Dotnet

Today I learned that .NET 8 Preview could play better with Homebrew (or vice-versa). I’m working on a C# 12 presentation for our local developer meetup, and for that, I wanted .NET 8 Preview to run side by side with version 7 on my Mac. As version 7 was initially installed with Homebrew, I also wanted to install version 8 Preview with Homebrew, but that recipe was unavailable. Not perfectly happy with that, I fell back to the stand-alone installer, expecting problems. ...

The latest .NET 8 Preview is out, and I love that they’re finally changing how MSBuild logs are printed to the terminal. The new Terminal Logger ditches the infamous “wall of text” that is a nightmare to parse in favor of a cleaner, leaner, and more organized output. Once enabled, the new logger shows you the restore phase, followed by the build phase. During each phase, the currently-building projects are at the bottom of the terminal, and each building project tells you both the MSBuild Target currently being built, as well as the amount of time spent on that target. ...

Fattura Elettronica for .NET v3.4.8 was released on NuGet today. The Fattura Elettronica project allows for the validation and de/serialization of electronic invoices following the Italian Revenue Agency standards. As with the previous one, this release also addresses a small undocumented behavior in validating the invoice. See the relevant ticket for the details.

Fattura Elettronica for .NET v3.4.7 was released on NuGet today. The Fattura Elettronica project allows for the validation and de/serialization of electronic invoices adhering to the canon defined by the Italian Revenue Agency. This release refines how the one-cent tolerance is accounted for in validation checks of types 00421 and 00423. As is often the case, there are subtle differences between the theoretical implementation defined in the official specs and the actual validation implemented by the same Agency that released said specs. See the relevant ticket for the details. ...

Steve Sanderson is experimenting again, and when Steve plays with his toys, I pay attention. In a new video on his YouTube channel, Steve introduces an experimental new .NET package that allows the creation of isolated instances of the .NET runtime that will safely run code in a sandbox.

In a C# library I’ve been working on, I wanted to use C# 9.0’s init keyword. Quoting the documentation: The init keyword defines an accessor method in a property or indexer. An init-only setter assigns a value to the property or the indexer element only during object construction. This enforces immutability so that once the object is initialized, it can’t be changed again. Consider the following class: public class Person { public string FirstName { get; init; } } You can initialize it like this: ...

Steve Sanderson, the original creator of Blazor, recently posted a quick peek at some of the new Blazor prototypes they are experimenting with for .NET 8. I think this looks great. Mixing client and server is a brilliant concept. Essentially one would be served with server-side Blazor on the first landing. While using the app, a background task would download the client-side stuff, ready to be consumed at any subsequent access. ...

Today, my last self-assigned duty before the Christmas break was to migrate our in-house rate-limiting implementation (based on the AspNetCoreRateLimiting third-party package) to the new, shiny rate-limiting middleware introduced by ASP.NET Core 7. While the process was relatively straightforward, I stumbled upon a few quirks I want to annotate here. Our use case is simple. We use what the ASP.NET Core 7 documentation defines as a “fixed window limiter.” It uses a specified time window to limit requests. When the time window expires, a new time window starts, and the request limit is reset. Consider the following code (for convenience, I’m using an extension method): ...

Today I upgraded to JetBrains’ Rider 2022.3. Startup speed has been enhanced, and full .NET 7 and C# 11 support is included. So far, my favorite feature is the conversion of regular and verbatim strings into their raw counterparts (it’s often the small, simple things.) My second best is the fulls upport for WSL2 remote development. This one took a good while to come out of the trenches, but better late than never, I’d say. ...

The other day we did a .NET 7 Spotlight event at this month’s DevRomagna meetup. The speakers were Ugo Lattanzi and me. In my session, I chose to talk about my top 7 new features in .NET 7 (pun intended.) What follows is a mix of my preparation notes and what I ended up really saying1. 1. Performance Since the initial release of “new dotnet” (.NET Core), performance has always been a critical goal for the .NET team. Starting with .NET 5, performance gains have been skyrocketing. .NET 6 was a lot faster than 5, and now, well, I’m surprised by the remarkable performance improvements in .NET 7. Stephen Toub posted a remarkably long (255 printed pages!) in-depth analysis of the performance improvements in .NET 7. one That was followed by articles dedicated to ASP.NET Core 7 and MAUI 7 performance gains. At .NETConf 2022, a particular slide caught everyone’s attention. ...