C# in Depth

The changing nature of language preferences353more than we might have dreamed about ten years ago, and tools that hold our handsthroughout the development processes… and yet we know that a large proportion ofsoftware projects fail. Often this is due to management failures or even customer failures,but sometimes developers need to take at least some of the blame.Many, many books have been written about why this is the case, and I won’t pretendto be an expert, but I believe that ultimately it comes down to human nature.The vast majority of us are sloppy—and I certainly include myself in that category.Even when we know that best practices such as unit testing and layered designs willhelp us in the long run, we sometimes go for quick fixes that eventually come back tohaunt us.There’s only so much a language or a platform can do to counter this. The onlyway to appeal to laziness is to make the right thing to do also the easiest one. Someareas make that difficult—it will always seem easier in some ways to not write unit teststhan to write them. Quite often breaking our design layers (“just for this one littlething, honest”) really is easier than doing the job properly—temporarily.On the bright side, C# 3 and LINQ allow many ideas and goals to be expressedmuch more easily than before, improving readability while simultaneously speedingup development. If you have the opportunity to use C# 3 for pleasure before putting itin a business context, you may well find yourself being frustrated at the shacklesimposed when you have to go back to C# 2 (or, heaven forbid, C# 1). There are somany shortcuts that you may often find yourself surprised at just how easy it is toachieve what might previously have been a time-consuming goal.Some of the improvements are simply obvious: automatic properties replace severallines of code with a single one, at no cost. There’s no need to change the way youthink or how you approach design and development—it’s just a common scenariothat is now more streamlined.What I find more interesting are the features that do ask us to take a step back. Theysuggest to us that while we haven’t been doing things “wrong,” there may be a better wayof looking at the world. In a few years’ time, we may look back at old code and be amazedat the way we used to develop. Whenever a language evolves, it’s worth asking what thechanges mean in this larger sense. I’ll try to answer that question now, for C# 3.13.1 The changing nature of language preferencesThe changes in C# 3 haven’t just added more features. They’ve altered the idiom ofthe language, the natural way of expressing certain ideas and implementing behavior.These shifts in emphasis aren’t limited to C#, however—they’re part of what’s happeningwithin our industry as a whole.13.1.1 A more functional emphasisIt would be hard to deny that C# has become more functional in the move from version2 to version 3. Delegates have been part of C# 1 since the first version, but theyhave become increasingly convenient to specify and increasingly widely used in theframework libraries.Licensed to Rhona Hadida