What’s new in C# 6.0? - Setting default values to Auto Properties

Did you try the new Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6? At the time of writing this blog post, it’s still in “Preview” release for the developers to try and report issues. .NET 4.6 comes with C# 6.0 with additional new features expected by developers to improve their coding productivity.

We are now going to describe the new features introduced in C# 6.0. Today in this blog post, we are going to see how to initialize/set default values to auto properties introduced in C# 6.0. Keep reading.

If you didn’t yet download Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6, download it now to try out the new features introduced in C# 6.0.

For quite a long time, it was asked by the developers to initialize or set default values to auto properties where it has been declared. Earlier to C# 6.0, we had to make them as full property with a private variable to initialize at the time of declaration. But, time has changed now. You don’t need to create the full property in order to initialize them. Less code, less chances of bugs and better chances of productivity. Isn’t it? A typical auto property looks similar to this:

But now it has changed a bit. Now you can assign default value to the auto properties without writing a second line. Let’s see, how to do it. It’s very simple. Just place an “=” equal sign at the end and write the default value to it.

Here is how you can set default value to auto properties at the time of declaring them:

Now when you create the instance of the class, it will automatically set the default value to the properties where you set it at the time of declaration. And when you call the properties, you will see the default value the property returns if not reinitialized. Here is a small piece of code to demonstrate it:

And when you compile and run the above code snippet, you will see that the default value returns to the output screen as the properties were not re-initialized.

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More posts are coming shortly on the topic “What’s new in C# 6.0?”. Till that time, happy coding.