C# tips and tricks - part 1

C# is a powerful and widely used programming language, but there are often techniques and tricks that are not so well known and can greatly improve the performance of your code. So we're going to do a series of articles demonstrating how to make the code you write more efficient, also some useful tips.

Deconstructor

A destructor is a method that allows you to "disassemble" an object into separate parts so that you can easily assign those values to separate variables. It has a special syntax and is implemented with the Deconstruct method, which usually returns the values of the main components of the class.

To define a destructor in C#, you must implement a method named Deconstruct in your class. This method can take out parameters that will contain the parts of the object.

public class Student
{
    public string FirstName { get; }
    public string LastName { get; }
    public int Age { get; }

    public Student (string firstName, string lastName, int age)
    {
        FirstName = firstName;
        LastName = lastName;
        Age = age;
    }

    // Define the deconstruct
    public void Deconstruct(out string firstName, out string lastName, out int age)
    {
        firstName = FirstName;
        lastName = LastName;
        age = Age;
    }
}

Once you have defined a destructor, you can use it to extract the values from the object into separate variables.

Student student = new Student ("Michael", "Doe", 30);

var (firstName, lastName, age) = student;

Console.WriteLine($"First Name: {firstName}, Last Name: {lastName}, Age: {age}");

In this example, the student object is "disassembled" into three parts: firstName, lastName and age. These values are assigned directly to the corresponding variables by destructuring.

Benefits of using destructors

1. Cleaner code: destructors make extracting values from objects more intuitive and easy.

2. Better readability: Disassembling objects using destructors makes code more readable, especially when working with objects that contain multiple properties.

3. Flexibility: You can define multiple versions of the Deconstruct method with different numbers of parameters if you only want to extract some of the data.

Amexis Team