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The danger of TaskCompletionSource class

October 1, 2018 Oct 1, 2018 10/1/18
Sergey Tepliakov
... when used with async/await. TaskCompletionSource class is a very useful facility if you want to control the lifetime of a task manually. I share a canonical example when TaskCompletionSource is used for converting the event-based asynchronous code to the Task-based pattern.

Combining iterator blocks and async methods in C#

September 5, 2018 Sep 5, 2018 09/5/18
Sergey Tepliakov
One of the best traits of a well-designed system is composability. Large systems are complex and hierarchical and one of the best ways to fight accidental complexity is to compose a system from smaller components. You write and test each component independently then you glue them together to achieve a higher-level behavior. Programming ...

Performance implications of default struct equality in C#

July 17, 2018 Jul 17, 2018 07/17/18
Sergey Tepliakov
If you're familiar with C#, then you most likely heard that you should always override Equals and GetHashCode for custom structs for performance reasons. To better understand the importance and the rationale behind this advice we're going to look at the default behavior to see why and where the performance hit comes from. Then we'll look at a ...

Dissecting new generic constraints in C# 7.3

June 12, 2018 Jun 12, 2018 06/12/18
Sergey Tepliakov
During the last Build conference, Microsoft has announced the next version of Visual Studio with C# 7.3 support. This is yet another minor language update with some quite interesting features. The main change was related to generics, starting from C# 7.3 there 3 more constraints: unmanaged, System.Enum and System.Delegate. The unmanaged ...

Avoiding struct and readonly reference performance pitfalls with ErrorProne.NET

May 3, 2018 May 3, 2018 05/3/18
Sergey Tepliakov
As you may know from my previous posts "The 'in'-modifier and the readonly structs in C#" and "Performance traps of ref locals and ref returns in C#", structs are trickier then you might think. Mutability aside, the behavior of readonly and non-readonly structs in "readonly" contexts is very different. Structs are meant for high-performance...

Performance traps of ref locals and ref returns in C#

April 11, 2018 Apr 11, 2018 04/11/18
Sergey Tepliakov
The C# language from the very first version supported passing arguments by value or by reference. But before C# 7 the C# compiler supported only one way of returning a value from a method (or a property) - returning by value. This has been changed in C# 7 with two new features: ref returns and ref locals. But unlike other features that were...

The ‘in’-modifier and the readonly structs in C#

March 7, 2018 Mar 7, 2018 03/7/18
Sergey Tepliakov
C# 7.2 got two very important features for high-performance scenarios -- the readonly structs and the in parameters. But to understand why this additions are so important and how they're related to each other we should look back in history. As you probably know, the .NET ecosystem has two family of types -- the value types (a.k.a. structs) ...

One user scenario to rule them all

February 14, 2018 Feb 14, 2018 02/14/18
Sergey Tepliakov
The async series Almost every non-trivial behavior of the async methods in C# can be explained based on one user scenario: migration of the existing synchronous code to asynchronous should be as simple as possible. You should be able to add async keyword before a method's return type, add Async suffix to its name, add ...

The performance characteristics of async methods in C#

January 25, 2018 Jan 25, 2018 01/25/18
Sergey Tepliakov
The async series In the last two blog posts we've covered the internals of async methods in C# and then we looked at the extensibility points the C# compiler provides to adjust the behavior of async methods. Today we're going to explore the performance characteristics of async methods. As you should already know from ...