A field guide to .NET data formats

A field guide to .NET data formats
9 minutes by Bipin Joshi

Different data formats each have their own query language suited to their structure. CSV relies on parsing libraries like CsvHelper before handing off to LINQ, while SQL remains the most mature standalone query language for relational data. XML uses XPath or LINQ to XML for tree traversal, JSON favors typed deserialization, and binary formats skip querying entirely. Most formats are just a path to in-memory objects, where LINQ takes over.

Rider's .NET Debugger in VS Code and Cursor? Yes, Really!
sponsored by Jetbrains

The ReSharper extension brings the Rider debugger engine to VS Code, Cursor, and other compatible editors. Enjoy full breakpoint support, watch expressions, step navigation, launch and attach for .NET, .NET Framework, Mono, and web apps, plus unit‑test debugging – and your existing launch.json configs are picked up automatically.

Building a distributed job scheduler
11 minutes by Aaron Stannard

Akka.Cluster.Sharding and cluster routers both fall short for long-running jobs: sharding rebalances and kills in-progress work, while routers lack memory and recovery. A better approach uses a persistent singleton actor as a central scheduler that tracks job sizes, picks the least-loaded node, and never moves work already in flight. When nodes join or crash, only queued jobs are redistributed, leaving running jobs untouched.

Faster blob copying in azure blob storage
6 minutes by Mark Heath

Copying blobs between Azure storage accounts can be done in three ways, with speed varying wildly. Downloading and reuploading is the slowest, taking over an hour for a 10GB file, as it is limited by your local connection. A server-side copy is faster but still slow across accounts. The fastest approach splits the file into blocks and copies them in parallel entirely within Azure, completing the same 10GB copy in under 10 seconds.

Introducing Postie
6 minutes by Andrew McLachlan

Postie is a free, open source library for ASP.NET Core that removes boilerplate from the CQRS pattern. Instead of writing repetitive handler lambdas for every endpoint, you map commands and queries directly to routes in a single line. It works with its own built-in mediator or with MediatR, and handles common HTTP conventions like 201 responses and 404s automatically.

Parsing IP addresses in C# at crazy speeds
3 minutes by Daniel Lemire

This article shows how to parse IP addresses in C# using AVX-512, a newer CPU instruction set. It uses masked loads to handle short strings safely, then locates dots and validates the address with vector math. The result is about three times faster than the standard library method, reaching roughly 71 million addresses per second on modern hardware.

And the most popular article from the last issue was:

• REST API security best practices in ASP.NET Core