C# Archives

Extension Methods – Serialize/Deserialize as Json/XML

.Net, C#, Extension Methods, Programming

Cranked these out last night, hope you find it useful too 1: public static class SerializationExtensions 2: { 3: private static readonly ConcurrentDictionary<Type, XmlSerializer> XmlSerializers = 4: new ConcurrentDictionary<Type, XmlSerializer>(); 5: 6: private static readonly ConcurrentDictionary<Type, DataContractJsonSerializer> JsonSerializers = 7: new ConcurrentDictionary<Type, DataContractJsonSerializer>(); 8: 9: private static readonly JavaScriptSerializer JavaScriptSerializer = new JavaScriptSerializer(); 10: 11: …

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.Net Tips – Getting the default value of a type outside of generics

.Net, C#, Programming, Tips

To get the default value of a type, you’ve probably used the default keyword in .Net already: 1: var defaultInt = default(int); // 0 2: var defaultObj = default(string); // null However, the use of the default keyword requires a type name to be specified at compile time, so you won’t be able to use …

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S3 – Use using block to get the stream

.Net, C#, Cloud Computing, Programming, Tips

When you’re using the Amazon S3 client, have you come across the occasional exception that says something like one of these exception messages: “The request was aborted: The connection was closed unexpectedly” “Unable to read data from the transport connection: A blocking operation was interrupted by a call to WSACancelBlockingCall” “Unable to read data from …

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.Net Tips – Find out if your app is running as a service

.Net, C#, Programming, Tips

When you are developing an application to run as a service it’s nice to be able to also run it as a console app so you can easily debug, etc. On the rare occasion you might even want to find out if your app is running in a console window at runtime so you can …

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Generic config section handlers

.Net, C#, Programming, Tips

It’s been a while since I had to create a config section handler and my god did I forget how cumbersome a process it is! Instead of doing all these work to make a bespoke config section handler every time you want to parse some data out of the app.config file, wouldn’t it be nice …

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.Net Tips – Use LINQ to create pairs of adjacent elements from a collection

.Net, C#, C# 4, LINQ, Programming, Tips

Suppose you have an array of numbers, say, [1, 3, 5, 7, 9, …], and you want to pair each element up with its neighbour in the array, e.g. [[1, 3], [3, 5], [5, 7], [7, 9], …]. Sure, you can iterate through the indices of the elements and recursively grab the element at an …

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.Net Tips – Use LINQ to avoid nested loops

.Net, C#, LINQ, Programming, Tips

Admit it, we’ve all done it before, writing those nasty nested loops just so we can iterate through multiple lists to get some combination/permutation of the lists, e.g.: 1: for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) 2: { 3: for (int j = 0; j < 10; j++) 4: { 5: for (int …

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.Net Tips – Make sure the runtime types match when combining delegates

.Net, C#, C# 4, Programming, Tips

In C#, it’s possible to combine two delegates, A and B to create a new multicast delegate, C: When the multicast delegate is executed, the combined delegates are executed in order as you can see from the example above. But before you can start mix and matching your delegates like a kid in a …

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Extension Methods – Helpful parse methods for string

.Net, C#, Extension Methods, Programming

1: /// <summary> 2: /// Parses a string as a short 3: /// </summary> 4: public static short ParseShort(this string str, bool throwOnOverflow = true) 5: { 6: return str.ParseAsStruct(Convert.ToInt16, throwOnOverflow); 7: } 8: 9: /// <summary> 10: /// Parses a string as an ushort 11: /// </summary> 12: public static ushort ParseUshort(this string str, …

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Mind the runtime optimization

.Net, C#, Programming, Tips

You might know this already, but in C# whenever you write something like this: 1: if (MethodA() || MethodB()) 2: { 3: // do something 4: } it’s not guaranteed that both methods will be executed, so DO NOT DO THIS if you’re relying on both methods to be expected to cause some desirable side-effects. …

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