I attended the SQL intersection conference in November 2014 in Las Vegas, Nevada.  I am including my notes from the sessions in this blog, primarily for my own reference later.  For anyone that comes across these notes, please take them with a grain of salt – I may very easily have misheard something or have written it down incorrectly.

This is one of two development session I attended.

Session Title:  A Tour through C# and Visual Basic Language Changes
Instructor: Kathleen Dollard

Visual Studio v14 is coded in native language (C#, VB)

• • Open source, transparent, etc.
  • Language extensibilities through analyzers
  • Language features have cleaner semantics
    • Some of these are in flux and may not happen
    • public int Id {get;} [=1;]
      • Can only init during construction; or, have initializer in code
    • Remove class name from static method calls
    • Initializers for dictionaries
      • new Dictionary<string, Customer> = { [“A”] = new Cust(…), [“B”] = new Cust(…) }
    • await in catch/finally blocks
    • Conditional catch (exception filters)
      • catch (Exception ex) if (ex.Code == 4) { … }
    • Expression body members
      • public string FullName => FirstName + “ “ + LastName;
    • Null propagation (aka null conditionals; sometimes call Elvis operator!)
      • x ?. x.Y
      • Evaluates to null if x is null, else evaluates to x.Y
      • Example
        • If (Event != null) { Event.Invoke (…); }
        • Now becomes: Event?.Event.Invoke (…)
      • array ?[index]
        • Checks if index has value (?)
      • String interpolation
        • Format(“{0} {1} {2}”, x, y, z)
        • Can now be written as $”\{x} \{y} \{z}”  (maybe will require \ prefix instead of $; still in limbo)
      • nameof
        • void method(int abc) { if (abc < 0} throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException(nameof(abc)); }
      • Visual Studio features
        • Breakpoint peek
          • Debug breakpoints (conditions, actions)
          • Tip: set hit count = 999999, will show actual hit count on exception
          • Tip: if breakpoints don’t hit, close VS, delete sou files and restart VS
        • Performance tips
          • Stepping through code will show elapsed time for running
        • Name refactoring
          • Ctrl RR while on an identifier will change all references
        • Other refactoring
          • Select code block, extract block
        • Touch to zoom or scroll
        • Improved coloration (i.e., hover tips on identifier)
        • Word part intelligence (ArgExp will find ArgumentException)
        • Proper case menus

Peek in XAML