Converting an enum value to a string using the ToString() method is expensive. In general, the performance impact is negligible. But when you call the ToString method thousands of times per second, saving a few milliseconds is important. enum Color { AliceBlue, AntiqueWhite, Aqua, Aquamarine, Azure, ... } Color value = Color.Aqua; _ = value.ToString(); // 👈 we'll improve this one! All of the following… [read more]

In .NET there are multiple ways to check if a value is null. But all of them are not equivalent. Let's look at the different ways to check if an object is null: object obj = ...; obj == null; object.Equals(obj, null); object.ReferenceEquals(obj, null); obj is null; // Equivalent to ReferenceEquals(obj, null) (object)obj == null; // Equivalent to ReferenceEquals(obj, null) obj is not object; // Equivalent… [read more]

Roslyn analyzers provide a live static analysis of your code. They can detect wrong usages of APIs, security issues, performance issues, etc. Analyzers often provide many rules. If some of them do not apply to your project, you can use a .editorconfig file to disable them. Also, some rules are configurable to better match your needs. Be sure to check the documentation before disabling a rule to validate… [read more]

Coyote is .NET library and tool designed to help ensure that your code is free of concurrency bugs. Concurrency bugs are hard to find and reproduce as they often depends on non-deterministics things such as timeout or message ordering. For instance, if multiple threads are waiting for a locked object, which one will acquired it first? Coyote is able to run a multi-threaded application in a deterministic… [read more]

When using an external closed-source library, it can sometimes be useful to understand how it works and debug it like if it were part of your solution. To display the source code of a DLL when debugging, Visual Studio relies on PDB files (Symbol files) to link compiled code to source code. This means Visual Studio needs to find the PDB file and the .cs files. Visual Studio can load these files either from… [read more]

Roslyn analyzers analyze your code for style, quality and maintainability, design and other issues. .NET includes built-ins analyzers (Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.NetAnalyzers), and it's very common to include a few other analyzers such as Microsoft.VisualStudio.Threading.Analyzers, Meziantou.Analyzer, or StyleCop.Analyzers. Roslyn analyzers runs while building the projects. If you enable lots of rules, it… [read more]

Debouncing and throttling are used to prevent too many events from being processing. For instance, when a user types text in a search bar, you may want to wait until they stop writing for a few milliseconds before executing the search request. This is what debouncing is made for. When using debounce, you will wait for a certain inactivity time before processing an event. In Blazor, there are 2 ways to use… [read more]

Recently, I had to convert an SVG file to PNG. I tried a few free online converters, but none of them were able to convert the image correctly. Indeed, they don't support custom fonts... Instead of wasting more time at searching for an existing tool, I opened Visual Studio and I made a quick application to convert my images! Example of a buggy SVG to PNG conversion (original SVG) Let's fix it! The idea is… [read more]

Your continuous integration script often looks like dotnet build mysolution.sln and dotnet test mysolution.sln. In my case, I have a solution that contains multiple class libraries and a few WPF projects. I want to create NuGet packages and also test projects on Windows, Linux, and Mac. However, you cannot build WPF projects on Linux or Mac. This means dotnet build fail on these platforms. One way to deal… [read more]

This website is hosted on a static website hosting provider and I use Cloudflare CDN to improve the performance. These 2 services allow me to host this website for free even if I got more and more visitors. However, I do not have lots of analytics. For instance, I want to know where the user comes from using the HTTP referer header or if they got a 404. Google Analytics is useful but most users use an… [read more]