[c#] What's with the dollar sign ($"string")

It's the new feature in C# 6 called Interpolated Strings.

The easiest way to understand it is: an interpolated string expression creates a string by replacing the contained expressions with the ToString representations of the expressions' results.

For more details about this, please take a look at MSDN.

Now, think a little bit more about it. Why this feature is great?

For example, you have class Point:

public class Point
{
    public int X { get; set; }

    public int Y { get; set; }
}

Create 2 instances:

var p1 = new Point { X = 5, Y = 10 };
var p2 = new Point { X = 7, Y = 3 };

Now, you want to output it to the screen. The 2 ways that you usually use:

Console.WriteLine("The area of interest is bounded by (" + p1.X + "," + p1.Y + ") and (" + p2.X + "," + p2.Y + ")");

As you can see, concatenating string like this makes the code hard to read and error-prone. You may use string.Format() to make it nicer:

Console.WriteLine(string.Format("The area of interest is bounded by({0},{1}) and ({2},{3})", p1.X, p1.Y, p2.X, p2.Y));

This creates a new problem:

1. You have to maintain the number of arguments and index yourself. If the number of arguments and index are not the same, it will generate a runtime error.

For those reasons, we should use new feature:

Console.WriteLine($"The area of interest is bounded by ({p1.X},{p1.Y}) and ({p2.X},{p2.Y})");

The compiler now maintains the placeholders for you so you don’t have to worry about indexing the right argument because you simply place it right there in the string.

For the full post, please read this blog.