C# Brain Teasers

Exercise Your Mind

by Steve Love

C# is a deceptively easy language to learn, but you’ll soon discover that its underlying complexity conceals many pitfalls for the unwary programmer. C# Brain Teasers exposes some of those perils in the form of puzzles to test and expand your knowledge of C#, and shows how to avoid or defeat them using simple and modern techniques. Whether you’re fairly new to C# or an experienced veteran, this book is sure to improve your understanding of C#, and boost your productivity.

Although C#’s designers have ensured that new features play nicely with long-standing mechanisms, C#’s complexity means it has many dark corners to explore. This book shines a light into a few of those places to help you write better C# programs and more deeply understand how to use its features safely and to your advantage.

The puzzles in C# Brain Teasers cover a broad section of C# features. You’ll work from common issues associated with loops, methods, and numbers, through more complex concepts such as exceptions and object lifetime. You’ll see some more advanced topics such as the intricacies of type conversions, object construction and initialization, and pattern matching. Along the way we’ll investigate some of the hazards associated with asynchronous methods, the `Dispose` method for explicit lifetime management, primary constructors, and more. At each step you’ll learn to identify problems and ways to avoid them.

C# Brain Teasers is not just a show-and-tell. Each puzzle spotlights a real-world problem that you’ll be able to recognize in your own programs, and learn how to fix or avoid it.

• Errata, typos, suggestions

• Source Code (zip file)

Releases:

• P1.0 2025/04/24
• B3.0 2025/02/24
• B2.0 2025/01/15
• B1.0 2024/11/04

• Introduction
• All the Things
• Advance with Caution
• Nothing to See Here
• What Was the Year?
• Unexpected Item in the Bagging Area
• Precision Instruments
• Inequality Among Equals
• Double Jeopardy
• So, What’s Left?
• New Tricks
• Property Development
• Default Setting
• Chicken or Egg?
• The Optional Default
• Deferred Judgment
• A Promising Future
• Fire and Forget
• Exceptional Circumstances
• Hanging Around
• The Sentinel
• A Narrowing Experience