Cost of exceptions

Hopefully the era of leprosy and corona is over for this time and it’s time to get back to blogging. Exceptions are powerful feature of object-oriented languages as far as they are used like they are thought to use – throw exception only when something really unexpected happens. This advice should be taken seriously – here’s why.

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Top-level programs in C# 9.0

C# 9.0 comes with nice new feature called top-level programs. It’s something that teachers of beginner classes will love for sure. Imagine – you start teaching C# with only two lines of code on screen. All missing code is generated by compiler. This blog post introduces top-level programs and shows some secrets of new C# compiler.

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Xamarin Forms turns to .NET MAUI – single project and code-base dev experience

Yesterday Microsoft announced .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) – the effort to turn Xamarin Forms apps use single cross-platform code-base targeting multiple platforms. Demos from Build conference yesterday gave clear signal – it’s not just an experiment but real deal. They really had single project running on Windows desktop and iPhone. This blog post is short overview of what’s coming.

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Implementing repository querying interface in EF Core DbContext

My last bold statement was that we don’t need custom unit of work and repository classes with Entity Framework Core. One issue remained unsolved and it was querying part of repositories (yeah, those custom querying methods). After some experiments to get querying interface of repositories to DbContext I worked out something that I kind of like. I managed to make DbContext to work like classic unit of work that hosts repository instances. Here’s my experiment and the solution I worked out.

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No need for repositories and unit of work with Entity Framework Core

After working again on codebase where Entity Framework Core was used through repository and unit of work patterns I decided to write eye-opener post for next (and maybe even current and previous) generations about what Entity Framework has to offer in the light of these to patterns. In many cases we don’t have to move away from database context approach but stick with it even more than we first planned. Here’s how many useless repositories and units of work born and here’s also how to avoid these and go with implementations offered by Entity Framework Core.

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Generalize file access for ASP.NET Core applications using IFileClient implementations

Once upon a time I worked out simple file client generalization so my applications can keep files on local machine or somewhere on the cloud without changes in application code. This blog post shows how to generalize file access in web applications and provides implementations for local and cloud file clients.

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Self-contained executable with .NET Core 3.0 on Windows, Linux and Raspberry

.NET Core 3.0 comes with support for self-contained executables. It means we can publish applications as a single executable for specified platform. Also trimming – removing of unused code from assemblies – is supported. This blog post demonstrates how to build self-contained executables using .NET Core.

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HttpClient: How to remove charset from Content-Type header

I was writing client library for one online service and faced situation where I had to remove charset definition from Content-Type header. It was like content type is application/json or response is 415 “Unsupported media type”. I was using HttpClient class to communicate with service and without additional efforts charset doesn’t go away. Here is how I got charset definition away from Content-Type header.

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Writing to CSV-file from multiple threads

I was writing document and metadata exporter that reads data from SharePoint and writes it to multiple files. I needed to boost up performance of my exporter and I went with multiple threads pumping out the data from SharePoint. One problem I faced – writing metadata to CSV-files from multiple threads in parallel. This blog post shows how to do it using concurrent queue.

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