BlockingCollection is essentially a queue that provides a thread-safe way to consume items. You can put it into a loop and consume the items one at a time, throttling execution and potentially preventing your system from being overwhelmed. I use these all the time, but most recently I built it in to a metric collection … [Read more…]
Recently I was looking at a MongoDB service and wondered if doing ReplaceOne was really the right call. My document was pretty simple – some identifying information that doesn’t change, and an array containing informational state that grows (never updates) as my program runs. I set up the documents to update to the database every … [Read more…]
The C# Interactive window allows you to use a C# REPL that can be pretty useful for testing something out quickly. I’ve used it a bunch of times for formatting a DateTime to a string, because I can never quite remember which combination of characters results in what I want. In Visual Studio, you can … [Read more…]
There’s been more than a couple times where I’ve wanted to use the Parallel class to take a collection and rip through it with multiple threads, but I’ve struggled with how to log the progress (especially the count of objects processed) easily. Interlocked .NET actually provides the solution in a static class called Interlocked, located … [Read more…]
If you find yourself writing a lot of the same code (or copy/pasting it) for similar constructs, you should probably consider using generics. It allows you to write a base class full of functionality that is basically the same across all of different classes, but in a way that doesn’t tie you to a specific … [Read more…]
In this post I talked about building out a configuration service that could be split into various areas of concerns so that each piece can be injected where it makes sense (without all of the noise of the rest of the configuration). Previously, the registration looked like this: Reflection With reflection, we can loop through … [Read more…]
Enums are useful because they help you avoid magic numbers. You can write your code in a way that is easy to read and understand from the human’s perspective, which, at the end of the day, is pretty important. Exposing enums on your Web API I want to share my enums with other things, notably … [Read more…]
I’m writing this down because I find that I’ve googled it a couple of times and it always seems to take longer to figure out than I think it should. Say you have a number, but you want it to be padded with leading zeroes. So, 42 => 00042. In my case, I was trying … [Read more…]
In this day and age, you don’t usually need to think about saving memory. Need a whole number? Just use an int! Who really cares if the maximum value will never get above 255? Using a byte is just archaic! Well, if you’re looking at optimizing network traffic or database usage, those bytes could add … [Read more…]
In the last post I talked about using and extending IActionResult to return your preferred HttpStatus code in your ASP.NET MVC controllers. But how do you write unit tests that make sure that you’re returning what you expect? Your controllers will return one of these: IActionResult There’s nothing on this interface that you can easily … [Read more…]