Enhancing C#: Introducing cs-tools, a Project for Beginner and Intermediate Developers

Introduction

C# is nice and all, but as you might know it's missing some useful functionalities which could potentially help beginner or intermediate C# programmers in their way of programming.

Motivation

When I was a first year student in my Computer Science bachelors degree, I came across a subject where TextFileReader.dll was given to us which was built a Prof at the Uni. What should I say.. It was full of flaws, it broke a few OOP principles. And then I realized, that C# is missing quite a few really useful services, which I then implemented in this project. My motive behind this project was to help the fellow C# developers to have an extensive but scalable toolset in their hand.

The project is open-source and it is on GitHub: joshika39/cs-tools: Extended base C# functionalities (github.com)

Composition

The project is published as a NuGet package and it is using Microsoft's IServiceProvider and a provided ServiceCollection to register all of its default and required components. You can read about it in more details here: Using the package · Wiki

Most of the things can be configured in the IApplicationSettings which stores the following properties:

public interface IApplicationSettings  
{  
    string ApplicationConfigurationFile { get; }  
    string ConfigurationFolder { get; }  
    string? RepositoryPath { get; }  
}

NOTE: The file is located under the /"userhome"/joshika39/modulename/

Repository

One of the useful tools are the IRepository which is basically a repository pattern interface, which has a default AJsonRepository implementation registered in the IServiceProvider.

It can be used the following way for example:

// A factory is required to create the repository.
var repositoryFactory = provider.GetRequiredService<IRepositoryFactory>();

// Create the user repository in hte file: `users.json` in the repository path.
using var repository = repositoryFactory.CreateRepository<User>("users");  

// This line will make sure that the repository is instantiated.
await repository.SaveChangesAsync();  

Timer

The other quite useful par is the IStopwatch which has a lot of functionalities:

• It can:
  • Stop the current thread for x seconds
  • Wait asynchronously then notify it's listeners
  • Start periodic notification for it's subscribed listeners

Conclusion

This package is still in development, so it's still missing some crucial documentation, but my goal will be to improve this package to help other people into the love of OOP programming.

Contribution

Any contributions or ideas are welcome, you can open an Enhancement Issue or make a contribute if you have any idea. If you drop a star, I would really appreciate it!