Laszlo

Hello, I am Laszlo

Software-Engineer, .NET developer

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Using Prioritized Channel

In .NET 9, a new UnboundedPrioritized channel type has been introduced to System.Threading.Channels. This feature has been available since version 8 of the Channel's NuGet package and is compatible with older .NET versions.

Channels provide thread-safe data structures for producer/consumer scenarios. In this pattern, one or more producers add items to a channel while one or more consumers read from it independently.

Two types of channels exist:

  • Bounded channels: Have a maximum size limit with customizable behavior when full
  • Unbounded channels: Have no size limit (beyond system memory constraints)

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Input Parsing to Known Value

A common task for Line of Business (LOB) applications is parsing an input string into an internal identifier. This blog post uses .NET 10 code samples. For simplicity, let's assume the inputs are non-malicious in terms of length, values, culture, etc.

Suppose you have a string input that needs to be parsed into one of the following enums:

public enum AccessLevel
{
    NONE,
    READONLY,
    READWRITE,
    CREATE,
    DELETE,
    MANAGE_USER,
    CONFIGURE_SYSTEM,
    FULL_CONTROL
}

I chose the enum names to be in uppercase ("shouting"). While this casing is not typical for C#, many applications define domain-specific terms in uppercase to match business terminology. If business analysts use uppercase names, the enums often follow suit.

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IsSorted using SIMD in .NET

Sorting a set or an array is a relatively expensive operation. The costs of sorting typically increase non-linearly with the input size. Therefore, in certain cases, it can be beneficial to check if an array is already sorted before attempting to sort it.

Note: Different sorting algorithms handle sorted or 'nearly sorted' collections with varying degrees of efficiency.

For perspective, sorting an already sorted integer array with a million elements using Array.Sort in .NET takes 5,180.9 us on my machine. In contrast, validating if the same array is sorted takes only 119.0 us. For applications where most input arrays are expected to be sorted, validating sorted-ness first can be a worthwhile optimization.

Similarly, an operation like binary search might want to validate the precondition of the input array being sorted.

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Measuring Lock Contention

Scaling multi-threaded applications is often limited by the proportion of the workload that cannot be parallelized. This concept is captured by Amdahl's law. Code sections guarded by locks are a common example — they restrict scalability by allowing only one thread (or n threads in the case of semaphores) to execute, forcing other threads to wait due to lock contention.

Context

In an HTTP/2 server, requests and responses on a connection are multiplexed. The server needs to write concurrently computed responses to a network stream. Such multiplexing can be achieved in multiple ways:

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HTTP/3 with ASP.NET Core and browsers

Configure ASP.NET Core WebApi

In this post I explore how to test locally an ASP.NET Core WebApi with HTTP/3 in a local environment using a browser. In ASP.NET Core with .NET 10, HTTP/3 is already supported, but it is an opt-in feature.

To enable HTTP/3, add the following configuration to the application, either in the appsettings.json file

"Kestrel": {
  "EndpointDefaults": {
    "Protocols": "Http1AndHttp2AndHttp3"
  }
}

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