C# 4.0: var, object and dynamic

Anders presentation on C# 4 was as usual great to listen to. He continues to evolve the language with solid steps, and the presentation was quite fun.

You can watch his presentation or just read the slide deck.

With C# 4 the new "dynamic" keyword has been introduced to flag a variable as a dynamic variable.

This is slightly different than var and object, the differences are as follows:

• "object x" is a shorthand for "System.Object x". This declares the variable x to have the type System.Object, this is strongly typed. And since C# provides autoboxing, you can assign anything you want to this variable.
• "var x = E" declares a variable x to be of the type of the expression E. The E is required, not optional. This is a strongly typed declaration, and you can only assign values whose type is typeof(E) to it.
• "dynamic x" declares the variable x to have dynamic semantics. This means that the C# compiler will generate code that will allow dynamic invocations on x. The actual meaning of "x.M" is deferred until runtime and will depend on the semantics of the IDynamicObject implementation.