c# – Page 4 – My Point of View

Getting all types that implement an interface

Using reflection, this is how we get all types that implement an interface with C# 3.0/.NET 3.5 with the least code, and minimizing iterations.

var type = typeof(IMyInterface);
var types = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies()
    .SelectMany(s => s.GetTypes())
    .Where(p => type.IsAssignableFrom(p));

Basically, the least amount of iterations will always be:

loop assemblies  
 loop types  
  see if implemented.

References

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26733/getting-all-types-that-implement-an-interface

When to use <> instead of ()

When we are suppose to use different parentheses in C#. When I run into a situation where i am trying to tell if i need to put <> or ().

The dumbed down version to explain is this;

() are for variables. <> are for types. If you have both, <> always comes first.

You would never has A(int). It would be A<int>. You’d also never have B<5>. It would always be B(5). And, rule two, you might have C<int>(5), but never C(5)<int>.

<> are used in generics.

Generic is a type used to define a class, structure, interface, or method with placeholders to indicate that they can store or use one or more of the types. In C#, the compiler will replace placeholders with the specified type at compile time. We use generic frequently with collections.

Generics are useful for improving code reusability, type safety, and performance compared with non-generic types e.g. arraylist.

Here is a code sample;

//Generic example - using single generic type
public class Hospital<T>            //Here <T> is a a placeholder beside Hospital class
{
    private T Cases;                //Declared a variable named "Cases" of type T
    public Hospital(T value)        //Constructor take another variable named value
    {
        this.Cases = value;         //assinged received type to containting type "Cases"
    }

    public void Show()
    {
        Console.WriteLine(this.Cases);
    }
}

Let’s implement this in our .NET6 main class;

Console.WriteLine("Hello, World!");

//use Hospital class
Hospital<int> x = new Hospital<int>(100);       //replacing T with int
Hospital<string> y = new Hospital<string>("Hospital Cases");
x.Show();
y.Show();

We can use two generic types in a class;

//using two generic types
public class EliteHospital<T, U>            //Here <T> is a a placeholder beside Hospital class
{
    // PatientCount of type T
    public T? PatientCount {  get; set; }

    //Docotrs of U
    public U? Doctors { get; set; }  
}

This is how we can use this;

Console.WriteLine("Hello, World!");
//using EliteHospital class
EliteHospital<int, string> xx = new EliteHospital<int, string>();
xx.PatientCount = 100;
xx.Doctors = "Available";
Console.WriteLine(xx.PatientCount);
Console.WriteLine(xx.Doctors);

Console.WriteLine("Press any key to continue..");
Console.ReadKey();

LINQ Distinct. How To Get Distinct Values From A Collection Using LINQ.

LINQ pronounced as “Link” is a .NET component that enables the processing of the native queries directly into C# and VB.NET languages. LINQ has Distinct() function which provides the unique list of values from a single data source.

Example Class – LINQ Distinct by Property or Field Using Distinct function

The Distinct() method is used to remove the duplicate values from the list and gives the unique values. Let us consider the example in which you need to have unique values from Book List, and you have the following model:

public class Book
{
        public int BookID { get; set; }
        public string Title { get; set; }
        public string Author { get; set; }
}

List of dummy data of the books. In real word scenario, the list is could be from live database or any other data source.


public List GetBooks() 
{
            List books = new List();

            books.Add(new Book { BookID = 1, Title = "Book Title 1", Author = "Author 1" });
            books.Add(new Book { BookID = 2, Title = " Book Title 2", Author = "Author 2" });
            books.Add(new Book { BookID = 3, Title = " Book Title 3", Author = "Author 1" });
            books.Add(new Book { BookID = 4, Title = " Book Title 4", Author = "Author 2" });
            books.Add(new Book { BookID = 5, Title = " Book Title 5", Author = "Author 8" });
            books.Add(new Book { BookID = 6, Title = " Book Title 4", Author = "Author 2" });
            books.Add(new Book { BookID = 7, Title = " Book Title 6", Author = "Author 4" });
            books.Add(new Book { BookID = 8, Title = " Book Title 8", Author = "Author 2" });
            books.Add(new Book { BookID = 9, Title = " Book Title 3", Author = "Author 3" });
            books.Add(new Book { BookID = 10, Title = " Book Title 5", Author = "Author 1" });

            return books;
}

LINQ Distinct() using Property

The Distinct() function in LINQ can be applied by the properties. You can make groups and get the first object from each group or you can use DistinctBy function to achieve the required result.

LINQ DistinctBy() On a Property

DistinctBy() apply on a specified property to get unique values from a list of objects. If you need a distinct list based on one or more properties, you can use the following code:

List bookList = GetBooks().DistinctBy(book => new { book.BookID, book.Title });

Using GroupBy and Select on a Property

By taking the above sample data, you can get the distinct author list by using the following code, as it will group the similar author named books first, and then select the first of every group in list.

List bookList = GetBooks().GroupBy(book => book.Author).Select(x => x.First()) .ToList();

LINQ Distinct By – Field

The Distinct() function in LINQ can be applied on the fields of tables also. This will group the similar data of the given field and return the unique list by selecting the first or default of the group depending on the requirement.

yourTable.GroupBy(x => x.TableFieldColumn).Select(x => x.FirstOrDefault());

When you use reference type object, LINQ will treat the values as unique even the property values are same. To overcome this situation, you can use either of the following ways to have distinct values:

LINQ Group By and Select Operators

In this method, GroupBy function is used to group the list which can either be a static list or a dynamic list. The Select operator is used to fetch the results from a list or a grouped list.

