Professional C# 7 and .NET Core 2.0, 7th Edition

6Operators and Casts

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Operators in C#
• Using nameof and null-conditional operators
• Implicit and explicit conversions
• Converting value types to reference types using boxing
• Comparing value types and reference types
• Overloading the standard operators for custom types
• Implementing the Index Operator
• Converting between reference types by casting

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

The Wrox.com code downloads for this chapter are found at www.wrox.com on the Download Code tab. The source code is also available at https://github.com/ProfessionalCSharp/ProfessionalCSharp7 in the directory OperatorsAndCasts.

The code for this chapter is divided into the following major examples:

• OperatorsSample
• BinaryCalculations
• OperatorOverloadingSample
• OperatorOverloadingSample2
• OverloadingComparisonSample
• CustomIndexerSample
• CastingSample

OPERATORS AND CASTS

The preceding chapters have covered most of what you need to start writing useful programs using C#. This chapter continues the discussion with essential language elements and illustrates some powerful aspects of C# that enable you to extend its capabilities.

This chapter covers information about using operators, including operators that have been added with C# 6, such as the null-conditional operator and the nameof operator, as well as operator extensions of C# 7, such as pattern matching with the is operator. Later in this chapter, you see how operators are overloaded. The chapter also shows you how to ...