Are lock and Monitor the same in C#?

Working on some threading stuff I stumbled upon some discussions about lock and Monitor. Some say they are different and some say they are the same. I took few minutes of time to make some simple experiments with both of these. This blog post shows what C# compiler does with lock statement. As I had to use also Monitor class I added one example here how to use it instead of lock.

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Fallback logger for Windows 10 IoT Core

We love to use our favorite logging solutions as much as possible but if external storage or external services are involved we cannot guarantee that logging works in crisis situation. This blog post introduces wrapper logger that uses main one to log all the messages and secondary one when main logger fails. Implementation is easy but there’s a good chance that log messages doesn’t get completely lost when main logging service goes down.

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Why Azure REST API-s and how to prepare for using them?

When new Microsoft Azure services come they usually have REST API-s available. Of course, there are usually client libraries available too as NuGet packages but usually not for every .NET flavour. Although Microsoft has plans to publish libraries for CoreCLR too it doesn’t happen always fast. Let’s see how REST API-s work and how to prepare for using them.

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Using OneNote API to count degustated beers

I am heavy OneNote user as OneNote is easybut still powerful application to keep important information and organize it the way I like. Not to mention powerful cloud back-end that makes my OneNote notebooks available for me on desktop, tablet and mobile phone. In this posting I will show you some code I use to update the number of degustated beers in beer diary.

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Using Microsoft Solver Foundation to solve linear programming tasks

One of soon-to-starts projects uses linear programming for some optimizations. As it is not very familiar topic to me I started looking for examples and tools so I am prepared better when action starts. In this posting I will show you how to solve simple linear programming tasks using Microsoft Solver Foundation – free math package available by DevLabs.

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Adding multiple data importers support to web applications

I’m building web application for customer and there is requirement that users must be able to import data in different formats. Today we will support XLSX and ODF as import formats and some other formats are waiting. I wanted to be able to add new importers on the fly so I don’t have to deploy web application again when I add new importer or change some existing one. In this posting I will show you how to build generic importers support to your web application.

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