Tag: csharp

For any new Blazor app on .NET 11, scaffold a Blazor Web App (the template formerly nicknamed Blazor United) and pick render modes per page. Server-only and WebAssembly-only templates only still make sense in narrow cases.

EF Core 11 Preview 4 drops the long-standing shadow-property restriction on SQL Server temporal tables. PeriodStart and PeriodEnd can now be regular CLR properties, configured with strongly-typed HasPeriodStart and HasPeriodEnd lambdas.

List<T> is a growable heap collection; Span<T> and ReadOnlySpan<T> are stack-only views over memory you already own. Use List<T> for anything you store, return from async, or grow; Span<T> for a mutable allocation-free view in a synchronous method; ReadOnlySpan<T> for read-only parsing over strings, u8 literals, and slices.

Use Parallel.ForEach for CPU-bound work over in-memory data, Parallel.ForEachAsync for async I/O over many items with a concurrency cap, and Task.WhenAll for a small fixed fan-out where you want every operation in flight and need the results back.

Use string interpolation for one-shot composition of a fixed set of values; use StringBuilder when you append in a loop or across an unknown number of pieces. The dividing line is the loop, not the number of values.

How to add a custom category to UiPath's Project Settings from your activity package, register fields at design time via IRegisterWorkflowDesignApi, and read those values back at runtime through IExecutorRuntime — with the App Insights instrumentation key as the example.

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.

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.

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.