It's been close to a month since "the RTM" and I'm starting to get a good
feel for what new features of the .NET Framework are becoming really useful
tools for the ol' dev toolbox. First and foremost are generics. I don't mean
custom generic classes, I mean the System.Collections.Generic and ObjectModel
namespaces. More specifically,
List<T> and
Dictionary<K,V>.
Collection<T> and
KeyedCollection<K,V> are great for base classes, but I find myself using
List<T> and Dictionary<K,V> a lot in lieu of
ArrayList and
Hashtable.
Nullable types are probably next on the list. I like being able to use a
value type, check to see if it is null, and handle as appropriate, such as the
following code you might see in ASP.NET 2.0.
bool?
b = (bool?) ViewState["Required"];
return
b ?? false;
Something that I thought I would absolutely hate to see in code, but I'm now
finding to be quite handy is anonymous methods. The Sort, Find, and ConvertAll
methods of List<T> for example. Using ConvertAll, I can easily create a
list of object property values in a collection. Since the generic list knows
what type it contains, I can call ToArray() as well to get a strongly typed
array of the property values.
public
void Save(List<FormDesignerControl>
controls)
{
List<string>
names = controls.ConvertAll(delegate(FormDesignerControl
c) { return c.Name; });
filter.PredicateExpression.Add(new
FieldCompareRangePredicate(ControlFields.ControlName,
null, names.ToArray()));
}
It will be interesting to see how things are looking in a few more months.
