.NET Aspire is a comprehensive, cloud-oriented framework designed for creating scalable, observable, and production-grade distributed applications. It was introduced in preview part of the .NET 8 release. The framework is provided through a set of NuGet packages, each addressing different aspects of cloud-native application development, which are typically structured as a network of microservices rather…
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…
Starting with .NET 8, it’s possible to directly generate a tar.gz container archive. This is particularly advantageous for more complex workflows where activities like scanning the images before pushing them are needed. After creating the archive, it can be transferred, scanned, or incorporated into your local Docker setup. For archiving during publication, integrate the ContainerArchiveOutputPath…
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…
Reflection allows you to obtain type information at runtime and to access private members of a class using that information. This can be particularly useful when dealing with classes outside of your control – provided by a third-party package. While powerful, reflection is also very slow, which is one of the main deterrents in using…