Book Image

Learn C# Programming

By : Marius Bancila, Raffaele Rialdi, Ankit Sharma
5 (1)
Book Image

Learn C# Programming

5 (1)
By: Marius Bancila, Raffaele Rialdi, Ankit Sharma

Overview of this book

The C# programming language is often developers’ primary choice for creating a wide range of applications for desktop, cloud, and mobile. In nearly two decades of its existence, C# has evolved from a general-purpose, object-oriented language to a multi-paradigm language with impressive features. This book will take you through C# from the ground up in a step-by-step manner. You'll start with the building blocks of C#, which include basic data types, variables, strings, arrays, operators, control statements, and loops. Once comfortable with the basics, you'll then progress to learning object-oriented programming concepts such as classes and structures, objects, interfaces, and abstraction. Generics, functional programming, dynamic, and asynchronous programming are covered in detail. This book also takes you through regular expressions, reflection, memory management, pattern matching, exceptions, and many other advanced topics. As you advance, you'll explore the .NET Core 3 framework and learn how to use the dotnet command-line interface (CLI), consume NuGet packages, develop for Linux, and migrate apps built with .NET Framework. Finally, you'll understand how to run unit tests with the Microsoft unit testing frameworks available in Visual Studio. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-versed with the essentials of the C# language and be ready to start creating apps with it.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

Structures

The content of this chapter so far has been focused on classes. Types that are defined as classes are reference types. However, in .NET and C#, there is another category of types: value types. Value types have value semantics, meaning that the value of the object, and not a reference to the object, is copied on assignment.

Value types are defined using the struct keyword instead of class. In most aspects, structures are identical to classes and the characteristics presented in this chapter for classes apply to structures too. However, there are several key differences:

  • Structures do not support inheritance. Although a structure can implement any number of interfaces, it cannot derive from another structure. For this reason, structure members cannot have the protected access modifier. Also, a structured method or property cannot be abstract or virtual.
  • A structure cannot declare a default (parameterless) constructor.
  • Structures can be instantiated without...