Tagged articles - C#

HTTP compression is a simple way to improve site performance and decrease bandwidth, with no configuration required on the client side. If you test your website through Google PageSpeed Insights, HTTP compression will be one of the points recommended to be used to increase website performance. Luckily for .NET developers IIS supports it out of the box...read more

If you were planning to create sitemap.xml in Umbraco, you most probably were doing it with HttpHandler. This was fine until Umbraco version 6.2.2. If your website was running in lower version, most probably after update your HttpHandler were crashing since UmbracoContext.Current returns null. ...read more

Working with any collection which implements IEnumerable is pretty easy in C#, plus if you are using LINQ you can easily manipulate with collection data. Recently I was doing some filtering with some in-memory collections and I had to check whether one collection contains same elements as some other collection with elements of the same type. At first sight this looks pretty simple, but first problem is that collection elements might not be in the same order in both collection. ...read more

Entity framework is an awesome tool for working with database in .net, but sometime you have to get back to old fashion ADO for the performances. The bad thing is that as soon as you get back to ADO, you have to deal with SqlDataReader, DataTable and DataSet classes...read more

Passing complex data to and from stored procedures has always been a tricky one. The most elegant way to pass values to a stored procedure is to use predefined data types in SQL Server...read more

Managed Extensibility Framework or MEF is a library introduced in .NET Framework 4 which allows developers to easily create plugin based applications. It lives in System.ComponentModel.Composition namespace and before start working with MEF reference to this assembly needs to be added in a project.It is basically an implementation of IoC (Inversion of Control) pattern with few core functionalities such as assembly loading...read more

I don't work with random values very often but recently I had to write some small function that returns random value from an array. It sounded like a good idea to write it as an extension method to make it reusable for other projects. ...read more

Basically all Dictionary collections in .NET internally implement Hashtable wrapped, so in terms of mechanism they are pretty much the same. The difference is that Dictionary exposes strong types while Hashtable uses object-object keyvalue pair which is much harder to work with because you need to know what is the actual type of the object stored in a key or value. Often casting will probably be required. In multithread code environment locking is considered by default when accessing any shared resource...read more

In many cases serialized data is returned in a form of string although the actual type of data is different. The problem begings when you want to use data in it's original type becaus direct cast is not allowed in C# as it is in VB.net. This is why you have to use TryParse and safely parse the value to it's original type...read more

If you often have projects which setup is pretty much the same you might consider creating ProjectTemplate for Visual Studio.It speeds up development for the project setup, adding references, default configuration .config, content files... Before you start make sure that you have installed Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 SDK (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40758) and Nuget Package Explorer (http://npe.codeplex.com/)I also attached a small dummy project just to help understanding what is written in this article.Skipping to hands on code is always more helpful and faster for me to, so if you are bored by reading, download the attached .7zfile and explore it...read more

Config files are really useful and allow you to store some setting values without having to hard-code them. It provides out of the box configuration utility which is very flexible, but because of its flexibility, it has some drawbacks as well. For you application you can easily create your own, nonstandard elements and easily bind them to your strongly typed model in order to read values...read more

Recently I started writing unit tests for a small project I keep in my visualstudio online TFS repository. After few test done I run into an issue. Since this project heavily relies on Reflection and dynamic assembly loading, main class constructor at one point is calling ...read more

When having a long running loop which you are not sure when it is going to end you will probably have to create a loop in a separate loop and on every iterration you will check whether some condition is true and exit the loop. Let's say you want to execute some piece of code after some specific time, let's say after one minute or everyday at specific time (common scenario in windows services). You can do it really simple with Timer class and just few lines of code as the code below. ...read more

JSON is really easy to use and it really boosts performances since it is a lot lighter than XML and SOAP. Sometime it can be really annoying having to create POCO class every time you need to deserialize JSON value passed from client side in ASP.NET web applications. During extending project functionality this number of POCO classes can significantly grow to that matter that you have a bunch of classes for even the simplest task you have to do with JSON value. ...read more

Few moths ago I wrote and article about simple way to implement plugin architecture in C# simple plugin host application approach. This approach is great for desktop applications because when you for example need to update (which means replace the plugin dll) you can easily close the app and start it again and it will pickup new code. If you do not stop the application to replace the dll of plugin, you will not be able to replace the dll...read more