C# *

This is a guest post from the Orleans team. Orleans is a cross-platform framework for building distributed applications with .NET. For more information, see https://github.com/dotnet/orleans.

We are excited to announce the Orleans 3.0 release. A great number of improvements and fixes went in, as well as several new features, since Orleans 2.0. These changes were driven by the experience of many people running Orleans-based applications in production in a wide range of scenarios and environments, and by the ingenuity and passion of the global Orleans community that always strives to make the codebase better, faster, and more flexible. A BIG Thank You to all who contributed to this release in various ways!

This article reviews the results of a second check of the Orchard project with the PVS-Studio static analyzer. Orchard is an open-source content manager system delivered as part of the ASP.NET Open Source Gallery under the non-profit Outercurve Foundation. Today's check is especially interesting because both the project and the analyzer have come a long way since the first check, and this time we'll be looking at new diagnostic messages and some nice bugs.

Hello, everyone. Today we have another Microsoft project on the check. By the title of this article, you can guess that this time developers didn't «please» us with a large number of errors. We hope the project's authors won't be offended by the title. After all, a small number of errors is great, isn't it? However, we still managed to find something intriguing in the Azure PowerShell code. We suggest getting to know the features of this project and checking out errors, found using the PVS-Studio C# analyzer.

Sometimes we don’t understand how the regular expression that we have composed works and want to check. There are many applications like regex101.com or vs code. I wanted to add one more to this list.

In this article we will see how you can wrap Regex in cross-platform graphics and create a simple application for testing regular expressions.

This is a second article, which focuses on usage of the PVS-Studio analyzer in cloud CI-systems. This time we'll consider the platform Azure DevOps — a cloud CI\CD solution from Microsoft. We'll be analyzing the ShareX project.

This article is a brief explanation about how using a common language keywords might have an influence on the budget of IT-infrastructure of a project or help to achieve some limitations/restrictions of hosting infrastructure and, moreover, will be a good sing of the quality and maturity of the source code.

This article is the story how we once decided to improve our internal SelfTester tool that we apply to test the quality of the PVS-Studio analyzer. The improvement was simple and seemed to be useful, but got us into some troubles. Later it turned out that we'd better gave up the idea.

.NET Core libraries is one of the most popular C# projects on GitHub. It's hardly a surprise, since it's widely known and used. Owing to this, an attempt to reveal the dark corners of the source code is becoming more captivating. So this is what we'll try to do with the help of the PVS-Studio static analyzer. What do you think – will we eventually find something interesting?

This is a short story about how PVS-Studio helped us find an error in the source code of the library used in PVS-Studio. And it was not a theoretical error but an actual one — the error appeared in practice when using the library in the analyzer.

We like to search for errors in Microsoft projects. Why? It's simple: their projects are usually easy to check (you can work in Visual Studio environment for which PVS-Studio has a convenient plugin) and they contain few errors. That's why the usual work algorithm is as follows: find and download an open source project from MS; check it; choose interesting errors; make sure there are few of them; write an article without forgetting to praise the developers. Great! Win-win-win: it took a little time, the bosses are glad to see new materials in the blog, and karma is fine. But this time «something went wrong». Let's see what we have found in the source code of Windows Forms and whether we should speak highly of Microsoft this time.

User interfaces of modern enterprise applications are quite complex. You, as a developer, often need to implement in-app navigation, validate user input, show or hide screens based on user preferences. For better UX, your app should be capable of saving state to the disk when the app is suspending and of restoring state when the app is resuming.

ReactiveUI provides facilities allowing you to persist application state by serializing the view model tree when the app is shutting down or suspending. Suspension events vary per platform. ReactiveUI uses the Exit event for WPF, ActivityPaused for Xamarin.Android, DidEnterBackground for Xamarin.iOS, OnLaunched for UWP.

In this tutorial we are going to build a sample application which demonstrates the use of the ReactiveUI Suspension feature with Avalonia — a cross-platform .NET Core XAML-based GUI framework. You are expected to be familiar with the MVVM pattern and with reactive extensions before reading this note. Steps described in the tutorial should work if you are using Windows 10 or Ubuntu 18 and have .NET Core SDK installed. Let's get started! Source code of the app described in this tutorial is available on GitHub.

In my previous article I described how to achieve the "Maybe" monad behavior using async/await operators. This time I am going to show how to implement another popular design pattern "Reader Monad" using the same techniques.

That pattern allows implicit passing some context into some function without using function parameters or shared global objects and it can be considered as yet another way to implement dependency injection. For example:

class Config { public string Template; }

public static async Task Main()
{
    Console.WriteLine(await GreetGuys().Apply(new Config {Template = "Hi, {0}!"}));
    //(Hi, John!, Hi, Jose!)

