C# – Nullable Reference Types feature basics

The main purpose of the Nullable Reference Types (NRT) feature is to help prevent NullReferenceExceptions by showing you compiler warnings. You can make a reference type nullable (ex: Movie? movie) or non-nullable (ex: Movie movie). This allows you to indicate how you plan on using these references. The compiler uses this info while analyzing actual … Read more

C# – How to use JsonNode to read, write, and modify JSON

When you don’t want to create classes for JSON (de)serialization, one option is to use JsonNode. This allows you work with JSON as a mutable DOM that consists of JsonNode objects (JsonObject, JsonArray, JsonValue). You can use it to read, write, and modify JSON. Here’s an example. Let’s say you have the following JSON that … Read more

C# – Filter a dictionary

The simplest way to filter a dictionary is by using the Linq Where() + ToDictionary() methods. Here’s an example: Note: You can use the Dictionary constructor (new Dictionary<string, int>(filterList)) instead of ToDictionary() if you prefer. This produces a new dictionary with the filtered item: Where() produces a list (actually an IEnumerable) of KeyValuePair objects. Most … Read more

C# – Change a dictionary’s values in a foreach loop

In .NET 5 and above, you can loop through a dictionary and directly change its values. Here’s an example: This outputs the following: You couldn’t do this before .NET 5, because it would invalidate the enumerator and throw an exception: InvalidOperationException: Collection was modified; enumeration operation my not execute. Instead, you’d have to make the … Read more

C# – TimeZoneInfo with current UTC offset

TimeZoneInfo always shows the base UTC offset. This can be confusing because the UTC offset can change based on the date (due to daylight savings rules). Here’s an example showing DateTimeOffset and TimeZoneInfo with different offsets: You can get a date’s UTC offset from DateTimeOffset and combine it with TimeZoneInfo.DisplayName. This approach is implemented in … Read more

C# – How to use TimeZoneInfo

Time zones are complicated and their rules can change, so it makes sense to use a library when you’re dealing with them. One option in .NET is to use the built-in TimeZoneInfo class. Here’s an example of using TimeZoneInfo to get the local system’s time zone: This outputs: Note: The display name always show the … Read more

C# – Get key with the max value in a dictionary

The simplest way to get the key with the max value in a dictionary is to use the Linq MaxBy() method (added in .NET 6). This returns the key/value pair with the max value. Here’s an example: Note: All examples shown initialize the dictionary with a small number of key/value pairs for readability. This outputs … Read more

C# – Get the current date and time

Use DateTime.Now to get the current date/time, like this: This outputs the system’s current date/time: Note: By default, it uses the current culture’s date format (from the OS). This is showing the US date format – MM/dd/yyyy. DateTime.Now is the local date/time from the system where the code is executing. Keep that in mind if … Read more

C# – Loop through a dictionary

The simplest way to loop through a dictionary is with a foreach loop. Here’s an example of initializing a dictionary with values and then looping through it: This outputs the following: The loop variable is a KeyValuePair<string, int> with Key and Value properties. Instead of using this, you can deconstruct the KeyValuePair into named variables, … Read more

WinForms – Loop through a form’s controls

Forms also have a collection of controls (Controls property) that you can loop through. This is useful for when you want to do something to multiple controls and don’t want to have to manually type out code to deal with individual controls. Here’s an example of looping through a form’s top-level controls: Note: In the … Read more

WinForms – ComboBox with enum description

By default, when you load enum values into a ComboBox, it’ll show the enum names. If you want to show the enum descriptions (from the [Description] attribute) instead, and still be able to get the selected enum value, you can do the following: I’ll show the code for this below. First, let’s say you have … Read more

C# – Check if a property is an enum with reflection

When you’re using reflection to look at a type’s properties, you can use PropertyInfo.PropertyType.IsEnum to check if the property is an enum. This is helpful when you want to be able to safely call an Enum API method (such as Enum.Parse()) on the reflected type, thus preventing an exception – ArgumentException: Type provided must be … Read more

CA2208: Instantiate argument exceptions correctly

The CA2208 code analysis rule checks for common mistakes when constructing argument exceptions. There are three main argument exception classes: ArgumentException, ArgumentNullException, and ArgumentOutOfRangeException. Unfortunately, it’s easy to make a mistake when using these. I’ll explain the common mistakes that CA2208 checks for and how to fix them (and when to suppress the warning instead). … Read more

WinForms – Bind controls to an object data source

Mapping classes to WinForm controls manually is probably the most tedious thing you can do in coding. In order to minimize this coding effort, you can bind your controls to an object data source. In this article, I’ll show how to do this in a WinForms App (.NET Core+) project. First, I’ll show step-by-step how … Read more

HackerRank – Zig Zag Sequence solution

In this article, I’ll explain the Zig Zag Sequence algorithm problem on HackerRank. Problem statement: You’re given an integer array with an odd number of elements (ex: [5, 2, 3, 1, 4]). You need to re-arrange the elements so they’re in a zig zag sequence, which means: Here’s a diagram to help you visualize what … Read more

ASP.NET Core – How to get request headers

There are two ways to get request headers: When a request comes in, the framework loads request headers into the Request.Headers dictionary. You can use this just like any other dictionary. Here’s an example of using TryGetValue() to check if a request header exists and get its value: Note: To just check if a header … Read more

Implement Interface with auto properties in VS

When you add an interface to a class, you can right-click the class and use the Implement Interface quick action to automatically implement the interface. By default, it implements members that throw exceptions, even the getters and setters: This is fine for methods, but you’d expect it to generate auto properties instead of properties that … Read more

C# – How to get the status code when using HttpClient

When you use HttpClient to make requests, you can directly get the status code from the HttpResponseMessage object, like this: The main reason for checking the status code is to determine if the request was successful and then reacting to error status codes (usually by throwing an exception). The HttpResponseMessage class has two helpers that … Read more

C# – Get subclass properties with reflection

When you use reflection to get properties, you can get just the subclass properties by using BindingFlags.DeclaredOnly (this causes it to exclude inherited properties). Here’s an example: Note: Use GetType() if you have an object. Use typeof() if you have a class. The code outputs just the subclass properties (from the Driver subclass): Get base … Read more

C# – How to read problem details JSON with HttpClient

Problem details (RFC7807) is a standardized error response format that has a Content-Type of application/problem+json, an error response code (i.e. 400 – Bad Request), and has a response body that looks like this: This can be extended to include any number of properties. The example shown above comes from the default way ASP.NET Core returns … Read more

C# – How to unit test a model validation attribute

You can unit test a validation attribute by creating an instance of it and then testing the two methods: In this article, I’ll show examples of unit testing these methods in a custom validation attribute and in a built-in validation attribute (i.e. [Range]). Unit testing a custom validation attribute Consider the following custom validation attribute … Read more

ASP.NET Core – Create a custom model validation attribute

There are many built-in model validation attributes available – such as [Required] and [Range] – which you can use to handle most validation scenarios. When these aren’t sufficient, you can create a custom validation attribute with your own validation logic. I’ll show an example of how to do that. 1 – Subclass ValidationAttribute and implement … Read more