Monday, May 14, 2007

* What's New in CSharp 3.0

Here is a point wise summary of features introduced newly in C# 3.0

Implicitly Typed Local Variables

  • Local variables can be declared as type ‘var’ which means compiler to determine the actual type based on the data by which its is initialized.
  • var i = 10; // i is created of type int
  • var name = “MyName” ; // name is created of type string
  • can only be used when declared and initialized in same statement.
  • Cannot be initialized to null.
  • Cannot be used as class members.
  • Mostly used to store anonymous types as in LINQ based programming.

Object & Collection Initializers

  • Allow assigning values to any accessible members or properties of a type at the time of initiation without invoking the constructor with parameters.
  • The default constructor gets executed before assigning the values.
  • E.g. Coordinate c1 = new Coordinate {x=1 , y=2};
  • Used in LINQ query expressions along with anonymous types.
  • Collection Initializers use Object Initializers to specify multiple elements of collection without calling Add method multiple times.

Extension Methods

  • Allows adding new methods to existing types without modifying the existing type.
  • Are special kind of static methods but are called as if they are instance methods.
  • The first parameter passed to Extension methods specifies to which type they operate on preceded by ‘this’ keyword.
  • They cannot access the private variables of type which they are extending.
  • Extension Methods need to defined in a non-nested and non-generic static class.
  • Instance methods take priority over extension methods in case they have same signature.

Anonymous Types

  • Are of class types which can have only public read-only properties as their members. No other class members like methods are allowed.
  • They are of reference types and are derived from ‘Object’ class.
  • Internally compiler gives them the name but its not accessible by application code.
  • They have a method scope.
  • Can be initiated directly e.g. new { property1=1, property2=”Hello World”};

Lambda Expressions

  • Very similar to anonymous methods introduced in C# 2.0.
  • Its an inline expression or statement block which can be used to pass arguments to method call or assign value to delegate.
  • All lambda expression use lambda operator => where the left side denotes result and right contains statement block or expression.

Auto-Implemented Properties

  • Helps in simplifying property declaration in cases where there is no custom logic required in accessors methods.
  • E.g. public int Price {get; set;};
  • Internally compiler creates an anonymous field for assigning values.

In my next post on this i will demonstrate these using a code sample.

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