Top-level statements

The .NET team introduced top-level statements to the language in .NET 5 and C# 9. From that point, writing statements before declaring namespaces and other members became possible. Under the hood, the compiler emits those statements in a Program.Main method.

With top-level statements, a minimal .NET “Hello World” console program looked like this (Program.cs):

using System;
Console.WriteLine("Hello world!");

Unfortunately, we still need a project to run it, so we have to create a .csproj file with the following content (for example, MyProject.csproj):

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">
    <PropertyGroup>
        <TargetFramework>net8.0</TargetFramework>
        <OutputType>Exe</OutputType>
    </PropertyGroup>
</Project>

From there, we can use the .NET CLI to dotnet run the application, and it will output the following in the console before the program terminates...