Various tips and tricks often focused on software engineering with specific code examples for you to use in your programming.
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.
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…
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…
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…
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,…
In C# 9.0 we received access to a great quality of life type called the record. You can read more about that from Microsoft here. Record types allowed us as dotnet programmers to skip a lot of boiler plate code, thereby saving us time and making code more readable. Wins all around! Before record types, we might have simple data transfer objects (called DTOs) that would look something like the following: public sealed class MyData { public MyData( string value1, int value2) { Value1 = value1; Value2 = value2; } publc string Value1 { get; } publc int Value2 { get; } } And for a simple class with two properties... I think we can all agree that the verbosity here is just over the top. With the record type that we were given access to, we can now write…
You're an intermediate dotnet programmer and you mostly know your way around using Tasks. You sprinkle async and await through your code, and everything is working just as expected. You've heard time and time again that you always want the return types of your asynchronous methods to be a Task (or Task<T>) and that async void is essentially the root of all evil. No sweat. One day you go to wire up an event handler using the syntax myObject.SomeEvent += SomeEventHandler, and your event handler needs to await some asynchronous code. You take all of the right steps and change your method signature to get that beautiful async Task added in, replacing void. But suddenly you get a compile error about your event handler not being compatible. You feel trapped. You're scared. And then you do the unspeakable... You change…
As a C# developer, understanding the different simple data types in C# and when to use them is crucial for writing efficient and maintainable code. I've been trying to spend more time this year putting together some content aimed at really introductory level programming. There's plenty of resources available online, but I want to do my part to ensure I can help break down some of the barriers for people getting started on their programming journey. In this beginner's guide, we will look at the basics of the most commonly used simple data types in C#, including int, float, double, byte, char, bool, and string. We will also look at how these data types differ from each other and when to use them in your C# programming! Integer Data Types The most commonly used integer data types in C# are…
(This article is intended to be a spiritual successor to this previous entry, and now includes Tasks!) Even if you're new to C#, you've probably come across at least one of Tasks, Threads, or BackgroundWorkers. With a bit of additional time, it's likely you've seen all three in your journey. They're all ways to run concurrent code in C# and each has its own set of pros and cons. In this article, we will explore how each one operates at a high level. It's worth noting that in most modern .NET applications and libraries you'll see things converging to Tasks. The Approach I've gone ahead and created a test application that you can find here. Because this is in source control, it's possible/likely that it will diverge from what we see in this article, so I just wanted to offer…
You can find part one of this here! Applying for Software Development Jobs How do I stand out on an application? I think this is largely going to depend on where you're applying. Something to consider is that especially with large tech companies, they're getting thousands and thousands of resumes all the time. It can be really competitive to be able to even land an interview so sometimes if the caliber of other applicants is high, it can make it difficult to stand out. That's okay. We don't have control over others, but we do have control over ourselves! We can try a few different things to stand out and help you get started on your software development journey professionally. The following are things I personally would suggest and may not reflect the exact views of my employers (past, present,…