    Console.WriteLine(await GreetGuys().Apply(new Config {Template = "¡Hola, {0}!" }));
    //(¡Hola, John!, ¡Hola, Jose!)
}

//These functions do not have any link to any instance of the Config class.
public static async Reader<(string gJohn, string gJose)> GreetGuys() 
    => (await Greet("John"), await Greet("Jose"));

static async Reader<string> Greet(string name) 
    => string.Format(await ExtractTemplate(), name);

static async Reader<string> ExtractTemplate() 
    => await Reader<string>.Read<Config>(c => c.Template);

PVS-Studio is a tool for detecting software bugs and potential vulnerabilities in the source code of software written in C, C++, C#, and Java. The analyzer runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS.

What's this about

After working on different projects, I've noticed that every one of them had some common problems, regardless of domain, architecture, code convention and so on. Those problems weren't challenging, just a tedious routine: making sure you didn't miss anything stupid and obvious. Instead of doing this routine on a daily basis I became obsessed with seeking solution: some development approach or code convention or whatever that will help me to design a project in a way that will prevent those problems from happening, so I can focus on interesting stuff. That's the goal of this article: to describe those problems and show you that mix of tools and approaches that I found to solve them.

Hi All,

I’m in the process of implementing a new simple microservices-based project as an example of a step-by-step guide for those who had a hard time with a microservices architecture and are still looking for “another” good reference. Also, I would really appreciate thought through feedback and proposal to make this project a high-quality chunk of work.

There are tons of articles and source code examples. But, unfortunately, I could not find any reference with simple step-by-step instructions, without doing a deep dive into Docker, Event Store, a multitude of configurations, cloud deployment stuff, etc. I cloned several projects and tried to start playing with them, but you know, only God knows how to start them, which dependencies are missing and why all those scripts are failing with thousands of ERRORS.

For example, this eShop project from Microsoft contains all we need, but it is not so simple to figure out what is going on there, SQL database connection strings, Docker scripts fail, no How-Tos and I’m not sure it is super-simple architecture you need to start with.

Many of our articles are focused on anything, but not the PVS-Studio tool itself. Whereas we do a lot to make its usage convenient for developers. Nevertheless, our efforts are often concealed behind the scenes. I decided to remedy this situation and tell you about the PVS-Studio plugin for Visual Studio. If you use Visual Studio, this article is for you.

No doubts that async/await pattern has significantly simplified working with asynchronous operations in C#. However, this simplification relates only to the situation when asynchronous operations are executed consequently. If we need to execute several asynchronous operations simultaneously (e.g. we need to call several micro-services) then we do not have many built-in capabilities and most probably Task.WhenAll will be used:

Task<SomeType1> someAsyncOp1 = SomeAsyncOperation1();
Task<SomeType2> someAsyncOp2 = SomeAsyncOperation2();
Task<SomeType3> someAsyncOp3 = SomeAsyncOperation3();
Task<SomeType4> someAsyncOp4 = SomeAsyncOperation4();
await Task.WhenAll(someAsyncOp1, someAsyncOp2, someAsyncOp4);
var result = new SomeContainer(
     someAsyncOp1.Result,someAsyncOp2.Result,someAsyncOp3.Result, someAsyncOp4.Result);

This is a working solution, but it is quite verbose and not very reliable (you can forget to add a new task to “WhenAll”). I would prefer something like that instead:

var result =  await 
    from r1 in SomeAsyncOperation1()
    from r2 in SomeAsyncOperation2()
    from r3 in SomeAsyncOperation3()
    from r4 in SomeAsyncOperation4()
    select new SomeContainer(r1, r2, r3, r4);

Further I will tell you what is necessary for this construction to work...

It's not a secret that Microsoft has been working on the 8-th version of C# language for quite a while. The new language version (C# 8.0) is already available in the recent release of Visual Studio 2019, but it's still in beta. This new version is going to have a few features implemented in a somewhat non-obvious, or rather unexpected, way. Nullable Reference types are one of them. This feature is announced as a means to fight Null Reference Exceptions (NRE).

Specifics of QueryProvider

QueryProvider can’t deal with this:

var result = _context.Humans
                      .Select(x => $"Name: {x.Name}  Age: {x.Age}")
                      .Where(x => x != "")
                      .ToList();

It can’t deal with any sentence using an interpolated string, but it’ll easily deal with this:

var result = _context.Humans
                      .Select(x => "Name " +  x.Name + " Age " + x.Age)
                      .Where(x => x != "")
                      .ToList();

The most painful thing is to fix bugs after turning on ClientEvaluation (exception for client-side calculation), since all Automapper profiles should be strictly analyzed for interpolation. Let’s find out what’s what and propose our solution to the problem.

Support of Visual Studio 2019 in PVS-Studio affected a number of components: the plugin itself, the command-line analyzer, the cores of the C++ and C# analyzers, and a few utilities. In this article, I will briefly explain what problems we encountered when implementing support of the IDE and how we addressed them.