XAM’s Favourite (New) C# Features
At XAM Consulting our developers love to stay on top of the current trends in all aspects of software and mobile development.Last week we had a slack conversation geeking out about our favourite new C# features. I thought it would be nice to share some of the new features we love. Majority of the features are C#7 and you can use them right now, in Xamarin and .NET.
Alfon
My favourite c# feature is the default implementation for an interface. This is my favourite because it solves the problem of developers of duplicating code implementations for an interface while still getting the power of multiple inheritances of it.
public interface IDocumentTransfer{void TransferObject();void ConnectToStorage()Jesse & Matthew Robbins
Oh yeah! My favourite C# 7 feature is `out var`s’ (Out variables)
public bool Validate(string input, out string message){// ….}//Usagevar result = Validate("Hello World", out var failureReason);I love it as it saves an unnecessary variable declaration. Instead, you can just inline itI also love the `if (type is SomeOtherType someOtherType)` syntax for checking typecasts
Matthew B
The name of operator, which we now use extensively. It’s subtle but powerful because helps rid your codebase of those string literals. Yay.
EmailPlaceholderColor = Consts.ErrorColor;RaisePropertyChanged(nameof(EmailPlaceholderColor));Alex
Tuples and Deconstructing
(string, bool) EnsureMaxLength(string input) =>input.Length <= 5 ? (input, false) : (input.Substring(0, 5), true);// Don't care if the value was trimmed or not, using "discard" variable name (underscore symbol):var (processedVal, _) = EnsureMaxLength("abcd");// Can check whether the value was trimmed by inspecting wasTrimmed variable:var (processedVal2, wasTrimmed) = EnsureMaxLength("abcdef");Martin
The inline getter arrow (“expression-bodied members”).
public bool IsOptionActive { get; set; }public ImageSource OptionImage => IsOptionActive ? “Option_Enabled” : “Option_Disabled”; (edited)Myself (Michael)
Personally, I love the new ability to assign variables using the is statement with pattern matching.
private static void PrintObject(dynamic x){if (x is Customer c){WriteLine($"Customer Id : Customer Name In my years I’ve met many developers who don’t keep up with the new releases of languages, this is a little unfortunate for them because these new C# features help make code cleaner, more concise and increase readability.