Logging information in .NET, or really in any production application, is invaluable. In many cases, developers don’t have direct access to the production environment to debug issues. Good quality logs are the difference between solving problems like Sherlock Holmes and stumbling upon solutions like Inspector Jacques Clouseau. As you can imagine, we’re pretty big on logging here at Stackify, and …
IIS Web Server
In this post, we’re going to take a close look at IIS (Internet Information Services). We’ll look at what it does and how it works. You’ll learn how to enable it on Windows. And after we’ve established a baseline with managing IIS using the GUI, you’ll see how to work with it using the CLI. Let’s get started! What Is …
The Evolution of C#: What’s Changed and What’s Ahead
Recently Microsoft made several changes to the C# language. Some of those may even seem quite strange – definitely not your daddy’s C# anymore The truth is, even though most of this is just “syntactic sugar” – has no equivalent in IL, in the same way that LINQ didn’t require any changes in IL too, the language is changing very …
Entity Framework vs NHibernate: Understand the Similarities and Differences
A long time before Entity Framework (EF) Core was around – or any other Entity Framework for that matter – we already had NHibernate. In this article, I’m going to review Entity Framework and NHibernate, what approaches and differentiates them. History of NHibernate and Entity Framework NHibernate is a port of Hibernate from Java, one of the oldest and most …
Debugging Tricky HTTP Problems with Fiddler and Charles
Almost every application these days communicates over HTTP: websites, RESTful services, and even SOAP APIs all make use of Hypertext Transfer Protocol. For the most part, we don’t worry too much about what is happening at the network level when we’re building these applications. However, from time to time a problem will show up that needs us to drop to …
.NET Core 2.1 Release: What To Expect in 2018
.NET Core 2.0 was made publicly available on August 14. Besides .NET Core, .NET Standard 2.0 was released, the standard to which .NET Core 2.0 complies, as well as Entity Framework Core 2.0 and ASP.NET Core 2.0. Pretty cool, all have the same version number, but I’m sure this won’t go on forever! I almost forgot about NuGet, which also …
How to Monitor Azure WebJobs: Performance, Errors, Usage
Azure Cloud Services and App Service made it relatively easy to run web applications in the cloud. Developers still need a simple way to run tasks on a schedule at pre-defined times or specific intervals . We commonly use simple console apps via the Windows Task Scheduler to handle these needs. WebJobs were released as part of Azure App Service …
3 New C# 8 Features We Are Excited About
C# is rapidly approaching its third decade of life. Originally released in 2000, the language has grown and changed across 7 major versions. Once a knock off of Java in all but name has jumped out ahead on many aspects. Throughout its life, the release of a new version of the language has been highly coupled with releases of new …
.NET Core vs .NET Framework: How to Pick a .NET Runtime for an Application
Is .NET Core the next big thing? We’ve been toying with it for a while now, and we tend to think that it is. In fact, we predict that there will be a huge demand for developers skilled in this technology in 2018. But how does it differ from the .NET Framework, and what do you need to know to …
The Ultimate List of C# Tools: IDEs, Profilers, Automation Tools, and More
C# is a widely used programming language in enterprises, especially those that are heavily Microsoft-dependent. If you build apps using C#, you most likely use Visual Studio and have explored some of its extensions to supercharge your development. However, this list of tools might just change the way you write C# code for good. Best tools for C# programming in …
Learn C#: Tutorials for Beginners, Intermediate, and Advanced Programmers
If you’re a beginner developer or someone looking to learn a new language, C# is a great choice for a number of reasons. Unlike C++, for instance, C# offers automatic memory management, and it also offers solid Type Safety compared to JavaScript and node.js. C# has robust base class libraries; the .NET framework includes hundreds of libraries for working with …
ASP.NET Performance Monitoring: A Developer’s How to Guide
Monitoring hasn’t traditionally been designed for developers or applications. With the rise of cloud computing, PaaS and even serverless applications, developers need to be much more involved in application monitoring. Comprehensive ASP.NET performance monitoring requires monitoring your application multiple ways, from server CPU usage, identifying slow web requests, slow SQL queries, garbage collection metrics, and much more. In this guide, …
ViewBag 101: How It Works, When It’s Used, Code Examples, and More
ViewBag is a property – considered a dynamic object – that enables you to share values dynamically between the controller and view within ASP.NET MVC applications. Let’s take a closer look at ViewBag, when it’s used, some limitations, and other possible options to consider. What is ViewBag? The Microsoft Developer Network writes that the ViewBag property allows you to share …
How C# Reflection Works With Code Examples
Reflection is when managed code can read its own metadata to find assemblies. Essentially, it allows code to inspect other code within the same system. To illustrate, Java’s static typing system isn’t designed to support the “doSomething” method unless the object conforms to a known interface. But with reflection, your code can view the object and find out if it …
OOP Concepts in C#: Code Examples and How to Create a Class
Object oriented programming (OOP) is a programming structure where programs are organized around objects as opposed to action and logic. This is essentially a design philosophy that uses a different set of programming languages such as C#. Understanding OOP concepts can help make decisions about how you should design an application and what language to use. Everything in OOP is placed …
What is Visual Studio Team Services? A Look at Its Features, Uses, Tutorials and More
At Stackify, we’re big fans of tools that make developers’ lives simpler, and one such tool is Visual Studio Online, which is now known as Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), an extension of the Visual Studio architecture that covers development teams. It has special tools and roles for software developers, testers, and specialists. These include tools for collaboration, reporting, development, and measurement. …
Advanced ASP.NET Trace Viewer – WebForms, MVC, Web API, WCF
What did my code just do? That is a critical question that developers always need to know. Application logging, tracing, and profiling are the primary ways that developers can answer this question. In this article, we’ll review ASP.NET tracing and how to view your tracing statements with Prefix. Intro to ASP.NET Tracing Tracing is built into the .NET framework and has …
Performance Tuning in SQL Server Tutorial: Top 5 Ways to Find Slow Queries
SQL performance tuning is a never ending battle. I’m not a DBA, but I am a developer who has pretended to be one for 15 years. I have worked with SQL Server databases with terrabytes of RAM all the way down to Stackify’s massive fleet of little SQL Azure databases. I have seen a little bit of everything over the …
Understanding & Profiling C# Async Await Tasks
Microsoft and the .NET community have made asynchronous programming very easy with their implementation of async await in C#. The latest versions of ASP.NET heavily utilize it to improve performance. Many performance monitoring and profiling tools struggle to support and visualize the performance of asynchronous C# code. Stackify’s Prefix & Retrace products both have excellent support for applications using C# async await. …
How to Catch All Exceptions in C# & Find All Application Errors
Exception handling is a critical component of every software application. The last thing you want is your users to see weird errors, or even worse, your application keeps crashing. In this article, we are going to discuss how to find and catch all exceptions in C# applications. .NET provides several different ways to catch exceptions and view unhandled exceptions. Topics …