C# 9 Top-Level Programs

In C# 9, a very intersting feature is introduced called Top-level programs. It is a simpler way to write your program on its top-level such as, Program.cs file.

Let's have a look into simple hello world example which you will see when you create a new console application from Visual Studio.

using System;

namespace CSharp9Demo
{
    public class Program
    {
        public static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");
        }        
    }
}

It will just print the "Hello World!" to the screen and there is only one line of code that does anything. With top-level programs feature introduced in C# 9.0, you can remove all the unnecessary ceremony and use only a using statement and a single line which print the message to the console window as shown below.

using System;

Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");

If you want a one-line program, you could remove the using directive and use the fully qualified type name as shown below.

System.Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");

In your application, only one file uses top-level statements. If the compiler finds top-level statements in multiple source files, it’s an error.

• It is also an error if you combine top-level statements with a declared program entry point method, such as, a Main method.
• In a sense, you can think that one file contains the statements that would normally be in the Main method of a Program class.

The Top-level programs are C# language features and it doesn’t come down to Common Language Runtime (CLR). C# compiler produces Program class and Main() method like it was before.

Main Method Argument

You will think how we can use args argument of Main() method? It is magically here and available in top-level programs as shown below.

using System;

Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");

for (var i = 0; i < args.Length; i++)
{
    Console.WriteLine("{0}: {1}", i, args[i]);
}