Emoji unicode characters for use on the web 

Any experienced .NET developer knows that even though .NET applications have a garbage collector, memory leaks occur all the time. It’s not that the garbage collector has bugs, it’s just that there are ways we can (easily) cause memory leaks in a managed language.

Memory leaks are sneakily bad creatures. It’s easy to ignore them for a very long time, while they slowly destroy the application. With memory leaks, your memory consumption grows, creating GC pressure and performance problems. Finally, the program will just crash on an out-of-memory exception.

In this article, we will go over the most common reasons for memory leaks in .NET programs. All examples are in C#, but they are relevant to other languages.  

/* 
 * Password Hashing With PBKDF2 (http://crackstation.net/hashing-security.htm).
 * Copyright (c) 2013, Taylor Hornby
 * All rights reserved.
 *
 * Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without 
 * modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
 *
 * 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, 
 * this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
 *
 * 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice,
 * this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation 
 * and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
 *
 * THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" 
 * AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE 
 * IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE 
 * ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE 
 * LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR 
 * CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF 
 * SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS 
 * INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN 
 * CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) 
 * ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE 
 * POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
 */

using System;
using System.Text;
using System.Security.Cryptography;

namespace PasswordHash
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Salted password hashing with PBKDF2-SHA1.
    /// Author: havoc AT defuse.ca
    /// www: http://crackstation.net/hashing-security.htm
    /// Compatibility: .NET 3.0 and later.
    /// </summary>
    public class PasswordHash
    {
        // The following constants may be changed without breaking existing hashes.
        public const int SALT_BYTE_SIZE = 24;
        public const int HASH_BYTE_SIZE = 24;
        public const int PBKDF2_ITERATIONS = 1000;

        public const int ITERATION_INDEX = 0;
        public const int SALT_INDEX = 1;
        public const int PBKDF2_INDEX = 2;

        /// <summary>
        /// Creates a salted PBKDF2 hash of the password.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="password">The password to hash.</param>
        /// <returns>The hash of the password.</returns>
        public static string CreateHash(string password)
        {
            // Generate a random salt
            RNGCryptoServiceProvider csprng = new RNGCryptoServiceProvider();
            byte[] salt = new byte[SALT_BYTE_SIZE];
            csprng.GetBytes(salt);

            // Hash the password and encode the parameters
            byte[] hash = PBKDF2(password, salt, PBKDF2_ITERATIONS, HASH_BYTE_SIZE);
            return PBKDF2_ITERATIONS + ":" +
                Convert.ToBase64String(salt) + ":" +
                Convert.ToBase64String(hash);
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Validates a password given a hash of the correct one.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="password">The password to check.</param>
        /// <param name="correctHash">A hash of the correct password.</param>
        /// <returns>True if the password is correct. False otherwise.</returns>
        public static bool ValidatePassword(string password, string correctHash)
        {
            // Extract the parameters from the hash
            char[] delimiter = { ':' };
            string[] split = correctHash.Split(delimiter);
            int iterations = Int32.Parse(split[ITERATION_INDEX]);
            byte[] salt = Convert.FromBase64String(split[SALT_INDEX]);
            byte[] hash = Convert.FromBase64String(split[PBKDF2_INDEX]);

            byte[] testHash = PBKDF2(password, salt, iterations, hash.Length);
            return SlowEquals(hash, testHash);
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Compares two byte arrays in length-constant time. This comparison
        /// method is used so that password hashes cannot be extracted from
        /// on-line systems using a timing attack and then attacked off-line.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="a">The first byte array.</param>
        /// <param name="b">The second byte array.</param>
        /// <returns>True if both byte arrays are equal. False otherwise.</returns>
        private static bool SlowEquals(byte[] a, byte[] b)
        {
            uint diff = (uint)a.Length ^ (uint)b.Length;
            for (int i = 0; i < a.Length && i < b.Length; i++)
                diff |= (uint)(a[i] ^ b[i]);
            return diff == 0;
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Computes the PBKDF2-SHA1 hash of a password.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="password">The password to hash.</param>
        /// <param name="salt">The salt.</param>
        /// <param name="iterations">The PBKDF2 iteration count.</param>
        /// <param name="outputBytes">The length of the hash to generate, in bytes.</param>
        /// <returns>A hash of the password.</returns>
        private static byte[] PBKDF2(string password, byte[] salt, int iterations, int outputBytes)
        {
            Rfc2898DeriveBytes pbkdf2 = new Rfc2898DeriveBytes(password, salt);
            pbkdf2.IterationCount = iterations;
            return pbkdf2.GetBytes(outputBytes);
        }
    }
}

C# is usually thought of as a backend, server-side language. But with the Blazor-Web Assembly combo, developers can use it for client-side as well. 

A .NET library for reading and writing CSV files. Extremely fast, flexible and easy to use. Supports reading and writing of custom class objects. 

.NET 7 minimal API from scratch | FULL COURSE | clean architecture, repository pattern, CQRS MediatR

In this course I want to provide you a project structure and code organization to get you started with real .NET 7 minimal API projects. It's a full course on this topic where I start from creating and explaining the project structure, setting up different layers using EF Core, repository pattern, CQRS and MediatR. The biggest part of the video is however around the .NET 7 minimal API, taking you from the initial setup, explaining route handlers, implementing all CRUD operations and so on. Last but not least, this course walks you through the process of refactoring the .NET 7 minimal API so that it becomes readable, maintainable and scalable. At the end, you'll have a full project structure organized according to modern architectural patterns that you can take as a template for your own projects.

Contents
1. Intro: 00:00
2. Structuring the solution: 01:00
3. Coding the domain layer: 05:25
4. Coding the data access layer: 08:22
5. Creating repositories: 11:17
6. Adding migrations and database update: 22:30
7. CQRS with MediatR: 29:07
8. Route and rout handlers: 52:06
9. Dependency injection: 55:52
10. Implementing GET by ID : 57:40
11. Implementing POST route: 01:00:26
12. Implementing GET all route: 01:03:41
13. Implement PUT and DELETE: 01:04:57
14. Testing with Postman: 01:09:01
15. Is there a problem? 01:12:41
16. Refactoring service registrations: 01:15:49
17. Refactoring route registrations: 01:20:01
18. Automatic registration of endpoints: 01:26:28
19. Introducing route groups:  01:31:43
20. Extract lambdas into instance methods: 01:34:31
21: Model validation with endpoint filters: 01:45:58
22. Global exception handling: 01:55:10
23. Conclusions: 01:59:49 

Modern, animated, responsive, easy to customize, easy to use, MVVM orientated, free, .Net charts, LiveCharts listens for any change in your data and updates the UI automatically, for now only available for WPF and WinForms