[7/30/2015] This article was written against a pre-release version of C# 6.0. Be sure to check out the list of my five favorite C# 6.0 features for content written against the release!

Expression-bodied members are another set of features that simply add some syntactic convenience to C# to continue streamlining type definitions. C# type definitions have always been a bit tedious, requiring us to provide curly braces and explicit returns even when the function consists of only a single line. Lambda expressions have spoiled us by abstracting away most of the syntax that’s typically associated with functions and finally making delegation feel like a natural part of the language. Expression-bodied members extend the convenience of lambda expressions to type members… to an extent.

According to the Visual Studio “14” CTP3 notes, expression-bodied members can be used for methods, user-defined operators, type conversions, and read-only properties including indexers (although expression-bodied indexers don’t work properly in the CTP).

To demonstrate the feature, I’ll define a custom RgbColor class and using expression-bodied members for both a hexadecimal formatting method and a custom negation operator.

public class RgbColor(int r, int g, int b)
{
  public int Red { get; } = r;
  public int Green { get; } = g;
  public int Blue { get; } = b;

  public string ToHex() =>
    string.Format("#{0:X2}{1:X2}{2:X2}", Red, Green, Blue);

  public static RgbColor operator - (RgbColor color) =>
    new RgbColor(
      color.Red ^ 0xFF,
      color.Green ^ 0xFF,
      color.Blue ^ 0xFF
    );
}

As convenient as expression-bodied members appear on the surface, they seem rather limited in their utility since their very nature requires expressions. This fact is compounded by the fact that C# isn’t an expression-based language; if it were (as F# is) we could get away with defining more complex bodies including some intermediate values such as a regular expression match result. As it stands today it’s not possible to do this without first defining that logic in a separate method that can be invoked from the expression-bodied member but that seems to defeat the purpose. Perhaps this would be a good use for the semicolon operator since we can’t even include that logic within curly braces as we could with a lambda expression.