In an application, you don't want to waste resources. When an ongoing operation is not needed anymore, you should cancel it. For instance, if your application downloads data to show them in a view, and the user navigates away from this view, you should cancel the download. In a .NET application, the way to cancel operation is to use a CancellationToken. You can create a CancellationToken using the… [read more]

GitHub Super-Linter is a simple combination of various linters to help validate your source code. The end goal of this tool: Prevent broken code from being uploaded to your repository Help establish coding best practices across multiple languages Build guidelines for code layout and format Automate the process to help streamline code reviews Instead of using many linters individually in your CI, you can… [read more]

If you use an internal NuGet server or just want to be explicit on the sources to use to restore package, you need to set the source in the NuGet configuration. You can use the dotnet nuget command to manage sources: dotnet nuget add source https://api.nuget.org/v3/index.json --name nuget.org dotnet nuget add source https://azureartifacts.microsoft.com/myTeam --name myTeam --username user --password pass… [read more]

I received an email from a service that catches spelling errors, grammar errors, and broken links on websites. They spam website owners to sell their services. Here's the content of the email: I wrote 340 posts and there are only 27 errors, I was happy 😃 But getting 0 error is still better. So, I clicked on the link. On the webpage, you can see a few errors for free. Then, you have to subscribe to get… [read more]

An IEnumerable<T> can be costly to enumerate. If you need to do it twice or more, you'll pay the cost each time you enumerate it. For instance, if you use Directory.EnumerateFiles(), it will enumerate the file system each time you start enumerating the results. You can use ToList or ToArray to read all the items and have a data structure you can enumerate very quickly. However, you have to read the full… [read more]

It's very easy to multitarget a library in the csproj. All you need to do is listing all target frameworks in the TargetFrameworks element: <Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk"> <PropertyGroup> <TargetFrameworks>net5.0;netstandard2.1;netstandard2.0;net461</TargetFrameworks> </PropertyGroup> </Project> Then, you may have different implementations in the code depending on the target framework. When MSBuild… [read more]

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed that I use a cover image for the posts. This improves the visibility of the posts I write on people's timelines. The image is composed of 3 parts: The post categories The post title The author website and Twitter handle Of course, I do not want to create all these images manually. Also generating an image with a dynamic text is not that trivial. For… [read more]

Regexes are very useful to extract information from a string. In the following example the regex extracts a name and a version from a string such as WhatEverReference("abc", "1.0.0"). The string can contain multiple references anywhere in it and we need to get all name-version couples contained in the string. private static readonly Regex regex = new Regex(… [read more]

C# 9 brings lots of new language features. One of them is the ability to suppress emitting .locals init flag. This feature allows to improve the performance of a method by not zeroing the local variables before executing the method. Even if zeroing local has been improved in .NET 5, not doing it will still be faster. What is locals init? By default, the C# compiler emits the .locals init directive. This… [read more]

.NET 5 introduces a new very handy method: Process.WaitForExitAsync(CancellationToken) (documentation). This method waits for the process to exit, or for the cancellationToken to be canceled. It is very similar to the synchronous version Process.WaitForExit and I'm pretty sure some analyzers will suggest replacing the method with the new asynchronous method. Both methods behave differently. WaitForExit… [read more]