If you need to host MySQL locally, but you don’t want it all the time, then Docker will be perfect for you — I was recently working on a project that required MySQL, but I wasn’t going to be needing it every day, and so I was a little hesitant to install it on my main development machine. Enter Docker. Docker is amazing at setting up containers that you can use whenever you…

We’ll see how we can use Pattern Matching to represent complex conditional logic in a simple and concise way — Pattern matching is awesome. It was introduced as part of C# 7 and has been improved upon with each subsequent version of the language. There are countless ways that pattern matching can be used, and it’s quickly become a staple that developers rely on to keep their code as concise…

A new feature that can help reduce the amount of repetitive code across your entire project — If you’ve written anything in C#, you’ll have come across Using Directives. By using them (no pun intended) you can reference types within that namespace, without having to fully qualify the type name. A quick re-cap of Using Directives Most C# files will reference types that exist in another namespace. Without any Using Directives, these types…

They’re very easy to get wrong, especially if you’re filtering out some data — If you’ve worked with SQL Server for any length of time, you’ll have come across LEFT JOIN. After the ubiquitous INNER JOIN, they’re probably the next most common join we deal with. However, if you don’t pay close attention to what you’re doing, it’s very easy to make a mistake…

When you’ve got a query that’s running a little slow, here’s an approach you can take to make it fast — Optimising SQL Server queries can be both painful and rewarding. On one hand, making a change that gets your query running in a fraction of the time is a brilliant feeling. The other side is having a query that refuses to get any quicker, regardless of what you change. In…

There are different ways of getting the result out from an async method, but using .Result is not one of the better options. — Asynchronous code in C# is lovely. By definition, asynchronous code can be a little hard to get your head around, but languages like C# have developed in such a way to make it very easy to control what’s going on. A quick re-cap of async code in C# Say you want to make a HTTP request, and return…