C# (pronounced see sharp, like the musical note ) is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language encompassing strong typing, lexically scoped, declarative, imperative, functional, generic, object-oriented, and component-oriented programming disciplines. It was introduced in 2000 by Microsoft as part of its .NET initiative, and later approved as an international standard by Ecma (ECMA-334) and ISO (ISO/IEC 23270:2018).
In C#, you can randomly slect items from a list using Random.GetItems, a method introduced in .NET 8. The method takes in two parameters: There are two important things to note about this method: With all this being said, let’s take a few examples. Let’s assume the following array of choices: For selecting 2 random…
Whether you are developing a custom controls library or simply organizing your solution into multiple project, you will most likely end up in the situation where you want to register some view handlers and services from within a MAUI library. To start off, there’s no such thing as zero-configuration registration. MAUI uses a builder pattern…
The error you’re encountering is because in C#, sizeof can only be used with types that have a predefined size known at compile-time, and the Point structure is not one of those types unless you’re in an unsafe context. There are two ways you can resolve this. Use unsafe code This would allow the use…
One less-known feature of the UnsafeAccessorAttribute is that it also allows you to access auto-generated backing fields of auto-properties – fields with unspeakable names. The way to access them is very similar to accesing fields, the only difference being the member name pattern, which looks like this: Let’s take the following class as an example:…
.NET 8 include new CreateFromDirectory overloads which enable you to create a ZIP file without writing them to disk. This is particularly useful in situations where you don’t want to store the zipped resources, you use the Zip content only for transfer. For example: if you were to provide an API allowing multi-file download. That…
.NET 8 brings some neat performance for existing APIs that handle type information. One such API that has seen a significant improvement is GetGenericTypeDefinition. In my benchmarks, the .NET 8 implementation is almost 10 times faster compared to the .NET 7 version. You can run this benchmark yourself if you’d like using BenchmarkDotNet: Or if…
In this article we’re going to look at how you can grab a screenshot of your entire desktop – that means all your displays, not just the primary one – from a console application using .NET core. This solution relies on Windows-only dependencies, so it will not work cross-platform, it will only work on Windows….
Unsafe accessors can be used to access private members of a class, just like you would with reflection. And the same can be said about changing the value of a readonly field. Let’s assume the following class: Let’s say that for some reason you want to change the value of that read-only field. You could…
In a previous article we covered how to access private members using UnsafeAccessor. This time around, we want to look at it’s performance compared to Reflection, and to see whether it’s truly zero-overhead or not. We’re going to do four benchmarks. If you want to run the benchmarks yourself, you have the code below: Benchmark…
Starting with C# 12, a new ExperimentalAttribute is introduced allowing you to mark types, methods, properties or assemblies as being experimental features. This will trigger a compiler warning during usage which can be disabled using a #pragma tag. The Experimental attribute requires a diagnosticId parameter to be passed in the constructor. That diagnostic ID will…
The ref readonly modifier enables a more transparent way of passing read-only references to a method. Passing of readonly references was already possible in C# by using the in modifier ever since version 7.2, but that syntax had some limitations, or rather too little constraints. So how does the new modifier work? Let’s assume the…
A NullReferenceException is a common runtime error which occurs when your code tries to access or manipulate an object or a member of an object, but the object reference is currently set to null (meaning it doesn’t reference any valid object in memory). In other words, you’re trying to perform an operation on something that…