.NET - 2021

Is is not so often than you have to use more than one authentication schemes in your project, but there are some corner cases when you have to do so. One of it is a scenario where you are supporting some weaker authentication schema like basic http authentication where credentials are supplied pretty much on every request. This kind of loosen security schema is to some limited extend suitable for internal APIs meaning that no other than users or most likely application within your organization network will access...read more

EF Core has migrations as a way of restoring the database structure inherited from Entity Framework and for the most of the cases all you have to do to setup your database structure changes when deploying your new application version is to call the Migrate method from your DbContext.Database property. It is not a perfect solution but as I mention, it works great for majority of the cases and takes of the complexity of sorting out order for execution of pending changes so you can focus on business logic of your application. ...read more

People often try to compare Dapper and Entity Framework. Although they both have same goal and that is reading and modifying the data against the database, they take completely different approach in doing so and therefore this comparison is not really valid. Entity framework is more robust as the name says framework, while Dapper is simple object mapper which is down the line set of extension methods on top of the ADO classes which allow easier manipulation with data in the database...read more

Enums are great way do list available options for certain variable values in your code. However, they do not come without limitations and they are not suitable for all scenarios. One of those limitations are Enum value names which have restrictions similar to variable name restrictions in C#...read more

I assume since you are reading this article you are involved in development of applications using C# and .NET platform. Microsoft .NET and C# have been around for quite a while but there is not much talk on haw you can use C# for writing code apart from creating your projects in your IDE of choice and compiling them to executables. This is typical approach for writing robust applications and that is fine, but from time to time, this whole ceremony of creating a project, adding packages and libraries just to run for example a simple scheduled task that cleans up old logs from IIS seems like and overkill...read more

I while ago I wrote an article on how to Access multiple databases from the same DbContext in EF Core which relies on interceptors to mutate the SQL query diring execution. This code works just fine and it updates the command prior to it's execution, but it lacks in option to inject registered services to it's constructor as i used new keyword to initialize class instances. Adding interceptor without dependency injection ...read more

Implementation approach for soft delete is more-less straight forward thing. Instead of deleting data record, you introduce a flag which will mark the record as deleted and you can simply filter out on it and not show the data with the flag set. This way you do not loose data, but you restrict the end user to see it. This way of "deleting" data records, or better said marking them as deleted applies for certain types of applications, but sometime this requirement may come later as a new feature while the actual delete is in place...read more

In 2019 I worked on a REST API service which accepts files and stores them. Back then in .NET Core 2.2 I wrote custom Swagger operation filter which I described in article Handling file uploads in Swagger UI with ASP.NET Core...read more

Generic types are great way to re-use methods and apply the same logic to different types. However, they come with some limitations, especially in ASP.NET realm...read more

Using in-memory DbContext is a great way to mock your actual DbContext in unit tests. You basically initialize the instance of your DbContext and seed some random data before you assert the result of your repository method...read more