Last time on this blog I talked about the new tuple feature of C# 7. In Visual Studio 15 Preview 3, the feature wasn’t quite finished; it lacked 2 important aspects:
emitting metadata for the names of tuple elements, so that the names are preserved across assemblies
deconstruction of tuples into separate variables
Well, it looks like the C# language team has been busy during the last month, because both items are now implemented in VS 15 Preview 4, which was released today!
A tuple is an finite ordered list of values, of possibly different types, which is used to bundle related values together without having to create a specific type to hold them.
In .NET 4.0, a set of Tuple classes has been introduced in the framework, which can be used as follows:
private static Tuple<int, double> Tally(IEnumerable<double> values) { int count = 0; double sum = 0.0; foreach (var value in values) { count++; sum += value; } return Tuple.
About two weeks ago, Microsoft released the first preview of the next version of Visual Studio. You can read about what’s new in the release notes. Some of the new features are really nice (for instance I love the new “lightweight installer”), but the most interesting for me is that it comes with a version of the compiler that includes a few of the features planned for C# 7. Let’s have a closer look at them!