UPDATE: Looks like Ian Cooper had posted pretty much the same code in the comments to Scott’s blog post. I hadn’t noticed it. He didn’t have a chance to compile it, so consider this post a validation of your example Ian! :)

Scott Hanselman recently wrote a post about how Ruby has tits or is the tits or something like that. I agree with much of it. Ruby is in many respects a nice language to use if you think in Ruby.

One of the comparisons of the syntactic sugar Scott showed was this:

Java:

new Date(new Date().getTime() - 20 * 60 * 1000);

Ruby:

20.minutes.ago

That is indeed nice. But I was on the phone with Rob Conery talking about this when it occurred to me that we’ll be able to do this with C# 3.0 extension methods. That link there is a blog post by Scott Guthrie talking about this feature.

Not having any time to install Orcas and try it out, I asked Rob Conery to be my code monkey and try this out. So we fired up GoToMeeting and started pair programming. Here is what we came up with:

public static class Extenders { public static DateTime Ago ( this TimeSpan val ) { return DateTime . Now . Subtract ( val ); } public static TimeSpan Minutes ( this int val ) { return new TimeSpan ( 0 , val , 0 ); } }

Now we can write a simple console program to test this out.

class Program { static void Main ( string [] args ) { Console . WriteLine ( 20. Minutes (). Ago ()); Console . ReadLine (); } }

And it worked!

So that’s very close to the Ruby syntax and not too shabby. It would be even cleaner if we could create extension properties, but our first attempt didn’t seem to work and we ran out of time (Rob actually thinks eating lunch is important).

Found out from ScottGu that Extension Properties aren’t part of the language yet, but are being considered as a possibility in the future.

So now add this to the comparison:

C# 3.0

20.Minutes().Ago();

Just one of the many cool new language features coming soon.