One of the questions I’ve started asking myself is what makes for happy C#? After a few years getting a bit more understanding of ML like languages like F# I’ve started to realise that C# is not built to write the kind of code that you write in an ML. Instead, you are happier when you embrace the Ruby-like patterns in C#. If you look at C# sort of like a typed Ruby like language: Object orientation, mutability first and meta programming using reflection. When you see that this is shared between the two lan[...]

One thing I neglegted to mention was that there isn’t really out of the box editor support for targeting both net45 and netstandard1.6 (or higher versions). My standard workaround for this have been to only target netstandard1.6 or lower for most of the relevant assemblies that I work on a day to day basis on. This works for most of the internal libraries since we deploy either netcoreapp1.1 or netcoreapp2.0 to Azure. For libraries that are supposed to be consumed by a wider set that has been a bit of a [...]

We asked the other developers in December 2016 what they wanted to work on. They said that they wanted to work on dotnet core and MVC. I was a bit hesitant at first since that would imply using something relatively new to base the business on. A cowoker at the time did inject that he was using it in production already. It has been an interesting journey. From json + xproj to a new csproj format. The nice thing about the new format is that it includes packages in the csproj. The file format has been cleane[...]

I wanted to see the state of EntityFramework on core. Turns out that it works on other platforms than Windows! NHibernate worked on mono as well as Windows, and now Entity Framework has caught up with that. However, EF Core is still somewhat limited as a ORM. This should not matter much if you are writing relatively simple SQL (LINQ) and have few relationships (so that you have less of a need for more advanced constructs). Many business apps do fall into this category if the requirements are made simple an[...]

It’s not obvious at first thought that there are applications for generalized regular expression engines. During my career, the regular kind has been the most prevalent kind. For certain problems, there is a simple pattern matching, that regular expressions excel at. For instance, in the case when you have a matrix with relatively regular content, it can be thought of as a general type of expressions. I’ve created the library Zander to help with that type of problem.