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)

Extension methods

It is sometimes useful to add functionality to a type without changing the implementation, creating a derived type, or recompiling code in general. We can do that by creating methods in helper classes. Let's say we want to have a function that reverses the content of a string because System.String does not have one. Such a function can be implemented as follows:

static class StringExtensions
{
    public static string Reverse(string s)
    {
        var charArray = s.ToCharArray();
        Array.Reverse(charArray);
        return new string(charArray);
    }
}

This can be invoked as follows:

var text = "demo";
var rev = StringExtensions.Reverse(text);

The C# language allows us to define this function in a way that enables us to call it as if it was an actual member...