Tagged articles - C#

Over the time various techniques to manipulate database data have evolved in .NET. Entity Framework is certainly the most advanced one, but for small ad hock applications where you have few inserts to deal with, ADO is still the fastest way to write data to the database...read more

Apart from running on Windows and Linux both x86 and x64 architecture, .NET Core is an ideal platform for IOT (Internet of things) projects because it can also run on ARM32 and ARM64. This means you can run it pretty much any device with both RISC or CISC processor architecture. If you are .NET developer or you are familiar with .NET platform and C# language, this means you can now write applications that run on Raspberry Pi which is based on RISC architecture by writing them in Visual Studio...read more

Starting from it's initial release ASP .NET Core comes with built in dependency injection (DI) to help implement Inversion Of Control design pattern. This is not something new in .NET and apart from built-in DI in .NET Core, there are other libraries which provide same and in some cases even more advanced dependency injection implementation...read more

When running ASP.NET Core application as self-hosted using Kestrel, it will by default use port 5000 for listening for requests. This should not be a big issue since you can always proxy requests to port 5000. Problem occurs when you might want to have multiple applications on one host, or you simply cannot use port 5000 for security or any other reasons.Luckily, default port for ASP.NET Core application running on Kestrel can be easily changed, but in order to make it easily configurable there are few changes you need to make in your code in order to access IHostingEnvironment and IConfiguration implementation instances combined. ...read more

Model validation is an important part of request life-cycle and pipeline in MVC Core regardless whether you are building Web API project or ASP.NET MVC web application. Both project templates rely on the common ASP.NET Core platform therefore validation is pretty much the same in both type of projects. Because Web API and micro services are more popular nowadays, I am going to use Web API sample project to demonstrate how to modify validation response in MVC Web API Core project. ...read more

Apart from adding your own middleware to the ASP.NET MVC Core application pipeline, you can control the response using custom MVC filter attributes and selectively apply them to either whole controller or controller actions. One of the commonly used MVC filter in ASP.NET Core is ExceptionFilterAttribute for handling error response in Wep API applications. It is easy to implement and I also wrote an article about Error handling in ASP.NET Core Web API few months ago...read more

Health checks or health probes are the crucial part for orchestrating micro services. If you are using Kubernetes for orchestrating containerized application instances or you just have multiple ServiceApps or VMS behind the load balancer, you need to define health checks in order for the orchestrator or load balancer to know to which instance to send the traffic and to which not...read more

Now here is a trouble that was bugging me for some time and I guess who ever is using IConfigration injected in the constructor and using extension methods to access configuration values reached whan trying to write Unit Tests. IConfiguration interface is a great way to easily replace your configuration layer in application, but it has it's drawbacks. The way interface envorces configuration reading is by exposing GetSection method which return IConfigurationSection...read more

Entity Framework Core implements optimistic concurrency strategy which is opposite to pessimistic concurrency strategy. Lets's first clear out what are main differences between these two approaches in concurrency control. Optimistic concurrency control allows multiple processes to access and modify data without any explicit lock on the data...read more

Versioning of your endpoints is important especially if you have 3rd party dependent clients of your REST API service. Any change in your endpoint, for example in data structure may impact clients even if it is backward compatible, clients may process your endpoint data in different ways, so even adding one additional property to your model may also impact functionality of the client which is consuming your endpoint. Prerequisites ...read more

Tagging Docker images is important to keep track of versions of the service running and to easily roll back in case of faulty behavior of the application. The version strategy which is the most clear and understandable is tagging image with version of the application for example ...read more

With growing popularity of dotnet Core, Git and Docker, developers who used to work mainly on Windows are now getting used to CLI environment and obviously Linux. Windows is still a development environment platform of choice, bit since Microsoft already developed and published Visual Studio Code as a cross platform IDE for Windows, Linux and Mac. Although it is still not mature as Visual Studio 2017, it is a decent tool for .NET Core applications development...read more

In memory caching is not a bullet proof way of caching data in an application, especially if this application is distributed. The lack of synchronization between nodes can cause you application to misbehave showing wrong data or even throwing exceptions and crashing. This is one of the main reasons why distributed caching is the best way of doing the caching in your web application. But not all applications you might be developing need to run as distributed on multiple machines...read more

For my website, since it runs on Umbraco 6 and it is basically ASP.NET MVC application. To reduce load time and increase website performances I decided to alternate the response of the application and minify it using simple regular expression. Initially I was trying to do this with YUI Compressor library which has .NET port as NuGet YUICompressor.NET which works fine in most of the cases, but in my case does not skip PRE tags which I use for code snippets on the website...read more

Caching common data like lookups for example in memory of your app can increase significantly your MVC web application performances and response time. Of course this data has to be periodically refreshed. You can use various approaches to refresh data including expiry, but this can create potential bottle necks in your application since once data expires, you will use request thread to pull the data, cache and serve the request response back...read more