C# – Serialize to JSON in alphabetical order

There are two ways to serialize an object’s properties to JSON in alphabetical order using System.Text.Json: I’ll show how to do these two options below. Option 1 – Manually alphabetize with JsonPropertyOrder You can specify the exact serialization ordering by using the JsonPropertyOrder attribute. Therefore, to serialize in alphabetical order, first arrange the properties in … Read more

C# – How to sort a list

When you need to sort a list, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. You can use one of these three built-in methods for sorting a list: In this article, I’ll show examples of using these three approaches for sorting a list. Sort a list with OrderBy() (Linq) The OrderBy() Linq method generates an IOrderedEnumerable … Read more

C# – Using a list of tuples

Here’s an example of how to initialize a list of named tuples: This creates a list of named value tuples (ValueTuple<string, int>) using list initializer syntax and then loops through the tuples. I suggest always using named value tuples (not System.Tuple). This outputs the following: I’ll now show how to add to the list of … Read more

C# – How to sort a dictionary

Dictionaries are unordered data structures. Key/value pairs aren’t stored in sorted order. When you want the Dictionary in sorted order, there are two simple options: I’ll show both options. Sort Dictionary with OrderBy() Use OrderBy() (from System.Linq) to sort the Dictionary by key or value. It returns the Dictionary’s KeyValuePairs in ascending sorted order. I’ll … Read more

Comparing performance with Benchmark.NET graphs

The following graph compares the execution time of three sort implementations ran against varying input sizes (1k, 10k, 100k): This graph was generated using Benchmark.NET, which I’ll show how to use in this article. I’ll be comparing the performance of multithreaded quicksort implementations (with the non-threaded Array.Sort() as a baseline). Create console app and reference … Read more

C# – How to sort by multiple fields (Linq)

Use the OrderBy() and ThenBy() Linq methods when you want to sort a list by multiple fields, like this: Ascending vs Descending order By default, OrderBy() and ThenBy() sort in ascending order. If you want to sort by descending order, use the Descending version of each method. For example, if I want to sort NFL … Read more

Multithreaded quicksort in C#

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