C# 11 — What You Need to Know

With .NET 7 and C# 11 out last week, I thought this would be a good excuse for me to put my fingers to the keyboard and write up a summary on some of the latest C# features, as much for my edification as your own.

Required Members

This feature is straightforward, but I feel like it requires (ha ha) a little history to fully appreciate, and so I present:

The Road to Required

About twenty years ago, if you had a class and you had to create an instance of it, it would look something like this:

static void Main()
{
    Pet pet = new Pet("Fido", 3, 4);
}

class Pet
{
    private string name;
    private int age;
    private int legs;

    public string Name
    {
        get
        {
            return name;
        }

        set
        {
            name = value;
        }
    }

    public int Age
    {
        get
        {
            return age;
        }

        set
        {
            age = value;
        }
    }

    public int Legs
    {
        get
        {
            return legs;
        }

        set
        {
            legs = value;
        }
    }

    public Pet(string name, int age, int legs)
    {
        this.name = name;
        this.age = age;
        this.legs = legs;
    }
}

This is old-school, early 2000s C#. Aside from those properties, it’s not much better than Java. Notice how you are passing in the values for your Pet object through the constructor. The constructor ensures…