Author: Patrick Smacchia
My dad being an early programmer in the 70's, I have been fortunate to switch from playing with Lego, to program my own micro-games, when I was still a kid. Since then I never stop programming.
I graduated in Mathematics and Software engineering. After a decade of C++ programming and consultancy, I got interested in the brand new .NET platform in 2002. I had the chance to write the best-seller book (in French) on .NET and C#, published by O'Reilly and also did manage some academic and professional courses on the platform and C#.
Over my consulting years I built an expertise about the architecture, the evolution and the maintenance challenges of large & complex real-world applications. It seemed like the spaghetti & entangled monolithic legacy concerned every sufficiently large team. As a consequence, I got interested in static code analysis and started the project NDepend in 2004.
Nowadays NDepend is a full-fledged Independent Software Vendor (ISV). With more than 12.000 client companies, including many of the Fortune 500 ones, NDepend offers deeper insight and full control on their application to a wide range of professional users around the world.
I live with my wife and our twin kids Léna and Paul in the beautiful island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean.
The new .NET 7.0 IParsable<TSelf> interface
As I explained in the post C# 11 static abstract members, C# 11 let’s write static abstract members in interface. This feature was mostly introduced to implement the new .NET...
C# 11 required members
C# 11 proposes the new keyword required that can apply to an instance property or an instance field declaration within a class, a record or a struct. [crayon-63890ca6d0e51722631092/] This keyword...
C# 11 File Scoped Types
C#11 added the file scoped types feature: a new file modifier that can be applied to any type definition to restrict its usage to the current file. This way we...
Managed pointers, Span, ref struct, C#11 ref fields and the scoped keyword
The concept of managed pointer exists in the NET runtime and C# since the inception of the platform in the early 2000. Managed pointers belong mostly to the pointer world,...
.NET Build Improvement: Stop Wasting Resources
I am working on .NET development full-time since 2002 and there is a point that still annoys me after all these years: the default .NET build behavior leads to a...
Architecture of a .NET Application: Case Studies
Recently the question Number of projects per solution has been asked on reddit which led to interesting debates. Of course the answer depends largely on the overall size and business...
C# 11 Raw String Literals Explained
C# 11 introduces Raw String Literals. Undoubtedly this feature will become very popular because it represents an elegant way to solve some issues with actual string literal. Let’s have a...
Visual Studio vs. Jetbrains Rider Performance
I work daily with Visual Studio since 1997 but still use Rider from time to time to keep up with progresses since we plan to also integrate our NDepend extension...
C# 11 static abstract members
C# 11 proposed interface members declared as static abstract. This is useful to handle both: Polymorphism at the type level, for example when abstracting the concept of zero accross numeric...
WPF / Winforms UI Refactoring: A Case Study
WPF and Winforms are still so massively used that Microsoft fully supports those technologies in .NET Core, .NET 5, 6 , 7 and so on. However WPF and Winforms are...
C# async await explained
In 2012, C#5 was released. This version introduced two new keywords async and await. At that time CPU clock speed reached an upper limit imposed by physical laws. But chip...
C# Pattern Matching Explained
Since the C# version 7, C# has support for pattern matching. C# pattern matching is here to simplify complex if-else statements into more compact and readable code. Pattern matching does...
Improve C# code performance with Span<T>
C# 7.2 introduced the structure System.Span<T>. First we’ll present a concrete example where Span<T> helps achieve better performance. Then we’ll explain what makes Span<T> so special. Span<T> primary goal is...
Improve Visual Studio Build Performance
Time is your most precious asset and slow build is high in the list of developer’s productivity killers. With slow build the penalty is twofold: not only the time taken...
How to collect return values from Parallel.ForEach?
Today I took 10 minutes to answer the 9 years old stackoverflow’s question: How do I collect return values from Parallel.ForEach? I though the improved solution deserved a quick blog...
C# Binary Search: Fast find of a free slot between 0 and uint.MaxValue
When a user is exporting a result to a document with NDepend, the tool needs to find a file name not taken in the temporary dir. Generating a GUID for...
Modern C# Hello World
With Visual Studio 2022 when you create a new console project based on .NET 6, the Hello World source code generated is now as simple as that: [crayon-63890ca6d29d7779485385/] Nice and...
In the Jungle of .NET Decompilers
C#, VB.NET and F# code gets compiled to IL code. IL stands for Intermediate Language. IL code is intermediate in the sense it sits between high level language like C#...
Solution to Visual Studio 2022 messing up Visual Studio 2019
As all .NET developers I am quite excited by Visual Studio 2022 and .NET 6 going RTM. However I noticed that Visual Studio 2022 RTM install messed up Visual Studio...
5x Lessons Learned from Migrating a Large Legacy to .NET 5/6
In January 2020 I wrote the post Not planning now to migrate your .NET 4.8 legacy, is certainly a mistake. Hopefully we followed our own advice and have been migrated...
Debugging a .NET App on Linux from Windows Visual Studio with WSL
NDepend analysis, reporting, API and Power-Tools will run on Linux and MacOS with the next version 2021.2. To achieve that, a major refactoring session has been achieved to isolate code...
Code Testability: A Case Study
[crayon-63890ca6d3451086382159/] This method is untestable because its logic depends on NdpOperatingSystem.Kind which returns an OSPlatform object. Notice the usage of the attribute UncoverableByTest that lets code reviewers and tools like...
3 productivity Resharper features missing in Visual Studio
Resharper is a great Visual Studio productivity extension but on the other hand it slows down significantly the IDE, especially when working with large solutions. However there are real hopes...
What is Code Review? – Guidelines and Best Practices
Code review is the process of mandating systematically one or several developers to review the code written by another developer in other to detects defect and to improve it. Code...
Top 10 New .NET 6.0 API
.NET 6 introduces new handy APIs that will make our development journey easier. Let’s go through the top 10 new API in terms of usage likelyhood. Then in the conclusion,...
How to Logically Name Embedded Resources in .csproj?
You can work with .NET for two decades and still discover some useful stuff. One thing that bothered me till now is that an embedded resource name is “the project...
In the Jungle of .NET Obfuscator Tools
In this article I will explain our genuine experience with various .NET Obfuscator Tools. We end up explaining that .NET Reactor is the one we choose to obfuscate our code...
Migrating Delegate.BeginInvoke Calls to .NET Core, .NET 5 and .NET 6
In this 2019 post, the .NET Base Class Library engineers announced that the good old Delegate.BeginInvoke .NET Framework syntax wasn’t supported in .NET Core and consequently in .NET 5, 6...
On replacing Thread.Abort() in .NET 6, .NET 5 and .NET Core
Thread.Abort() is not supported in .NET 5 / .NET Core We are actually migrating the NDepend analysis and reporting to .NET 5 and figured out that there is no equivalent...
Visual Studio 2022 64 bits: Elements of history
Finally after all these years of waiting Visual Studio 2022 will run in a 64 bits process on 64 bits machines! As a consequence the effective process address space of the...