Fail tests instead of crash on Debug.Assert failures
The Debug.Assert(bool) method is a very old API that allows your program to test your assumptions at runtime, but in a way that only impacts performance of debug builds. The…
A fresh MessagePack library
I’ve been honored to work on the MessagePack-CSharp library since at least 2019. I’ve learned a lot from its founder in the process. We shared a lot of values, and…
How to quickly delete old branches in git
As you work in your local clone of a git repo, you tend to create lots of topic branches. These will often get merged online via pull requests, leaving the…
.NET library for Zcash
My recently released Nerdbank.Zcash library is available on nuget.org and makes the Zcash cryptocurrency accessible to .NET apps. This library exposes all the APIs necessary to generate seed phrases and…
Rust: A C# developer’s perspective
I’ve programmed primarily in C# for over 20 years. Before that, I did a mix of C++ and VB, and a bit of ruby. While I’m a long-time fan of…
Get rid of your .designer.cs code-behind for .resx
Committing generated files into source control is a shame. Besides bloating your source control database, it creates more opportunity for merge conflicts. And if the computer generated the file in…
Ban use of System.Console from .NET libraries
Shared libraries should not use System.Console. Besides an assumption that they are running in a process with an attached console, which may not be correct, the library really has no…
Embedded resources in C# projects that retain slashes
.NET assemblies may contain embedded streams of arbitrary data. In an msbuild project this is done by adding an EmbeddedResource item to your project with the path to a file…
How to get OS architecture in Windows PowerShell
In PowerShell if you need to determine the process or OS architecture, you should theoretically be able to leverage the .NET APIs to find it out. And in fact this…
Are warning-free builds really a good thing?
I’m a big fan of pipelines that fail for warnings as well as errors. Such a policy keeps repos clean, current, less buggy, and even more agile. This works best…