With new .NET (Core) versions being released every year, we might quickly forget that there are still many old .NET framework applications in use without being regularly updated. Recently I helped to fix one such application as it suddenly stopped working because of a failing SSL/TLS connection.
Since the release of Roslyn, the complete C# compiler pipeline is available as a NuGet package and we can include it in our own application. I was wondering how difficult it would be to use it to compile some C# source code into an executable and run it.
Since this week, The Absolutely Awesome Book on C# and .NET is finally available for order in its final form: in all eBook formats and with the accompanying source code.
Tuples, as added to C# 7, can be a nice alternative to anonymous types in LINQ when you only want to return a subset of values from the queried type. Before tuples, this was only possible by creating an anonymous type in the Select method. Now you can create a tuple instead. However, if you try to do that with EF Core, the code won't compile. How come?
Windows 10 by default doesn't come with .NET Framework 3.5 installed, however some older applications still require it. You can install it by enabling the corresponding Windows feature, however you need to be online for this to work. Fortunately you can use DISM.exe to work around that requirement.
For the second year in a row, I spent a significant amount of time in December solving the Advent of Code programming puzzles. Before writing the first line of code, I created a repository for my solutions. Unlike last year, I wanted to have all the code readily available for future reference. More than once, I actually looked up previous solutions while solving a more recent puzzle.
Are you used to the fact that strings are null-terminated? Well, in .NET framework they are not. In this article I explore the consequences of that, explain the circumstances under which you might stumble across it, and suggest, how to avoid being affected by it.
You might not be aware of it, but Visual Studio projects have additional identity beyond their project file name and path. Each one of them contains a GUID value which should by definition be unique in normal circumstances. The troubles begin, when you create a copy of a project by copying its folder and renaming the files.
I was expecting in-depth content, describing the good and bad practices in different scenarios supported by measurements, pitfalls to be aware of, options to consider. Instead I only got a high-level overview of several performance related aspects, at best.
Recently I was involved in troubleshooting a strange performance issue, manifesting itself in the form of long initialization time of each newly created process or AppDomain on one of the servers. In the end it turned out, it was caused by assembly binding log being enabled on that machine for a long time.
When an application starts misbehaving in production, attaching a debugger to alive process is out of the question. Creating a memory dump and analyzing it in WinDbg is the way to go. Most of us are required to do this on rare occasions only. To make it easier for me in the time of crisis, I created a short cheat sheet.
The content is not focused only on sagas at all. The samples are very contrived and almost impossible to make sense of by just reading the book. Not even the basic functionality and structure of sagas is properly explained, much less any advanced concepts and usage scenarios. I can't really recommend the title to anyone.
Whether you're starting to learn about NServiceBus, considering the adoption of distributed architecture in a .NET framework based project, or just want to know what NServiceBus is about, you should read this book.
It's always best to completely avoid using reflection, but unfortunately that's not always possible. Sometimes you need to use APIs, which are not strongly typed. In such cases you should transition from reflection to strongly typed code as soon as possible: because of performance, and because of code readability as well. In this blog post I'll describe a couple of techniques which are useful in situations like this.
Creating a Windows service in .NET could hardly be any easier. Installing multiple instances of such a service on a single computer is not that easy. Since there's not much documentation about it, many articles are describing over-complicated custom solutions instead of taking advantage of the APIs that are already available.
A couple of days ago I encountered a surprising FileLoadException. The key to the solution was in carefully reading the complete exception message. The last sentence made it clear that strong name validation had failed.
Recently a colleague of mine mentioned that he has just learned about KeyedByTypeCollection, although it has been included with .NET framework since .NET 3.0. I'm writing this post, because I didn't know about it until that day, either. This leads me to believe that there must be many more developers out there who aren't aware of this niche class being readily available.
Recently I got my hands on the full version of NDepend and I decided to take advantage of that by trying it out on a couple of projects I am working on, both personally and professionally. It turned out that NDepend isn't all that easy to use if you want to make the most out of it. In this post I'll go over the steps I made to set everything up and reconfigure it in a way that made the results more meaningful to me.
I have learned quite a few new tricks while reading the book and I would have even more if it wasn't for my previous hands-on experience with many of the topics covered. If you are considering or already developing parallel or asynchronous code, I strongly recommend reading this book.
It seems that different String methods handle special 0xFFFD Unicode replacement character in different ways.
It's more than a year since NAnt 0.92 has been released, but if you take a look at the project issues page, many of them still report problems related to finding different versions of SDKs.
The author really managed to convey a lot of information in a concise and useful way, although not all of the topics are covered equally well: some really do shine, while others could still be improved.
Writing asynchronous code in .NET framework 4.5 is pure joy thanks to task-based asynchronous pattern (TAP) and the async/await syntactic sugar. Although many APIs have been updated since the introduction of TAP to provide task based asynchronous methods which can be used with async and await, occasionally you will still encounter operations in APM (Asynchronous programming model) or EAP (Event-based asynchronous pattern) without a TAP equivalent. Fortunately .NET framework provides helpers which will make wrapping older style asynchronous operations into tasks much easier.
The book addresses a lot of advanced topics throughout the chapters, as expected based on the target audience of experienced .NET developers. Still, most of the chapters include some basic topics as well, which slow down the pace.
When you pass an instance of IList<T> to the constructor, the BindingList<T> doesn't create its copy. It serves as a wrapper for it, supporting only the operations also supported by the underlying collection.
