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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
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
The simplest way to deserialize JSON to a derived type is to put the type name in the JSON string. Then during deserialization, match the type name property against a set of known derived types and deserialize to the target type. System.Text.Json doesn’t have this functionality out of the box. That’s because there’s a known … Read more
Normally when you’re working with JSON, you deserialize it to a target type and get back an initialized and fully populated object. How about if you need to initialize an object yourself, and then populate it with JSON later? For example, let’s say you want to load the following JSON array into a case-insensitive HashSet: … Read more
In a console app there are two ways to get commands: After getting a command, you have to parse it to figure out what code to execute. Typically commands have the following format: commandName -argumentName argumentValue. For example, take a look at this familiar git command: This is passing the command line arguments into the … Read more
Most of the time System.Text.Json will get you want you want. You can pass in options to control JSON serialization and deserialization to a certain extent. But sometimes you’ll run into scenarios where you need to customize how it handles a specific type. This is where JsonConverter comes in. You can customize serialization / deserialization … Read more
Sometimes you may find it necessary to have conditional logic based on an object’s type. The simplest way to do this is to switch on the type, like this: This feature is called type pattern matching. Before this feature was added (in C# 7), you’d have to use a bunch of if-else’s and check the … Read more
If I want to change the behavior of a method from the outside, I can pass in a function pointer. This approach exists in every language, and is one way to implement the Strategy Pattern. In C#, function pointers are referred to as delegates, and the two most common ones are Action and Func. The … Read more
The Switch Statement code smell refers to using switch statements with a type code to get different behavior or data instead of using subclasses and polymorphism. In general, it looks like this: This switch(typeCode) structure is typically spread throughout many methods. This makes the code difficult to extend, and violates the Open-Closed Principle. This principle … Read more