.NET Core 3 is a major milestone in .NET and with it, brings some exciting new functionality — most notably with the arrival of C# 8.
I want to offer my own perspective on this release and specifically how C# 8 helps with software quality.
Note that by software quality, I mean the overall quality of delivered software, not code quality which relates to the maintainability and readability of our source code.
C# 8.0
C# 8.0 is now available with Visual Studio 2019 and available in .NET Core 3 and .NET Standard 2.1 projects.
The new set of features are dependent on changes inside of the .NET runtime, which means that the new language features we’ll be discussing here are not available for .NET Framework or Visual Studio 2017 or earlier at this time.
So, that’s the bad news.
The good news is that C# 8 is a very feature-rich update that has some very exciting features for all aspects of software development.
I won’t be talking about everything new in C# 8, but the most significant language features that can improve software quality. Specifically, I’m going to be focusing on:
- Nullable Reference Types
- Null Coalescing Assignments
