[Braindump – warning]

So I’ve been playing with devcontainers for Visual Studio Code, they’re awesome… go play with them. They let you use a Dockerfile to describe all the tooling needed for devs to get started with your project.

One of the side effects is that you have a nice Dockerfile which you can then also use it for your build server meaning that you never have an inconsistency between your local setup and your CI server.

In this example I build a golang project and use Azure DevOps and use caching to minimize the amount of time for each build.

I started out with C# since then I’ve learned other languages and one of my favorites is Golang.

When I was reading the release notes from C# 8 I saw the new using declaration and through it was awesome… I also realized it could be misused to give C# the defer keyword from Golang.

Whats defer in Golang do?

defer in Golang lets you define a function that will get run when the code block exits.

The example below will print:

hello
world

Code: Try it out here


package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
    defer fmt.Println("world")
    fmt.Println("hello")
}

I’m a big fan of this approach as I think it’s clearer to read than the standard try finally pattern as it lets you put the cleanup code directly below the code which is making the mess like:

    f := createTempFile("/tmp/defer.txt")
    defer deleteTempFile(f)
    writeFile(f)
    
    // here the `deleteTempFile` method gets called

How can we do this in C# 8 with the new using syntax?

Well now because using var x = new thing()exists you can write a simple class called defer which runs a function when the current method exits, just like in golang

The interesting thing is that as a using statement generates a try finally under the covers these defer functions will still run if an exception is thrown.

The example below will print:

Hello World!
Defer 2
Defer 1
Exception thrown: It's all one wrong

Code:

Should you do this? Well that’s kinda up to you, I don’t think it’s super nasty but I’ve not used this in anger so probably worth testing out a bit before going all out.