Wednesday, January 14, 2026

A crisp walkthrough of C# 14’s field keyword and why it doesn’t replace FluentValidation. Field streamlines property-level invariants by letting you set the compiler-generated backing field directly, while FluentValidation remains the go-to for contextual, cross-property, user-friendly input rules at application boundaries. The upshot is a layered approach: field for safeguarding domain integrity, FluentValidation for rich input validation.

David McCarter’s Rock Your Code: Code & App Performance for Microsoft .NET (5th ed.) is a hands-on, benchmark-driven guide to writing fast, scalable C# for .NET 10 and beyond. It dives into real-world patterns for memory, collections, LINQ, strings, I/O, and more plus analyzers, caching, logging, serialization, source generators, and the Spargine library balancing runtime speed with cloud cost. A companion to his coding standards book, it helps you think like a performance engineer from the first line of code.

Ever wrestled with phone-number masks, culture-aware numbers, or a dropdown that needs to be searchable? This guide surveys C#/.NET input controls text, masked, numeric, date/time, and selection then shows how ComponentOne’s editors (C1TextBox, C1MaskedTextBox, C1NumericBox, C1DateRangePicker, C1MultiSelect, etc.) bring validation, formatting, and localization together across WinForms, WPF, ASP.NET Core, Blazor, WinUI, and .NET MAUI. It’s a practical look at when to stick with native widgets versus reaching for richer controls to cut boilerplate and keep behavior consistent.

A friendly primer on System.Threading.Channels shows how to build high-throughput, async pipelines in .NET without drowning in locks and polling. It contrasts Channels with ConcurrentQueue and manual synchronization, highlights bounded channels for built‑in backpressure, and walks through producer/consumer patterns using ChannelWriter/Reader, await foreach, and graceful completion. You’ll also get practical use cases, best practices, and context on why ASP.NET Core leans on Channels for predictable performance under load.

Ajay Kumar walks through a pragmatic, layered TDD approach for a .NET Web API by building a “get expenses by category” endpoint in an Expense Manager app. He splits responsibilities across controller, service, and repository, using Moq and in-memory fakes to keep tests fast, DTOs to protect boundaries, and the red–green–refactor loop to guide design. It’s a clear blueprint for what to test, what to mock, and how to keep your API thin, tidy, and change‑friendly.

A cautionary tale for clean-code fans: spinning up a new HttpClient in a using block per request can quietly trigger socket exhaustion under load thanks to TIME_WAIT. The author recounts a real production outage at an event check-in system and shows how IHttpClientFactory, named clients, and DI-backed connection pooling fix it with reused sockets and sensible timeouts. A crisp reminder that HttpClient is special and how to keep high-throughput .NET APIs from melting their ephemeral ports.

Part 4 of a practical JWT-in-.NET series strips the mystery from signatures covering hash basics, HMAC (HS256), and why symmetric keys can bite you in microservices. It contrasts RSA/ECDSA’s private/public split, introduces JWKS for safe rotation and discovery, previews verification in code, and tees up how a validated token becomes HttpContext.User reminding us that strong, well-guarded keys (not algorithm glitter) keep your APIs honest.

Static-analysis sleuthing meets real-world C# in a roundup of ten noteworthy bugs uncovered across open-source projects in 2025. Rather than just gawking at glitches, it teases out the patterns behind them and how analyzers and better idioms can catch issues earlier handy guardrails for your day-to-day .NET work. A light, practical tour of pitfalls that quietly ship to prod and the habits that keep them from tagging along.

.NET 10 and C# 14 get a down-to-earth walkthrough aimed at everyday dev pain points less boilerplate, more zip. On the C# side you’ll see chained ??= for deep object graphs, a new field keyword to safely work with auto-property backing fields, and ref/out/in-friendly lambdas for zero-copy hot paths. Platform-wise, it highlights cleaner left-join patterns and JSON partial updates in EF Core, built-in validation for minimal APIs, and friendlier quick-script workflows practical wins from CRUD to performance-heavy code.

Windows 11 Insider builds are rolling out a modernized Win+R Run dialog, and this walkthrough shows how to enable it either via a Settings toggle or a quick registry edit, then restart Explorer). Targeting recent Dev/Beta previews like build 26220, it’s a small but welcome quality-of-life tweak for developers who live in Win+R to launch tools, scripts, and system commands.

A friendly, code-first tour of Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF) positioned as the successor to Semantic Kernel showing how to build C# agents with tool/function calling, strongly-typed structured outputs, and durable threads without playing framework roulette. It also covers RAG with a vector store and TextSearchProvider plus Azure AI Foundry’s managed agents, illustrating how MAF blends SK’s integrations with AutoGen-style orchestration to take you from local experiments to production.

A clear, real-world guide to background work in .NET 9+, comparing BackgroundService, Hangfire, Quartz.NET, and Temporal what each does well, how retries with exponential backoff are handled, and how to wire up monitoring and tracing with OpenTelemetry. It includes concise C# examples and a pragmatic decision map to know when a simple hosted service will do, when you need a scheduler and dashboard, and when your flows call for a durable workflow engine in 2026.