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Articles about coding with C# in .NET projects.
Use the XElement class (from the Linq-to-Xml API) to parse XML and work with it in memory. You can use this to search for XML elements, attributes, and modify values. This is an alternative to deserializing to an object (which requires you to define a class that matches the XML structure). I’ll show examples of … Read more
XML elements can have attributes, which are key-value pairs. To read the attributes, use the XElement class (from the Linq-to-Xml API). There are two main methods for getting attributes: Once you have the attributes, use the XAttribute.Value property to read the attribute’s string value. Here’s an example of getting all elements named Movie and then … Read more
The simplest way to select a single row with Dapper is to use QuerySingleOrDefault() with a SELECT + WHERE query. You can pass in the parameters to specify which record to select and specify the model type. Here’s an example: The SQL query returns a single row from the Movies table and Dapper maps it … Read more
You can update records with Dapper by using Execute() with an UPDATE statement and passing in the parameters. Here’s an example: Dapper maps the properties from the param object to the query parameters (ex: it maps year to @year). You can pass in the parameters with an anonymous type (as shown above) or by passing … Read more
You can insert records with Dapper by using Execute() on an INSERT statement and passing in a model object. Here’s an example of inserting a single movie record: Notice that you can simply pass in an object (param: movie) and Dapper handles the tedious parameter mapping for you. It tries to map properties from the … Read more
You can delete records with Dapper by using Execute() with a DELETE statement and specifying the record ID as a parameter. Here’s an example: This deletes a single record from the Movies table. Delete multiple records When you’re deleting multiple records, you can efficiently execute a single DELETE statement with a WHERE clause including all … Read more
You can execute stored procedures with Dapper by specifying the name, parameters, and CommandType.StoredProcedure. Let’s say you have the following stored procedure (single parameter, returns movie rows): Here’s how to execute this stored procedure with Dapper and map its results to Movie objects: Use an output parameter To get a stored procedure’s output parameter, add … Read more
ASP.NET Core gives you a chance to gracefully shutdown your background services (such as cleaning up and/or finishing in-progress work). By default, you’re given a grand total of 5 seconds to shutdown all background services. If you need more time than this, there are a few ways to control the graceful shutdown time, which I’ll … Read more
When you’re using the Visual Studio debugger to step through your code, sometimes it’s useful to be able to step into the .NET source code. I had to do this recently to figure out why my ASP.NET Core code wasn’t behaving as expected. You can enable .NET source code debugging with the following steps: Now … Read more
StreamWriter buffers by writing data to an internal char array with a default size of 1024 (and a minimum size of 128). Once the buffer is full (or when you dispose the StreamWriter), it flushes the buffer to the underlying stream. You can change StreamWriter’s buffer size by passing in the bufferSize parameter. Here’s an … Read more
There are two ways to programmatically make a file read-only: Here’s an example showing both ways to make a file read-only: Using File.SetAttributes() is useful when you want to manage all of file’s attributes at once. FileAttributes is an enum flag, so you can use bitwise operations to add/remove multiple attributes at once. That’s why … Read more
When you want to set permissions for a directory (and its files/subdirectories), you can use DirectoryInfo.GetAccessControl() to get the directory’s security, add/modify/remove access control rules, and then use DirectoryInfo.SetAccessControl() to apply the changes. Access control rules are a complex combination of different settings. So before jumping into setting the permissions programmatically, I suggest taking a … Read more
The simplest way to delete a directory is by using Directory.Delete() (in System.IO). You specify the directory path (absolute or relative) and an optional parameter that tells it to delete everything in the directory. Here’s an example of how to use this to delete directories: Note: If you’re working with DirectoryInfo objects already, you can … Read more
You can use Directory.CreateDirectory() to create a directory at the specified path (absolute or relative), like this: This creates the directory if it doesn’t exist, otherwise it does nothing. That means you don’t need to check if the directory exists before calling Directory.CreateDirectory(). In this article, I’ll go into more details about using Directory.CreateDirectory(). CreateDirectory() … Read more
There are three ways to update a file’s content: Which option you pick depends on the file’s format and size. For example, if you’re writing to an existing CSV file, you’d append new lines to the end of the file. If you’re updating a JSON file, you’d read all the JSON content, make changes, then … Read more
You can use Directory.EnumerateFiles() (in System.IO) to search for files in a directory. This has many overloads, allowing you to specify exactly what you want. You can get all the files in a directory, get all files in all subdirectories, filter files by name (including extension), and filter by attributes. Here’s an example of getting … Read more
The simplest way to read a file is to use a high-level method in the .NET File API (in System.IO), such as File.ReadAllText(). These high-level methods abstract away the details of opening a file stream, reading it with StreamReader, and closing the file. Here’s an example of reading a text file’s content using File.ReadAllText(): Notice … Read more
There are a few ways to create a file and write to it using the .NET File API (in System.IO). The simplest way is to use high-level methods like File.WriteAllText() and File.WriteAllLines(), specifying the file path and string(s) to write to the file. Here’s an example of using these (and their async equivalents): These high-level … Read more
When you execute a SQL query and read the results with SqlDataReader, you have two options for getting column values by name (instead of by ordinal number): Use the indexer and cast to the primitive type. Use the Get extension methods (from System.Data) such as GetString(string name). I’ll show examples below. Read column by name … Read more
You can use System.IO.File.Delete() to delete a file by specifying its relative or absolute path. Here’s an example: Note: Unlike other methods in the File API, there’s no async version of File.Delete(). If the specified file exists and the permissions are right, then File.Delete() deletes the file as expected. If there’s a problem, it throws … Read more
Manually validating a model can mean a few different things. It depends on what you’re trying to do exactly. Are you trying to validate a model object against its validation attributes? Use TryValidateModel(). Are you trying to do validation logic manually (instead of using validation attributes)? You can add errors to ModelState in that case. … Read more
There are two ways to receive CSV data in a web API: Receive CSV as a file in a multipart/form-data request. Receive CSV as a string in a text/csv request. In this article, I’ll show examples of both of these approaches. I’ll be using the CsvHelper library to parse CSV data into model objects and … Read more
In this article, I’ll show how to unit test a custom InputFormatter. The main thing to test is the output of the ReadRequestBodyAsync() method. To test this, you have to pass in an InputFormatterContext object containing the request body. As an example, I’ll show how to unit test the following ReadRequestBodyAync() method: Note: This is … Read more
Input formatters are used to deserialize the request body to a model object (which is then passed into an action method). There are built-in input formatters for handling JSON and XML. You can add your own input formatter when you want to customize request body deserialization. There are two scenarios where this is useful: You … Read more
Receiving requests with XML content is straightforward. You have to register the built-in XML InputFormatter (otherwise you get 415 – Unsupported Media Type errors). When a request comes in with an XML Content-Type (such as application/xml), it uses this InputFormatter to deserialize the request body XML. In this article, I’ll show step-by-step how to receive … Read more
