What is Generative Fill? You are probably familiar with the Generative Fill feature in graphic editing software like Adobe Photoshop. The idea is that well-trained AI models can guess how to fill blank areas in the picture. The model can either try to guess what to do by itself or accept prompts to steer it … Read more
Recently, I’ve been prototyping various plugins and tools for Anki (flashcard management system) in C#. So far, the biggest technical obstacle I encountered was the following exception thrown when I tried to query data from the database: System.Data.SQLite.SQLiteException: ‘SQL logic error, no such collation sequence: unicase‘ or, when I used Microsoft.Data.Sqlite NuGet package instead of … Read more
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
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