A while ago I came across “Quick notes on a rant” authored by Don Syme. This rant criticizes the C# language for the lack of a few important features. The first point is "Implicitly discarding information is so 20th Century" which brings our attention to one of the sources of bugs in C# programs. Lucky me, I got the pleasure to make this kind of bug and find it later in production code, so this blog post is to save you the trouble. ... Read More

I discovered the power of Roslyn over three years ago and since then I’ve developed three Visual Studio extensions and a couple of code analyzers. Because I work on those tools only in my free time, the word “time” is a key here, so automation really matters. So far I’ve been using AppVeyor for building and testing my extensions. However, I’m a huge fan of integrated solutions because they require much less work for setup, and since GithubActions became generally available I wanted to give it a try. ... Read More

In the last two posts, I’ve described 14 different code smells related to the async/await keywords. Beside the problem description, I’ve also provided info about code analyzers that can detect and report given issue. Those analyzers come from a few different packages that are not strictly devoted to the asynchronous programming area. They also contain rules from other fields with predefined severity, which might not be appropriate to your needs, or you might not be interested in enforcing them at all. ... Read More

This blog post continues the series which is a guide through the code analyzers available on the market and their possibilities. I’m trying to help you answer the question: “Which analyzer package should I use and how to configure it to avoid problems related to async/await?”. In the previous episode, I presented the first seven most common code smells related to asynchronous programming. Today, I present the next seven traps from this area. ... Read More

Roslyn analyzers are great. Not only do they detect different issues in our code, but they are also able to propose solutions, thanks to accompanying code fixes. There’s one more, less-advertised aspect of analyzers: besides improving the quality of our codebase, they also improve the state of language knowledge in our teams. This is a real time-saver during the code review because the technical, language-related remarks are reported automatically in design/build time. ... Read More