In the previous post, I've written about inlining a Stylesheet file in the page. This allow you to reduce the number of requests required to load the page, and so to reduce the loading time of the page. The TagHelper automatically replace the tag by the content of the file at runtime, so the html document stays clean in the source code. In this post, we'll create new Tag Helpers to be able to inline CSS,… [read more]

When you have a very tiny stylesheet, it may be more performant to inline it directly in the page. Indeed, it will avoid one network call, and the layout may be blocked until the browser get the response of this call. If the stylesheet is very small you may not care about caching the file on the client. For instance, on this website, the main stylesheet is 2kB large, and the full page with the inlined… [read more]

Integrating Google Analytics in your website is not very complicated. You just need to copy the snippet in the head tag of your page. But, there are another way to integrate it. Since ASP.NET Core 2.0, you can create a Tag Helper Component. A Tag Helper Component is a Tag Helper that allows you to conditionally modify or add HTML elements from server-side code. This allows you, for instance, to add some… [read more]

When working with an http service, you have to do lots of http requests to the server. This may slow down your tests/debugging experience. There are multiple ways to handle that issue. The first one is to mock the calls and work with fake data. You can easily mock the HttpClient class in C# (see Mocking an HttpClient using an HttpClientHandler), but this requires to do that for each projects and to create… [read more]

Enumeration in .NET are very useful to avoid magic strings/numbers. .NET provides useful methods such as GetValues, Parse, TryParse, ToString. public enum Role { [DisplayName("Viewer")] [Description("read and comment on posts and pages")] Guest = 0, [DisplayName("Editor")] [Description("has access to all posts, pages, comments, categories, tags, and… [read more]

It's very common to use basic types such as string, int, or long to represent your data. However, sometimes there is a semantic behind the type. For instance, a string can be a file path, a full name, or an id. Also, you need to compare them or pretty-print the value. For instance, the length of a file is a long, but you almost never show the raw information. Instead, you format it as MB or GB. Which one… [read more]

Integration tests sometimes rely on external resources. It can be a database server like Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL or CouchDB, an external service like GitLab or Artifactory, a SSH server, etc. When you run a test that use such a service, you need to ensure you start with a clean state. This is where Docker is useful. Docker allows to quickly spawn a new instance of a service. You can run a new… [read more]

It can be useful to get the compilation date of an assembly. For instance, you can display it in addition to the version number: v1.2.3 built one day ago. Linker timestamp You can retrieve the embedded linker timestamp from the IMAGE_FILE_HEADER section of the Portable Executable header: public static DateTime GetLinkerTimestampUtc(Assembly assembly) { var location = assembly.Location; return… [read more]

Following my previous post about ILRepack, some people asked me where the MSBuild property ReferencePathWithRefAssemblies comes from. Is there a documentation, or something to find properties like this one? The documentation of MSBuild is very useful to understand how it works and the key concepts. However, they cannot document all the properties because there are dependents of the kind of project you… [read more]

ILRepack is a tool that allows you to merge multiple assemblies into a single assembly. This can be useful when you deploy an application that has a few dependencies. In this case, you can merge all the dll and the exe into a single exe file, so it's easier to deploy it. It's also useful if you create a NuGet package. In this case, it allows to remove the dependencies that you don't want to expose to your… [read more]