4 of the Best C# Blogs We've Found

It’s good to keep your coding skills sharp, and that’s a tall order these days with the pace and scope of changes in the development landscape. There are constantly new versions of venerable development frameworks and libraries, things moving to open source, and cross-platform workarounds.

It’s definitely an exciting time to be part of the development world, and one good way to keep your finger on the pulse of these changes is through the blogosphere. After all, we already know there are some great blog-based resources for Visual Studio and AngularJS, right?

Four other blogs we've recently come across—three from Microsoft staffers and one from an independent expert—provide an excellent insider’s view to the inner workings of C#.

1. C# Developer Blog: Ravinder Singh

Ravinder Singh is a senior software engineer at Lockheed Martin; the only one mentioned here who is not actually a Microsoft employee.

One recent post covered C# CSV Library and HTTP Handlers. After looking at some original code placed in a standard ASP.NET WebForms page in the OnLoad event handler, he realized the code was better off placed in an HTTP Handler. The primary advantage of using a HTTP handler to generate the file is he could bypass the unnecessary ASP.NET WebForms page life cycle.

"The existing code was using a StringBuilder to generate the CSV string in the page OnLoad event handler. As you may imagine, this looked messy and was a pain to maintain. To abstract the CSV string creation logic, my colleague introduced me to a useful CSV library called LINQ to CSV. The project page link for this library is here and the library is available as a NuGet package."

2. Maarten Balliauw

Another impressive C# blog comes from Maarten Balliauw, who is indeed a Microsoft guy. His primary interests are ASP.NET (C#) or PHP Web apps and Microsoft Azure.

His self-titled blog has recently covered such topics as broken dependency chains that, as he put it, broke the Internet. There are also posts on disabling session affinity in Azure App Service Web Apps and working with a private npm registry in Azure Web Apps.

3. Bill Blogs in C#: Bill Wagner

Another excellent blogger, Bill Wagner just recently joined Microsoft. He’s on the .NET Core content team, focused on building learning resources for developers new to the .NET Core platform.

One of his recent posts covered a potential new feature in C#, called Local Functions. This may or may not be part of the next version of C#, and he welcomes your input and discussion. "The overall effect is a more clear expression of your design," he concludes. "It’s easier to see that a local function is scoped to its containing function. It’s easier to see that the local function and its containing method are closely related."

4. Joe Duffy

Finally (at least in this post), Joe Duffy’s blog is another to visit on a regular basis. Joe is an engineering director for compilers and languages at Microsoft. His top posts currently include The Error Model, Safe Native Code, and Asynchronous Everything.

Are there any other C# blogs you visit regularly? Comment below or email [email protected] with your suggestions!

Posted by Lafe Low on 03/31/2016