Unity3d 2017.1 includes experimental support for c# 6 and 4.6. This enables us to use a bunch of new features.

Activating dotnet 4.6 support

To enable .net 4.6 support go to Edit->Project Settings->Player->Other Settings->Configuration->Scripting Runtime Version.

Read-only auto properties

Properties are already available in Unity3d. But c# 6 gives us the ability to have read only properties. These are defined using a single getter and can only be set in a constructor.

public class ReadOnlyProperties : MonoBehaviour { public string Greeting { get ; } public ReadOnlyProperties () { Greeting = "Hello" ; } // Use this for initialization private void Start () { //Greeting = "Hi there!"; //Uncomment this and you will get a compiling error Debug . Log ( "Your current Greeting is: " + Greeting ); } ... }

Auto-Property Initializers

Properties can now be initialized “inline”. No need to set them in the constructor. If we expand on our Greeting example from above we can remove the constructor and change the Greeting property to

public string Greeting { get ; } = "Hello" ;

Expression-bodied function members

The body of our methods might consist of only one statement that can be represented as an expression. In our greeting example we can create a Format Debug log message that generates the string we log to the console.

public class ReadOnlyProperties : MonoBehaviour { public string Greeting { get ; } = "Hello" ; // Use this for initialization private void Start () { //Greeting = "Hi there!"; //Uncomment this and you will get a compiling error Debug . Log ( GenerateDebugString ( Greeting )); Debug . Log ( GenerateEBFDebugString ( Greeting )); } //Normal method private string GenerateDebugString ( string greeting ) { return "Your current Greeting is: " + greeting ; } //Expression-bodied function member public string GenerateEBFDebugString ( string greeting ) => "Your current Greeting is: " + greeting ; }

Null-conditional operators

The null conditional operation, or as its also know the YEEES-NO-MORE-HUGE-IF-CHECKS-WHEN-FINDING-COMPONENTS-ON-A-GAMEOBJECT operator is one of the coolest and most help feature in c# 6 perhaps.

Lets assume we have the following.

string superData1 = GameObject . Find ( "ObjectWithNullValue" ). GetComponent < MySuperComponent >(). SuperData ;

The risk of getting a NullReferenceException here is quite high if either ObjectWithNullValue is not in the scene or it doesn’t have the MySuperComponent component on itself.

This is where the Null-conditional operatior helps out a lot. We can rewrite our line as:

string superData1 = GameObject . Find ( "ObjectWithNullValue" )?. GetComponent < MySuperComponent >()?. SuperData ;

The following will run smoothly without any null reference exceptions

string superData1 = GameObject . Find ( "ObjectWithNullValue" )?. GetComponent < MySuperComponent >()?. SuperData ; string superData2 = GameObject . Find ( "ObjectWithoutNull" )?. GetComponent < MySuperComponent >()?. SuperData ; Debug . Log ( superData1 ); Debug . Log ( superData2 );

Output

Null Hi I'm Not null

String Interpolation

Another neat feature available in c# 6 is string interpolation built into the syntax. Previously you would use the string.format feature or perhaps concatinating together string. No more!

We can turn the following

string fullGreeting1 = string . Format ( "{0} {1}" , Greeting , Name ); string fullGreeting2 = Greeting + " " + Name ;

Into

string fullGreeting = $" { FirstName } { LastName } " ;

But wait! There’s more!

There are a lot of other features as well. For a further intro i would suggest having a look at the dotnet documentation. What’s new in c# 6

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