Game Creation with XNA/Basics/C-Sharp

C-Sharp

When coding for the XBox with the XNA framework, we will be using C-Sharp (C#) as programming language. C-Sharp and Java are quite similar, so if you know one, basically you know the other. A good introduction to C-Sharp is the Wikibook C_Sharp_Programming.

C# has some features that are not available in Java, however, if you know C++ some may look familiar to you:

• properties
• enumerations
• boxing and unboxing
• operator overloading
• user-defined conversion (casting)
• structs
• read-only fields

The biggest difference between C-Sharp and Java probably are the delegates. They are used for events, callbacks and for threading. Simply put, delegates are function pointers.

Properties

This is an easy way to provide getter and setter methods for variables. It has no equivalent in Java, except if you consider the automatic feature of Eclipse to add these methods. Simply consider the following example, notice the use of the value keyword.

Enumerations

In Java you can use interfaces to store constants. In C# the enumeration type is used for this. Notice that it may only contain integral data types.

Boxing and Unboxing

This corresponds to Java’s wrapper types and also is available now in Java. Interesting to notice is that the original and boxed are not the same. Also notice that unboxed stuff lives on the stack, whereas the boxed stuff lives in the heap.

Operator Overloading

This is a feature that you may know from C++, or you might consider the overloading of the ’+’ operator for the Java String class. In C# you can overload the following operators:

• unary: +, -, !, +, ~, ++, --, true, false
• binary: +, -, *, /, %, &, |, ^, <<, >>, ==, !=, <, >, <=, >=

For instance for vector and matrix data types it makes sense to overload the '+', '-' and the '*' operators.

User-Defined Conversion

Java has built-in casting, so does C#. In addition, C# allows for implicit and explicit casting, which means you define the casting behavior. Usually this makes sense between cousins in a class hierarchy. However, there is a restriction: conversions already defined by the class hierarchy cannot be overridden.

Structs

Structs basically allow you to define objects that behave like primitive data types. Different from objects, which are stored on the heap, structs are actually stored on the stack. Structs are very similar to classes, they can have fields, methods, constructors, properties, events, operators, conversions and indexers. They can also implement interfaces. However, there are some differences:

• structs may not inherit from classes or other structs
• they have no destructor methods
• structs are passed by-value not by-reference

Read-Only Fields

When we were discussing the keyword const the difference to Java’s final was that you had to give a value to it at variable declaration time. A way around this is the readonly keyword. However it still has the restriction, that a readonly variable has to be initialized inside the constructor.

Delegates

Usually, in Java when you pass something to a method, it is a variable or an object. Now in C# it is also possible to pass methods. This is what delegates are all about. Note that delegates are also classes. One good way of understanding delegates is by thinking of a delegate as something that gives a name to a method signature.

In addition to normal delegates there are also multicast delegates. If a delegate has return type void, it can also become a multicast delegate. So if a delegate is the call to one method, then a multicast delegate is the call to several methods, one after the other.

Callbacks

Callback methods are used quite often when programming C or C++ and they are extremely useful. The idea is instead of waiting on another thread to finish, we just give that thread a callback method, that it can call once its done. This is very important when there are tasks that would take a long time, but we want the user in the meanwhile to do other things. To accomplish this, C# uses delegates.

Inheritance

Object-oriented concepts in C# are very similar to Java’s. There is a few minor syntax related differences. Only with regard to method overwriting in an inheritance chain, C# provide more flexibility than Java. It allows for a very fine-grained control over which polymorphic method actually will be called. For this it uses the keywords 'virtual', 'new', and 'override'. In the base class you need to declare the method that you want to override as virtual. Now in the derived class you have the choice between declaring the function 'virtual', 'new', or 'override'.