Essentially you still have to put your functions in a class, but you're allowed to call them without the class (if desired). Kind of like "free functions" in C.
I like C#, but it looks like the team is running out of ideas. Or, perhaps, they realized that the "everything must go in a class" mantra was a bad idea.
Regardless, this change is very handy. Even if "everything must go in a class" is a bad idea (I think it's fine), the end result of this change, from the library consumer's standpoint, is the same as having functions defined outside a class but within a namespace. It's a great pragmatic change that doesn't rock the boat much.
In line with that are the other mostly minor but time saving changes like simplified null coalescing.
public static string Truncate(string value, int length)
{
return value?.Substring(0, Math.Min(value.Length, length));
}
public static string Truncate(string value, int length)
{
return value != null ? value.Substring(0, Math.Min(value.Length, length)) : null;
}
At least in Java-land, it's considered bad style to use this for anything other than constants.