C# Posts

The modern, cross-platform programming language Haxe is well-known in some circles, yet many developers have never heard of it. Since it first appeared in 2005, it’s been battle-tested by its loyal—if rather quiet—following.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Kevin Bloch explores the Haxe ecosystem and how to transpile some sample code.

Elasticsearch is one of the most powerful full-text search engine solutions out there. Using the NEST package, you can easily leverage the power of Elasticsearch in your .NET projects.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Ivan Cesar shows how Elasticsearch can solve real-world full-text search problems in your .NET projects.

The Aho-Corasick algorithm can be used to efficiently search for multiple patterns in a large blob of text, making it a really useful algorithm in data science and many other areas.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Roman Vashchegin shows how the Aho-Corasick algorithm uses a trie data structure to efficiently match a dictionary of words against any text.

In the past few years, Microsoft has pulled a few aces from up its sleeve. Yes, they messed up Skype, failed with smartphones, and almost succeeded with tablets. But, they did some really amazing things as well.

Relinquishing their closed empire approach, they open-sourced .NET, joined the Linux Foundation, released SQL Server for Linux, and created this great new tool called Visual Studio for Mac.

In this post, Head of Open Source Demir Selmanovic details how to make an Android and iOS app in C# on your Mac.

Caching is a powerful technique for increasing performance, but the whole idea behind caching works only as long as the result we cached remains valid. And here we get to the hard part of the problem: How do we determine when a cached item has become invalid and needs to be recreated?

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Daniel Ivanov provides an ASP.NET-based solution to replace invalid cached items and assure high throughput and performance of web applications designed to handle a high load.

Unity is an excellent and straightforward tool to use for multi-platform development. Its principles are easy to understand, so programmers can start developing new products quickly and intuitively. However, if developers do not keep some important things in mind, development can slow down at crucial points, including when the project moves away from initial prototype or is approaching final release.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Tomas Macek outlines the most common mistakes that Unity developers should be aware of for future projects.

To create a .NET project from scratch, simply using Visual Studio Wizard is good enough most of the time. However, the default project settings produced by wizards are hardly acceptable for professional teams, as they set too low of a bar on quality.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Andrei Smirnov guides us through several standard practices, configuration files, and project settings every developer should apply when starting a new .NET project. Doing this in the very beginning of a project decreases future technical debt and makes product source code readable and professional-looking.

With Microsoft’s no-brainer shift towards open source and interoperability it was only a matter of time before we started seeing alternatives to some of their key products, like Visual Studio. Enter Project Rider: the code name for IDE guru JetBrains’ competition to Visual Studio.

Here’s the lowdown on Project Rider, the newest member of the IntelliJ platform family.

Maintainable code is something we all desire and there are no shortage of coding principles that promise it. It is not always apparent how tremendously useful these principles are during the early stages of development. Nonetheless, the effort put in to ensure these qualities certainly pay off as the project grows and development continues. In this article, Toptal engineer Adel Fayzrakhmanov discusses how the Single Responsibility Principle is one of the most important aspect in writing good maintainable code.

In this article I’ll relate my experience with the popular Unity game development platform and the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern for game development. In my seven years of development, having wrestled with my fair share of game dev spaghetti, I’ve been achieving great code structure and development speed using this design pattern.

In this article, I will show that unit testing itself is quite easy; the real problems that complicate unit testing, and introduce expensive complexity, are a result of poorly-designed, untestable code. We will discuss what makes code hard to test, which anti-patterns and bad practices we should avoid to improve testability, and what other benefits we can achieve by writing testable code. We will see that writing testable code is not just about making testing less troublesome, but about making the code itself more robust, and easier to maintain.

When coming across the term “text search”, one usually thinks of a large body of text, which is indexed in a way that makes it possible to quickly look up one or more search terms when they are entered by a user. This is a classic problem in computer science, to which many solutions exist.

But how about a reverse scenario? What if what’s available for indexing beforehand is a group of search phrases, and only at runtime is a large body of text presented for searching?

Data conversion, translation, and mapping is by no means rocket science, but it is by all means tedious. This article introduces MetaDapper, a .NET library that strives to simplify, streamline, and automate the data conversion process to the greatest extent possible.

C# is a powerful and flexible language with many mechanisms and paradigms that can greatly improve productivity. Having a limited understanding or appreciation of its capabilities, though, can leave one in the proverbial state of “knowing enough to be dangerous”. This article describes 10 of the most common programming mistakes made, or pitfalls to be avoided, by C# programmers.

In a recent phone screen, I decided to use a class attribute in my implementation of a certain Python API. My interviewer challenged me, questioning whether my code was syntactically valid, when it was executed, etc. In fact, I wasn’t sure of the answers myself. So I did some digging.

Python class attributes. No one really knows when (or how) to use ‘em. In this guide, I walk through common pitfalls and conclude with a list of valid use-cases that could save you time, energy, and lines of code.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

It’s a well known phrase, but as we know, most of the human technological progress was made by people who decided to fix what isn’t broken. Especially in the software industry one could argue that most of what we do is fixing what isn’t broken.

Fixing functionality, improving the UI, improving speed and memory efficiency, adding features: these are all activities for which it is easy to see if they are worth doing, and then we argue for or against spending our time on them. However, there is an activity, which for the most part falls into a gray area: refactoring, and especially large scale refactoring.