.NET and C# Development

I’ll share the results of a quick benchmark testing how the number of files in a directory impacts the following filesystem operations executed from a .NET application: My motivation was to decide if it was a good design performance-wise to have a single directory containing many cache files. I’m thinking about the order of magnitude … Read more

.NET 8, along with C#12, is now official. Last week, I upgraded one of my projects to the new version and tried using some new features. Primary constructors in classes don’t generate auto-properties One thing that surprised me was that the primary constructors, known from record types and now supported in classes, behaved differently than … Read more

I was recently reading about the JPEG XL format, which is one of the promising options for replacing a venerable JPEG standard. One of the aspects underlined in several sources is that it’s possible to losslessly transcode JPEG to JPEG XL and reduce the size of a file. What I found interesting is the possibility … Read more

.NET 7 introduced the [GeneratedRegex] attribute that allows doing some regex initialization in compile time rather than in runtime. Using this attribute might help improve performance. Therefore some tooling might start showing you a warning that you miss an opportunity for free performance gains 🙂 SYSLIB1045 Use ‘GeneratedRegexAttribute’ to generate the regular expression implementation at … Read more

I see many developers use Visual Studio Code as a tool helping them perform a quick full-text search in their code. And for a good reason. You can open a folder in VS Code and find fragments of text in just seconds! However, sometimes we might want to ignore (hide) some files from search results. … Read more

In Docker, it is common to build your containers upon a base image from a third party. For example, a Dockerfile for .NET project usually starts with a code similar to: Now, for a long time, I assumed that when I build an image from such a Dockerfile, it will use the most recent available … Read more

The most popular feature of JetBrains.Annotations is probably the addition of two cool attributes: [NotNull] and [CanBeNull]. They add a meta-information to a marked element, describing if null is a correct value for that element, or not. Then, developers using ReSharper would get help from the IDE and could easier avoid mistakes like here: I … Read more

Making Visual Studio treat warnings the same way as errors .NET projects have an interesting property that we can set. It’s named TreatWarningsAsErrors. We can set it in *.csproj files: For years, I would say that this is great! The more strict code checking rules, the better, right? Code style, warnings, conventions. And in theory, … Read more

The top-level statements are a feature introduced in C# 10. The idea is to reduce the boilerplate code needed to define aplication’s entry point. So instead of the traditional: We can write the code directly in the main project’s file, which reduces the code to just one line: .NET 6 templates use this new, concise … Read more

Sometimes when we develop unit tests it’s convenient to check if the tested code wrote something to the log. Is it a good practice to assert that some particular message appeared in the logs? I think there are pros and cons. On the pros side, we can make general assertions like “no errors were written … Read more