Hey, I'm Steven a .NET Developer in Switzerland. I am a Microsoft MVP. Also, this blog is open source on GitHub.
ChatGPT is going viral right now. Besides funny conversations, you can use that tool to generate also code for you. But does it really hold up to its reputation and it is a serious pairing partner? Let's see.
In the past, it was tricky to get if the current process runs under elevated rights. In the sense of it is run under the sudo group in *nix (Unix, Linux, macOS, you name it) or administrative rights in Windows.
But that changes with .NET 8 as we now have a unified API for that.
Abstraction and Encapsulation are two fundamental concepts in object-oriented programming. So let us have a small look what the difference is between those two.
Did you ever wonder how we can iterate through a StringBuilder? I mean, of course, we can just call ToString and use the returned string, but that means we materialize the whole thing without good reason.
We can also use a normal for-loop. But we can also find a completely different and probably dumber way! And if you wonder: No, this is not something you do in your daily life, but by doing so, I can show some cool stuff C# and .NET offer.
Do you remember how .NET 6 introduced the ArgumentNullException.ThrowIfNull guard? And afterward, with .NET 7 we've got this excellent bit: ArgumentException.ThrowIfNullOrEmpty? Guess what, there might come some new handy additions for the upcoming .NET 8 iteration.
So let's see what are those new changes and how they make the code simpler.
Analyzers did become an integral part of the .NET ecosystem. Their main responsibility is to find potential code issues and warn you. Often times this comes even with potential fixes you can directly apply.
And Microsoft will continue this journey with the upcoming .NET 8 release. This blog post will show you potential candidates, which will make the cut.
.NET 7 was freshly released but Microsoft does not sleep. .NET 8 is already in the making and I want to showcase to you one new area where the dotnet team is working on Frozen collections.
So let's have a look at what frozen collections are and how they are working.
Use always a
StringBuilder
That is what you can read from time to time. The basic idea is, that a StringBuilder is "better" to be defined.
Why are people telling that lie? Let's discuss this and see what it isn't true.
Often times we hear about allocations on the heap. How can we easily measure this? This article will show you a very easy way of doing so.
Plus we will answer the question how big is an empty array? And if you think 0 bytes, then spoiler alert, that is not the case at all.
Often times we have unit or integration tests that rely on some input data. The easiest solution is just to take some hard-coded values and move on with life. This has some major downsides:
Giving specific values in a test carries meaning, but we are often times not interested in that. We just need to pass the object around to fulfill the API. Also the simplest solution to fulfill your test is literally checking against those values.
Here is an elegant solution to that problem: AutoFixture. I will show you what it can do, especially in combination with xUnit.