In this example, grouping is done by using the groupby operator to group Authors and Title and then Select is used to get the first result of a grouped list.

using System;
using System.Text;
using System.Linq; 
namespace MyFirstApp{
     public class LINQProgram {
              public static void Main(String[] args) {
                      List bookList = GetBooks()
                                       .GroupBy(book => new { book.Author, book.Title })
                                       .Select(book => book.FirstOrDefault());
             }
     } 
}

Distinct with IEqualityComparer

You can give an instance of IEqualityComparer to an overloaded method of the Distinct method. For that, you need to create a new class “BookComparer” that must be implementing the IEqualityComparer to overload it.

using System;
using System.Text;
using System.Linq; 

namespace MyFirstApp{

     public class BookComparer : IEqualityComparer   // Implements interface
     {
            public bool Equals(Book x, Book y) {
                if (Object.ReferenceEquals(x, y)) 
                    return true;

                if (Object.ReferenceEquals(x, null) || Object.ReferenceEquals(y, null))
                    return false;

                return x.Author == y.Author && x.Title == y.Title;
            }

            public int GetHashCode(Book book) {
                if (Object.ReferenceEquals(book, null)) 
                       return 0;

                int hashBookName = book.Author == null ? 0 : book.Author.GetHashCode();
                int hashBookCode = book.Title == null ? 0 : book.Title.GetHashCode();
                return hashBookName ^ hashBookCode;

            }
     } 

     public class LINQProgram {

              public static void Main(String[] args) {

                      List bookList = GetBooks()
                                      .Distinct(new BookComparer());
             }
     }
}

Using Select and Distinct operators

You can use the Select and Distinct functions to get rid of the repeated values from a list of objects. In the following example, select and distinct operators are used to get the unique values from Books list.

using System;
using System.Text;
using System.Linq; 

namespace MyFirstApp{
     public class LINQProgram {
              public static void Main(String[] args) {
                      List bookList = GetBooks()
                                        .Select(book => new { book.Author, book.Title })
                                       .Distinct();
             }
     } 
}

LINQ Distinct by Field

If you want to achieve the distinct values for a specific field in the list, you can use the following two methods:

1. Using GroupBy and Select functions

In this approach, you need to use two LINQ functions i.e., GroupBy and Select to get the list of unique field values. You can use the following code to have groupby and select in one query.


using System;
using System.Text;
using System.Linq; 

namespace MyFirstApp{

     public class LINQProgram {

              public static void Main(String[] args) {

                      List bookList = GetBooks()
                                                             .GroupBy(o => o.Author)
                                                             .Select(o => o.FirstOrDefault());
             }
     } 
}

2. Using Select and Distinct functions

In the second approach, you need to use two LINQ functions i.e. Select and Distinct, to achieve the list of unique field values.

using System;
using System.Text;
using System.Linq; 

namespace MyFirstApp{

     public class LINQProgram {

              public static void Main(String[] args) {

                      List bookList = GetBooks()
                                                             .Select(o => new { Author = o.Author } )
                                                             .Distinct();
             }
     } 
}

Sources

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19548043/select-all-distinct-values-in-a-column-using-linq

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.linq.enumerable.distinct?view=net-7.0

TransactionScope Async Thread Fail

I updated some data access code to wrap some operations in a TransactionScope. The operations are async methods running some Dapper execute statements to write data to a SQL Server database. Something like:

public async Task InserData(SourceData sourceData)
{
    using (var transactionScope = new 
    TransactionScope(TransactionScopeAsyncFlowOption.Enabled))
    {
     using (IDbConnection connection = new  
        SqlConnection(this.ConnectionString))
      {
         connection.Open();

         await InsertSomeData(sourceData.Registers, connection);
         await InsertMoreData(sourceData.Deposits, connection);

         transactionScope.Complete();
       }
    }
}

Anyway, I wire up a unit test to this method and it fails with this message:

Result Message:
Test method ExtractSourceDataTest.CanStart threw exception:
System.InvalidOperationException: A TransactionScope must be disposed on the same thread that it was created.

As usual, Google to the rescue. I found a nice blog post that explains the issue, https://particular.net/blog/transactionscope-and-async-await-be-one-with-the-flow. Basically, TransactionScope was not made to operate asynchronously across threads, but there is a work around for that. Microsoft released a fix, TransactionScopeAsyncFlowOption.Enabled. I went from a zero

using (var transactionScope = new TransactionScope())

to a hero

using (var transactionScope = new TransactionScope(TransactionScopeAsyncFlowOption.Enabled))

Now, if this would have been turned on by default I wouldn’t of had this little problem… talking to you Microsoft. I’m sure there is some backward compatibility issue or other quirk that makes default enable difficult, but I’m ranting anyway.

Conclusion

This is awesome, but I basically just enabled a distributed transaction and that scares me. You do not know the trouble I have seen with distributed transactions. Hopefully, its not that bad since we are distributing across processes on the same machine and not over the network, but scary none the least.

Tag: c#