Command Line Arguments and C# 9.0 Top Level Statement – Visual Studio

Until C# 9.0, It was all about the Main() method where program control start and ends. With C# 9.0, you don’t need to mention the Main() method or Class definition explicitly using Top-Level Statement. Then how do you pass command-line arguments for your program? especially when you are running it from Visual Studio. In this post let us have a look at how we can pass command line arguments in Visual Studio for C# 9.0 Top Level Statement.

Typical C# Console Vs Top-Level Statement in C# 9.0

A typical Hello World Console Application for C# looks as below

using System;

namespace TopLevelStatementCsharp
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");
        }
    }
}

With Top-Level Statement in C# 9.0, you can achieve the same using just following line of code.

System.Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");

Which will produce the same output as previous code block.

Command Line Arguments with Visual Studio

You can pass the parameter for the top-level statement along with multiple arguments.

System.Console.WriteLine($"Hello {args?[0]}");

In Visual Studio you can set the parameter from the debug tab as “Application Argument” .

Once this is set, you can run and test it out.

Read : How to Pass Command Line Arguments using Visual Studio ?

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