Jonathan Crozier, Author at Jonathan Crozier

Converting CSV files with values containing commas to JSON using C#

CSV (Comma-separated values) remains an extremely popular file format, and, in the context of programming, it is particularly useful for importing and exporting data between different software applications. One of the issues with CSV, or any other delimiter-separated file format, is that often the values that need to be parsed into separate ‘parts’ will contain…

Communicating with ASP.NET Core hosted services from API endpoints using Channels

InAPIs Web

Hosted services are a powerful .NET feature, providing a robust mechanism for executing long-running background tasks in different types of applications. Given the flexible nature of .NET, such applications could be running on client devices, on-premise servers, or the cloud, depending on the particular use case. When it comes to ASP.NET Core, hosted services are…

Store and retrieve enums as strings with Entity Framework Core

InProgramming

C# enumeration types (enums) provide a highly extensible and type-safe way of storing values and they are used frequently in .NET software development. When enums are saved to a SQL database with Entity Framework Core, by default they are stored using their underlying integer values rather than as strings. There are several reasons for this…

How to replace accented characters with plain characters using C#

InProgramming

The majority of software applications developed today need to work with strings that contain accented characters such as à and é since many human languages use these to indicate variations in pronunciation and other subtleties. Even English borrows some French words that contain accents and other glyphs, such as café, déjà vu, and façade. These…

ASP.NET Core runtime exception: Could not load type ‘Microsoft.IdentityModel.Json.JsonConvert’

InAPIs Web

When developing ASP.NET Core web applications, it is common to interact with JWTs (JSON Web Tokens). Quite often you will want to validate JWTs and possibly even generate your own JWTs to secure API endpoints. However, it’s not always plain sailing when it comes to software development. After updating certain Microsoft NuGet packages to newer…

Extracting query performance statistics from a SQL Server database

InSQL

Monitoring query performance is an essential aspect of proper database management. Poorly performing queries can produce a domino effect, affecting the overall health of your database server and severely degrading application user experience. Queries that result in many reads and writes to the hard disk and that use excessive amounts of CPU time and memory…

Exploring ASP.NET Core Minimal APIs: Should I use them in production?

InAPIs

If you’ve been keeping up to date with what’s new in the .NET ecosystem over the last year or two, you’ll probably already be aware of the Minimal APIs feature that debuted in ASP.NET 6.0 back in 2021. However, since Minimal APIs are still a relatively new concept, perhaps you haven’t considered using them in…

Substituting Moq for NSubstitute

InProgramming

In light of the recent controversy surrounding the .NET Moq library, many developers are reconsidering their choice of mocking framework for unit testing. The undisclosed inclusion of the proprietary SponsorLink DLL that reportedly extracts internal developer email addresses and uploads them to a remote server has undoubtedly been alarming to many. Beyond the immediate privacy…

Why you can’t debug your Blazor WebAssembly application

InWeb

You’ve had enough. Yes, you’ve finally decided that this is the last time you’ll use a Console.WriteLine method call to troubleshoot one of your Blazor WebAssembly components because you can’t get any debug breakpoints to hit! Debugging is an essential part of software development and when it doesn’t work, it can be frustrating. This is…

Taming Nullable Reference Types in C#

InProgramming

The term Nullable Reference Types refers to a set of features introduced in C# 8.0 that help us to write cleaner, more robust code that is resistant to unintended null dereferencing. The features that are provided make us aware of possible null reference exceptions that could occur in our applications, reducing the likelihood of encountering…

Author: Jonathan Crozier

Converting CSV files with values containing commas to JSON using C#

Communicating with ASP.NET Core hosted services from API endpoints using Channels

Store and retrieve enums as strings with Entity Framework Core

How to replace accented characters with plain characters using C#

ASP.NET Core runtime exception: Could not load type ‘Microsoft.IdentityModel.Json.JsonConvert’

Extracting query performance statistics from a SQL Server database

Exploring ASP.NET Core Minimal APIs: Should I use them in production?

Substituting Moq for NSubstitute

Why you can’t debug your Blazor WebAssembly application

Taming Nullable Reference Types in C#

Working with JSON functions in SQL Server

Using AzCopy to transfer a large number of files between Azure Blob Storage Containers

How to output inserted and source IDs when cloning SQL Server table data