2021 Advent of Code

It’s almost December, and that means a new Advent of Code begins. I am freezing and its late so this is a quick one.

I maintain a Github template that I update yearly to reflect the latest C#/.NET features available.

The biggest changes to the template this year is the addition of global usings and file scoped namespace declarations.

This isn’t going to affect performance, but it will let me delete a bunch of (now) unnecessary code.

For example:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using AdventOfCode.Properties;

namespace AdventOfCode.Day01
{
    // the rest
}

Can now simply be:

namespace AdventOfCode.Day01;

// the rest

We reduced the file size a bit, cleaned up one level of (now) redundant indentation and got the easiest win of the “learning the latest C# features” endeavor.

However, those using directives still need to go somewhere…

Since the 3 using directives I removed are all needed across the board in this project, I added them to the Program.cs file, along with the new global modifier. (Note This was a logical central point to me, its not required to go specifically here; the modifier can be used anywhere!)

global using AdventOfCode;
global using AdventOfCode.Properties;
global using System;
global using System.Collections.Generic;

// rest of Program.cs

The way I have structured this project means I have one folder for every day in the Advent of Code calendar. Removing n of using directives, across 25 folders gave me a lot of pre-holiday joy.

The C# language team have been making wonder & welcome additions to the language yearly. This isn’t Steve Ballmer’s Microsoft anymore…

Happy holidays!

• Advent of Code