Arabic and Hebrew characters
We are also adding Arabic and Hebrew characters to Cascadia Code in mid-June. These are being added to the existing Cascadia Code font set, however they will not yet be included in the italic font variants. 

In the last post, I looked at auto-property enhancements, with several comments pointing out some nicer usages. I recently went through the HtmlTags codebase, C# 6-ifying “all the things”, and auto property and expression bodied function members were used pretty much everywhere. This is a large result of the codebase being quite tightly defined, with small objects and methods doing one thing well. 

WTF is a personal information dashboard for your terminal, developed for those who spend most of their day in the command line.

The future of WebAssembly - A look at upcoming features and proposals

WebAssembly is a performance optimised virtual machine that was shipped in all four major browsers earlier this year. It is a nascent technology and the current version is very much an MVP (minimum viable product). This blog post takes a look at the WebAssembly roadmap and the features it might be gain in the near future.

I’ll try to keep this blog post relatively high-level, so I’ll skip over some of the more technical proposals, instead focusing on what they might mean for languages that target WebAssembly. 

• New interaction utilities. Quickly set user-select with the new utilities and Sass map.
• New Reboot style for pointer cursors. We now include a role="button" selector in Reboot to set cursor: pointer on non-<button> element buttons.
• Examples are now downloadable. We’ve added a script to zip up and offer all our Examples as their own download from the docs.
• Saved ~5% from the compressed minified JS builds. 

 The @font-face CSS at-rule allows authors to specify online fonts to display text on their web pages. By allowing authors to provide their own fonts, @font-face eliminates the need to depend on the limited number of fonts users have installed on their computers. Unfortunately different browsers understand differnt font types. This service allows you to generate css rule and font files that makes your font work in all the browsers that support font-face or webfonts. 

Channels are a construct that simplifies concurrent execution and pipelining of data and is often touted as one of the main draws of Go. But did you know that .NET also has built-in support for channels? 

Since all we need from the build tools is MSBuild, which is MIT-licensed, we are providing a JetBrains redistributable of MSBuild that can be used freely. 

using(var client = new HttpClient())
{
   // do something with http client
}

 Unable to connect to the remote server
System.Net.Sockets.SocketException: Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted.

using (var client = new HttpClient())
{
       var result = await client.GetAsync("http://example.com/");
}

for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
{
      using (var client = new HttpClient())
      {
            var result = await client.GetAsync("http://example.com/");
            Console.WriteLine(result.StatusCode);
      }
}

  TCP    192.168.1.6:13996      93.184.216.34:http     TIME_WAIT
  TCP    192.168.1.6:13997      93.184.216.34:http     TIME_WAIT
  TCP    192.168.1.6:13998      93.184.216.34:http     TIME_WAIT
  TCP    192.168.1.6:13999      93.184.216.34:http     TIME_WAIT
  TCP    192.168.1.6:14000      93.184.216.34:http     TIME_WAIT
  TCP    192.168.1.6:14001      93.184.216.34:http     TIME_WAIT
  TCP    192.168.1.6:14002      93.184.216.34:http     TIME_WAIT
  TCP    192.168.1.6:14003      93.184.216.34:http     TIME_WAIT
  TCP    192.168.1.6:14004      93.184.216.34:http     TIME_WAIT
  TCP    192.168.1.6:14005      93.184.216.34:http     TIME_WAIT

 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\TcpTimedWaitDelay]

CancelPendingRequests
DeleteAsync
GetAsync
GetByteArrayAsync
GetStreamAsync
GetStringAsync
PostAsync
PutAsync
SendAsync

BaseAddress
DefaultRequestHeaders
MaxResponseContentBufferSize
Timeout

var sp = ServicePointManager.FindServicePoint(new Uri("http://thisisasample.com"));
sp.ConnectionLeaseTimeout = 60*1000; //In milliseconds

