dotnet falcon (Page 3)

Generate index for TPH discriminator with Entity Framework Code First

Mar 26, 2019

When it comes to mapping inheritance hierarchies to database tables using an ORM, there are a lot of different options. Though it definitely has drawbacks, one of the most popular method is 'table-per-hierarhy' (TPH). TPH maps all the entities in the inheritance hierarchy to one table that contains all the

Entity Framework

Visual Studio extension to manage your Github gists

Akos Nagy

Mar 20, 2019

There are a couple of extensions available in the Visual Studio Marketplace to handle your Github gists — and not to belittle others, but I have to admit, I didn't like any of them. They are not intuitive or comfortable to use or lack features. What I wanted was a complete,

Visual Studio

Countdown to C# 8: Range and Index

Akos Nagy

Mar 18, 2019

In my previos post, I discussed one of the new features of C# 8: non-nullable reference types. That feature has been out for a while, so I think most of what can be said has already been said. But this time, I'm taking a look at something even newer: the

C#

Countdown to C# 8: Visual Studio 2019 first impressions and non-nullable reference types

Akos Nagy

Mar 11, 2019

The launch of Visual Studio 2019 is upon us — and with the new IDE, we also get a new compiler for the newest version of our favorite programming language. There are already a lot of reviews and previews about the features that are available in the preview, but I decided

An old trick for new dogs: collection initialization with an extension method in C# 6

Akos Nagy

Mar 6, 2019

During one of my courses, I was talking about the new language features of C# 3 to introduce the students LInQ. I was discussing collection initializers and extensions methods, when I made an off-hand remark about C# 6 allowing for the Add() method used for the collection initialization to be

C#
Teaching

Implementing the IFormatter interface

Akos Nagy

Feb 28, 2019

One of the courses I teach is the standard Microsoft 70-483 exam preparation course. For some reason, the exam still has questions about how the BinaryFormatter and SoapFormatter components work (I'm not even going to try to guess why), so the training material also discusses the related concepts in detail.

A Visual Studio extension to really clean your projects

Akos Nagy

Feb 25, 2019

During one of my C#-.NET courses, one of the participants was complaining how the "Clean solution" option of Visual Studio doesn't actually clean the solution. That is, it doesn't delete the bin and obj folders. And he was entirely right, and he was not alone with his frustration,

Decorating a component that doesn't want to be decorated

Akos Nagy

Feb 22, 2019

Decorator is one of the most useful OO design patterns out there. It's basically a holy grail of helping you stay S.O.L.I.D.: it lets you keep the responsibilities to a minimum in a component, while also being probably one of the best examples of the open/

Software design

Converting traditional EF includes to EF Core includes

Akos Nagy

Feb 19, 2019

In a previous post I tried to give reasons why you should use the repository and unit of work design patterns even if you have a modern, object-relational framework like Entity Framework (well, modern would be up to debate in this case, but whatever). Besides the usual reasons ('EF already

Entity Framework

Dependency injection for Visual Studio extensions

Akos Nagy

Feb 14, 2019

Dependency injection is awesome. I have written a lot of posts that start the same way; mostly because dependency injection is awesome. I'm not going into the details of why (I have already done that in those posts), let's just assume I'm right :) When using dependency injection, there is a