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A modern UiPath custom activity needs more than a CodeActivity: a DesignPropertiesViewModel, an embedded metadata file for the toolbox, private host-supplied references, and the right System.Activities assembly version. Here's the whole recipe.

One repo, three NuGet packages, independent versions. Per-package MinVer tag prefixes, a tag-driven GitHub Actions release that publishes via OIDC trusted publishing (no API key), pinning a cross-package dependency to a real version, and the default-branch gotcha that silently swallows your first tag.

Four ways to guard a critical section in C#, and a decision matrix for picking one. Use System.Threading.Lock for synchronous mutual exclusion on .NET 9+, SemaphoreSlim when the section spans an await, and Monitor only when you need Wait/Pulse.

If you came from Semantic Kernel looking for 'skills,' the Microsoft Agent Framework 1.0 calls them function tools and builds every one from AIFunctionFactory.Create. Here are the three ways to author one in C# -- an inline lambda, a named method, or a class of related tools -- plus what the declarative YAML 'file' approach can and cannot do.

Use the Microsoft.Extensions.Http.Resilience handler for HttpClient calls, since it is Polly with HTTP-aware defaults and telemetry in one line. Reach for Polly's ResiliencePipeline directly only when you protect something that is not an HttpClient.

There's no public hook to run code around every UiPath activity in the Robot. CoreWF's TrackingParticipant gets you the events, and a small reflection bridge into the live executor attaches it from inside a running workflow — so a single Super Initialize activity instruments the whole run.

Three ways to push work onto the thread pool in C#, and which one to reach for. Use Task.Run for almost everything, ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem<TState> for allocation-free fire-and-forget, and Task.Factory.StartNew only for LongRunning or a custom scheduler.

Ship a Workflow Analyzer rule inside your UiPath activity package: register it with IRegisterAnalyzerConfiguration, scope it to the workflow so the result lands on the right file, detect the project's entry point, and walk the activity tree — with the gotcha that InspectionResult has no File property.

.NET 11 Preview 4 ships DeflateEncoder, GZipEncoder, and ZLibEncoder plus matching decoders so you can compress straight into a Span<byte> with OperationStatus, no Stream required.

For read-heavy paths in .NET 11, plain EF Core with AsNoTracking is within ~5% of Dapper. Reach for compiled queries on a profiled single-row hot path, and Dapper only for the lowest latency or SQL LINQ can't express.