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Net.Http;

namespace HttpClientTips
{
    public interface IHttpClientFactory : IDisposable
    {
        HttpClient GetOrCreate(
            Uri baseAddress,
            IDictionary<string, string> defaultRequestHeaders = null,
            TimeSpan? timeout = null,
            long? maxResponseContentBufferSize = null,
            HttpMessageHandler handler = null);
    }
}

using System;
using System.Collections.Concurrent;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Net;
using System.Net.Http;
using System.Threading;

namespace HttpClientTips
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Lifetime of this class should be set to `Singleton`.
    /// </summary>
    public class HttpClientFactory : IHttpClientFactory
    {
        // 'GetOrAdd' call on the dictionary is not thread safe and we might end up creating the HttpClient more than
        // once. To prevent this Lazy<> is used. In the worst case multiple Lazy<> objects are created for multiple
        // threads but only one of the objects succeeds in creating the HttpClient.
        private readonly ConcurrentDictionary<Uri, Lazy<HttpClient>> _httpClients =
                         new ConcurrentDictionary<Uri, Lazy<HttpClient>>();
        private const int ConnectionLeaseTimeout = 60 * 1000; // 1 minute

        public HttpClientFactory()
        {
            // Default is 2 minutes: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.servicepointmanager.dnsrefreshtimeout(v=vs.110).aspx
            ServicePointManager.DnsRefreshTimeout = (int)TimeSpan.FromMinutes(1).TotalMilliseconds;
            // Increases the concurrent outbound connections
            ServicePointManager.DefaultConnectionLimit = 1024;
        }

        public HttpClient GetOrCreate(
           Uri baseAddress,
           IDictionary<string, string> defaultRequestHeaders = null,
           TimeSpan? timeout = null,
           long? maxResponseContentBufferSize = null,
           HttpMessageHandler handler = null)
        {
            return _httpClients.GetOrAdd(baseAddress,
                             uri => new Lazy<HttpClient>(() =>
                             {
                                 // Reusing a single HttpClient instance across a multi-threaded application means
                                 // you can't change the values of the stateful properties (which are not thread safe),
                                 // like BaseAddress, DefaultRequestHeaders, MaxResponseContentBufferSize and Timeout.
                                 // So you can only use them if they are constant across your application and need their own instance if being varied.
                                 var client = handler == null ? new HttpClient { BaseAddress = baseAddress } :
                                               new HttpClient(handler, disposeHandler: false) { BaseAddress = baseAddress };
                                 setRequestTimeout(timeout, client);
                                 setMaxResponseBufferSize(maxResponseContentBufferSize, client);
                                 setDefaultHeaders(defaultRequestHeaders, client);
                                 setConnectionLeaseTimeout(baseAddress, client);
                                 return client;
                             },
                             LazyThreadSafetyMode.ExecutionAndPublication)).Value;
        }

        public void Dispose()
        {
            foreach (var httpClient in _httpClients.Values)
            {
                httpClient.Value.Dispose();
            }
        }

        private static void setConnectionLeaseTimeout(Uri baseAddress, HttpClient client)
        {
            // This ensures connections are used efficiently but not indefinitely.
            client.DefaultRequestHeaders.ConnectionClose = false; // keeps the connection open -> more efficient use of the client
            ServicePointManager.FindServicePoint(baseAddress).ConnectionLeaseTimeout = ConnectionLeaseTimeout; // ensures connections are not used indefinitely.
        }

        private static void setDefaultHeaders(IDictionary<string, string> defaultRequestHeaders, HttpClient client)
        {
            if (defaultRequestHeaders == null)
            {
                return;
            }
            foreach (var item in defaultRequestHeaders)
            {
                client.DefaultRequestHeaders.Add(item.Key, item.Value);
            }
        }

        private static void setMaxResponseBufferSize(long? maxResponseContentBufferSize, HttpClient client)
        {
            if (maxResponseContentBufferSize.HasValue)
            {
                client.MaxResponseContentBufferSize = maxResponseContentBufferSize.Value;
            }
        }

        private static void setRequestTimeout(TimeSpan? timeout, HttpClient client)
        {
            if (timeout.HasValue)
            {
                client.Timeout = timeout.Value;
            }
        }
    }
}

namespace HttpClientTips.Web
{
    public class Startup
    {
        public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
        {
            services.AddSingleton<IHttpClientFactory, HttpClientFactory>();
            services.AddMvc();
        }

namespace HttpClientTips.Web.Controllers
{
    public class HomeController : Controller
    {
        private readonly IHttpClientFactory _httpClientFactory;
        public HomeController(IHttpClientFactory httpClientFactory)
        {
            _httpClientFactory = httpClientFactory;
        }

        public async Task<IActionResult> Index()
        {
            var host = new Uri("http://localhost:5000");
            var httpClient = _httpClientFactory.GetOrCreate(host);
            var responseMessage = await httpClient.GetAsync("home/about").ConfigureAwait(false);
            var responseContent = await responseMessage.Content.ReadAsStringAsync().ConfigureAwait(false);
            return Content(responseContent);
        }