It was year 2000 when .NET 1.0 was released and till now, .NET has been on a long journey of advancements, and so C# 2.0 was released with Whidbey which will be getting public on November 7, 2005.

But future has unpredictable features to be available with another new version of C# and so named as C# 3.0(C# Orcas).Orcas is code name of VS .NET for future release of 64-bit OS Longhorn.

C# 3.0 (C# Orcas) has very interesting features which will make it much easier to write applications. Somehow I too believe that this much ease is not good.

It has been a practice for many years with almost all languages, that variable declaration requires a data type; for example: int i=10; or string s=”C Sharp”;

C# 3.0(C# Orcas) will be having an interesting behavior of Declaring Local Variables Implicitly and there is no need to mention data type while declaring a variable. I.e. a local variable can be specified using var as type without requiring any specific data type for that variable For example: var i=10; in C# 3.0 is as same as int i=10; and var s=”C Sharp”; is as same as string s=”C Sharp”; which was the procedure of declaring variables in earlier versions of C# and C# 2.0.

On the contrary declaring local variables implicitly has some restrictions: that the variable must be initialized and must be an expression and can not be null.

Another new feature is Query Expressions which provide a new language integrated syntax for queries like offered by SQL(relational) and XQuery (hierarchical)query languages.

Besides these features C#3.0(C# Orcas) has other great features too, which are extensions to the functionalities offered by C# 2.0.