Implicit Operators in C# and How To Create a Multi Type
Want to see how implicit operators work in C#? Check out this example code to see how you can make a multi-type object in dotnet that uses implicit operators!
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May 31, 2023
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Facade Pattern: A Beginner’s How-To for Simplified Code
In this article I'll be going over one of my most used design patterns called the facade (or façade), and explaining why I like to use it. As with all things I share information about, it's important to remain pragmatic as software engineers. With that said, this article is not to persuade you to use this pattern exclusively or that there are not alternatives. Instead, I'd like to arm you with another design pattern tool in your figurative coding toolbox. The more tools you have available, the better prepared you are to go build awesome stuff. What We're Trying to Achieve With a Facade When I am developing software, whether it is personally, professionally, or as someone that is influencing the direction of software I am not directly coding myself, I encourage a focus on flexibility in software. I have…
March 31, 2023
Iterator Benchmarks That Shocked With Unexpected Results
I wanted to create a follow-up post in my series on IEnumerables, iterators, and collections focusing on performance characteristics. When checking out the runtime performance and memory characteristics between these materialized collections and iterator benchmarks, I was very surprised! Check out this article for performance benchmark characteristics and some curious finds.
March 17, 2023
How To Choose The Best Beginner Programming Language
If you're new to programming then without a doubt you've had to ask yourself what is the best beginner programming language so that you know where to focus your efforts. You're about to go invest all of this time and mental effort into learning a new skill, so of course you want to make sure you're starting off on the right track. I would be willing to bet you that I know what the number one language you're told to start with is after you do a bit of searching on the Internet. I'm here to tell you that the best beginner programming language is not what you think.
March 6, 2023
C# Basics: A Guide for New Programmers
I've been making it my mission more recently to try and reduce the barriers for people that want to get started with programming. If you're just getting started out, it can be incredibly intimidating and often leaves folks quitting before they get started. When you factor in just how many programming languages there are to pick from, it's yet another barrier for getting started. How do you pick? What's the best one? I’ve spoken before about how to approach getting started and if you’re open to starting with the “dotnet” ecosystem then this C# basics article is for you! For some history, C# was originally created back in 2000 although if you check out this other page, we can see that it looks like C# 1.0 was actually out in 2002. For homework, you can go read about all of…
March 1, 2023
Beware of These Iterator and Collection Traps
This article is not set out to try and persuade you, the reader, that either using an iterator or materialized collection will universally solve your problems. Both iterator and materialized collection usage can be used to solve the scenarios that we'll be looking at, but both will come with a different set of pros and cons that we can further explore. The purpose of this article is to highlight scenarios based on real world experiences where either an iterator or materialized collection was being misunderstood, misused, and ultimately leading to a pile of headaches. As you read this article, if you find yourself saying "Well, sure, but they should have..." you're probably right. The problem is fundamentally not the usage of an iterator or the materialized collection, but not understanding how to consume them effectively. So I hope that when…
February 22, 2023
Task EventHandlers – The Little Secret You Didn’t Know
As C# programmers, we've all been burned by asynchronous EventHandlers. And if you still haven't yet, then hopefully this article will arm you for being able to better navigate long debugging sessions where functionality mysteriously stops working in your application. While there are several different solutions for dealing with async event handlers, either by avoiding use of async void or even by embracing async void, in this article we will explore another option which is Task EventHandlers. Disclaimer: this article was originally written with the perspective that this solution feels close to bullet-proof, but there are important limitations. These limitations are addressed later in the article, and I felt it would still be valuable to explore the space (both positives and negatives). A Companion Video! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVGjpRz0JZU What you DIDN'T know about C# Async EventHandlers The Source of the Problem Normal…
February 18, 2023
Async EventHandlers – A Simple Safety Net to the Rescue
When we discuss async EventHandlers, the first thing that comes to mind for many of us is that it's the only exception that we seem to allow for the dreaded async void setup. When I had written about this before, I was excited that I was exploring a solution that involved actually allowing async void to exist (without wanting to pull the rest of my hair out). For me, this was much more about some clever tricks we can use to overcome async EventHandlers than it was to provide solutions for avoiding the problem entirely. With that said though, there was a lot of traction on the article, which I am very thankful for, and some folks expressed opinions that they'd rather solve async EventHandlers a different way. I thought this was a great point, so I wanted to come…
February 14, 2023
Iterators – An Elementary Perspective on How They Function
If you're newer to C# or programming in general, you may have used an iterator and not even realized it. Iterators can be a performant and effective tool that we have access to as .NET developers that allow us to traverse collections of data. Because one of the requirements of an iterator is that it must implement the IEnumerable interface, the results of an iterator can only be enumerated over. For example, you could use the results of an iterator in a foreach loop but you could not directly index into the iterator results (like you could an array) without some additional steps. Another requirement of iterators is that they use a special keyword called "yield" so that they can yield and return the individual elements that are to be provided to the caller of the iterator. In a nutshell,…
February 10, 2023
IEnumerable in C# – A Simplified Beginners Guide
In C# and .NET, as programmers we have access to an interface that is called IEnumerable (or IEnumerable<T> for the generic version). Using IEnumerable allows us to iterate from a collection or data source by moving one element at a time. It's also important to note that all collection types in C# inherit from IEnumerable so collections you are familiar with like arrays and lists implement IEnumerable. I have been trying to help educate around IEnumerable usage for many years now so this is a renewed effort to help get more junior developers understanding how they work. As a bonus, if you're interested in working with the code that you see in this article you can clone it down from GitHub by visiting this link. A Companion Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RR7Cq0iwNYo Simple IEnumerable Example Let's consider the following code example that will…
February 5, 2023