Under The Influence(of code)

33 Posts | 98 Comments

Hi there! Thank you for visiting my blog. My name is Abhijeet Patel. I mostly go by just "Abhi". I'm a developer by trade. I live and work in the beautiful Pacific Northwest for a large financial firm where I serve as a Technical lead. This blog, its content and opinions are my own. I blog about technology mainly (as and when I get time), specifically development on the .NET stack since that's where my interests and expertise lie. I'm excited about the brave new world of open source development on the Microsoft stack and am pretty stoked by the prospect of being able to truly "write once, run anywhere" with .NET core. I can be reached at abhidotnet at gmail.com

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Under The Influence(of code) Abhijeet Patel's blog

Jul 16

Maximize your keystrokes before you die

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Today’s topic/rant is not a technical topic but very relevant to techies in particular. Someone wise that I respect, one said “You have a finite number of keystrokes left in your hands before you die” and created this. Morbidity aside, this is a true statement. However, the upper and lower limits of the finiteness of your keystrokes is controlled by ......

Posted On Friday, July 15, 2016 9:14 PM C# , musings , health , technology , development

Jun 16

Adding CORS support for ASP.NET / WebAPI: The no hassle way

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If you are working with WebAPIs, you inevitably will have to deal with CORS. This is a good read for the uninitiated. I won't go into the specifics of how browsers issue, and servers handle (or should handle) CORS, but at a high level, the following sequence of events occur when you need to update/create a resource from a domain other than the one your ......

Posted On Saturday, June 4, 2016 10:01 PM ASP.NET , iis , webapi , CORS

Jul 12

Mutexes, Semaphores, Monitors, ReaderWriterLocks, AutoResetEvents & ManualResets oh my!

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Mutexes, Semaphores, Monitors, ReaderWriterLocks, AutoResetEvents & ManualResets oh my! Up until a few years ago, mainstream programming for the most part did not involve asynchrony and/or parallelism except for the most performance demanding applications. In the multi core world we live in today async and parallel programming have become common ......

Posted On Sunday, July 15, 2012 6:58 PM C# , Parallellism , Threading

Oct 11

MEF 101 - Part2

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This is part 2 of a 2 part series exploring the MEF.We covered some of the basics in Part 1 In this part we'll cover the following: Catalogs Recomposition Export Providers Catalogs: Catalogs provide one way for MEF to discover components that it can compose. In it's most basic form it contains a registration of types. A container by itself is just an ......

Posted On Sunday, October 30, 2011 3:27 PM C#

Jul 10

MEF 101 - Part1

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The Managed Extensibility framework or MEF is a framework released as part of .NET 4 and Silverlight that provides a mechanism to dynamically compose an application at runtime out of loosely coupled parts and provides a variety of mechanisms to discovering these parts. You can think of this as an implementation of a plugin framework that enables plugging ......

Posted On Saturday, July 3, 2010 9:03 AM C#

Apr 10

A simple Dynamic Proxy

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Frameworks such as EF4 and MOQ do what most developers consider "dark magic". For instance in EF4, when you use a POCO for an entity you can opt-in to get behaviors such as "lazy-loading" and "change tracking" at runtime merely by ensuring that your type has the following characteristics: The class must be public and not sealed. The class must have ......

Posted On Sunday, April 4, 2010 3:41 PM C#

Mar 10

CLR via C# 3rd Edition is out

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Time for some book news update. CLR via C#, 3rd Edition seems to have been out for a little while now. The book was released in early Feb this year, and needless to say my copy is on it’s way. I can barely wait to dig in and chew on the goodies that one of the best technical authors and software professionals I respect has in store. The 2nd edition ......

Posted On Saturday, March 13, 2010 4:09 PM Books

Mar 10

Chunking a List - .NET vs Python

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Chunking a List As I mentioned last time, I'm knee deep in python these days. I come from a statically typed background so it's definitely a mental adjustment. List comprehensions is BIG in Python and having worked with a few of them I can see why. Let's say we need to chunk a list into sublists of a specified size. Here is how we'd do it in C# static ......

Posted On Sunday, March 7, 2010 12:36 PM C# , Python

Feb 10

Showing Progress in a .NET Console Application

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Showing the progress of an operation is trivial in rich client applications using a progress bar control of some sort. But what about .NET console apps? The Console class offers 2 static methods Console.Write and Console.WriteLine to write out to the Console, but any subsequent calls to these methods will write the content out at the current location ......

Posted On Sunday, February 21, 2010 10:50 AM C#

Jan 10

Covariance and Contravariance in C# 4.0

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C# 4.0 introduces the notion of Covariance and Contravariance of generic type parameters for interfaces and delegate types. Eric Lippert has put together a bunch of posts that goes into details of the why and how, an excellent read but not for the faint of heart. I would strongly suggest reading these posts to get a firm grounding and a better appreciation ......

Posted On Sunday, January 10, 2010 12:50 PM C#