How to use the new ValueTuples : A C# 7.0 feature

Tuples are one of the awesome features of C# which was initially introduced with .NET 4.0. Although it is less used but it become very handy when we need to return multiple values from a function. We have another option to use out operator but it is not recommended due to various reasons. I am not going to discuss it in this post. Tuple is a static class under namespace System which implements a Factory pattern to create the instances of Tuples. It has a Create method with eight overloads which allows us to have 8 elements in a Tuple. Also, we can have nested tuples as well.

There were few issues with System.Tuple. It is a reference type so even if you are returning few values type elements , the instance gets created on heap, means adding pressure on Garbage Collector. It doesn’t allow to provide a name to the elements, instead we have to refer it as item1, item2.. etc. Also, the way we used to create Tuple is also quite verbose.

Tuple in C# 7.0

C# 7.0 introduces System.ValueTuple as a new language feature, which resolves the problems mentioned above and provides few more additional features. And Yes, it has the power of Value Type so it removes the GC overhead of the old tuple.

Note: ValueTuple is available as indepedent nuget package. You can install it from here.

Lets see few examples of new Value Tuples,

Tuple Literals

Tuple literal is a comma separated list of literal (of various types), surrounded by parenthesis.

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    // Tuple Literals
    var tpl = (1, 2);
    var author = ("Brij", 32, "https://codewala.net/");
}

public (string, int, string) Author { get; set; } = ("Brij", 32, "https://codewala.net/");

Here we can see that creating Tuple is now a simple assignment operation. Also we can have different types in a Tuple which helps in combining various set of information in a tuple based on the need.

Using Tuples as Return Type

We can use value tuple as return type and the syntax looks so simple as


var author = GetAuthor();

Console.WriteLine($"Author Details: Name: {author.Item1}, Age: {author.Item2}, BlogURL : {author.Item3 ?? "URL not available" } ");

private static (string, int, string) GetAuthor()
{
    string name = "Amit Kumar";
    int age = 33;
    return (name, age, null);
}

Naming the Tuple Elements:
Yes, we can name the tuple elements and this also provides the intellisense support. This is one of the best improvements. We can write the above code as

var author = GetAuthor();
WriteLine($"Author Details: Name: {author.name}, Age: {author.age}, BlogURL : {author.url ?? "URL not available" } ");

private static (string name, int age, string url) GetAuthor()
{
    string name = "Amit Kumar";
    int age = 33;
    return (name, age, null);
}

We can give names in tuple literal as well

var author = (name: "Brij", age: 32, url: "https://codewala.net/");      
Console.WriteLine($"Author Details: Name: {author.name}, Age: {author.age}, BlogURL : {author.url ?? "URL not available" } ");
// Or we can also write as
(string name, int age, string url) author = ("Brij", 32, "https://codewala.net/");

Let’s move to another exciting feature

Value Tuple Deconstruction

Value tuple allows us deconstruct the tuple and access the elements as a local variable. We need to assign a tuple to variable surrounded by parenthesis. Broadly, it can be done in three ways

Providing the types of each element in parenthesis.
Using var keyword outside the parenthesis (it is applied to each variable).
Or using existing variables

Lets see the examples


// First Option - Providing the type of each element. var is also allowed.
(string authorname, int age, var blog) = GetAuthor();
Console.WriteLine($"Author Details: Name: {authorname}, Age: {age}, BlogURL : {blog ?? "URL not available" } ");

// Second Option - Using var outside of the parenthesis
var (authorname, age, blog) = GetAuthor();
Console.WriteLine($"Author Details: Name: {authorname}, Age: {age}, BlogURL : {blog ?? "URL not available" } ");

// Third option - Using existing variables
string authorname = "Brij";
int age = 32;
string blog = "https://codewala.net/";

(authorname, age, blog) = GetAuthor();
Console.WriteLine($"Author Details: Name: {authorname}, Age: {age}, BlogURL : {blog ?? "URL not available" } ");

Now it may happen that you are not sure about all the elements or want to discard few , you can use underscore (_) as

var (authorname, age, _) = GetAuthor();
Console.WriteLine($"Author Details: Name: {authorname}, Age: {age}");

Last thing, as we have now System.Tuple and System.ValueTuple both, ValueTuple provide a nice extension method as ToTuple() to convert it to System.Tuple.

C# 7.1 Enhancements:

There are a small enhancement in C# 7.1 which can save few keystrokes as now elements names are inferred from the variables. Let’s see the example

// Earlier
string name = "Brij";
int age = 32;
string blog = "https://codewala.net/";
var author = (name: name, age: age, blog: blog);

// With C# 7.1 
string name = "Brij";
int age = 32;
string blog = "https://codewala.net/";
var author = (name, age, blog); // Element names would be - name, age, blog

Hope you have enjoyed this post and will be able to use in your day to day coding.

Cheers,
Brij