C# is fixing a thing that irritated me!

For a long time a small thing in writing Razor code for Sitecore (and in some other places) has irritated me. It's not really very important, but with the new version of C# there is finally a way to round off this rough edge that's been getting to me...

What was the issue? url copied!

There are various places in the .Net world where Microsoft built a thing and we get to extend it. One of these places is in ASP.Net's Html object, which exposes a bunch of useful helpers for web programming. But in quite a few places (like Sitecore renderings) products and tools have added extra features this using Extension Methods. For example, displaying a Sitecore field in a rendering can look like:

<h1>
  @Html.Sitecore().Field("Title")
</h1>

					

And here's the thing that's irritated me: When you write an add-on like Sitecore() here, in the past this had to be a method - and hence the need for () on the end of the name.

That's because until now, the compiler only supported methods that acted as extensions to a someone else's object. So you'd declare that Sitecore extension something like:

public static SitecoreExtensions
{
   public static SitecoreExtensionClass Sitecore(this IHtmlHelper helper)
   {
      // return your custom helper object
   }
}

					

And the compiler understands it can extend ASP.Net's Html helper object to return the custom Sitecore code for you. It can re-write the code behind the scenes so that your method gets called passing in the HTML Helper object that Microsoft provide.

But the need to make the extension here a method rather than a property has always looked a bit wrong in my mind.

How can we do that better? url copied!

But the new v14 release for C# (Available with previews of .Net 10) has a new and more flexible way to declare extensions. You can still declare extension methods, but also now you can write extension properties.

The syntax is a bit different because there's no natural way to pass the equivalent of the this parameter into a property, but in future it will be possible to declare helpers like the Razor add-on above more like this:

public static SitecoreExtensions
{
    extension(IHtmlHelper helper)
    {
        public SitecoreExtensionClass Sitecore
        {
            get
            {
                // return your custom helper object
            }
        }
    }
}

					

And now because it's declared as an extension property there's no need for that extra () and your Razor code can become:

<h1>
  @Html.Sitecore.Field("Title")
</h1>

					

To me at least, that looks better.

Shame it won't work on your old DXP code - but maybe the .Net headless codebase might adopt it in future?

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