Design Document

We're making Snake in C#.

Project Setup

We'll need to create a new console project.

dotnet new console

You should now see a whole host of new files in the solution explorer (but not solution).

The file that defines how to build and run our application is our SnakeSharp.csproj file. Solution and .csproj files make it so that we can run, build, and links parts of our applications together.

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">

  <PropertyGroup>
    <OutputType>Exe</OutputType>
    <TargetFramework>net8.0</TargetFramework>
    <ImplicitUsings>enable</ImplicitUsings>
    <Nullable>enable</Nullable>
  </PropertyGroup>

</Project>

Inspecting it we see that it just defines our application as an executable, targeting the .NET 8 framework version, and that we can use nullable and implicit using declarations.

You can build your project with dotnet build and you can actually run your project with dotnet run. Your IDE abstracts away a lot of this for you.

By default dotnet will try and compile (build them into executable units) all of your .cs files and look for a static Main as the entrypoint to begin running your code. Newer C# versions have nice and easy to use top level statements that hide away from you but basically...

Whenever you write a program like this in the newer C# with "top-level" statements (statements that are NOT inside a class):

// See https://aka.ms/new-console-template for more information
Console.WriteLine("Hello World;");

Behind the scenes it gets treated something like this:

// See https://aka.ms/new-console-template for more information
public static class Program
{
    public static void Main()
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Hello World;");
    }
}

With an executable application there can only be one entry point (Main). Running your application runs that Main function.

queercat/SnakeSharp

Design Document

Project Setup