Vaughan
August 24, 2020
What is AyncLocal in C#?
An interesting class that is useful to know about but you most probably won’t directly use is AsyncLocal. It stores data local to the async flow. This means that if a method further down the chain changes the underlying value, the change will only apply to that and its children. A potential use case might […]
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Vaughan
August 20, 2020
Why you should start using property based testing
I recently watched a talk on Property-based testing and its a really interesting approach. When we write a unit test we generally use what they call example based testing. What this means is that we create an expected response and run our test to confirm that the function returns that response. Its great but the […]
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Vaughan
August 12, 2020
Classifying tweet sentiment with ML.NET
Following from my previous post on getting paged data from twitter, I thought it would be fun to use ML.NET to do a little analysis. A common problem solved with machine learning is doing sentiment analysis on text to evaluate how positive or negative something is. To solve this problem with ML.NET really isn’t that […]
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Vaughan
August 5, 2020
Consuming paged Twitter data with async enumerable
A really nice feature in C# 8 is async enumerables. A popular use case is if you want to consume paged data and potentially aggregate each page of data without having to get everything first. Previously the consuming code would have to handle the paging but now your method can just enumerate over the IAsyncEnumerable […]
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Vaughan
July 21, 2020
Creating an AWS Lambda function written in C# .NET Core
With more and more companies moving to the cloud, the idea of serverless execution of your code has more and more appeal. AWS has Lambda and Azure has Functions. The idea is the same: You give them a method that you want to execute and the provider works out the scaling. As you get more […]
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Vaughan
July 16, 2020
ASP.NET Core integration tests with WebApplicationFactory
We all agree that we want to have tests that cover as much of our application as possible. Right? The general approach with ASP.NET applications has been to extract meaningful business logic out of your controllers. Pretty much everything that needs to be tested would be injected with an interface so that its easy to […]
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Vaughan
July 7, 2020
Performance with ref readonly returns
When looking at performance of an application, there is a trade off between when you should be using value types and when you should be using reference types. People often talk about minimizing allocations to the heap for reference types but allocations themselves are actually very quick. The reason why its an issue is that […]
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Vaughan
June 30, 2020
Understanding default interface members in .NET Core
A new feature in C# 8.0 and .NET Core 3.0 is that of default interface members. The motivation for it is where authors of a public interface would like to add functionality to an existing interface but don’t want to force all the consuming code to implement it. You are able to add a default […]
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Vaughan
June 23, 2020
Using the new Index and range operators
A great C# feature that was recently released is the new Index and Range operators. Two new system objects were created to make accessing elements or range of elements in arrays shorter and more convenient. Index You can now index an array from the end of the array instead of using Array.Length. To be honest, […]
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Vaughan
June 17, 2020
A case for pattern matching
Over the years developers using more functional languages like F# have boasted about how much easier their code is to read and how imperative C# can be. NO LONGER! Well maybe not much longer. We are starting to move in the right direction with pattern matching as a good replacement for switch statements. switch statements […]
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