Category: Tutorials

Where applicable favour Boolean assignment via expressions rather than if/else blocks. The first example below is still so common but the 2nd and 3rd examples require much less code without sacrificing readability. Note… Visual Studio has a nice refactor to help converting relevant if/else blocks to an expression.

Using the digit separator character _ in C# to break up your large numbers is just another little thing you can do to help the next developer (and you later) read your code. It’s available from C#7…

Be careful with nested ternarys as they can impact code readability. For example I know what 👇🏻 … var comparison = (a > b) ? “a is greater than b” : (a < b) ? “b is greater than a” : “a is equal to b”; does but I have to ‘think’ about it. I … Continue reading Nested ternarys can be hard to read for other developers

BenchmarkDotNet has become the de facto standard for performance benchmarking on .NET. Nearly every video or blog post which Microsoft developers do which has some performance benchmarking uses it. It’s really easy to get started… 1 – Install BenchmarkDotNet from NuGet2 – Create a class which will contain your methods3 – Use the [Benchmark] attribute … Continue reading How to get started with BenchmarkDotNet using a simple example

Global Usings in C# 10 allow us to declare a namespace as being available to all files in a project so we don’t need a using statement for it in each file which needs it. Ideally we’d put these global usings in a separate file. This will reduce so called ‘vertical waste’ which is nice.  … Continue reading Use C# 10 Global Usings to make namespaces available to all files in a project

In C# 9 we saw how top-level statements can help us reduce ‘wasted’ vertical space… BUT… reducing ‘wasted’ horizontal space and in particular nesting levels is much more valuable IMHO and in C# 10 (released November 2021) we have file-level namespaces to help with this. File-level namespaces are definitely one of my favourite features from … Continue reading Use file-level namespaces in C# 10 to reduce vertical nesting

By using named arguments in C# we don’t have to match the ordering of parameter lists of called methods. Instead the matching parameter for each argument can be specified by parameter name. I never use these to change the position of arguments passed in as I find that can confuse other developers but I often use … Continue reading Consider using named arguments in C# to increase readability of method calls

In .NET 6 Microsoft introduced the ArgumentException.ThrowIfNull guard clause and in .NET 7 (Preview 4) they have introduced ArgumentException.ThrowIfNullOrEmpty. Using these kind of guard clauses instead of if statement checks results in cleaner code. Here is a example (from Steven Giesel on LinkedIn) with the new guard clause… I really like it, hopefully Microsoft can … Continue reading .NET 7 to include new ThrowIfNullOrEmpty ArgumentException guard clause

In .NET 6 Microsoft have changed the algorithm used in System.Random and the performance improvements are crazy. Check out the Ratio columns on the BenchmarkDotNet output below… WOW!!! Click on the image for a larger view in a new tab. There’s so many performance improvements in .NET 6 but the Random class is used in … Continue reading System.Random is much faster in .NET 6 as Microsoft have changed underlying algorithm

Looks like Microsoft have pulled the null check !! operator from C#11. It had been included in C# 11 early previews. I can’t say I’m particularly unhappy about it. It has been discussed for years. Time to focus on more needed features I think. What do you think?