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Boxing in C# has little to do with Saturday night television but quite a bit more with that part-time job at the warehouse you had as a student. It is an important concept in C# that is related to how the compiler handles different kinds of variables in memory. Knowing how the compiler handles the various types allows you to avoid unexpected side effects in your code.

This article explains what boxing is, how it works and how it can negatively effect your code if you don’t pay attention to it. We also look at how generics can be used to improve your code’s efficiency. And we try to answer the ultimate question: Is everything in C# an object?

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One of the best things about C# is that as the language and libraries expand thought is put into keeping things readable. Below I have listed 10 shorthands that you can use to make your code tighter and less wordy. No doubt you know one or more already — but do you currently use all ten of them ?

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I have been doing quite a bit with regular expressions recently and to avoid having to look them up again and again I made myself a little table with the most important C# regular expression operators and stuck it on the wall. This post contains the C# regular expression operators as used by the .NET regular expression classes such as RegEx.

If you would like to print this, click here for a pure HTML version.

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One of my favorites in the PHP libraries is the strip_tags function. Not only does it neatly remove HTML from an input it also allows you to specify which tags should stay. This is great if you are allowing your visitors to apply some basic HTML tags to their comments. This post explores two issues: using C# to remove unwanted tags, and cleaning up unwanted attributes that might be hidden in the allowed tags.

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Sending an e-mail is pretty old news by now so it should come as no surprise that .NET contains a significant SMTP mail client. One old programming truth still holds: All programs will expand to eventually include sending (and receiving) e-mails. So how about adding e-mail to your program ? This post explores how we can use the System.Mail.SmtpClient to send formatted e-mails. There are plenty of options available and we will explore most of them.

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Sometimes it is handy to have a quick overview of all the assemblies that your C# program has loaded. Maybe because you are trying to debug a version conflict, or because you want to distribute your application and want to get an idea of its dependencies.

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Today I needed to automate posting some data to a web form from a C# program, and sure enough this is not at all that difficult. But surprisingly you need to call quite a large number of methods to get your data ready to ship. A working code example only took a few minutes to write but it took quite a bit more time to clean things up. You can find the full implementation at the end of this post.

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Your C# program has just calculated the weekly sales report and you need to upload it to the company file server. The C# System.Net.Webclient class makes this quite trivial. The same for downloading a file from the server and then parsing it for content. This post shows how you can use basic FTP actions to upload, download files and either store them in memory or write them to disk.

At the end of this post you will find my BasicFTPClient class that implements the uploading and downloading code.

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In this post I look at how we can simply retrieve basic information about our own types, discover their methods and lastly how we can import a foreign assembly, inspect its contents, load a class and execute its methods.

When C# compiles your code it not only stores the program in the assembly but the complete information on each of the structures you have defined. Each class, its types, parameters and methods described into detail are all available. This might sound like stating the obvious, but until recently most compilers treated this kind of “meta” data as a waste of space and never included it into the final assembly.

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A union is a data structure that stores several different types of data at the same single location in memory. Although this might sound like madness in a garbage collected world many older binary data formats still heavily rely on this. A possible use is if you want to modify an IPv4 address. An IPv4 address is 4 bytes, or an unsigned C# int. You might want to manipulate the IP address as a single value, or by splitting it into four separate bytes.

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