Reflection allows you to access private members of a class. This is very useful when you want to access private members of a class that you don't own. However, it is slow and doesn't work well with Native AOT. In this post, I describe how to access private members without reflection in .NET 8. Let's consider the following class containing private members: class Sample { // Constructors private Sample() {… [read more]

In the blog post Per virtual desktop single-instance application, I introduced the IVirtualDesktopManager interface to detect if a window is on the current virtual desktop. In this post, I describe how to list the virtual desktops. This can be useful to provide a list of virtual desktops to the user to select the one where the application should be displayed. The IVirtualDesktopManager interface doesn't… [read more]

When I lock my computer, it's because I'm going to leave it for a while. I don't want to waste energy by keeping the monitors on and I don't like having a useless source of light. So, I want to turn them off automatically when I lock my computer. To turn off monitors on Windows, you can use the SendMessage function from the user32.dll library. To avoid creating an executable, I use PowerShell to call this… [read more]

PowerShell Core doesn't provide a built-in cmdlet to parse YAML. However, there is a PowerShell module called powershell-yaml that provides the ConvertFrom-Yaml and ConvertTo-Yaml cmdlets. The following example shows how to convert a YAML file to a JSON file with PowerShell Core: $InputFile = "test.yaml" $OutputFile = "test.json" Install-Module powershell-yaml -Scope CurrentUser Get-Content -LiteralPath… [read more]

This post is a collection of resources that I use to stay up to date with .NET. This list is not exhaustive, but I think it is a good starting point when you don't know where to start. I hope that you find it useful! You can subscribe to most blogs using tools such as Feedly. This allows you to read the blogs in a single place and also to get notifications when new posts are published. .NET documentation… [read more]

WebView2 is a new web browser control for Windows desktop applications. It is based on the Chromium engine and is a replacement for the old WebBrowser control. A browser mostly handles HTTP requests, but it is also possible to handle custom protocols. Custom protocols are used by some applications to open a specific page. For example, the mailto: protocol is used to open the default email client. When… [read more]

WebView2 is a new web browser control for Windows desktop applications. It is based on the Chromium open-source project and is powered by the Microsoft Edge browser. It is available in the Microsoft.Web.WebView2 package. Using this control, you can have a web browser in your application and interact with it. You can use it to display web pages, execute JavaScript code, inject custom CSS, handle navigation… [read more]

When you write a .NET library, you may want to target multiple target framework monikers (TFM). For instance, you may want to target .NET 6 and .NET Standard 2.0. This allows your library to be used by more applications, By targeting the latest supported framework, you can also use Nullable Reference Types. However, it can be challenging to write a library that targets multiple TFMs. For instance, you may… [read more]

Microsoft.Extensions.Logging allows providers to implement semantic or structured logging. This means that the logging system can store the parameters of the log message as fields instead of just storing the formatted message. This enables logging providers to index the log parameters and perform ad-hoc queries on them. If you are not familiar with structured logging, here's an example of a structured log… [read more]

This post is about micro-optimization. Don't make your code unreadable for the sake of performance unless there is an absolute need and you have a benchmark proving this is worth it. In most cases, you should not worry about this kind of optimization. .NET introduced some new methods that allow slight performance improvements in string concatenations. In this post, I'll show you how to concatenate a… [read more]