Tag: .NET

Back in 2023, I wrote about discriminated unions in C# and how C# developers had to work around the lack of language support using things like ASP.NET Core’s Results<> type or the OneOf NuGet package. Real C# language support (csharplang issue #113) had been open for years with no sign of a proper solution. Well, the wait is over. C# 15, shipping with .NET 11 (preview), introduces first-class union types. Let’s have a look.

At Build 2023 back in June, Microsoft announced a new form of storage volume for Windows 11: Dev Drive. In October 2023, support for Dev Drive was shipped as a Windows Update and now available to anyone using the latest version of Windows 11.

When writing libraries and frameworks that others are using, it’s sometimes hard to convey that a given API is still considered “experimental”. For example, you may want to iterate on how to work with part of the code base with the freedom to break things, while still allowing others to consume that code if they are okay with that.

Discriminated unions have been a long-standing request for C#. While F# users have had discriminated unions for years, C# developers will have to wait a bit longer. What discriminated unions allow you to do is tell the compiler (and other tooling like your IDE) that data can be one of a range of pre-defined types.

For the past few months, a lot of news in tech as well as mainstream media has been around ChatGPT, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) product by the folks at OpenAI. ChatGPT is a Large Language Model (LLM) that is fine-tuned for conversation. While undervaluing the technology with this statement, it’s a smart-looking chat bot that you can ask questions about a variety of domains.

How do you test that your ASP.NET Core Minimal API behaves as expected? Do you need to deploy your application? Can you write tests with frameworks like xUnit, NUnit, or MSTest? In this post, you will learn the basics of testing ASP.NET Core Minimal APIs. You’ll get started with testing a “hello world” endpoint, and then test a more complex API that returns JSON data. You’ll finish with customizing the ASP.NET Core service collection, so you can customize services for your unit tests and integration tests.

Previously, we saw how you can help the compiler’s flow analysis understand your code, by annotating your code for nullability. In this final post of our series, we’ll have a look at the techniques and tools that are available to migrate to using nullable reference types in an existing code base. In this series: As we have seen in a previous post, it can be an overwhelming experience to go all-in and enable the nullable annotation context for all projects in your solution.

In the previous post, we looked at some internals of C# nullable reference types, and the nullable annotation context. Today, let’s look at the many options for annotating your code and various ways to help the flow analysis understand your code. As a result, you (and anyone consuming your libraries) will get better and more reliable hints from the IDE and the C# compiler. In this series: So far, we’ve only been annotating our code with ? to inform flow analysis that a reference type can be null when nullable annotations are enabled. This one annotation may not be enough for all scenarios…

In the previous post, we saw that with nullable reference types enabled, you get better static flow analysis when working on your code. While nullable reference types don’t give you runtime safety, the design-time and compile-time help is priceless! In this post, we’ll look at some internals of how C# nullable reference types work, and how the C# compiler and IDE use the nullable annotation context. In this series: We’ve already seen there is a difference between nullability for value types and reference types.

The C# nullability features introduced in C#8 help you minimize the likelihood of encountering that dreaded System.NullReferenceException. Nullability syntax and annotations give hints on whether a type can be nullable or not. Better static analysis is available to catch unhandled nulls while developing your code. What’s not to like? Introducing explicit nullability into an existing code base is quite an effort. There’s much more to it than just sprinkling some ? and ! throughout your code. It’s not a silver bullet either: you’ll still need to check non-nullable variables for null.