C# *

Multithreading

Now let’s talk about thin ice. In the previous sections about IDisposable we touched one very important concept that underlies not only the design principles of Disposable types but any type in general. This is the object’s integrity concept. It means that at any given moment of time an object is in a strictly determined state and any action with this object turns its state into one of the variants that were pre-determined while designing a type of this object. In other words, no action with the object should turn it into an undefined state. This results in a problem with the types designed in the above examples. They are not thread-safe. There is a chance the public methods of these types will be called when the destruction of an object is in progress. Let’s solve this problem and decide whether we should solve it at all.

This chapter was translated from Russian jointly by author and by professional translators. You can help us with translation from Russian or English into any other language, primarily into Chinese or German.

Also, if you want thank us, the best way you can do that is to give us a star on github or to fork repository github/sidristij/dotnetbook.

Span<T> usage examples

A human by nature cannot fully understand the purpose of a certain instrument until he or she gets some experience. So, let’s turn to some examples.

ValueStringBuilder

One of the most interesting examples in respect to algorithms is the ValueStringBuilder type. However, it is buried deep inside mscorlib and marked with the internal modifier as many other very interesting data types. This means we would not find this remarkable instrument for optimization if we haven’t researched the mscorlib source code.

What is the main disadvantage of the StringBuilder system type? Its main drawback is the type and its basis — it is a reference type and is based on char[], i.e. a character array. At least, this means two things: we use the heap (though not much) anyway and increase the chances to miss the CPU cash.

Another issue with StringBuilder that I faced is the construction of small strings, that is when the resulting string must be short e.g. less than 100 characters. Short formatting raises issues on performance.

This chapter was translated from Russian jointly by author and by professional translators. You can help us with translation from Russian or English into any other language, primarily into Chinese or German.

Also, if you want thank us, the best way you can do that is to give us a star on github or to fork repository github/sidristij/dotnetbook.

In 2013, while working at GFRANQ photo service, I participated in the development of an eponymous web service for publishing and processing photos. Filters and transformations were defined in the file with parameters, and all processing was carried out on the server. During service development, there was a need to support these transformations on the client side for the preview. According to Larry Wall, one of the virtues of a programmer is laziness. Therefore, as truly lazy programmers, we thought about the possibility of using the same code on both the server and client sides. The entire development was conducted in C#. After researching the libraries and a couple of attempts, we proudly concluded that this was possible and began to write the universal code.

Why is this article needed? Indeed, 6 years have passed since 2013, and many technologies have lost their relevance, for example, Script#. On the other hand, new ones have appeared. For example, Bridge.NET or Blazor based on the fancy WebAssembly.

Nevertheless, some ideas can still be used. In this article I tried to describe them as detailed as possible. I hope that the mention of Silverlight and Flash will cause a smile with a hint of nostalgia, and not a desire to criticize the old solutions. Anyway, they have contributed to the development of the web industry.

Disclaimer

First — theory

Memory<T> and ReadOnlyMemory<T>

There are two visual differences between Memory<T> and Span<T>. The first one is that Memory<T> type doesn’t contain ref modifier in the header of the type. In other words, the Memory<T> type can be allocated both on the stack while being either a local variable, or a method parameter, or its returned value and on the heap, referencing some data in memory from there. However, this small difference creates a huge distinction in the behavior and capabilities of Memory<T> compared to Span<T>. Unlike Span<T> that is an instrument for some methods to use some data buffer, the Memory<T> type is designed to store information about the buffer, but not to handle it. Thus, there is the difference in API.

• Memory<T> doesn’t have methods to access the data that it is responsible for. Instead, it has the Span property and the Slice method that return an instance of the Span type.
• Additionally, Memory<T> contains the Pin() method used for scenarios when a stored buffer data should be passed to unsafe code. If this method is called when memory is allocated in .NET, the buffer will be pinned and will not move when GC is active. This method will return an instance of the MemoryHandle structure, which encapsulates GCHandle to indicate a segment of a lifetime and to pin array buffer in memory.

This chapter was translated from Russian jointly by author and by professional translators. You can help us with translation from Russian or English into any other language, primarily into Chinese or German.

Also, if you want thank us, the best way you can do that is to give us a star on github or to fork repository github/sidristij/dotnetbook.

Generalized async return types — it is a new C#7 feature that allows using not only Task as a return type of async methods but also other types (classes or structures) that satisfy some specific requirements.

