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Modern C# and .NET Tutorial: Cross-Platform Basics

Understanding Top Level Programs

Explore how top level programs in C# 10 and .NET 6 improve development by automatically generating boilerplate code for console apps. Understand the structure and restrictions of these programs, including implicit System namespace imports, and learn to reveal the hidden compiler-generated code for deeper insight.

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Top level programs

If we have seen older .NET projects before, we might have expected more code, even just to output a simple message. This is because some code is written for us by the compiler when we target .NET 6 or later.

If we had created the project with .NET SDK 5.0 or earlier or selected the check box with “Do not use top-level statements” label, then the Program.cs file would have more statements, as shown in the following code:

C#
using System; // Not needed in .NET 6 or later.
namespace HelloCS
{
  class Program
  {
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
      Console.WriteLine("Hello, World!");
    }
  }
}

During compilation with .NET SDK 6.0 or later, all the boilerplate code to define a namespace, the Program class, and its Main method is generated and wrapped around the ...