The new csproj format introduces two major changes that are important from the artifact metadata management perspective. First of all, a NuGet package definition was moved into the project file which allows sharing common attributes between NuGet package manifest and assembly info. Secondly, a new mechanism for generating source code of assembly metadata attributes was added, which shares some benefits from the first feature as well as simplify how these values can be overridden during the build process. ... Read More

Almost two years ago I created the very first version of MappingGenerator. Since then, I’ve put a lot of work in this project, adding new functions and improving the mapping generation algorithm with 14 releases (43 issues/feature requests closed) in the meantime. With over 5.5k downloads from the marketplace and 380 stars on Github, it looks like there is quite a market demand for this kind of tool (even though my coffee button statistics indicate something different). ... Read More

With the new SDK format for .NET projects, it’s much easier to manage with the project’s dependencies. In most scenarios references added with standard mechanism (Visual Studio or dotnet cli) result in sufficient content in the output directory. However, sometimes we want to do something non-standard that requires a slightly different set of components in the output dir - simply speaking we expect to see there either more or fewer files. ... Read More

Two weeks ago .NET Core 3.0 was officially published. Together with the new framework version, Visual Studio 2019 got support for a long-awaited C# 8.0. The complete list of the new language features is available here on the MSDN, but the one that deserves special attention is Nullable reference types. This is a very important change in the language semantic, because from now we will be able to eliminate certain class of errors related to reference nullability on the compilation stage. ... Read More

Multithreading is one of the most difficult aspects of programming and can cause a lot of headaches. The main source of problems is often the improper usage of synchronization mechanisms, which can result in deadlocks or a complete lack of synchronization despite our expectations. The effect of the broken synchronization can be analyzed with various runtime tools, but it would be nice to have an asset that is able to report all those issues in the design time right on the stage of writing code. ... Read More