Use C♯ 6.0 today in Visual Studio 2013

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In case you haven't heard, C♯ 6.0 is here now and it's awesome (here's a cheat sheet from programmingwithmosh.com showing the most noteable new features). Unfortunately, you must be using either Visual Studio 2015 or above or MonoDevelop in order to take advantage of it.... until now: Microsoft have released their C♯ 6.0 compiler Roslyn as a NuGet package.

If you don't know what a NuGet package is, Nuget is a modular system that allows you to pull in and use various different libraries and tools automatically. There's a central registry over at nuget.org, which people (like you!) can upload their packages to and other people can download them from. This looks like a good tutorial for Windows users. MonoDevelop users need to install this addin, but it should be installed already.

All you have to do is install the Microsoft.Net.Compilers NuGet package in order to use C♯ 6.0 in Visual Studio 2013. That's it! Unfortunately, this breaks the build process on platforms other than Windows, as the MicroSoft.Net.Compilers package is Windows only. The solution is fairly simple however. Once you've installed the above NuGet package, open your ".csproj" file in your favourite plain text editor (such as Notepad or gedit), and find the line that looks like this (it should be near the bottom):

<Import Project="..\packages\Microsoft.Net.Compilers.1.3.2\build\Microsoft.Net.Compilers.props" Condition="Exists('..\packages\Microsoft.Net.Compilers.1.3.2\build\Microsoft.Net.Compilers.props')" />

And add AND '$(OS)' == 'Windows_NT' to the end of the Condition attribute like this:

  <Import Project="..\packages\Microsoft.Net.Compilers.1.3.2\build\Microsoft.Net.Compilers.props" Condition="Exists('..\packages\Microsoft.Net.Compilers.1.3.2\build\Microsoft.Net.Compilers.props') AND '$(OS)' == 'Windows_NT'" />

The above adds a condition that prevents the compiler in NuGet package you installed from being used on platforms other than Windows. This doesn't mean that you can't use C♯ 6.0 on other platforms - Mono (the Linux c♯ compiler) already supports C♯ 6.0 natively, so it doesn't need to be replaced. it's just the C♯ compiler bundled with Visual Studio 2013 and below that's no good.

Splitting your C♯ Code into Multiple Files 2: DLLs

I have found out about compiling and linking to DLLs. I think this is called Dynamic Linking but again, I could be wrong.

We will be using the example files from last time:

filea.cs:

using System;

class ClassA
{
    public static void Main()
    {
        Console.WriteLine("This is a test from file A");
        Someplace.ClassB.PrintHello();
    }
}

fileb.cs:

using System;

namespace Someplace
{
    public class ClassB
    {
        public static void PrintHello()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Another hello from file B!");
        }
    }
}

This is a 2 step process. First we need to compile the DLL, then we need to compile the main exe and link to the DLL.

To compile the DLL, you type something like this:

csc /target:library fileb.cs

The important bit here is /target:library. This tells the C♯ compiler to compile your code to a DLL and not and exe.

To compile the main exe, you need to type something like this:

csc /reference:fileb.dll filea.cs

This tells the C♯ compiler to compile the code in filea.cs into an exe, and link it to fileb.dll.

Taken from this MSDN page.

Splitting your C♯ Code into Multiple Files

I have just started to work out how to split my C♯ code into multiple files, and thought that I would share it with you. This post will be about what I believe to be static linking, but I could be wrong. Anyway, it is actually quite simple:

Here is the contents of filea.cs:

using System;

class ClassA
{
    public static void Main()
    {
        Console.WriteLine("This is a test from file A");
        Someplace.ClassB.PrintHello();
    }
}

and here is the contents of fileb.cs:

using System;

namespace Someplace
{
    class ClassB
    {
        public static void PrintHello()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Another hello from file B!");
        }
    }
}

Then when you compile, you should do something like this:

csc filea.cs fileb.cs

This will tell the C Sharp compiler to grab both filea.cs and fileb.cs, and to output a single filea.exe.

Next I will try to figure out how to create a .dll file and include that - then I can build my own libraries.