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Dictionaries have keys mapped to values, which enables you to efficiently lookup values by key. But you can also do a reverse lookup: get the key associated with a value. The simplest option is to use FirstOrDefault(), but that’s only a good idea if you know the value exists for sure. Instead, the best option … Read more
Dictionaries contain key/value pairs. When you want to remove one or more items from a dictionary, you can use one of the following methods: I’ll show examples below. Remove item by key Use Dictionary.Remove() to remove an item based on its key. If the key exists, it removes the key/value pair from the dictionary and … Read more
There are two ways to receive CSV data in a web API: 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 then do model validation. Note: To use CsvHelper, install the CsvHelper package (Install-Package CsvHelper). Or use whichever parser … Read more
In this article, I’ll show how to parse a CSV file manually and with a parser library (CsvHelper). Let’s say you have the following CSV file: To manually parse this, read the file line by line and split each line with a comma. This gives you a string array containing the fields that you can … Read more
You can use the Description attribute to describe types and type members (properties, methods). One of the most common use cases is providing a user-friendly string for enum values. Here’s an example of using the Description attribute with an enum: To read the Description attribute, use reflection and do the following steps: This can be … Read more
In a consumer/producer scenario, there are many reasons why you might want the consumer to read a batch of items. Maybe you’re bulk inserting into the database, or sending a payload with HttpClient. Sending lots of individual items over the network can be costly, and waiting for a full batch of items before sending is … Read more
Here’s how you can use Enum as a generic constraint: Note: Microsoft added this feature in C# 7.3. Whenever you have a generic method, it’s a good idea to use generic type constraints. Without constraints, you would have to implement type checking in the generic method and throw exceptions if an invalid type was used. … Read more
Dapper makes your code difficult to unit test. The problem is that Dapper uses static extension methods, and static methods are difficult to mock out. One approach is to wrap the Dapper static methods in a class, extract out an interface for that wrapper class, and then dependency inject the wrapper interface. In the unit … Read more
SqlDataReader returns a DBNull object when a column is null. This isn’t the same as a C# null. You can check if the column is null by comparing it with DBNull.Value or by using SqlDataReader.IsDBNull(). Here’s an example showing these two ways of checking if a column is null: After checking if the column is … Read more
When you merge two dictionaries, you can either merge them in-place, or create a new dictionary and copy the values over to it. The following extension method does an in-place merge of two dictionaries. It loops through items in the right dictionary, adding them to the left dictionary. When duplicate keys exist, it’s keeping the … Read more
Problem You’re trying to return null from a generic method and you’re getting the following compiler error: Cannot convert null to type parameter ‘T’ because it could be a non-nullable value type. Consider using ‘default(T)’ instead You can’t return null because the compiler doesn’t know if T is nullable. Solution There are a few options … Read more
You can use Convert.ChangeType() to convert from a string to any type, like this: Normally you’d call the specific type converter method, such as when you’re converting a string to an int. However, sometimes it makes sense to use the generalized type converter method – Convert.ChangeType() – instead of hardcoding the calls to specific type … Read more
You can use reflection to get all classes in the current assembly that implement a specific interface. Here’s how: To create instances of these types, loop through them and use Activator.CreateInstance(), like so: Example – Auto-wire a command routing table Let’s say we want to build a command routing table. We have commands and want … Read more
In this article, I’ll explain how to implement the plugin pattern. This approach uses a generic plugin loader that solves many real world problems when loading plugins in .NET. Besides being generic, this plugin loader also solves the following real world problems when working with plugins: If you find that this generic plugin loader doesn’t … Read more
Problem When you call .First() on an empty IEnumerable, you get the following exception: System.InvalidOperationException: Sequence contains no elements Solution Option 1 – Use .FirstOrDefault() instead of .First() When the IEnumerable is empty, .FirstOrDefault() returns the default value for the type. For reference types this returns null. For value types this returns 0 or that … Read more
Events are an implementation of the observer pattern and consists of two parts: There are three simple steps to using events, which I’ll show below. 1 – Add an event field The first step is to add an event field to a class with the event keyword and a delegate type (such as the generic … Read more
One day I decided to challenge myself by trying to implement multithreaded quicksort. I wanted to see how it would compare to the built-in Array.Sort() method. I came up with two algorithms that were 2-4x faster than Array.Sort(): After continuing to tinker, in attempts to further optimize, I came across the AsParallel().OrderBy() method (PLINQ). After … Read more
Attributes are used to store additional info about a class/method/property. The attributes are read at runtime and used to change the program’s behavior. Here are a few examples of commonly used built-in attributes: In general, you should try to use built-in attributes when possible. When it makes sense, you can create your own custom attribute. … Read more