Book Image

C# 9 and .NET 5 – Modern Cross-Platform Development - Fifth Edition

By : Mark J. Price
Book Image

C# 9 and .NET 5 – Modern Cross-Platform Development - Fifth Edition

By: Mark J. Price

Overview of this book

In C# 9 and .NET 5 – Modern Cross-Platform Development, Fifth Edition, expert teacher Mark J. Price gives you everything you need to start programming C# applications. This latest edition uses the popular Visual Studio Code editor to work across all major operating systems. It is fully updated and expanded with a new chapter on the Microsoft Blazor framework. The book’s first part teaches the fundamentals of C#, including object-oriented programming and new C# 9 features such as top-level programs, target-typed new object instantiation, and immutable types using the record keyword. Part 2 covers the .NET APIs, for performing tasks like managing and querying data, monitoring and improving performance, and working with the file system, async streams, serialization, and encryption. Part 3 provides examples of cross-platform apps you can build and deploy, such as websites and services using ASP.NET Core or mobile apps using Xamarin.Forms. The best type of application for learning the C# language constructs and many of the .NET libraries is one that does not distract with unnecessary application code. For that reason, the C# and .NET topics covered in Chapters 1 to 13 feature console applications. In Chapters 14 to 20, having mastered the basics of the language and libraries, you will build practical applications using ASP.NET Core, Model-View-Controller (MVC), and Blazor. By the end of the book, you will have acquired the understanding and skills you need to use C# 9 and .NET 5 to create websites, services, and mobile apps.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
22
Index

Working with spans, indexes, and ranges

One of Microsoft's goals with .NET Core 2.1 was to improve performance and resource usage. A key .NET feature that enables this is the Span<T> type.

More Information: You can read the official documentation for Span<T> at the following link: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.span-1

Using memory efficiently using spans

When manipulating collections of objects, you will often create new collections from existing ones so that you can pass parts of a collection. This is not efficient because duplicate objects are created in memory.

If you need to work with a subset of a collection, instead of replicating the subset into a new collection, use a span because it is like a window into a subset of the original collection. This is more efficient in terms of memory usage and improves performance.

Before we look at spans in more detail, we need to understand some related objects: indexes...