Advanced Topics in C#

A discussion of the more complicated aspects of the C# language

This course presents a collection of interesting/unusual case studies where C# is used to solve a particular problem. This course is 100% practical, and demonstrates mainly the practical applications of C# in building solutions to common problems.

The main themes covered in this course are:

• Numerics — the specifics of how to work with numeric types in .NET, with a focus on SIMD data types and operations.

• Reflection — how to operate reflection mechanisms to investigate assemblies and types, how to create types and invoke their members. Also a look at the practical use of reflection for working with attributes.

• Memory Management — a discussion of latest C# features for high performance computation, such as the passing of value types by reference, ref structs and Span<T>.

• Extension Methods — a seemingly simple mechanism has plenty of advanced uses.

In addition, this course comes with a section dedicated to assorted topics that also showcase advanced uses of C#. These topics include:

• Exploiting IDisposable — shows how you can abuse the IDisposable/using mechanism in order to dynamically define operations as pairs of start/end calls. Useful for things like simple performance measurement.

• Continuation Passing Style — demonstrates how you can define complex algorithms in terms of sequentially invoked methods with customized return types indicating the result of the operation.

• Local Inversion of Control shows that sometimes inversion of control happens at a local scale. Here we use extension methods to invert control on a bunch of different data types, providing useful functionality.

• Beyond the Maybe Monad — even though C# introduced the ?. operator in order to chain null checks together, the classic monad implementation, based on extension methods, is still relevant, as it can also handle other scenarios.

• Mnemonics — not so much a C# language feature but rather an interesting way of defining huge sets of similar code templates that can be expanded quickly to the code constructs you need the most.

Course Pre-Requisites

• Good understanding of C#

• Understanding of object-oriented programming (OOP)

• Experience writing real-world C# applications

Course Organization

• 100% hands-on

• Demonstrated either in Visual Studio or using the Kinetica rendering engine

• Demos are single .CS files

• Heavy use of IDE features

• Ad-hoc use of 3rd-party packages

Enjoy!