Using new C# features in .NET Framework 4.8

When taking a look at the version history of C#, the language is picking up pace in the last couple of years: while 13 years passed between C# 1.0 and 6.0, there’s now a new major version coming every year. I personally love the following new features from the latest versions:

• Nullable reference types
• Global using declarations
• File-scoped namespaces
• Raw string literals

One half of my worktime at Swiss Post I’m working in the parcel sorting. There we’re using the latest .NET stack and all these cool new features. But the other half I’m spending in project which is bound to .NET Framework 4.8 and where I want to use some of the mentioned features as well. Surprisingly this can be done very easily.

The C# compiler offers the property LangVersion. The used default language version depends on the used target framework as you can see here. And for all versions of the .NET Framework the default C# language version points to 7.3.

Now the trick is pretty easy: open the csproj of the .NET Framework project and set the LangVersion property, e. g. to <LangVersion>11</LangVersion> for C# 11 which was releases just recently 💡

This way you can easily use newer C# features on older platforms like .NET Framework 4.8. In my case I created a shared library targeting .NET Standard 2.0 (which uses C# 7.3 by default) with C# 11 features - pretty cool 💪🏻

Thanks for reading!