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.
You might have heard that mutable value types are evil. But why is that and why does the .NET framework use them then? Are they really that evil?
Let's have a look at a few examples and have a look what is going on!
Often times your API in your program or library evolves. So you will need a mechanism of telling that a specific API (an interface or just a simple method call) is obsolete and might be not there anymore in the next major version.
Also it can happen that you have a preview version of a API, which might not be rock-stable and the API-surface might change. How do we indicate that to the user?
This edition has the following infographics:
DebuggerDisplayAttributeExceptionDispatchInfoimplicit and explicit operator
.NET knows local functions and lambda expressions. You can almost take them interchangeably, but there are also some differences between them.
This article will show the differences between them.
You might have read, that re-throwing an exception like this: throw exc; is considered bad practice and you should just do this: throw; instead.
But why is it like that?
In this article we will have a closer look at LiteDB, a .NET NoSQL Document Store in a single data file. We will discover the advantages of LiteDB and why it is a viable candidate for your next project.
We will also explore what are the differences between a NoSQL and a classical SQL database are and what this has to do with the reminiscent SQL CE or the more modern SQLite database.
In this short blog post I want to show you two silly things so that you can apply right now! Both of them equally silly, but that is not the point (is it ever?).
We will see how to await an integer or TimeSpan and how to foreach through an integer. All of this thanks to the magic of extensions methods.
This edition has the following infographics:
ConfigureAwait on IAsyncDisposableforeachstructnull for a Task
This article will show you what exactly a WebApplicationFactory is and why it is so "mighty" when it comes down to testing. I will highlight some of the properties, which you can leverage to write powerful tests.
Sometimes I publish parts of my infographics I publish on various channels with more explanation.
And then sometimes I don't. This time I just put some of my (hopefully self-explanatory) infographics here.
In this article I will show you what is the difference between x86 (32-bit) vs x64 (64-bit) in the .NET World.
What is the impact if you choose on or another.
Pattern matching, which was introduced in C# 9, is a hell of a beast and does more than you might think.
In this small blog post I show you where the magic is and what it does under the hood.
Did you ever wonder what is a nice way of structuring your Blazor application?
I will show you how I structure my Blazor projects (as well as this very blog). What are the upside in contrast to the "default" structuring you get with the Blazor template.
This is a small story about how memory operates in your .NET application. Well not only .NET but how memory does or does not get allocated.
We will see how a 1 Gigabyte big array is only a few megabytes big to some extend. Furthermore I will discuss working set and committed memory.
NDepend is a static analysis tool for .NET managed code. The tool proposes a large number features, from dependency visualization to Quality Gates and Smart Technical Debt Estimation. For that reasons the community refers to it as the "Swiss Army Knife" for .NET Developers.
So let's check if that descriptionI shamelessly stole from Wikipedia checks out and what we can do with that tool.
Often times it is easier to have a nice illustration at hand, which explains you things the easy way. So let's do this for a lot of LINQ operations like Where, Select and friends.
Of course a small explanation will be attached as well.
You might have code where an object offers you an event to notify you when a specific operation is done. But event's can be tricky to use, especially when you want to have a continuous flow in your application.
That is where TaskCompletionSource comes into play. We can "transform" an event based function into something which is await-able from the outside world via the await keyword.
When you get started or even if you have quite some knowledge it can be confusing to juggle with those terms. So what is the difference between C# and .NET? And what does it have to do with IL and JIT?
C# offers a lot of utility especially around the delegate topic. So let's see what exactly a delegate is and how the distinct types like delegate, Action, Func, Predicate, anonymous function, lambda expressions and MulticastDelegate behave. A lot to digest and discover so let's go.
I already made a post about how the Garbage Collector works in .NET and also introduced slightly the topic of Generations. This article will look a bit more in detail why we have those mechanism in the first place including the Large Object Heap.
Just imagine a car pool: There is a dealer which bought the car and lent's it to you. After a while you will return this car where you got it from. Much like that works an ObjectPool in C#. You can rent an expensive object from the pool and when you are done with it, you just return it. Sounds beautiful, doesn't it?
Let's explore the advantages and disadvantages of a ObjectPools and how they work.
RavenDB is a well known open-source document-oriented databse for .NET. And of course we want to test our logic and not only locally while developing, but also our continuous integration pipeline should be able to run our tests. So let's tackle exactly that.
This article will talk about the garbage collector in .NET. Why do we have and need him? And why it is important to understand the behavior to know what impact on our application he has.
What is Tail-Recursion? We will discover this "special" form of recursion on the example of the Fibonacci series. Also we will check how much faster it is and why.
In C# we can add the sealed modifier to a class to indicate that no one is allowed to derive / inherit from that class.
Let's have a look at the compiler in certain scenarios what happens if you seal a class.
When we are passing objects around we can do this either via reference or by value. What of those two methods is faster?
To answer this question we have to dive a bit info what happens exactly when you pass something around and how the other side will receive this.
Besides the big announcements of .NET 6 there are also some smaller features. I want to show case a special one: static abstract interfaces. With this you have ability to extend the contract in that sense, that an implementing class has to provide also static methods. This feature is right now flagged as preview, but you can use it if you want.
This also enables generic math operations on an interface level.
.NET brings two types which seem very similiar
IEnumerableIQueryableWhat is the difference? Most are familiar with using IQueryable when we want to go to the database and back. But why not using IEnumerable?