What articles C# developers liked in 2016 December 19, 2016 posted in c#, articles, trends, hot, newsletter.

One of the benefits of running C# Digest – a weekly newsletter from .NET community – is to see which articles were the most popular in the C# space and what the programmers liked to read in the last year.

This year I shared over 486 articles through the weekly emails and I bet you are wondering which ones were the top 5.

Multithreading, concurrency and parallel programming are big topics in the .NET community and sometimes even seasoned developers don’t get them right. In this series of posts Ben Bowen explains common mistakes and how to avoid them. We are eager to see part 3 about unsafe assumptions.

One of the big things of 2016 was .NET Core and Microsoft officially supporting OS X and Linux platforms. Piotr Gankiewicz shared his experience of setting up and running a competitive development environment on Linux Mint and lots of people liked it. I’m glad to see .NET on other platforms as the power of some UNIX tools is enormous and programmers can only benefit from this mutual symbiosis.

Productivity tips and improving your development experience in Visual Studio is a popular topic. It seems that every .NET developer loves to be more efficient and deliver better quality code and use the best tools possible. In this article Hamid Mosalla shared his 12 favorite extensions for Visual Studio. Check them out!

Number two is actually not an article but a reddit discussion about C# bad practices. Some might argue that it doesn’t belong to a newsletter, but reading these battlefield proven stories might actually improve the way how you think about your design as opposed to read another article about Javascript fatigue.

And it only proves that C# developers care about their code and want to avoid common pitfalls. Good on us!

Performance is a hot topic in .NET world. You can write very efficient and fast applications in .NET with the speed of development a C++ developers could only dream of.

The most popular article of this year is this deep dive into Entity Framework performance and database techniques by David Obando and Eric Dettinger. Great read guys, thank you — I bet you saved a few CPU cycles and disk spins out of our database and application servers.

Conclusion

These were the most read articles that I shared with you over 2016. I recommend reading through them (even twice if you already did) as you can learn a heaps.

Make sure that you don’t miss the golden ones in 2017 and subscribe to the weekly newsletter to keep your knowledge up to date.

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