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…
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…
The easiest way to shuffle an array in C# is using Random.Shuffle. This method has been introduced in .NET 8 and works both with arrays and spans. The suffling is done in-place (the existing array/span is modified, as opposed to creating a new one and leaving the source unchanged). In terms of signatures, we’ve got:…
There are some situations in which creating a whole new IJsonTypeInfoResolver will seem overkill, when the default (or any other already defined) type info serializer could do the job with only one or two small modifications. Until now, you could play with the DefaultJsonTypeInfoResolver.Modifiers property for the default type info resolver, but you didn’t have…
A new extension method – GetFromJsonAsAsyncEnumerable<T> – has been added to the HttpClient part of .NET 8. This new mthod will take the response body JSON and deserialize it into an async enumerable operation. The complete signature of the extension method is as follows: Let’s take a look at how to use it. First thing…