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What is a NullReferenceException in .NET and how can it be avoided?

A NullReferenceException is a common error that occurs in .NET applications when a null reference is accessed as if it were an object. This can happen when you attemp to call a method or access a property of a reference type variable that is null or when a null reference is passed as an argument to a method that expects a non-null object.

Avoid hardcoded Microsoft URLs with Bicep environments

Bicep has a great feature, which meanwhile also leads to warnings during execution if you don’t pay attention to it: the avoidance of static values like URLs in Bicep files. A corresponding warning looks like this:

Create a Fulltext Catalog with EF Core .NET Migrations for MSSQL

A full-text catalog in Microsoft SQL Server is a specialized storage that is used to store and manage full-text indexes for one or more tables in a database. A full-text index is a special type of index that is used to support fast, full-text searches of large amounts of text data. It enables users to search for words and phrases within a column of text data in a table and returns rows that contain the search criteria. Full-text indexes can be created on columns of data that are stored in character data types, such as char, varchar and text.

My Top Microsoft Ignite 2022 News

Microsoft Ignite is a classic IT conference, but it also has news for us developers regarding innovations in our ecosystem.

Compile Linq Expressions to increase performance

Expressions are now an absolute part of a developer’s everyday life in .NET thanks to Linq.

However, due to their nature, expressions are not one of the very best performing tools, which is why the .NET team is also doing a lot to improve general performance while maintaining usability.

DateTime vs. DateTimeOffset - UtcNow vs. Now

.NET has two principal ways for handling times: DateTime and DateTimeOffset .

The big deficit of DateTime, which was also recognized early in .NET 1.0, is that it is not clear from the DateTime information which time zone the time information represents. Therefore DateTime is also called implicit representation of time information, whose “hope” is that the time information is always in relation to UTC-0. DateTime cannot guarantee this, which is why errors often occur in combination with time zones and DateTime. DateTime supports only two possibilities at this point: the local time of the application or UTC.

Microsoft is moving backend services to .NET 6

Microsoft has announced in an impressive blog post on the .NET DevBlogs that they have started an enterprise-wide migration to migrate backend services.

Health Check Ping with EF Core and MSSQL

Sometimes it is quite useful to be able to send a query to the MSSQL server independently of its schema; for example to check if the server is principally reachable and the connection information as well as the credentials are correct.

Why you should no longer use var in C#

Beginning with C# 3, variables that are declared at method scope can have an implicit “type” var. An implicitly typed local variable is strongly typed just as if you had declared the type yourself, but the compiler determines the type.

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Embed Code into your blog - and also on Medium

There are several ways to integrate source code including code highlighting into blogs, but GitHub Gists are by far the most convenient and best maintained option.
Especially for Medium blogs, since Medium does not offer any code highlighting by default.