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Exciting new features in C# 9

May 25, 2020 (Last Modified: June 17, 2020)

Last week at Microsoft Build, there have been a lot of exciting annoucements! .NET 5, Blazor WebAssembly, .NET MAUI, WinUI… But the thing I’m most eager to get my hands on is C# 9, which introduces many interesting new features, so let’s take a quick tour! There’s a long list, so I won’t cover all of them here, but I will highlight the ones I find the most interesting.

Note: Unfortunately the new C# features aren’t supported yet in the latest SDK preview, so we can’t test them in actual projects. Some features can be tried in SharpLab, but things are moving fast, so the bits available in SharpLab don’t always reflect what has been announced at Build.

Update 2020/06/17: A few of the features mentioned in this post are now available in the .NET 5 preview 5 SDK.

Target typed `new`

In C# 9, it will be possible to omit the type in object creation expressions, if the type can be inferred from the context, making code terser and less repetitive:

private Dictionary<string, object> _properties = new();

Parameter null-checking

This feature introduces a simple syntax to automate null checks on method parameters. For instance, this code :

public string SayHello(string name)
{
    if (name == null)
        throw new ArgumentNullException(nameof(name));
    return $"Hello {name}";
}

Can be simplified to this:

public string SayHello(string name!) => $"Hello {name}";

The ! after the parameter name automatically inserts a null check for that parameter.

Pattern matching improvements

C# 9 comes with a few improvements to pattern matching. The most useful, in my opinion, is the not pattern, which lets you write code like this:

if (foo is not null) { ... }
if (animal is not Dog) { ... }

Relational (<, >=, etc.) and logical operators (and and or) can also be used in pattern matching:

return size switch
{
    < 10 => "small",
    >= 10 and < 100 => "medium",
    _ => "large"
}

Records and `with` expressions

This is the big one, in my opinion. Creating simple data types in C# have always been more painful than it should be; you have to create a class, declare properties, add a constructor if you want your type to be immutable, override Equals and GetHashCode, maybe add a deconstructor, etc. C# 7 tuples made this a little easier, but still not ideal since a tuple is anonymous. The new Record feature in C# 9 makes things much easier!

For instance, a simple class representing a point might look like this, if you implement equality, deconstructor, etc.

public class Point : IEquatable<Point>
{
    public Point(int x, int y) =>
        (X, Y) = (x, y);

    public int X { get; }

    public int Y { get; }

    public bool Equals(Point p) =>
        (p.X, p.Y) == (X, Y)

    public override bool Equals(object other) =>
        other is Point p && Equals(p);

    public override int GetHashCode() =>
        (X, Y).GetHashCode();

    public void Deconstruct(out int x, out int y) =>
        (x, y) = (X, Y);
}

In C# 9, using the Records feature, the above class can be reduced to this:

public data class Point(int X, int Y);

Yup, just one line, and not even a long one! How great is that? Note that it also works with structs, if you need a value type.

Note that records are immutable: you can’t change the values of their properties. So if you want to modify an instance of a record type, you need to create a new one (this should be familiar, since the same is true of dates and strings, for instance). The current approach would be to do something like this:

Point p1 = new Point(1, 2);
Point p2 = new Point(p1.X, 3);

Basically, copy all properties from the original instance, except the ones you want to change. In this case, it’s OK because there are only 2 properties, but it can quickly become annoying when there are many properties.

C# 9 introduces with expressions, which let you do this instead:

Point p1 = new Point(1, 2);
Point p2 = p1 with { Y = 3 };

A with expression makes a clone of the original object, with the modified properties specified between curly brackets.

There are several sub-features related to records (e.g. init-only properties), that I won’t cover here. Check out Mads Torgersen’s article for a more in-depth description.

Target-typed conditionals

There’s a small thing that has been annoying C# developers for years: when using the conditional operator (also known as “ternary”), there must be a type conversion from one side to the other. For instance, this code doesn’t compile:

Stream s = inMemory ? new MemoryStream() : new FileStream(path);

Because there’s no conversion between MemoryStream and FileStream. To fix it, one side has to be explicitly cast to Stream.

In C# 9, the code above will be allowed, if both sides are convertible to the target type (in this case, Stream).

Covariant return

Currently, when you override a method from a base class, the overriding method must return the same type as the base class method. In some situations, it would be more practical to return a more specific type. C# 9 makes this possible by allowing overriding methods to return a type that derives from the base method’s return type:

public class Thing
{
    public virtual Thing Clone() => new Thing();
}

public class MoreSpecificThing : Thing
{
    // Override with a more specific return type
    public override MoreSpecificThing Clone() => new MoreSpecificThing();
}

Top-level statements

This feature aims to reduce boilerplate code for simple programs. Currently, even the simplest program needs a class with a Main method:

using System;

public class Program
{
    public static void Main()
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Hello world");
    }
}

This just adds noise, and make things confusing for beginners. C# 9 will make it possible to omit the Program class and Main method, so that the code above can be simplified to this:

using System;
Console.WriteLine("Hello world");

Conclusion

Most of the features introduced by C# 9 are relatively small ones, designed to make code simpler, less cluttered and more readable; they’re very convenient, but probably won’t change how we write code in a very fundamental way. Records are another story, though; they make it much easier and less painful to write immutable types, which I hope will encourage developers to take advantage of immutability whenever possible.

Note that the release of C# 9 is still a few months away, and things are still moving, so some of the features I mentioned in this post could be modified, postponed to a later version, or even abandoned completely.

Target typed new