Left fold

Let's talk about accessor's accessibility introduced in C# 2.0. This is a tiny little feature that can make your life easier in a number of ways. But first, let's define what i am talking about. Normally, a property is composed this way: So, from the example above, we can see that a property has a backfield (called _myProperty) and is composed by a getter and a setter . The getter is called whenever you get the value of that property. The setter is called when you set it's value. If we look carefully, we notice that the getter returns the value of the backfield, and the setter sets it's value, respectively. If we think about it, a property is nothing more than a wrapper around a private field. This way we can control all the access to that field's value. C#'s properties are nothing more than sintactic sugar for the following structure: This is an " old school property ". In languages where you don't really have the concept of prop...

In C# 2 there was a new addition in the functionality called static classes and members . When i say "members", i am referring to methods, properties, events and so on. I have a strong opinion about this modifier which i will share with you along the article, but let's start by looking at what "static" means. Take this code as example: Above we can see that we define two properties and one is static. In the main method we then create an instance of Person and set the normal property ( Name ). Now notice the Person.NumberOfBrains  assignment. This is the static property we created in the class. Notice that the access is made at class level , instead of instance level.  This means that there will only be one NumberOfBrains  value throughout all Person instances, but there will be a Name  value per each instance  of Person . Of course, the example is not the best, but you get the idea. Static applies when all  instances share the same value. There are so...

Let's get back to my series on the evolution of the C# language. Everybody is familiar with what a delegate is, right? We know that delegates are a big part of the events system in .Net. We register a method on that delegate ( called handler ) that is invoked when the delegate is invoked. In other words, a delegate simply points to a method. The advantage here is that, as the delegate wraps the method and is an object, we can simply pass it to a method as a parameter! Think about this: This is how we use a delegate in events, for instance. The class exposes the delegate and we register our method to listen it. When the delegate is called inside the class, all the registered methods will be called (because of this, we call it a Multicast Delegate ). This works well, because all you have to do is have a method with the required signature. In the example above, we needed to declare two methods just to make a Console.WriteLine. Isn't this too much? I think it's a bit to...

For those of you interested, i found a very interesting list of features that were introduced in C# in  here . This is a very complete list that contains all the features, and i'm explaining them one by one in this post series. We've talked about  Generics  and  Iterators . Now it's time for some partial types . A partial type  is a type which definition is spread across one or more files. It doesn't have to be in multiple separated files, but can be. This is a very simple concept that can give us many benefits, let's see: If a type is partial, multiple developers can work on every part of it. This allows a more organized way of working and can lead to production improvement.  Winforms , for example, generates a partial class for the form so that the client can separately edit other parts it. This way, a part contains information about the design and the other contains the logic of the form. In fact, this is a very spread pattern across .Net. Ent...