At the same time, async/await is a way to call a set of "continuation" functions inside some context which is an essence of another design pattern — Monad. So, can we use async/await to write a code which will behave in the same way like if we used monads? It turns out that — yes (with some reservations). For example, the code below is compilable and working:

async Task Main()
{
  foreach (var s in new[] { "1,2", "3,7,1", null, "1" })
  {
      var res = await Sum(s).GetMaybeResult();
      Console.WriteLine(res.IsNothing ? "Nothing" : res.GetValue().ToString());
  }
  // 3, 11, Nothing, Nothing
}

async Maybe<int> Sum(string input)
{
    var args = await Split(input);//No result checking
    var result = 0;
    foreach (var arg in args)
        result += await Parse(arg);//No result checking
    return result;
}

Maybe<string[]> Split(string str)
{
  var parts = str?.Split(',').Where(s=>!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(s)).ToArray();
  return parts == null || parts.Length < 2 ? Maybe<string[]>.Nothing() : parts;
}

Maybe<int> Parse(string str)
    => int.TryParse(str, out var result) ? result : Maybe<int>.Nothing();

Further, I will explain how the code works...

Beginning with C# 8.0 on .NET Core 3.0, you can define an implementation when you declare a member of an interface. The most common scenario is to safely add members to an interface already released and used by innumerable clients.

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to:

• Extend interfaces safely by adding methods with implementations.
• Create parameterized implementations to provide greater flexibility.
• Enable implementers to provide a more specific implementation in the form of an override.

I guess one of the most important issues in this topic is building an exception handling architecture in your application. This is interesting for many reasons. And the main reason, I think, is an apparent simplicity, which you don’t always know what to do with. All the basic constructs such as IEnumerable, IDisposable, IObservable, etc. have this property and use it everywhere. On the one hand, their simplicity tempts to use these constructs in different situations. On the other hand, they are full of traps which you might not get out. It is possible that looking at the amount of information we will cover you’ve got a question: what is so special about exceptional situations?

However, to make conclusions about building the architecture of exception classes we should learn some details about their classification. Because before building a system of types that would be clear for the user of code, a programmer should determine when to choose the type of error and when to catch or skip exceptions. So, let’s classify the exceptional situations (not the types of exceptions) based on various features.

Starting with Visual Studio 2019 Preview 4 and RC, we’ll be adjusting how C# versions are treated in .NET tooling. Read more below <cut>.

Summary of changes

Firstly, we’re adding two new Language Version (LangVersion) values: LatestMajor and Preview. Here’s how they stack up with the currently supported list of values:

• .NET Core 3.1 SDK and Runtime
• Docker container images
• Snap installer

• .NET Core 3.1 release notes
• GitHub issue for .NET Core 3.1 issues
• GitHub release

I'm putting part of older WebForms portions of my site that still run on bare metal to ASP.NET Core and Azure App Services, and while I'm doing that I realized that I want to make sure my staging sites don't get indexed by Google/Bing.

I already have a robots.txt, but I want one that's specific to production and others that are specific to development or staging. I thought about a number of ways to solve this. I could have a static robots.txt and another robots-staging.txt and conditionally copy one over the other during my Azure DevOps CI/CD pipeline.

Then I realized the simplest possible thing would be to just make robots.txt be dynamic. I thought about writing custom middleware but that sounded like a hassle and more code that needed. I wanted to see just how simple this could be.

Today, we are announcing .NET Core 3.0 Preview 6. It includes updates for compiling assemblies for improved startup, optimizing applications for size with linker and EventPipe improvements. We’ve also released new Docker images for Alpine on ARM64.

• Download .NET Core 3.0 Preview 6 right now on Windows, macOS and Linux.

• Release notes have been published at dotnet/core. An API diff between Preview 5 and 6 is also available.

• ASP.NET Core and EF Core are also releasing updates today.

• If you missed it, check out the improvements we released in .NET Core 3.0 Preview 5, from last month.

Structured logging is gaining more and more popularity in the developers' community. In this article I'd like to demonstrate how we can use structured logging with the Microsoft.Extensions.Logging package and show the idea how we can extend it using the new features of C# 10.

After 210 days, 600 commits, tens of debugging nights, and thousands of messages in the project chat, I finally released AngouriMath 1.2.

This is an open-source symbolic algebra library for C# and F#, maybe it is interesting for someone?

You've optimized all of the low-hanging fruits of your game. Except that you didn't. You missed a sneaky, non-so-obvious spot: optimizing your Unity Scene Hierarchy.

What's the crack with the hierarchy now?

I want to show you something.