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

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?

By default when you output the Ratio column in BenchmarkDotNet using the Baseline = true attribute it is output using the Value approach below. This means that the baseline method will be shown as 1.00 and that other methods will be shown as a relative value to this. If we wish we can also output … Continue reading How to set the Ratio column style in BenchmarkDotNet results

Since C#8 we can use single line using declarations which will allow us to dispose of resources at the end of the enclosing scope. This helps us reduce nesting in our code BUT… … while the using {} approach allows us to explicitly tell the compiler when to dispose of a resource, the C#8+ using declaration … Continue reading Using declarations in C#8+ can allow us to dispose of resources correctly without increasing nesting levels