In my last post, I wrote about the new items in the second edition of Effective C#, and those items that were removed to make room for the new items. Now, let’s discuss what happened to the items that I carried over from the previous edition.
Every item received a rather significant update for this new versions. However, you won’t see that from looking at the table of contents in InformIT. That’s because the advice is very similar to the earlier edition. However, the way you implement the advice has changed significantly. As I mentioned in the last post, the C# language has made many significant enhancements over the years since the first edition was published. We have many different tools at our disposal to express our designs. That means we have many new techniques that we can use to achieve the same goals of better software, and clearly communicating our designs to other developers.
In the new edition, I re-wrote all the samples to use the latest version of C#, taking advantage of all the features in C# 4.0. That does not mean I use C# 4.0 syntax in every single item. It does mean that I thought about how to express an idea using the full palette of features available in C# 4. In many cases, that meant using features available in C# 3, or even C# 2. In other cases, the samples will include some of the latest C# features. In all cases, I updated the justifications for the advice, and how to implement the goals, in the context of C# 4.0.
Even if you have no experience with earlier versions of C#, you can use the advice in the second edition. Furthermore, you can use much of the advice even if you have not updated your environment to C# 4.0, and .NET 4.0.