What useful minor features of C# 4.0 can you list?

Question

C# 4.0 has a lot of new major features such as dynamic type, covariance and contravariance, named arguments etc.

But C# 4.0 contains new minor (but useful) changes such as TryParse method for TimeSpan, Enum, Guid data types, String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace, System.IO.Stream.CopyTo etc.

What other minor and useful features of C# 4.0 can you list?

Answer 1

You need to differentiate between features of the language vs features of the framework. For C#4.0, those features you list are the new features that was added.

For .NET Framework 4, the list is long. Some of the most interesting and/or generally usable ones include:

• Managed Extensibility Framework
• BigInteger and Complex types.
• Lazy<T>
• ASP .NET improvements
• Better support for parallel computing, including the new Tasks namespace ("lightweight" threads) and Parallel LINQ.

There is an exhaustive list here. It is also interesting to read the list of obsoleted types in the new version.