2017-05-19

Friday Links 0.0.26 - C#-7: Literals, Async, and Throw Expressions

This is based on an email I send my .NET team at work

Happy Friday,

It appears to have been almost 2 months since I last sent one of these. My apologies for the laziness. I’m sure you wait every Friday with bated breath for a happy little notification in your email client.

Lets talk briefly about a few more new features in C#-7, which you can use today in VS2017.

New Literal Features

A literal is a funny language designer term for a value specified directly in source code, like 5 or "somestring".

In case you were ever using large integers, you should be happy to know you can now place underscores anywhere in the number and have it ignored by the compiler.

int i = 42_234;
int hex = 0xBAD_F00D;

This is a small feature, and I guess its nice.

I actually got bitten by a bug just yesterday where I could have been saved with this. I couldn’t figure out why my math was always turning out to be off by a factor of 10. It took me a minute to realize I had const int MAX = 10000 instead of const int MAX = 1000.

Digit separators might have made it more obvious: const int MAX = 10_000 is a little more distinguishable from const int MAX = 1_000.

Here’s the feature proposal for your entertainment: https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/issues/216

Oh, and they also added binary literals. This is for when you need to specify bit patterns directly, and is a little bit nicer than hex codes.

byte b8 = 0b1001101;
short b16 = 0b10110011110111010;

Combine it with the digit separator feature to split out the different bytes.

As primarily web programmers, we probably won’t run into much need for binary literals, but they’re nice to have for infuriating the rest of your team. Replace all the numbers in your application with binary literals: they might enjoy the challenge of translating them. And if they’re one of the 10 types of people who can’t read binary, they don’t deserve to be on a team of such high caliber developers as you.

Here’s the feature proposal: https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/issues/215

Generalized async return types

This is not a feature you would use directly, but certain library authors would be happy to have it.

Normally async methods have to return Task or Task<T>. This feature lets those methods return any type of object that quacks like Task or Task<T>. I’m not sure of the specifics, but there are probably a couple of methods you have to implement like GetAwaiter() and Result, etc.

The main purpose was to allow the creation of ValueTask and ValueTask<T>. Unlike Task and Task<T>, this async return type is a struct not a class. Thus there is no dynamic memory allocation or garbage collection. In some high performance scenarios, this can reduce GC pauses.

To use ValueTask you’ll need to load this nuget package: System.Threading.Tasks.Extensions.

This change probably won’t effect your day to day. If a library starts using ValueTask you probably wouldn’t even notice, since it works the same way as Task.

Just be aware.

Here’s the implementation of ValueTask: https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/blob/master/src/System.Threading.Tasks.Extensions/src/System/Threading/Tasks/ValueTask.cs

Here’s one of the proposals for the feature: https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/issues/7169

Throw Expressions

In previous versions of C# the throw keyword was always a statement. This meant it had to be used on a line of its own which made certain patterns annoying.

Now, it can be an expression in some contexts.

For example, in assignment:

class Foo
{
    private IService _service;

    Foo(IService service)
    {
        _service = service ?? throw new ArgumentNullException(nameof(service));
    }
}

Previously you would need an if statement to check the parameter for null. I like this feature, it will make parameter validations a lot cleaner.

Here’s the initial proposal: https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/issues/5143

Next time we talk about Tuples, a much bigger change to the language. Stay tuned.

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dotnet, c#