Friday, March 10, 2017

What’s New in C# 7.0 for Beginning Programmers

Well it looks like Visual Studio 2017 is out. I've installed the community edition on my Surface (not enough disk for everything I'd like :-( ) but enough to try some things out. I found this awesome blog post on what is new with C# 7. I wonder if there is one coming for Visual Basic?
As usual, many, perhaps most, of the improvements are exciting to professional developers or more advanced students. I teach raw beginners and I don’t have near enough time to cover as much as I would like. But there are a couple of new things in C# 7 that I think I will use with my students.
The improvements in out variables will be useful for example. I use TryParse with my students a lot and being able to declare the variable inside the TryParse will save a step and prevent some errors. Maybe create others but that is ok.
C# 7.0 allows _ to occur as a digit separator inside number literals now. This is cool. Especially with binary literals. This may let me do some additional cool stuff with Binary flag bits and maybe make parsing some numbers easier or more interesting.
Well that is a first look from me. I’m still playing with things and hope to have some insights into what is new with Visual Basic and Visual Studio the IDE soon. IN the mean time, what is everyone else finding interesting?

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