I’ve been using Azure Cosmos DB on a fairly regular basis for the last 2 years or so. It’s a pretty good database, but one thing has always bothered me: the lack of a proper tool to query and modify data in the database. Basically, here are the current options: The standalone Cosmos DB Explorer website The Data Explorer in the Azure Portal Cosmos DB support in Azure Storage Explorer These 3 options are actually the same thing, made from the same code base, which was recently open-sourced.

Most JSON converters are fairly simple, and typically self-contained. But once in a while, you need to do something a little more complex in a converter, and you end up needing to call a service. However, there’s no built-in dependency injection in System.Text.Json converters… How can you access the service you need? There are basically two variants of this problem. One has a simple solution, the other is a bit of a hack…

HTTP headers are key/value pairs sent at the beginning of a request or response. According to the grammar in RFC 7230, a field could have an empty value. In practice, it probably doesn’t make much sense: semantically, a header with an empty value or the absence of that header are equivalent. However, some client or server implementations actually require that a given header is present, even if it’s empty. For instance, the validation tests for WOPI (an HTTP-based protocol used to integrate Office for the Web with an application) require that the X-WOPI-Lock header is included in the response in certain situations, even if it’s empty (even though the spec says it can be omitted).

Sometimes your API needs to expose a non-primitive type that has a “natural” string representation. For instance, a standard representation for a duration is the ISO 8601 format, where “1 month, 2 days, 3 hours and 4 minutes” can be represented as P1M2DT3H4M (note that this isn’t the same as a Timespan, which has no notion of calendar months and years). A duration could be represented in C# as a custom type, like the Duration structure in my Iso8601DurationHelper project.

Oh no, you just accidentally commited to master, when you were supposed to work on a feature branch! How to fix it? It’s actually pretty easy with Git! A common Git workflow nowadays is the “feature branch” workflow: you can’t push directly to the “main” branch (usually master, but it can be something else); instead you have to create a branch from master, commit to that branch, publish it and submit a pull request.

Last week at Microsoft Build, there have been a lot of exciting annoucements! .NET 5, Blazor WebAssembly, .NET MAUI, WinUI… But the thing I’m most eager to get my hands on is C# 9, which introduces many interesting new features, so let’s take a quick tour! There’s a long list, so I won’t cover all of them here, but I will highlight the ones I find the most interesting. Note: Unfortunately the new C# features aren’t supported yet in the latest SDK preview, so we can’t test them in actual projects.

As a C# developer, there are obviously a lot of skills you need to master to be effective: language syntax, framework classes, third-party libraries, databases, regular expressions, the HTTP protocol, etc. But there are a handful of things that I consider to be really fundamental, and I often see C# developers, even experienced ones, who don’t master them. So, I’m doing a series about those things! Today: hash codes. The GetHashCode method OK, I realize that most developers don’t need to implement their own hash table, or even implement GetHashCode very often, but still, it’s important to know about this.

If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you probably noticed that the design has changed. In fact, it’s not just the design, it’s just about everything! My blog used to be hosted on WordPress. It did the job, but honestly, I didn’t really like WordPress. It’s slow, bloated, and the editing and publishing experience is a bit of a mess (or at least, it’s not a good fit for the way I like to work).

Over the last few years, OpenID Connect has become one of the most common ways to authenticate users in a web application. But if you want to use it in a desktop application, it can be a little awkward… Authorization code flow OpenID Connect is an authentication layer built on top of OAuth 2.0, which means that you have to use one of the OAuth 2.0 authorization flows. A few years ago, there were basically two possible flows that you could use in a desktop client application to authenticate a user:

The problem with circular dependencies When building an application, good design dictates that you should avoid circular dependencies between your services. A circular dependency is when some components depend on each other, directly or indirectly, e.g. A depends on B which depends on C which depends on A: It is generally agreed that this should be avoided; I won’t go into the details of the conceptual and theoretical reasons, because there are plenty of resources about it on the web.