Solve real coding problems
The IntelliCode completions feature (added in VS2022) suggests full line completions as you’re typing. It’s enabled by default. It shows a greyed out suggestion based on what it thinks you’re going to want. This is different from the regular modal popup that shows below the line you’re typing. Here’s what it looks like: If you … Read more
It’s important to add .gitignore to your git repository. This tells git which files in your source directory to not track. Without this, you end up pushing lots of unnecessary files to your repository – such as build output files. The simplest way to add .gitignore is by using Visual Studio. This initializes it with … Read more
When you use a single instance of HttpClient to send requests, it keeps connections open in order to speed up future requests. By default, idle connections are closed after 2 minutes, and otherwise will be kept open forever (in theory). In reality, the connection can be closed by the server-side (or other external factors) regardless … Read more
When you use the same instance of HttpClient for multiple requests (sequential and concurrent) to the same URL, it’ll reuse connections. Requests that get to reuse a connection are 5.5-8.5x faster than requests that have to open a new connection. There are a few scenarios that benefit from this connection reuse: Measuring the performance gains … Read more
Here’s how to round a DateTime up to the nearest 30 minutes: When the time is 3:38 pm, it rounds to 4:00 pm. When it’s 5:03 pm, it rounds to 5:30 pm. When it’s exactly 2:00 pm, it’ll round up to 2:30 pm (note: see the What if you’re at the start of a 30 … Read more
In versions before .NET Core 3.0 (including .NET Framework), HttpClient disposes the request HttpContent object for you. This is surprising default behavior (a violation of the principle of least surprise for sure). This causes multiple problems, but one of the main problems is it prevents you from reusing the HttpContent object (you’re greeted with an … Read more
In order to send a file in a request with HttpClient, add the file into a MultipartFormDataContent object, and send this object as the request content. Here’s an example: This sends the following multipart/form-data POST request: In this article, I’ll explain a few details about MultipartFormDataContent, and show a few other file-sending scenarios. MultipartFormDataContent Add() … Read more
User Secrets are stored in secrets.json. This file is specific to your application. Once you know the path of secrets.json, you can load and update it. Here’s an example of how to update secrets.json programmatically: Note: 1) For brevity, this isn’t showing all using statements. 2) This is using Newtonsoft because it’s better than System.Text.Json … Read more
When you’re developing a web API with file uploading, you can use Postman to send files in test requests. This simplifies development because you don’t have to write your own client-side code for sending the test requests. In this article, I’ll show how to upload a file with Postman by posting a file in a … Read more
When the client posts a file in a multipart/form-data request, it’s loaded into an IFormFile object. This contains file information (such as the file name) and exposes the file content as a stream. This allows you to save the file content or process it however you want to. You can access the IFormFile object through … Read more
When you send a request with HttpClient, it returns an HttpResponseMessage. You can read the response headers through the HttpResponseMessage.Headers property: This outputs the response headers: Raw response headers are really just key/value(s) pairs. When the response comes in, the headers are loaded into the Headers property (which is of type HttpResponseHeaders). This parses the … Read more
There are two ways to do inheritance mapping in EF Core: Let’s say we have a database with employees. All employees have an id and a name. There are currently two types of employees: programmers and drivers. Programmers have a language (ex: C#), and drivers have a car (ex: Honda). We can model this with … Read more
There are two ways to represent numbers in JSON: as number literals (ex: 123) or as quoted numbers (ex: “123”). In this article, I’ll explain how quoted numbers are handled during deserialization in Newtonsoft and System.Text.Json and how to change the behavior. At the end, I’ll show how to write quoted numbers during serialization. Quoted … Read more
The simplest way to return a 500 response is to use the Problem() helper method, like this: This method returns an ObjectResult with status code 500 and a generic error message, which gets serialized to JSON and returned in the response body. The response looks like this: The ControllerBase class has many helper methods like … Read more
You can post form data asynchronously by using fetch() + FormData, like this: FormData parses the form element into an array of key/value pairs for you. This results in sending the following request: When you set the request body to a FormData object, it sets the content-type to multipart/form-data. You can post the data in … Read more
Problem When you try to initialize a FormData object from a form element, it’s empty. There are no keys or values whatsoever. For example, let’s say you’re trying to post form data with fetch(): When you look at the request, it has the right Content-Type, but no data: Note: If you look in DevTools > … Read more
The simplest way to send requests in JS is to use the fetch() API. Here’s an example that gets a stock quote from a web API and displays the results: You can wire this up to a button click (and have a div for displaying the results): Note: fetch() is supported in all major browsers … Read more
It’s a good idea to provide users with a way to cancel a HttpClient request that’s taking too long. To be able to cancel an HttpClient request, you can pass in a CancellationToken: To get a CancellationToken, you have to create a CancellationTokenSource: To actually cancel the request, you have to call CancellationTokenSource.Cancel(): This means … Read more
Let’s say you want to search for specific characters in a large text file and return a list of context objects to the calling code for further processing (such as showing the results in the UI). One way to do that is to build the entire list at once and return it. If you don’t … Read more
The simplest way to save a list of strings to a file is to use File.WriteAllLines(). This creates (or overwrites) the file and writes each string on a new line. The resulting file looks like this: Note: Showing non-printable newline characters \r\n for clarity. Specifying the separator character What if you want to separate each … Read more
The ASP.NET Core framework automatically parses query strings (i.e. ?name=Dune&year=2021) into HttpContext.Request.Query and maps the query string values to parameters in the action method (if you’ve added them). You can get the mapped query string values by adding action parameters, like this: Or you can use HttpContext.Request.Query directly (which is useful in many scenarios): This … Read more
Query strings start with ‘?’ and have one or more key-value pairs separated by ‘&’. All characters except a-z, A-Z, 0-9 have to be encoded, including Unicode characters. When you use HttpClient, it automatically encodes the URI for you (internally, it delegates this task to the Uri class). This means when you include a query … Read more
Problem When your application tries to write to the Windows Event Log, you get the following exception: System.Security.SecurityException: The source was not found, but some or all event logs could not be searched. To create the source, you need permission to read all event logs to make sure that the new source name is unique. … Read more
The simplest way to remove non-alphanumeric characters from a string is to use regex: Note: Don’t pass in a null, otherwise you’ll get an exception. Regex is the simplest options for removing characters by “category” (as opposed to removing arbitrary lists of characters or removing characters by position). The downside is that regex is the … Read more
To unit test an action filter, you have to pass in an action filter context object (which requires a lot of setup). Action filter methods are void, so you have to verify the behavior by inspecting the context object (or dependencies, like a logger, if you are injecting those). Here’s an example of doing the … Read more