In a previous post, I've talked about inlining a CSS file in the html page. In term of performance, this is important to inline the critical CSS. However, the rest of the styles of the page doesn't need to be downloaded immediately. For script elements, you can simply add the attribute async to instruct the browser to load the resource asynchronously. For stylesheets, there is no equivalent. You have to… [read more]

This blog post is part of The Second C# Advent Calendar, a series of 50 posts about C#. Be sure to check out the rest of the blog posts in the calendar! Roslyn is the C# and VB.NET compiler. Roslyn also provides language services that can be used by IDE such as refactorings, code fixes, or edit and continue. If you are not familiar with Roslyn, you should read the following post to discover the scope of… [read more]

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 links")] Editor = 1, … [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]