Practical .NET


Convert .NET Framework Lists into Dictionaries

You probably use ToList to convert your LINQ results into Lists. It's almost as easy to convert any collection into a Dictionary whose items you can retrieve by key.

Chain of Responsibility and Adapting to Change in Complex Apps

As a company's problems continue to become more complicated, your code will become more complicated. Peter shows how refactoring code can lead you to better designs.

Getting to the File You Want in Visual Studio's Editor Window

Peter gets an improved tip from one reader and some more tips from another, all designed to navigate Visual Studio faster.

Providing Multiple Solutions to a Problem

Sometimes life is like playing Whack-a-Mole: You write some code that solves a problem, and then someone comes along and makes the problem harder. Here's how to continuously integrate new solutions without having to rewrite your old solutions (much).

Get Rid of the Old ASPX View Engine

Peter didn't bother doing any performance testing but he believes that this change has just got to speed up your ASP.NET MVC application.

Find Out What Your Entity Framework Query Is Really Doing

You can turn on logging for your Entity Framework code with a single line. Configuring it to write to a file takes only a little bit more effort.

Coding Without a Plan

I don't believe in coding design tools. I've been programming for more than 30 years now (40 years if you go back to my first class in programming). I think in code. Code is my design language and procrastination is my friend.

Let Other Processes Run When Debugging One Process

When you hit a breakpoint in Visual Studio, everything stops. If you'd rather other processes keep running, you can enable that.

Looking at Entity Framework Core 1.0

There's more (and some less) in Entity Framework Core compared to Entity Framework 6, at least in version 1.0. While you can move to Entity Framework Core now, it might be too early for you.

Ensure Consistent Testing with Mock Objects and Moq

If you run an automated test and your test fails then you want to know that it's your fault -- not a problem in someone else's code or the result of a change in your test data. Moq lets you do that in two lines of code, even if your code uses the ASP.NET Session object.

ORM-Less Data Storage with Document Databases and Marten

Document databases are a form of NoSQL database that may store all of the information for a given object in a single instance in the database.

Leverage Joins in Entity Framework To Get Just the Data You Want

Every once in a while you'll need to use the LINQ Join to get the data you want.

Speed Up Skip and Take in Entity Framework with Lambda Expressions

If you're using Skip and Take in LINQ to page through your data, a tweak to your syntax can cut your response time by as much as 10 percent as you page through your data.

Testing Experimental Code in Production with Scientist.NET

A .NET port of the Ruby library allows for experimental testing of code that's gone to production.

Testing Only the Code You Write: Isolating Components with Moq

When you're testing an ASP.NET MVC controller (or, really, any class at all) you want to make sure the code that fails is the code you're testing. Moq provides a simple way to isolate the code you're testing and lets you generate test cases.

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