Cross-platform with Capacitor

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.

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.

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.

One of the more pragmatic ways to get going on the current AI hype, and to get some value out of it, is by leveraging semantic search. This is, in itself, a relatively simple concept: You have a bunch of documents and want to find the correct one based on a given query. The semantic part now allows you to find the correct document based on the meaning of its contents, in contrast to simply finding words or parts of words in it like we usually do with lexical search. In our last projects, we gathered some experience with search bots, and with this article, I'd love to share our insights with you.

If you previously wanted to integrate view transitions into your Angular application, this was only possible in a very cumbersome way that needed a lot of detailed knowledge about Angular internals. Now, Angular 17 introduced a feature to integrate the View Transition API with the router. In this two-part series, we will look at how to leverage the feature for route transitions and how we could use it for single-page animations.

.NET 8 brings Native AOT to ASP.NET Core, but many frameworks and libraries rely on unbound reflection internally and thus cannot support this scenario yet. This is true for ORMs, too: EF Core and Dapper will only bring full support for Native AOT in later releases. In this post, we will implement a database access layer with Sessions using the Humble Object pattern to get a similar developer experience. We will use Npgsql as a plain ADO.NET provider targeting PostgreSQL.