Hidden Features of C#? [closed]

Answer 1

Using @ for variable names that are keywords.

var @object = new object();
var @string = "";
var @if = IpsoFacto(); 

Answer 2

Here are some interesting hidden C# features, in the form of undocumented C# keywords:

__makeref

__reftype

__refvalue

__arglist

These are undocumented C# keywords (even Visual Studio recognizes them!) that were added to for a more efficient boxing/unboxing prior to generics. They work in coordination with the System.TypedReference struct.

There's also __arglist, which is used for variable length parameter lists.

One thing folks don't know much about is System.WeakReference -- a very useful class that keeps track of an object but still allows the garbage collector to collect it.

The most useful "hidden" feature would be the yield return keyword. It's not really hidden, but a lot of folks don't know about it. LINQ is built atop this; it allows for delay-executed queries by generating a state machine under the hood. Raymond Chen recently posted about the internal, gritty details.

Answer 3

@Ed, I'm a bit reticent about posting this as it's little more than nitpicking. However, I would point out that in your code sample:

MyClass c;
  if (obj is MyClass)
    c = obj as MyClass

If you're going to use 'is', why follow it up with a safe cast using 'as'? If you've ascertained that obj is indeed MyClass, a bog-standard cast:

c = (MyClass)obj

...is never going to fail.

Similarly, you could just say:

MyClass c = obj as MyClass;
if(c != null)
{
   ...
}

I don't know enough about .NET's innards to be sure, but my instincts tell me that this would cut a maximum of two type casts operations down to a maximum of one. It's hardly likely to break the processing bank either way; personally, I think the latter form looks cleaner too.

Answer 4

From Rick Strahl:

You can chain the ?? operator so that you can do a bunch of null comparisons.

string result = value1 ?? value2 ?? value3 ?? String.Empty;

Answer 5

Avoid checking for null event handlers

Adding an empty delegate to events at declaration, suppressing the need to always check the event for null before calling it is awesome. Example:

public delegate void MyClickHandler(object sender, string myValue);
public event MyClickHandler Click = delegate {}; // add empty delegate!

Let you do this

public void DoSomething()
{
    Click(this, "foo");
}

Instead of this

public void DoSomething()
{
    // Unnecessary!
    MyClickHandler click = Click;
    if (click != null) // Unnecessary! 
    {
        click(this, "foo");
    }
}

Please also see this related discussion and this blog post by Eric Lippert on this topic (and possible downsides).

Answer 6

Here's a useful one for regular expressions and file paths:

"c:\\program files\\oldway"
@"c:\program file\newway"

The @ tells the compiler to ignore any escape characters in a string.