Hello, I am Laszlo

Range Kata

06/07/2024

I have recently come across the Range kata. In this post I dive into a variation of this kata using integer numbers. One implementation is A Range kata implementation in C# by Mark Seemann focuses on property testing and comparing Haskell, F# and C# implementations.

The referenced post has chosen using Church encoding as the implementation which results in a more complicated code in C#. In this post I will focus on building on the recently added features of .NET 8: IBinaryInteger<T>.

My test cases cover the samples described by the kata. Although I don't find these test cases extensive, they give a good enough starting point. That said, do not expect the code below to handle edge-cases that has no test case detailed in the kata.

This implementation utilizes the following relatively new C# features:

Find out more

Favorite Build 2024 Sessions

06/02/2024

These are my favorite sessions from Build 2024:

• Microsoft Build opening keynote

• Zero to Hero - Develop your first app with Local LLMs on Windows

• What’s new in C# 13

• Scott and Mark learn AI

• Demystify cloud-native development with .NET Aspire

• Create Generative AI experiences using Phi

• Developer experience improvements in Windows

• Introducing the Next Generation of Windows on Arm

• Next generation AI for developers with the Microsoft Cloud

Find out more

Source Generated JSON Serialization using fast path in ASP.NET Core

05/11/2024

In this post I explore how ASP.NET Core works together with the source generated JSON serializer. In .NET 8 the streaming JSON serialization can be enabled to use serialization-optimization mode with ASP.NET Core. However, using the default settings does not enable this fast-path. In this post I will explore how to enable the fast-path serialization by exploring the inner workings of JsonTypeInfo.cs. For this post I use .NET 8 with the corresponding ASP.NET Core release.

The .NET 8 runtime comes with three built-in JSON serializer modes:

• Reflection

• Source generation (Metadata-based mode)

• Source generation (Serialization-optimization mode)

Reflection mode is the default one. This mode is used when someone invokes JsonSerializer.(De)SerializeAsync without additional arguments passed. Source Generation (Metadata-based mode) as the name suggests generates source code at compile time that contains the metadata that the Reflection would need to discover during its first invocation. This mode helps to enable JSON serialization in environments where reflection otherwise would not be possible, for example in case of AOT published applications. Source generation (Serialization-optimization mode) also generates code at compile time, but besides the metadata it also uses a generated fast-path method when serializing objects.

Find out more

Exploring DATAS

04/20/2024

.NET 8 introduced a new garbage collection feature: Dynamic Adaptation To Application Sizes or DATAS. The inner workings of it are detailed in this post.

This feature tunes the GC to adjust the number of heaps and execute compacting garbage collections more often to have a smaller overall heap size. The result should be a heap size that more closely resembles the actual amount of memory that the application uses.

This feature is great for memory constrained environments or with uneven loads, where memory may be reclaimed between the loads.

In this post I will enable DATAS on my test server application and test client side application to observe the differences in the memory utilization.

Find out more

Implementing ISpanFormattable

04/14/2024

I have recently realized that implementing the ISpanFormattable interface enables a type to participate in string interpolation feature of C# in a more efficient way. This realization made me curious how much more efficient it is to implement the corresponding public bool TryFormat(Span<char> destination, out int charsWritten, ReadOnlySpan<char> format = default, IFormatProvider? provider = default) method to the standard ToString(). In this blog post I use .NET8 and C# 12.

Implementing ISpanFormattable is not automatically justified for all types, but ones that participate in frequent serialization, such as string interpolation. One can search the types that implement this interface, and it contains most of the primitive and value types (int, Guid, DateTime, etc).

Fortunately I just have one such type on hand that lends itself for the investigation. In a previous blog post, I iterated through a couple of different implementation of FractionalDouble type.

While understanding the details of the FractionalDouble format is less relevant for this post, here is a quick summary:

Find out more