-->

dev csharp

It’s a shorthand for writing methods. The body now can be written just like a Lambda expression as shown in Log2 method below:

public string Log(string timestamp, string application, string error, string status)
{
    return string.Format("[Timestamp: \{timestamp}], Application: [\{application}], Error: [\{error}], Status [\{status}]");
}

public string Log2(string timestamp, string application, string error, string status) => string.Format("[Timestamp: \{timestamp}], Application: [\{application}], Error: [\{error}], Status [\{status}]");

It may come in handy for helper methods. The only benefit I can see is getting rid of opening and closing curly braces which generally don’t bother me much. But I know lots of people trying to avoid curly braces as much as possible. I’m sure this feature will be popular among them.

dev csharp

There are 2 improvements on exception handling:

  1. Exception filters
  2. Using await in catch and finally blocks

Exception Filters

Visual Basic and F# already have this feature and now C# has it too! the way it works is basically defining a condition for the catch block (example taken from Channel 9 video):

try
{

}
catch(ConfigurationException e) if (e.IsSevere)
{

}

I think it can make exception handling more modular. Also it’s better than catching and rethrowing in terms of we don’t lose information about the original exception.

Using await in catch and finally blocks

Like most people I hadn’t noticed we couldn’t do that already! Apparently it was just a flaw in the current implementation and they closed that gap with this version

try
{

}
catch(ConfigurationException e) if (e.IsSevere)
{
	await LogAsync(e);
}
finally
{
	await CloseAsync();
}

dev csharp

Conclusion and List of Posts

General consensus is that the new features are just small increments to improve productivity. They will help to clean up existing code. Less code is helpful to focus on the actual business logic instead of the clutter caused by the language.

For easy navigation I listed the links for all the previous posts:

Table of contents

  1. C# 6.0 New Features - Introduction
  2. Auto-Properties with Initializers
  3. Using statements for static classes
  4. Expression-bodied methods
  5. String interpolation
  6. Index initializers
  7. Null-conditional operators
  8. nameof operator
  9. Exception-handling improvements

Resources