This is the first in a series of blog entries in which I will elaborate on progressively more advanced subjects, beginning with fundamental software patterns, practices, principles and conventions; culminating in the establishment of an architectural template demonstrating how to build enterprise business applications which can be deployed to the Microsoft Azure cloud. Along with this and future blog entries, I'll be using a demo application for a fictional organization to demonstrate the concepts I discuss. Additionally, I talk about some topics that are relevant to the "inner game" of software development.

If Visual Studio is your samurai sword, then the C# programming language along with patterns and practices of structured software development are your fighting techniques, principles and disciplines. In this post, I'm going to talk about some of the features of C#, versions 6, 7, and 8. I've chosen to focus on these three versions because not only are they the most recent (obviously) but also because the style of language version releases started to change with version 6, focusing on a more frequent tempo and more granular features. Even more importantly, the syntax and feel of the language itself seemed to turn a corner with C# 6, marking what in my opinion is an evolving paradigm shift toward functional programming.