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

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