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Category: Essentials
.NET

Pattern Matching with Discriminated Unions in .NET

Traditional C# pattern matching with switch statements and if/else chains is error-prone and doesn’t guarantee exhaustive handling of all cases. When you add new types or states, it’s easy to miss updating conditional logic, leading to runtime bugs. The library Thinktecture.Runtime.Extensions solves this with built-in Switch and Map methods for discriminated unions that enforce compile-time exhaustiveness checking.

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Pawel Gerr 26.08.2025
.NET

Smart Enums: Adding Domain Logic to Enumerations in .NET

This article builds upon the introduction of Smart Enums by exploring their powerful capability to encapsulate behavior, a significant limitation of traditional C# enums. We delve into how Thinktecture.Runtime.Extensions enables embedding domain-specific logic directly within Smart Enum definitions. This co-location of data and behavior promotes more cohesive, object-oriented, and maintainable code, moving beyond scattered switch statements and extension methods. Discover techniques to make your enumerations truly “smart” by integrating behavior directly where it belongs.

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Pawel Gerr 29.07.2025
.NET

Discriminated Unions: Representation of Alternative Types in .NET

Representing values that may take on multiple distinct types or states is a common challenge in C#. Traditional approaches—like tuples, generics, or exceptions—often lead to clumsy and error-prone code. Discriminated unions address these issues by enabling clear, type-safe modeling of “one-of” alternatives. This article examines pitfalls of conventional patterns and introduces discriminated unions with the Thinktecture.Runtime.Extensions library, demonstrating how they enhance code safety, prevent invalid states, and improve maintainability—unlocking powerful domain modeling in .NET with minimal boilerplate.

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Pawel Gerr 15.07.2025
.NET

Handling Complexity: Introducing Complex Value Objects in .NET

While simple value objects wrap single primitives, many domain concepts involve multiple related properties (e.g., a date range’s start and end). This article introduces Complex Value Objects in .NET, which group these properties into a cohesive unit. This ensures internal consistency, centralizes validation, and encapsulates behavior. Discover how to implement these for clearer, safer code using the library Thinktecture.Runtime.Extensions, which minimizes boilerplate when handling such related data.

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Pawel Gerr 01.07.2025
.NET

Smart Enums: Beyond Traditional Enumerations in .NET

Traditional C# enums often fall short when needing to associate data or behavior with constants, or ensure strong type safety. This article explores the “Smart Enum” pattern as a superior alternative. Leveraging the library Thinktecture.Runtime.Extensions and Roslyn Source Generators, developers can easily implement Smart Enums. These provide a robust, flexible, and type-safe way to represent fixed sets of related options, encapsulating both data and behavior directly within the Smart Enum. This results in more maintainable, expressive, and resilient C# code, overcoming the limitations of basic enums.

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Pawel Gerr 17.06.2025
.NET

Value Objects: Solving Primitive Obsession in .NET

Overusing primitive types like string or int for domain concepts (“primitive obsession”) causes bugs from missed validation, like invalid emails or negative monetary values. This article explores Value Objects as a .NET solution. Learn how these self-validating, immutable types prevent entire classes of errors, make code more expressive, and reduce developer overhead. We’ll demonstrate creating robust domain models with minimal boilerplate, improving code quality without necessarily adopting full Domain-Driven Design, and see how Roslyn Source Generators make this practical.

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Pawel Gerr 03.06.2025
Essentials

Interactive Rebase: Git In Practice – Part 2

Once you are comfortable with rebase, it is time to step up your game with interactive rebase. As introduced in the previous article, rebasing involves taking multiple commits and applying them to a base tip.
In an interactive rebase, we have a lot more control over what we want to do with the affected commits. Some of the options include re-ordering the commits, rewording a commit message, dropping commits, merging several commits into a single one, and editing a past commit.

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Yannick Baron 11.12.2020
Essentials

Code Quality: Automate Linting, Formatting And More By Sharing Git Hooks

There he is. Bob. The new guy in the office. Time to on-board him onto the flagship project of the company. Sounds like a job for Kevin. Kevin helps out Bob to get setup. Providing him with the appropriate access rights, cloning the repository, and making sure Bob’s seat is nice and comfy. After Bob has the project up and running, it is his time to shine and work on the first ticket. He fires up his IDE, touches a couple of files, resolves the issues, commits, pushes, and opens up a merge request for Kevin to review.

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Yannick Baron 25.11.2020
Essentials

Demystifying Git Rebase: Git in Practice – Part 1

Working with git every day as our software of choice for version control, I always try to point out that familiarity with our toolset is important. The more comfortable you are with git, the easier it will be to integrate changes and follow their history.

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Yannick Baron 12.11.2020