Things that cheer Andy up #76112

I just found this piece on the latest version of the BCL (base class libraries) that will arrive in .Net 4.

And I'm delighted to see that they're simplifying a couple of things that have been a bit of a pain so far.  My favourite of which is converting strings to enums, which used to require:

try 
{
    string value = Console.ReadLine();
    FileOptions fo = (FileOptions)Enum.Parse(typeof(FileOptions), value);
    // Success
}
catch 
{
    // Error
}

but is now

string value = Console.ReadLine();
FileOptions fo;
if (Enum.TryParse(value, out fo)) {
    // Success
}

(and that TryParse is clearly using inferred typing - in the same pattern that I tend to use in my code.)

Syntax I'd like to use.

Given a particular case I need to make four contols invisible.

I can just say:

control1.visible = false;
control2.visible = false;
label1.visible = false;
label2.visible = false;

but it seems awfully longwinded.

You can shorten it a bit to:

control1.Visible = control2.Visible = label1.Visible = label2.Visible = false;

but that's pretty awkward to read, and has redundancy too.

I think that C# lambda functionality would allow me to end up with code something like:

{label1,label2, control1,control2}.Set(Control c => c.visible=false;)

but that also seems pretty clunky (I can't check that syntax at work, we're using VS 2005, which doesn't support lambdas).

Is there a language that would let you do this?:

{label1,label2, control1,control2}.Visible = false;