Structured logging is the modern way of logging. To put it simply, instead of traditional log with log messages only, structured logs contain extra information for context. To give you an example, a traditional log may look like this: while the structured version may look like this: Structured logging is good because you can enrich […]
I have been working as a C# .NET engineer mostly working in the backend for almost 6 years. C# is very popular in enterprise environment and used a lot in backend development. I want to share my experience in the field and give some advise if you want to get into this field or just […]
Have you been working in a large code base and feel the pain of updating NuGet package version across many projects? Not only is it painful to update all the version in every projects, it is especially painful when you try to review a pull request with 99 files updating the .csproj and only 3 […]
If you worked with regular expression and have upgraded to .NET 7 or newer, you may see a warning SYSLIB1045: Use GeneratedRegexAttribute to generate the regular expression implementation at compile time. to alert you that you can use the new regular expression source generation. But is it really better? I have done a benchmark to […]
If you are looking for a no BS setup guide for Serilog with seq and Application Insights sink in .NET 8 worker services, you have came to the right place. Let’s get started! Sample project I have created a sample project in GitHub: samtc-lau/SerilogWorkerServicesSample: A sample .NET 8 Worker service application with Serilog (github.com). You […]
I am switching to Rider from Visual Studio as my IDE recently and I have faced this situation where Rider is not picking up environment variable from launchSettings.json. I would like to share what I learnt. Issue I realized something was wrong while debugging my app where my configurations from appsettings.Development.json were not being picked […]
A while back, I have helped upgrading one relatively large solution from .NET Framework 4.7.2 to .NET 8 in my company. I would like to share the strategy we used and hope this can help someone on a similar path. Context We have a solution that are in active development that is in .NET Framework […]
Today, I am going to share a simple technique that can improve the readability of your code: early return pattern. What is early return? In a method, there are usually the happy path (main logic) and the unhappy path (invalid input, invalid operation, etc.). Early return pattern is writing code such that when an unhappy […]
Recently, I have fixed one very strange bug and want to share this cautionary tale of using async lambda expression inside Parallel.ForEach() loop. Context In the code base, we have a Parallel.ForEach() that look something like this: Imagine SomeWorkAsync() being some sort of I/O work, like inserting data to a database. The issue we observe […]
If you have been doing C# development for some time, I am sure you are vary familiar with the infamous NullReferenceException. I certainly saw it happen many many time. Tony Hoare, the inventor of null reference, said it was the billion dollar mistake he made (Btw, it is good talk and you should check it […]
