Missed the Last 10 Years of C#? Read This (Quick) Guide
25 Jan 2025 #csharp #asp.netHere’s an opinionated catch-up guide if you missed the last decade of the C#/.NET/Microsoft evolution.
#1. C# isn’t JAVA anymore. That joke doesn’t work anymore. The two languages have taken completely different paths. They don’t even look the same.
#2. There’s a new runtime: .NET. It’s multiplatform and open-sourced. We have the classic one, we call it: .NET Framework, which you probably already know. And the new one was called “.NET Core.” But now, it’s simply “.NET” Yes, naming is hard.
#3. Speaking of the language, the main language features are still there. C# is an imperative side-effect-heavy language. But with every release, it’s adopting more features from functional languages, like lambda expressions, pattern matching, and records. (See #7)
#4. There’s excellent support for asynchronous methods with two keywords: async and await.
#5. There’s a whole lot of new small language features. Apart from async/await (from C# 5.0) we haven’t had a release with a single major feature. Most of the new features are syntactic sugar for existing features.
#6. There’s a new feature you shouldn’t miss: nullable references. It should have been called: “non-nullable references” instead. Do you remember nullable primitive types? Like int?? We allow a type to contain null by appending a ? when declaring it. We can do the same for classes. So Movie? m can be null, but Movie m can’t. And the compiler warns us when we’re trying to use a reference that might be null. Awesome!
#7. I compiled a list of C# features we should know about. Those are the features I like and have used the most.
#8. A “Hello, world” is now literally one line of code. We don’t need to declare a class and a Main method for console applications. Just write your code directly in a file like in a scripting language.
#9. I stopped expanding that list with the most recent features. C# is getting bloated with more features that are making the language less consistent. I don’t like that.
#10. The same way we have a new runtime, we have a new web framework: ASP.NET Core. It was a full rewrite of the classic ASP.NET. There’s no Global.asax, web.config, or files listed on csproj files. If you knew and used the old ASP.NET, I wrote a guide with the difference between the two. With .NET, we have way better tooling like a command line interface to create projects.
#11. Well, there’s Xamarin, MAUI, Blazor… But unless you’re planning to do front-end work, you don’t need to worry about them. Microsoft is still trying to find, create, and establish a golden hammer for the front-end side.
Sure, I’m missing a lot of other things. But you’re safe catching up on those.