Question

In C, I could declare a compiler directive as follows:

#define MY_NUMBER 10

However, in C#, I only appear to be able to do this:

#define MY_NUMBER

Which is obviously useless in this case.

Is this correct, or am I doing something wrong? If not, can anyone suggest a way of doing this, either at namespace or solution level? I thought of maybe creating a static class, but that seems to be overkill for one value.

Answer 1

Yes, it is correct.

Here’s a quote from the MSDN documentation:

The pre-processing directives provide
the ability to conditionally skip
sections of source files, to report
error and warning conditions, and to
delineate distinct regions of source
code. The term “pre-processing
directives” is used only for
consistency with the C and C++
programming languages. In C#, there is
no separate pre-processing step;
pre-processing directives are
processed as part of the lexical
analysis phase.

So you can’t really define compiler constants, like in C and C++.

Related resources:

• Pre-processing directives