Recently I encountered strange and inconsistent behavior in exceptions being thrown by different file operations in WinRT.
Task-based asynchronous pattern has many advantages over other asynchronous patterns introduced in the past, most of them boiling down to the fact that it's really easy to get into and start using it. Like any other technology, it does have its pitfalls and there are many details to know about once you get into more advanced scenarios.
The book seems more like a collection of blog posts, which have passed a much stricter review process. If enough of them are of interest to the reader they should provide enough value to be worth the purchase. Check the table of contents online, before buying it.
This year's Bleeding Edge conference was taking place this week in the beautiful surroundings of Gozd Martuljek. The second day was dedicated to community driven redelivery of Build. As the last session of the day I had a talk on the aspects of reusing existing .NET framework code in Metro applications for Windows 8.
Reflection is a great tool for calling methods on objects when their types are not known at compile time. Unfortunately the Type.GetMethod method doesn't work with generic methods, therefore we need to find the right method by iterating through all the methods returned by Type.GetMethods. Searching for alternatives I stumbled upon a solution using expression trees. It got me wondering though, which of the two solutions actually performs better.
XmlSerializer is often a great choice for persisting objects or transmitting them over the wire, either by using default object serialization tailored only with attributes or by implementing the IXmlSerializable yourself. If you're not careful though, this might come at a significant performance cost.
It seems that no matter how much experience one has with .NET framework, there are still surprises awaiting him somewhere down the road. This time I'd like to point out an interesting behavior of MethodInfo.Invoke many of you might not be aware of. I certainly wasn't, until today.
One of the changes in .NET Framework 4 was the retirement of Code Access Security (CAS). Until recently this was something, I have only read about at the time of release, but it didn't have any effect on my day to day work. Therefore I was even more surprised that an application which has recently been migrated from .NET 2.0 to .NET 4 suddenly failed to start from the network drive while working flawlessly from the local machine.
My favorite environment for running NUnitunit tests during the development process is definitely Unit Test Runner in CodeRush. When I just recently had to get a usable development environment up and running with Visual C# 2010 Express, I had to find a different solution since extensions are not supported in the Express SKUs of Visual Studio.
Recently I tackled a seemingly simple task: XML serialization of a generic class used with a TimeSpan data type. It turned out that XmlSerializer doesn't serialize the TimeSpan structure at all.
Trace listeners are a great mechanism for troubleshooting and monitoring applications in production environment. What I didn't know until recently, is that by adding a trace listener to your application you can cause it to crash.
A few months ago I worked on a small spare time project which included some manipulation of binary Excel (.xls) files. This seemingly simple task soon turned out to be quite a challenge if you want to handle it right. The post you are reading is a short summary of my experiences. They should make your choices easier if you are about to tackle a similar problem.
Subversion and CruiseControl.NET can be invaluable tools in your .NET development process. There are many resources available to help you get started which I'll try to gather in this post along with some of my personal experiences.
Microsoft Exchange supports Send As and Send On Behalf Of permissions to be granted to users for individual e-mail addresses. Sending e-mail from Outlook for these users is very simple. If you want to achieve this from code there is a little more work involved.
.NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1 caused the C# compiler in Visual Studio 2005 and later to set the NXCOMPAT bit for all build targets without an option to turn this new behavior off. This means that DEP (data execution prevention) will kick in unless it is turned off completely in the operating system.
Close() must be called on a CompressionStream before you start reading from the underlying stream. Calling only Flush() is not enough in this case.
In my opinion RSACryptoServiceProvider class is seriously under-documented in MSDN. For future reference I'm listing the solution to two problems I had.
If you need cheap and simple OCR functionality Microsoft Office Document Imaging Type Library (MODI) is a nice option if its requirements (Microsoft Office 2003 or later) and limitations (limited language support) don't bother you.
I've recently passed the MCP exam 70-536: TS: Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 – Application Development Foundation. I found the exam quite easy with only a few really nitpicking questions.
Don't use Configuration.Save in scenarios where users might only have read and write permissions for the configuration file.
The following code returns the time when a web resource was last modified. Maybe it will be useful to someone.
Before using EventLog.WriteEntry for adding events to event log you should consider calling EventLog.CreateEventSource to make your application a valid source of events. Keep in mind though that you need administrative privileges for it to succeed, therefore it is best to call it at installation time.
Essentially everything you need to implement plugins in your application is some way to dynamically instantiate classes at runtime. In COM world this was achieved by calling the CreateObject function. In the managed world you should use AppDomain.CreateInstanceAndUnwrap.
By switching from C# with P/Invoke calls to Managed C++ when implementing a managed wrapper for the ANSI C style library I stumbled upon, I wanted to avoid the tedious and error-prone task of writing the P/Invoke signatures for function calls and user-defined types for the structures they used. As a side result I also managed to avoid most of the advanced marshaling issues with complex data structures.
Managed C++ is actually quite nice in the 2005 version. You probably still wouldn't want to use it if you could get away with C# or VB. But if platform invoke is giving you too many headaches, you might want to take a look at it.
To measure the time it takes to execute a piece of code before .NET 2.0, you had to develop your own high resolution timer by wrapping the unmanaged calls. Stopwatch class implements the same high resolution timer functionality out of the box.
No matter what you're doing in the static constructor, never allow it to throw an exception unless the problem is indeed fatal and you intend to quit the program immediately. In all other cases provide reasonable defaults and handle changed circumstances elsewhere in the code.