About CSharpWith

A C# implementation of the With..EndWith statement that is featured in some other languages such as VB.

Back in the day when I worked in Visual Basic (from version 3 to VB.Net) I always liked how clean and readable using the With...End With statements made my code. This is my take on implementing a similar pattern in C# using extension methods and Lambda expressions.

CSharpWith allows you to wrap an object of your choosing inside a With object that you can then use to invoke methods by calling Do. Each call will return the With object, making it possible to chain method calls together.

Finally if you need to get to the underlying value, you can do this by calling the EndWith property on the With.

There are a few different ways to use the library so here are some examples of using With....

using CSharpWith;

// Using the extension method to wrap an object with a 'With' object
person.With()
    .Do(x => _ = x.FirstName = "John")
    .Do(x => _ = x.Surname = "Smith");

// Without the extension method
_ = new With(person)
    .Do(x => _ = x.FirstName = "John")
    .Do(x => _ = x.Surname = "Smith");

// With is a wrapper for your object instances, 
// you can access the wrapped object by
// calling the EndWith property
// Examples...            

// With extension method
Person myVar = new Person().With()
    .Do(x => _ = x.FirstName = "John")
    .Do(x => _ = x.Surname = "Smith");
.EndWith;

// Without the extension method
Person person = new With(new Person())
    .Do(x => _ = x.FirstName = "John")
    .Do(x => _ = x.Surname = "Smith");
.EndWith;

Remember you don't have to construct a new object instance when using With, the object could have been created at another point in your program. The examples use new Person() purely to try and provide a complete demonstration.

// Finally you can use the With extension methods to pass in a single
// action<T>, or mulitple action<T>s. 
// Each one will return the T type so there's no need to use EndWith to.

    Person person1 = new Person().With(x =>
    {
        x.FirstName = "John";
        x.Surname = "Smith";
    });

    Person person2 = new Person()
    .With(
        x => x.FirstName = "John", 
        x => x.Surname = "Smith");