Unit testing can be tedious sometimes, especially when testing classes that have complex dependencies. Fortunately, some tools make it somewhat easier. I’ve been using FakeItEasy a lot recently; it’s a very easy to use mocking framework for .NET. It has a very lean and simple API based on generics and lambda expressions, and is a real pleasure to work with. It came as a breath of fresh air compared to the old RhinoMocks I had been using before.

The .NET framework comes with a number of low-level synchronization primitives. The most commonly used are collectively known as “wait handles”, and inherit the WaitHandle class: Semaphore, Mutex, AutoResetEvent and ManualResetEvent. These classes have been there since at least .NET 2.0 (1.1 for some of them), but they haven’t evolved much since they were introduced, which means they don’t support common features that were introduced later. In particular, they don’t provide support for waiting asynchronously, nor do they support cancelling the wait.

I don’t think it’s really necessary to present ReSharper (often abbreviated R#), but in case you don’t know about it, it’s a tool made by JetBrains that performs real-time analysis of your C# or VB.NET code to warn you about possible bugs, bad practices, convention violations, etc. It also provides many useful refactorings and code generators. I’ve been using it for a few years now, and it has tremendously improved both my productivity and my coding style.

I love to solve C# puzzles; I think it’s a great way to gain a deep understanding of the language. And besides, it’s fun! I just came up with this one: static void Test(out int x, out int y) { x = 42; y = 123; Console.WriteLine (x == y); } What do you think this code prints? Can you be sure? Post your answer in the comments! I’ll try to post more puzzles in the future if I can come up with others.

One of the major new features in C# 6 is string interpolation, which allows you to write things like this: string text = $"{p.Name} was born on {p.DateOfBirth:D}"; A lesser known aspect of this feature is that an interpolated string can be treated either as a String, or as an IFormattable, depending on the context. When it is converted to an IFormattable, it constructs a FormattableString object that implements the interface and exposes:

Recently, my team and I started writing unit tests on an application that uses a lot of async code. We used NUnit (2.6) because we were already familiar with it, but we had never tried it on async code yet. Let’s assume the system under test is this very interesting Calculator class: public class Calculator { public async Task<int> AddAsync(int x, int y) { // simulate long calculation await Task.Delay(100).ConfigureAwait(false); // the answer to life, the universe and everything.

A few years ago, I wrote an article that showed how to display an animated GIF in WPF. The article included the full code, and was quite successful, since WPF had no built-in support for animated GIFs. Based on the issues reported in the comments, I made many edits to the code in the article. At some point I realized it was very impractical, so I published the code on CodePlex (it has now moved to GitHub) under the name WpfAnimatedGif, and started maintaining it there.

The ToArray and ToList extension methods are convenient ways to eagerly materialize an enumerable sequence (e.g. a Linq query) into an array or a list. However, there’s something that bothers me: both of these methods are very inefficient if they don’t know the number of elements in the sequence (which is almost always the case when you use them on a Linq query). Let’s focus on ToArray for now (ToList has a few differences, but the principle is mostly the same).

If you write an application that has anything to do with file management, you will probably need to display the size of the files. But if a file has a size of 123456789 bytes, it doesn’t mean that you should just display this value to the user, because it’s hard to read, and the user usually doesn’t need 1-byte precision. Instead, you will write something like 118 MB. This should be a no-brainer, but there are actually a number of different ways to display byte sizes… For instance, there are several co-existing conventions for units and prefixes:

With the upcoming version 6 of C#, there’s a lot of talk on CodePlex and elsewhere about string interpolation. Not very surprising, since it’s one of the major features of that release… In case you were living under a rock during the last few months and you haven’t heard about it, string interpolation is a way to insert C# expressions inside a string, so that they’re evaluated at runtime and replaced with their values.