How To Choose The Best Beginner Programming Language
Without a doubt you've had to ask yourself, "What is the best beginner programming language?" if you're new to programming. This article will help you decide!
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March 6, 2023
C# Basics: A Guide for New Programmers
I've been making it my mission more recently to try and reduce the barriers for people that want to get started with programming. If you're just getting started out, it can be incredibly intimidating and often leaves folks quitting before they get started. When you factor in just how many programming languages there are to pick from, it's yet another barrier for getting started. How do you pick? What's the best one? I’ve spoken before about how to approach getting started and if you’re open to starting with the “dotnet” ecosystem then this C# basics article is for you! For some history, C# was originally created back in 2000 although if you check out this other page, we can see that it looks like C# 1.0 was actually out in 2002. For homework, you can go read about all of…
March 1, 2023
Beware of These Iterator and Collection Traps
This article is not set out to try and persuade you, the reader, that either using an iterator or materialized collection will universally solve your problems. Both iterator and materialized collection usage can be used to solve the scenarios that we'll be looking at, but both will come with a different set of pros and cons that we can further explore. The purpose of this article is to highlight scenarios based on real world experiences where either an iterator or materialized collection was being misunderstood, misused, and ultimately leading to a pile of headaches. As you read this article, if you find yourself saying "Well, sure, but they should have..." you're probably right. The problem is fundamentally not the usage of an iterator or the materialized collection, but not understanding how to consume them effectively. So I hope that when…
February 22, 2023
Task EventHandlers – The Little Secret You Didn’t Know
If you're writing asynchronous code in C# and using EventHandlers, odds are you've had issues with exceptions. Task EventHandlers might be consideration!
February 18, 2023
Async EventHandlers – A Simple Safety Net to the Rescue
Dealing with async EventHandlers in C# can be very problematic. async void is a pattern cause headaches with exceptions. Check out this simple solution!
February 14, 2023
Iterators – An Elementary Perspective on How They Function
If you're newer to C# or programming in general, you may have used an iterator and not even realized it. Iterators can be a performant and effective tool that we have access to as .NET developers that allow us to traverse collections of data. Because one of the requirements of an iterator is that it must implement the IEnumerable interface, the results of an iterator can only be enumerated over. For example, you could use the results of an iterator in a foreach loop but you could not directly index into the iterator results (like you could an array) without some additional steps. Another requirement of iterators is that they use a special keyword called "yield" so that they can yield and return the individual elements that are to be provided to the caller of the iterator. In a nutshell,…
February 10, 2023
IEnumerable in C# – A Simplified Beginners Guide
New to C# and looking to understand more about the IEnumerable interface? Check out this article for a crash course on getting started with C# IEnumerable!
February 5, 2023
Everything You Wanted to Know About Multiline Strings
Working with strings is probably one of the earliest things we get to do as C# developers. In fact, if you consider that most of us start with the "Hello, World!" example, you're being exposed to the string type right away. But as you continue to use strings, you'll quickly find that you want to work with strings that span multiple lines and how we define multiline strings might be a tricky topic for beginners. No sweat! In this article, we'll look at some simple code examples that demonstrate how to define multiline strings. I'll also link over to GitHub where you can see this code committed and pushed up to a public repository. Finally, the last example contains a special bonus that I think you'll like (even if it's a slightly more advanced topic). Read until the end! What's…
February 1, 2023
Simple Secrets for Access to the dotnet Record Type
In C# 9.0 we received access to a great quality of life type called the record. You can read more about that from Microsoft here. Record types allowed us as dotnet programmers to skip a lot of boiler plate code, thereby saving us time and making code more readable. Wins all around! Before record types, we might have simple data transfer objects (called DTOs) that would look something like the following: public sealed class MyData { public MyData( string value1, int value2) { Value1 = value1; Value2 = value2; } publc string Value1 { get; } publc int Value2 { get; } } And for a simple class with two properties... I think we can all agree that the verbosity here is just over the top. With the record type that we were given access to, we can now write…
January 29, 2023
async void – How to Tame the Asynchronous Nightmare
Most intermediate dotnet devs writing async await code in C# will come across async void at some point. Here's a creative solution for avoiding the headaches.
January 27, 2023
