C# Select and Where: Writing SQL-Style Queries in Code
C# is a marvelous language. It’s powerful, fast, and easy to learn. It also exposes advanced features that make doing otherwise difficult things simple. Even more impressively, it manages to make reading the code to do those complicated things easy, too. Many programming languages struggle with this last part. You might be able to do something really cool, but the code is opaque for other developers to read.
One example of a feature where C# makes the difficult easy is in the Language Integrated Natural Query (LINQ) interface. If you’ve been working with a C# code base for a little while, you might have run up against some LINQ code. The first time you see it can feel a little confusing. Some variations of LINQ code look like an entirely different programming language from the C# that you’re used to. Even for variations of LINQ that aren’t entirely different syntax, it can be difficult to parse just what the code you’re looking at is doing.
In this post, we’ll walk through the basics of LINQ and talk about how they work, so the next time you see some LINQ code, it’ll be because you’re writing it yourself.
“Code cleanup” is a phrase that sounds like it’s a lot of work. Well, sometimes it may be an arduous task, indeed. But that doesn’t mean it’s the way it should be. As with many things in software development—and in general life—it’s often more comfortable, less painful and more productive to do an unpleasant task every day, little by little than let it accumulate and become a monster.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that?
As the title of the article makes clear, this post is a gentle introduction to the concept of inheritance. It’s aimed at beginners that still haven’t mastered inheritance. That means that, despite being a complete introduction, we’ll not venture into more advanced aspects of the concept. By the end of the post, you’ll not know everything there is to know about C# inheritance. Instead, you’ll have a solid working knowledge, upon which you can keep building more and more.
A good code review can feel like magic. A skilled code reviewer will deftly work through each part of a pull request, noting potential problems and proposing elegant solutions. If you’re like many developers, you recognize a good code review when you see one. You’ve probably even created a few yourself. But you’re probably also a bit unsure as to how to make sure that your code reviews are good every time.
Every programming language has operators. Operators are the components of the language that, well, operate on variables mostly. Most C# operators are symbols such as % and ??. And some are words, like async and is. In this guide, you’ll see all of them, including an example of each one. We’ll start with the operators that are common among programming languages and end on some that are more specific to C#.
Does the term “XML comments” confuse you? Well, rest assured. You’re not alone. “Does that refer to comments inside an XML file?” you might wonder. Or maybe you have this vague notion that it has something to do with some kind of documentation for programming source code. Both assumptions are kind of right. But you’re still reading this post, which means that “kind of” isn’t going cut for you, right?
“Everything automatable will eventually be automated.” Have you heard that saying? I’d prefer to tweak it a little bit and say that everything automatable should be automated. If you’re a regular reader of the SubMain blog, you’ll know that 
By now, we all know Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V like the backs of our hands. Heck, some developers write entire programs using these copy/paste shortcuts! But what about using other shortcuts to make yourself more efficient? That’s right, I’m talking about Visual Studio comment shortcuts.
We’ve already covered so many C# concepts, and most of them relate to objects. This is hardly surprising, C# being an object-oriented language. What is surprising is that, up until this point, we haven’t covered the “thing” responsible for creating objects!