C# 11 Highlights: Generic Math, Required Members, and Raw String Literals

Background

Microsoft .NET Conf concluded in early August. The .NET 6 platform now offers a unified ecosystem with a consistent foundation and increasingly mature developer toolchains.

Since Microsoft announced .NET as open source on 12 November 2014, the platform can run on Windows, Linux, and macOS, supporting cloud‑native, desktop, mobile, big‑data, machine‑learning, gaming, and IoT development.

C# 11 New Highlights

C# language designer Mads Torgersen showcased several C# 11 features at the conference, slated for release alongside .NET 7.0 in November. He highlighted three major additions: generic math, required members, and raw string literals.

.NET releases a new version each year. .NET 7 will become the current release and will receive 18 months of support. The next long‑term support (LTS) version, .NET 8, is planned for November 2023.

Three Important New Features

The talk focused on static abstract members in interfaces, a capability described in the documentation as allowing interfaces to define overloadable operators, other static members, and static properties—primarily for generic mathematical operations.

This feature lets functions accept and return generic types while still performing addition, subtraction, and similar operations. Although the feature is small, some community members expressed concerns about the restriction that interfaces with static virtual members cannot be used as type parameters with such constraints.

One .NET developer remarked, “I really don’t understand how much help static abstract or static virtual members in interfaces provide for development.” Another welcomed the generic math addition, saying, “Generic math and Int128 have been my dream for ten years!”

The required members update introduces the required modifier for properties or fields, mandating their initialization in a constructor, which also simplifies inheritance scenarios.

The third key update is raw string literals, first introduced in .NET 6. They eliminate the need for escape sequences, allowing developers to write any string—including spaces, formatting, and exact output—directly.

Raw string literals are defined by starting and ending a string with at least three double‑quote characters. If three consecutive quotes appear inside the literal, four quotes can be used as delimiters, and so on. Interpolated raw strings use a leading $, and additional $ characters can be added to escape braces.

Visual Studio assists by drawing a vertical line to indicate which whitespace is part of the literal, helping developers see what will be included in the output.

While not revolutionary, raw string literals are easy to understand and highly useful, and they are expected to be well received by C# developers.