Most .NET developers either have used Entity Framework Core or eventually will, because it is one of the most known and flexible ORM frameworks to access databases in the .NET ecosystem, directly supported by Microsoft and the Open Source community.

In this article I’m going to explain how you can create a console application that will check if migrations are missing from the database and apply them accordingly. This is an approach I’ve been using ever since Microsoft released .NET Core 1 RC 1 (at the time I even created an open-source library to facilitate console hosting, now deprecated because we can use Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting).

Read More

Ever since Microsoft introduced Language Integrated Query to the .NET framework (also known as LINQ) developers have been using it extensively to work with collections.

From a simple filter, to an aggregation, to a transformation, LINQ is the technology of choice to keep code clean and readable. We even have providers that convert LINQ instructions into SQL commands that will be run in some database.

In this article I’m going to compare the performance of ToList versus ToArray when creating short lived collections. I’m also going to execute the test in different versions of the framework (.NET Framework 4.8, .NET 7 and .NET 8) so we can also see how much the performance have improved over the years.

Read More

Microsoft’s upcoming release of .NET 8 will introduce a lot of new features that will certainly be welcomed by the developer community, making it an even stronger framework for application development.

One of those features is the namespace System.Collections.Frozen that introduces two new collections: FrozenDictionary and FrozenSet. These new types, as stated by Microsoft, are focused in reducing the time of read operations at the expense of increasing initialization time of immutable collections. This makes them perfect for shared data that only needs to be populated a single time, like application configurations or cached data in-memory.

In this article I’m going to benchmark the performance gains that can be achieved by using a FrozenDictionary instead of a Dictionary or an ImmutableDictionary to store shared data.

Read More

Enumeration types, also known as enum types, are widely used by C# developers to improve code readability and maintainability, by offering a standardized way to represent a set of related numeric constants. Good examples are days of the week, seasons, or a predefined range of colors.

In this article I’m going to talk about flag enums, which are a special case, that can be used to represent a combination of binary choices into a single value using bitwise operations.

Read More

Nowadays, when implementing a .NET application that works directly with a database (relational or not), most developers will chose Entity Framework Core to abstract their data layer and work directly with entity classes.

It has become an integral part of the .NET ecosystem, just like ASP.NET, and it is extremely rare finding someone that never worked with it. I’ve been using it myself ever since version 4 (along with other ORMs) and I must say that it aged like a fine wine.

Fully open sourced, with support for multiple databases (not just SQL Server) while offering relatively optimized and extensible conversion from LINQ to database queries, accessing data from a .NET application never been easier. And when it doesn’t support something, just integrate with some micro ORM and go crazy on that SQL!

Read More