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What's New in the Second Edition?

Third Edition Second Edition First Edition

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  • Updated for Visual Studio 2015, C# 6.0, and .NET 4.6.
    • Comparison between Visual Studio 2015 Community, Professional, and Enterprise.
    • VS 2015 Community is recommended for most individuals, other than companies. It’s free and has all of the features of Pro, intended for individual users, and still allows you to make commercial (and non-commercial) software with it.
  • Discussion of new C# 6 features.
    • Null conditional operator (?. and ?[]), a.k.a. “succinct null checking”.
    • Auto-property initializers (assigning a value to an auto-property by default without needing a backing field).
    • The nameof keyword.
    • Expression bodied methods and read-only properties (using lambda-like syntax to define short named methods).
    • String interpolation ($"Some text goes here, {code.GoesHere()}, more text here.").
    • Static imports.
    • Exception filters.
  • Massive rewrite of several chapters that were (in my opinion) weak in the 1st Edition:
    • Delegates
    • Events
    • Threading
    • Asynchronous programming and async and await keywords.
  • Random assortment of smaller changes for clarity throughout the rest of the book.
  • Change in fonts and style (that probably only a sharp eye will really notice).
  • Overall, 18 pages added to the book (5.5% longer) though the font changes make that less than it really ought to be. The book is slightly denser than it was, so there was realistically more content than that added to the book.