Teaching - dotnet falcon

Visual Studio extension to change the C# language version of a project

May 16, 2019

One of the courses that I teach is a workshop on the new features of the new C# language versions. During the course we look at the different language features of C# 6 and the newer versions. To illustrate the different features, I often change the language version of the

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

Awesome Northwind

Akos Nagy

Feb 5, 2019

Whenever I give a talk at a meetup or teach at a course or just want to try a demo about a data driven technology, my biggest problem (and the biggest nag) is always to get some real(istic) sample data. Thankfully there are sample databases available on the internet

Memento design pattern done (almost) right

Akos Nagy

Nov 13, 2018

I regularly teach courses on basic object-oriented design patterns. Over the years I have come to realize that not every pattern is equally useful or equally well-thought out. One of the most common examples of patterns that have become more like anti-patterns over the years is the Singleton pattern. But

New extension in the marketplace: Linq standard query operators practice project template

Akos Nagy

Sep 27, 2018

As a teacher, I'm constantly faced with a frustrating challenge: eliminating boilerplate code from demos. If students have to type a lot of boilerplate code before starting a demo together or an exercise, valuable time is lost and they don't get the same knowledge — and since this is a service

Deserialize into interface

Akos Nagy

Jun 12, 2018

Not long ago I was teaching a Programming in C# exam prep course. One of the modules involved serialization and a student asked me a question that was quite intriguing: Given the serialized form of an object, is it possible to deserialize it into an object if we only have

Adding bytes in C#

Akos Nagy

Nov 20, 2017

What happens if you run this little piece of code? More specifically, what's the type of the variable 'x'? byte b1=1; byte b2=1; var x=b1+b2; Console.WriteLine(x.GetType()); Well, if you guessed byte, you were wrong. This will actually result in an int. This was

Danger zone: true, false or...

Akos Nagy

Nov 1, 2017

As an MCT I regularly teach courses of different levels. And I have to say, I love teaching — that's the most efficient way to learn :) A participant at one of my advanced courses brought me this little 'problem' (of course, this is not a 'real' line-of-business problem, just something to

Back to the basics: Overload resolution in C#

Akos Nagy

Oct 21, 2017

During one of my courses, and interesting question came up. Let's say you have a class definition like this: public class Test<T> { public void Method(T parameter) {} public void Method(int parameter) {} } // ... // Test<int> object = new Test<int>(); // object.Method(7); So, as

C#
Teaching

Want to become a meetup speaker? Here's what you need!

Akos Nagy

Aug 17, 2017

I'm not just a software engineer, I'm also a teacher of software engineering. I feel obligated to share my knowledge with anyone who's in need of it, and, in the process, furthering my own understanding of technology and software engineering. That's why I became and MCT, that's why I'm on