15 September 2023

Log Formatters in C#

Good description of the standard log formatters in .Net, and how to configure them.

Cancelling cancellation tokens

He’s suggesting a way to inject the cancellation token into a scoped context, rather than passing it through the chain of method calls. Interesting idea, but seems a bit error-prone to me.

What is Locking and How to Use a Locking Mechanism in C#

Describes all the locking mechanisms in .Net:

• Interlocked class - lock a single variable
• lock statement - exclusively executes a code block with a lock on an object
• Monitor class - lock is syntactic sugar for the Monitor class
• Mutex class is similar to lock and Monitor, but it also locks external threads, eg another instance of our program
• SpinLock class is similar to lock and Monitor, but it doesn’t block the thread - instead it spins in a loop, aka busy waiting

All of the above are exclusive locks. Below are the non-exclusive locking mechanisms:

• Semaphore class limits the number of threads accessing a limited pool of resources
• SemaphoreSlim class - Semaphore can also lock external threads, whereas SemaphoreSlim is a lightweight version for internal threads only
• ReaderWriterLockSlim class has a read lock and a write lock - as you’d expect, multiple threads can acquire the read lock, but only one thread can acquire the write lock

Azure DevOps Pipelines: Practices for Scaling Templates

Best practices for organizing pipeline yaml files:

• one repository
• template scope
• file structure
• naming conventions
• conditions vs expressions
• running jobs in parallel
• variable scoping
• dependencies
• decorators

Onboard AI

The idea is nice, but I’m an AI skeptic. You point it at a GitHub repo and use ChatGPT to ask questions about it.

On Moq and our Part in the OSS Sustainability Social Contract

An opinion on the Moq fiasco.

CSS Selectors: A Visual Guide

It is what is says - a visual guide to the most popular CSS selectors - elements, classes, descendents, siblings, attributes, pseudo, etc.

The “Weak Event” Pattern in C#

Describes the problem with the event pattern - the publisher keeps a strong reference to the subscriber, so if the subscriber forgets to unsubscribe it’ll prevent the subscriber from being garbage collected. This is only a problem when you have short-lived subscribers.

The solution he proposes is to use the WeakReference class. This class was designed for this purpose - allow garbage collection when this is the only reference to a class.

As well as being a solution to this problem, this sounds like a good thing to consider more often.

BearerToken: The new Authentication handler in .NET 8

I must admit I didn’t quite understand the value proposition, but that’s because auth is hard and I didn’t really feel like blowing my mind trying to understand it. Anyway, I’ll keep this link in case I need to later.

OWASP Top 10 API Security Risks – 2023

• Broken Object Level Authorization
• Broken Authentication Authentication
• Broken Object Property Level Authorization
• Unrestricted Resource Consumption
• Broken Function Level Authorization
• Unrestricted Access to Sensitive Business Flows
• Server Side Request Forgery
• Security Misconfiguration
• Improper Inventory Management
• Unsafe Consumption of APIs