Reasons why you might want to consider incorporating record types into your code

Probably the biggest features in C#9 was the introduction of record types.

A record fulfills many useful functions — It’s a reference type, but at the same time hosts the qualities a lot of developers are using value types for, for example, equality between two records is given when all their fields are considered equal. Also, it’s a very concise and short way to define a reference type hosting a set of properties, compared to a fully fledged class.

However, while a lot of people know about records, it’s not always clear how and where they might be useful. In this post, I would like to go over some of them to inspire you to adapt this new language feature

Less POCO boilerplate!

A great way to use a record is to use it as a POCO (Plain Old CLR Object). Very often developers create small classes which have no responsibility besides storing data in the simplest way possible. See this for example:

void Main()
{
    var container = new MyContainer("Hello", 5);
}
public class MyContainer
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
 
    public int Counter { get; set; }
 
    public MyContainer(string name, int counter)
    {
        Name = name;
        Counter = counter;
    }
}

Pretty basic, and every developer is familiar with how annoying it is to write the same boilerplate over and over. However, now you can drastically reducer the boilerplate:

void Main()
{
    var container = new MyContainer("Hello", 5);
}
public record MyContainer(string Name, int Counter);

Awesome! Much better! Note that checking this object for equality as well as hashcodes will behave a lot different compared to a regular class out of the box, but unless you rely on the regular equality behaviour, this is a great way to reduce code written for the same output.

If you want to see in detail what the compiler creates for you under the hood, take a look at https://sharplab.io/#v2:CYLg1APgAgzABAJwKYGMD2DhwLIE8BKqGwAFAJYB2ALnAGJkIDOVANHFAIwAMcAykRWABKANxA==. It is a lot of functionality goodness the compiler builds for you.