When Microsoft released .NET Framework 4.0 in April 2010, the Task Parallel Library (TPL) was introduced to help developers replace the previously used Asynchronous Programming Model (APM) pattern for a Task-based asynchronous programming.

Before the introduction of Tasks, when implementing asynchronous code, developers had to define two variations of the same method: one to begin the operation execution (convention: BeginOperationName), that would receive an optional callback to be invoked when completed, and another to wait for the operation to complete (convention: EndOperationName) and get the result or an exception, usually used inside the callback to prevent the main thread to be blocked.

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When working with .NET, you’ll often hear about the garbage collector and how it manages the allocation and release the application’s memory from the managed heap, making our life easier.

This is true for the majority of objects but sometimes we have to work with unmanaged resources — files, network or database connections — that we must explicitly release since the garbage collector doesn’t know how to do the cleanup for us, despite being able to track the object that encapsulates the unmanaged resource.

To help preventing memory leaks, .NET provides a simple and standard way to cleanup unmanaged resources called dispose pattern, which consists in implementing the IDisposable interface and calling Dispose method when resources aren’t needed, which is usually done via the using keyword.

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When I finished my university degree, back in November 2010 (yes, I’m getting old), Microsoft wasn’t as open as it is today, but because they had a lot of education protocols we had access to a lot of their development tools for free — Visual Studio, SQL Server, Team Foundation Server, just to name a few.

Because of this, C# was actually the language used to teach Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), design patterns and even deeper runtime concepts like garbage collection (an ode to the amazing book “CLR via C#” from Jeffrey Richter — I learned so much).

At the time, we also used a lot of Java, C, C++, LISP, and even Assembly, but C# earned a place in my heart.

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One interesting feature of the .NET ecosystem is the ability to configure the application using Microsoft.Extensions.Options library. It allows developers to easily manage and inject application settings from different sources, such as appsettings.json files, environment variables, command-line arguments, or even custom sources.

Using a SQL database as an example, in this article I’m going to explain how to create a custom provider for Microsoft.Extensions.Options that reads key-valued configurations from a table that also ensure values are refreshed in-memory if the table content changes.

If you want to use an approach for which you don’t have a provider available, like getting configurations from some custom API inside your company, you can easily use this example as a template to implement whatever requirements you may have.

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When C# 7.0 was officially released in March 2017 it introduced several new features to make the life of developers easier, like tuples and deconstruction, local functions, expression body definitions and, the focus of this article, pattern matching.

One of the advantages of pattern matching is a more concise syntax for testing expressions and taking actions when there’s a match, increasing the readability and correctness of your code.

Checking for nulls is one of the most common usages. Before C# 7.0, if a developer wanted to check if a given value was null, usually the equality comparison would be used.

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