For the VB’ers out there, here’s some translations:

1. Return If(reference, _defaultInstance)
Yep, the If looks pretty dang terrible, but that’s the blessed way to do a null coalesce in VB.Net

2. Replace square brackets with pointy brackets

3. Us poor old VB coders don’t get automatic properties. Dang!

4. Dim emp As Employee = New Employee With {.Name = “John Smith”, .Age=10}
Note the dots, that’s the big difference when doing copy paste translations

5. Er… no idea about this one. It reminds me too much of the oldskool VB data type characters that my brain shuts down reading it :-)

C# 3.0 goodies don’t require .NET 3.0. They only require VS2008. Of course, some of the new stuff (such as LINQ) requires .NET 3.

Regarding automatic properties, in your example, what’s the purpose? What does it achieve vs simly having a variable?

instance = one ?? two ?? three ?? default;

which sets “instance” to the first of “one”, “two” and “three” which is not null. Otherwise it uses “default”.

In C# 3.0 you can also initialize arrays in a new way:

int[] numbers = { 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 };

instead of

int[] numbers = new int[] { 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 };