An Immutable Asynchronous State Holder in C#

Managing state in a clean way is probably one of the most challenging aspects of many software projects. When using asynchronous programming technologies such as .NET’s async/await functionality or the Reactive Observable pattern, the problem of state management is exacerbated and often becomes a source of errors. In several projects that I have worked on […]

I Hate #regions

As software consultants, we work in many environments. Most of the time we are working in our own environment on a brand new project, but sometimes we work with a team of client developers on existing software. In the later case, we have to be mindful of their coding standards. One practice that drives me […]

Ninject Tips: Some Binding Magic & Kernel Cleanup

I’ve been happily using the Ninject Dependency injection library on my C# project for over a year. In order to keep my project even reasonably organized, I quickly started using Modules to group together my dependencies. For the most part in my project, my Modules correlate to the first layer of namespaces beneath the project […]

Testing C#.Net Async Code

Writing C#.Net async code can be a bit of a challenge, and writing tests around the code can frequently cause much pain and agony. In fact, conventional wisdom around the Internet seems to be that writing async tests is hard enough that it’s okay to avoid it. I disagree. Writing tests has enough benefits (most […]

IEnumerable, for a More Elegant C#

I’ve recently had the chance to dig in deeper than ever before in C#. There are a lot of things I like about C#, one of them being LINQ (Language-Integrated Query). I’ve started to rely heavily on one aspect of LINQ, Enumerables. What is LINQ? At first glance, LINQ expressions look like SQL queries. Expressions […]

You Can Write Inline C# in XAML – But Should You?

Did you know that you can write inline C# in your XAML file with the x:Code Intrinsic type? When I stumbled on this feature, my first reaction was, “Wow, I didn’t know you could do that!” After several years of using WPF, I thought I knew all the tricks. Discovering something new was exciting! The initial […]

Caching Data Transforms on IObservables

I’ve been using ReactiveExtensions a lot lately in my C# code, and I am really impressed with the library. Every now and then, however, I want some additional features. Thankfully, due to Extension methods, they are really easy to add. Here’s one feature I added, which I call CachedSelect.

Generic Memoization in C#

I have seen some very nice, generic forms of memoization in the dynamic languages I’ve used. In languages like Ruby and Perl, for example, dynamically redefining a method to be a memoized version of itself is a good way to transparently handle it. However, I haven’t seen any examples of generic case memoization for C# […]

C#: (a few of) The Good Parts

After any prolonged dive into a particular technology stack, I end up with a set of tools and features I feel most comfortable with—the ones that most naturally fit how the rest of the team and I choose to build. Being part of a team at Atomic Object means those tools will be the ones […]

Testing C# Code That’s Run as the Result of an Event Being Fired

Or, How to test your Presenter classes A couple of colleagues and I recently finished up a project for a client that involved a lot of C# code. Our unit testing tools of choice were NUnit and Rhino Mocks. The NUnit choice was a pretty easy one (although there are other platforms out there), but […]

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