C#

Three strengths

• Catches errors early. Every piece of data has a declared kind, and the compiler tells you if one is used wrongly, so errors are fixed before the program ever runs. 1
• International standard. C# is defined by a published standard (ECMA-334), not just by one company's product. 3
• Runs on many devices. C# programs run on everything from small connected gadgets to servers and the cloud. 1

What it is

Plenty of businesses run on Microsoft: Windows, Office, SQL Server, Azure. C# (said "C sharp") is the programming language most closely tied to that world. It's the most popular language for .NET, the free, open source platform that C# programs run on, and C# programs can run on devices from Internet of Things gadgets to the cloud. 1

It shipped as version 1.0 in January 2002, alongside Visual Studio .NET 2002, and its stated design goal at the time was to be a "simple, modern, general-purpose object-oriented language". 2 (Object-oriented is a way of organising code into self-contained pieces that model real things, such as a customer or an invoice.) The first edition of its standard, ECMA-334, was published by Ecma International in December 2001, and the standard has since been updated several times, most recently in December 2023. 3 That kind of independent standard matters to a business because it means the language is publicly specified, not a black box.

C# is strongly typed: every piece of data has a declared kind, such as text or a number, and the compiler (the tool that turns code into a working program) reports it when something is used wrongly. 1 It has also kept growing. Features such as async, which lets a program wait on a slow task like a web request without freezing, arrived in 2012, and a new version has appeared every November since 2020. 2

It's widely used too: 27.8% of developers surveyed in 2025 said they use it. 4

We choose it for one reason above the rest: when the systems you already run are built on Microsoft, C# is the language that platform is built around.

How we use it

C# isn't our main language, but every member of our team can write it. We use it for a handful of integrations and automations, mainly where we need to connect to a back end in the Microsoft suite.

That's Integrations & Automations work: the code that lets your Microsoft tools hand information to your other systems without anyone retyping it. The Microsoft systems on the other end are often ones like Azure or SQL Server, so connecting them means your existing Microsoft tools become part of one joined-up system instead of standing alone.

References

1. Microsoft, "A tour of C#: Overview", Microsoft Learn. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/tour-of-csharp/overview (accessed 28 October 2026)
2. Microsoft, "The history of C#", Microsoft Learn. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/csharp-version-history (accessed 28 October 2026)
3. Ecma International, "ECMA-334: C# Language Specification", ecma-international.org. https://www.ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/standards/ecma-334/ (accessed 28 October 2026)
4. Stack Overflow, "2025 Developer Survey: Technology", survey.stackoverflow.co, 2025. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology (accessed 28 October 2026)