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]

It's very common to have unused CSS rules on a website. Having unused CSS rules is not a good thing. It increases the size of the CSS file, so it increases the loading time. Also, it increases the time needed to parse the file by the browser, it increases the time needed to find matching rules for an element, and it increases the RAM necessary to keep the data in memory. Don't forget about green… [read more]

The C# compilers has some hidden features. Today I've discovered a new compiler option. The author of a recent issue on GitHub indicates that the C# compiler allows to compare an IntPtr with null, which at runtime is always false. He suggests the compiler should raise an error in this case. The answer of Sam Harwell describes a compiler option, /features:strict, to detect this error and a few other… [read more]

Documenting your API is very important if you want people to be able to consume it. An API documentation should contain the list of accessible endpoints (URL, method), their parameters, and the response (http status code, body). The documentation should be readable by a human, but also by a computer. The later is very useful to generate clients automatically. OpenAPI Specification is the most common way… [read more]

Using a NuGet package is a very convenient way to add a dependency to your project. However, when you have an issue with a NuGet package and you want to debug it, it's hard because you don't have the source code. Lots of NuGet packages have their source code on GitHub, so it would be very convenient to automatically get the code from the GitHub repository. This is what SourceLink provides. It adds some… [read more]

As a user, it's hard to explain an issue you have with a software. How to explain the problem to a developer who isn't next to you? A developer needs to know exactly how to reproduce your issue and fix it. As a developer, you know the users are not very good to explain their problems and you have to deal with incomplete explainations, so you have to guess a few steps. Problem Steps Recorder (PSR) is a… [read more]

Every company/team has its own coding style. The coding style is about naming, spacing, or language feature usages. Do you use tabs or spaces, and how many spaces? Do you use PascalCase or camelCase? Do you prefix field names with _? Do you always use var or only when the type is visible? And a few more questions in that vein… In an open/inner source project, you want to ensure every contributor uses your… [read more]