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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Vaughan
June 16, 2020
Why is async void return bad?
When writing async code, your method is allowed to return either void, Task, Task, or ValueTask). Since early on with async code, the advice has been to not use void return methods. But in real life there are times when you don’t really have a choice. Since we can’t always get away from using them, […]
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Vaughan
June 11, 2020
Running a .NET Core HostedService as a Windows service
If you need to run your long running .NET Core worker application on a windows server, you can easily install it as a windows service with minimal changes. Just add the following package. Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting.WindowsServices Then all you have to do is add UseWindowsService() to your host builder and its ready to use. public static IHostBuilder […]
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Vaughan
June 9, 2020
When to consider using ValueTask over Task with async code
As of .NET Core 2.0, you can use ValueTask and ValueTask as return types for your async methods. Its important to understand when and if you should use these instead of a Task and what the trade-offs are if you decide to use it. I would say that if you aren’t measuring the performance of […]
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