Part 4. C# 7 and beyond

 

C# 7 is the first release since C# 1 to have multiple minor releases.[1] There have been four releases:

1 Visual Studio 2002 included C# 1.0, and Visual Studio 2003 included C# 1.2. I’ve no idea why the version number skipped 1.1, and it’s not clear what the differences were between the two versions.

  • C# 7.0 in March 2017 with Visual Studio 2017 version 15.0
  • C# 7.1 in August 2017 with Visual Studio 2017 version 15.3
  • C# 7.2 in December 2017 with Visual Studio 2017 version 15.5
  • C# 7.3 in May 2018 with Visual Studio 2017 version 15.7

Most of the minor releases have expanded on new features introduced in earlier C# 7.x releases rather than introducing entirely new areas, although the ref-related features covered in chapter 13 were greatly expanded in C# 7.2.

As far as I’m aware, no plans exist for a C# 7.4 release, although I wouldn’t completely rule it out. Having multiple versions seems to have worked reasonably well, and I expect the same sort of release cycle for C# 8.