I don’t know about you, but I hate using the mouse. The entire concept of a mouse is not productive. I’m supposed to move my hand to a different place, nudge something with accuracy, and click a button. I’m getting tired just thinking about it. I’d argue that unless you’re doing design or graphics, you can get by with just a keyboard. Most certainly as a software developer. Well, an occasional mouse contact might be required to browse a website and whatnot, but you’ll be better off without it for most things.

The annual Microsoft Build 2023 conference just occurred and it came with a truckload of announcements. This event is Microsoft’s developer-focused conference, and it’s usually about cloud services and developer platforms. But it’s not unusual for the conference to be used as a marketing opportunity, and this year wasn’t an exception. Microsoft marketed the hell out of Windows, Microsoft 365, and Bing among other products, and it did so with a singular focus on AI.

I don’t think I have to make the point of how important tools are. What would we do without IDEs like Visual Studio? Or without good email clients like Gmail and Outlook? For power users like software engineers, good tools can 10x your productivity. Everyone got their favorite tools, and I think I gathered a pretty good list. So here’s my list of tools that I use every day and highly recommend.

C# has been through a lot of change in the last decade. From open-sourcing the language to a new cross-platform framework to yearly releases instead of 3-year iterations. Meanwhile, new languages, new frameworks, and new paradigms have taken off in the software industry, including the rise in popularity of Node.js , TypeScript, Kotlin, Rust, Go, and Python. Through it all, C# and .NET stayed relevant and popular . In this blog post, we’ll glimpse the day-to-day activity and challenges the C# language design team faces.

Disclaimer: This blog post was written by a protein-based intelligence. in a previous blog post , I showed you how to use PostgreSQL in C# with Npgsql, Dapper, and Entity Framework Core. But if you’re going to use one of them, it’s probably a good idea to make sure you’re not choosing a library that has really bad performance. Or at least to understand how much it’s going to hurt.

Disclaimer: This blog post was written by a human, with no AI-generated text Have you ever considered the concept of the proof of concept? I bet you’ve been asked more than once in your career to prove something works before committing fully. It could have been anything - a change in UI, a performance optimization, or a new feature. The underlying contract is that if you prove the concept works, you’ll get the resources to develop the new thing.

One of the most used databases these days is PostgreSQL (aka Postgres). Its accomplishments include being the most popular DB [among professional developers] according to Stack Overflow survey of 2022 , the database in all of the fastest TechEmpower benchmarks , and being the most advanced open source database (self-proclaimed). We’ll talk today about combining Postgres with my favorite language and runtime: C# and .NET. Just because Postgres isn’t a first-party Microsoft database, like SQL Server, doesn’t mean you don’t have full support for it in C#.

Disclaimer: This blog post was written by a human, with no AI-generated text. An application’s code base is a living entity. It keeps growing, changing, and adapting. There’s always a new feature to add, more bugs to solve, and new bugs that are created as a result. As the teams grow, the code changes more often and there are ever more features, more issues, and more bugs. Thorough manual testing becomes impossible the bigger your application gets and as you ship more frequently.

We continue on our path to make a web application using C# and .NET. After choosing the front-end technology in part 1 , picking the backend server tech in part 2 , and deploying to Azure in part 3 , we’re going to concentrate on choosing the database. With emphasis on .NET and Azure technologies of course. A database, or rather databases, is one of the most important aspects of any big application.