Data-Driven Services with Silverlight 2

Language Enhancements

Several .NET language enhancements were introduced with .NET 3.5. These language enhancements, along with features such as generics, are important pieces to building queries with LINQ.

This section will demonstrate and discuss several key language features, including:

• Automatic property setters/getters

• Object initializers

• Collection initializers

• Extension methods

• Implicitly typed variables

• Anonymous types

Figure 1-3 shows the .NET 3.5 language enhancements.

Figure 1-3. .NET 3.5 language enhancements at a glance

Automatic Properties in C#

Creating properties can be a very redundant process, especially when the getters and setters contain no logic other than getting and setting the value of the private field. Using public fields would reduce the amount of code; however, public fields do have some drawbacks. Most importantly, public fields are not fully supported by data binding.

One way to avoid having to type the code for a private field and its public property getter and setter is to use a refactoring tool. However, automatic properties allow you to type less code and still get a private field and its public getter and setter. You create an automatic property using shortened syntax. The compiler will generate the private field and the public setter and getter for you. In Example 1-1, a Customer2 class and an Address2 class have several private fields that are exposed through ...