A year ago I started working on a set of projects that requires accessing data from a huge legacy database. There was a decision to use Dapper to facilitate database access code. For those of you who are not familiar with Dapper, it’s a set of extension methods to IDbConnection, which allows to easily map C# object to SQL query parameters, as well as SQL query result to C# objects. I was quite skeptical to use a library that requires writing SQL queries directly in the C# code, because I got used to relying always on ORMs (NHibernate in particular). ... Read More

There’s a certain set of special method signatures in C# which have particular support on the language level. Methods with those signatures allow for using a special syntax which has several benefits. For example, we can use them to simplify our code or create DSL to express a solution to our domain-specific problem in a much cleaner way. I came across those methods in different places, so I decided to create a blog post to summarize all my discoveries on this subject. ... Read More

A couple of months ago I’ve started working on a simple CRUD service. A mix of ASP Core for REST API with Dapper for Database access - probably one of the most popular stacks for this kind of application. Very quickly it turned out that it’s more complex than I expected and this “simple-boring” CRUD became more interesting and challenging. The Problem 🔗︎ One of the first problems that I came across was that I had a lot of types that looked very similar but had some differences and served different purposes, like: ... Read More

A few weeks ago I started using non-nullable reference types - a new C# language feature which was shipped with version 8.0. It wasn’t a completely new experience for me, because I was working before on projects that were heavily utilizing [NotNull] and [CanBeNull] Resharper annotations. The way how non-nullable types are handled by Roslyn seems to be a little more complex in comparison to Resharper - there are around 40 different diagnostics related to this area. ... Read More

Some time ago I came across Jimmy Bogard’s article “Immutability in DTOs?” about the pros and cons of using immutable type pattern/approach. I fully agree with the author - the idea of immutable types is great but without the proper support from the language syntax it might not be worth applying. C# allows creating immutable types by adding readonly keyword to fields or by removing setter from properties. We are obligated then to initialize those readonly members from the constructor or directly in the member’s definition. ... Read More