Chapters 6 and 7 have now been included in the Manning Early Access Program. That means that the whole of the C# 2 part of the book is now available. Marc Gravell has been picking holes in it on the forum (and I mean that in a very positive way – it’s great to have more eyes running over it). Can you find more errors? Here’s a rundown of chapters 6 and 7:

Chapter 6: Implementing iterators the easy way

In C# 1, it was a pain to implement IEnumerable. C# 2 makes it easy with iterator blocks, and this can make it worthwhile introducing IEnumerable where you might not have done before. Aside from anything else, it’s fun just to watch the C# compiler build a state machine for you!

Chapter 7: Concluding C# 2: the final features

Confession: this is really “C# 2: the features which didn’t fit anywhere else”. It’s a round-up of features which didn’t deserve their own chapters, and which could easily wait until the “big” features had been explored before being mentioned. Ironically, C# 3 is exactly the opposite – the “little features” in C# 3 are pretty key to understanding the big features such as lambda expressions and query expressions, which is why they’re in chapter 8. Chapter 7 covers the following areas:

• Partial types (including partial methods from C# 3)
• Static classes
• Separate getter/setter property access (e.g. public getter, private setter)
• Namespace aliases (using ::, the global namespace alias, and extern aliases)
• Pragma directives
• Fixed size buffers