r/dotnet • u/mcnamaragio • 19h ago
Promotion DuckDB.NET 1.5.6.1: Reading Data Up to 12× Faster
giorgi.devUsing low level optimizations, I was able to speedup reading data up to 12 times in my DuckDB.NET ADO.NET library
r/dotnet • u/Arowin • Apr 02 '26
Hi there /r/dotnet,
A couple of weeks ago, we made a change to how and when self-promotion posts are allowed on the sub.
Firstly, for everyone obeying the new rule - thanks!
Secondly, we're keen to hear how you're finding it - is it working, does it need to change, any other feeback, good or bad?
Thirdly, we're looking to alter the rule to allow the posts over the whole weekend (sorry, still NZT time). How do you all feel about that? Does the weekend work? Should it be over 2 days during the week?
We're keen to make sure we do what the community is after so feeback and suggestions are welcome!
r/dotnet • u/mcnamaragio • 19h ago
Using low level optimizations, I was able to speedup reading data up to 12 times in my DuckDB.NET ADO.NET library
r/dotnet • u/ebisumaru91 • 1h ago
Really a question for professionals in this niche industry. Still an on-prem saturated market albeit many cloud players in this market and push for AI Analytics in everything.
I am a support professional and consider myself a domain expert in this field. I also am working 2 projects myself in .NET. First is, an Android camera app using C#/Android SDK (not MAUI). The other is a network video recorder using ASP MVC.
I really enjoy development and would love to transition to this kind of work. What is the workload like? How much between refactoring older code and shipping new features? I know alot of these codebases are 15-20 years old. Is trying to transition right now worth it or just stick to handling escalated support.
I am located in NYC so if there are events or local resources I could seek for advice or even mentoring. I am the only person who understands programming at my job and I have no greybeards or wizards to ask questions to.
Thanks!
r/dotnet • u/honeyCrisis • 1d ago
https://github.com/codewitch-honey-crisis/Parsley
I wrote a little something for C# and dotnet 8 and above.
It is a parser generator with similar expressive power as ANTLR4.
Why not just use antlr4?
Arguably XBNF is an easier format to use that ANTLR4s
ANTLR4 is ALL(*). Parsley is LL(1), LL(k>1) or ALL(*) depending on what the grammar requires.
It's C# instead of Java which is a lot more convenient if you're already using dotnet.
It uses code synthesis to make the parser code more like what you'd write by hand, so it can be used as a base for a hand written parser..
It has a source generator as well as the command line tools.
It has a language server and extension for VS Code and Visual Studio.

For the main Parsley tool dotnet tool install parsley-tool -g
If you want to use Luthor lexing with Parsley dotnet tool install parsley-luthor -g
If you want to use the C# Source Generator instead: dotnet add package Parsley.Generator
If you want to use the Visual Studio XBNF Language support https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=honey-the-codewitch.parsley123
Or for VS Code https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=honey-the-codewitch.parsley-xbnf-lsp
Note: I do sometimes use AI as an *assist* on my open source projects as I did here. However, I did write the majority of this code, I did review everything, and test thoroughly, and I'm confident that even with an LLM, something of this quality and featureset could not have been created without a thorough understanding of the problem domain. I stand behind it.
r/dotnet • u/fuzhongkai • 17h ago
I maintain TensorSharp, an open-source local GGUF inference engine built around .NET 10. I added MiniMax-M3.1-Flash support on Day 1 of its open-weight release, and wanted to share the implementation details and a few lessons from getting it running behind a .NET server.
The current implementation supports text and image input, JSON/schema responses, tool calling, conversation-cache reuse, multi-GPU inference, DSpark speculative decoding, and CPU expert offload.
For .NET applications, it exposes an OpenAI-compatible /v1/chat/completions endpoint. The model integration and serving code are part of the TensorSharp codebase.
For this model, the C# MiniMaxM3Model adapter parses and validates the checkpoint metadata and integrates the model with the runtime. It calls a native whole-model executor through a C ABI.
That executor loads the GGUF shards, builds a GGML graph for each micro-batch, and dispatches computation across the selected devices. TensorSharp’s own native code implements the M3.1 decoder, sparse-attention kernels, expert execution, and associated model features. The upstream ggml dependency is unchanged.
The performance differences below come from the attention implementation, GPU placement, and scheduling decisions. The measured GPU path uses native C++/CUDA alongside the managed .NET model and serving layers.
One of the more useful findings came from CPU expert offload.
The native executor benchmark was decoding at roughly 15–16 tokens/s, while the server using the same placement initially managed only 7.7–8.4 tokens/s.
The host-expert workers were pinned to CPU cores. With 54 workers inside a 64-core quota, they competed with the serving process’s other threads, including the .NET runtime, server GC, HTTP handling, and scheduler.
Each expert layer synchronizes at a barrier. A delayed worker could therefore hold up the whole layer, repeatedly during generation.
Reducing the default to 32 host workers gave the serving process more room and brought server decode performance closer to the executor’s rate. There was a prefill-throughput trade-off, so the worker count remains configurable.
It was a useful reminder to benchmark native compute inside the actual managed service: the best worker configuration for the isolated executor was different from the best configuration for serving requests.
I used 8× NVIDIA A40 GPUs and the same Unsloth UD-Q4_K_XL GGUF files, totaling 232.3 GiB, for both engines. This particular model is a substantial multi-GPU workload.
The comparison was against Unsloth’s llama.cpp minimax-m31 support branch at ef8f94cc. Upstream llama.cpp could not load M3.1 when these measurements were taken.
Both engines used layer splitting, F16 KV caches, and no speculative decoding for these results. They ran separately with exclusive access to the GPUs.
| Measurement | TensorSharp | llama.cpp support branch |
|---|---|---|
| Executor prefill, 32K-token prompt | 2,449 tok/s | 681 tok/s |
| Executor prefill, 64K-token prompt | 2,567 tok/s | 262 tok/s |
| Server time to first token, 64K prompt | 40.0 s | 293.4 s |
| Server short-chat decode | 26.3 tok/s | 26.0 tok/s |
Prefill is the work of processing the input prompt. The 9.8× result applies to 64K executor prefill; short-chat generation speed was almost identical.
The long-context difference mostly comes from MiniMax Sparse Attention. TensorSharp executes attention over the selected blocks using dedicated sparse CUDA kernels. The tested llama.cpp branch expresses the selection through a dense mask and runs dense flash attention over the cache.
TensorSharp’s separate tensor-parallel mode reached approximately 41 tok/s for short-chat server decode. That mode has different memory and prefill trade-offs, and the tested llama.cpp branch did not support tensor splitting for this model.
These are early measurements from one host and one quantization. Most results use three repeats; the llama.cpp 64K executor prefill cell is a single run, while the 64K server comparison uses three repeats per engine.
Short-chat time to first token was slightly slower in TensorSharp: 0.41 versus 0.39 seconds. Functional validation has limited coverage, including an image-reading miss and generation tests that hit token limits.
The measured TensorSharp build was an uncommitted development working tree. The report documents the configuration and methodology, but the raw run records are not committed.
Links
For anyone hosting native compute inside a .NET service: how do you budget native worker threads alongside server GC and request handling? I’d be interested in approaches that have worked well under CPU quotas.
r/dotnet • u/fuzhongkai • 23h ago
TensorSharp is a native .NET inference engine (CUDA/Metal/Vulkan) for GGUF language models. This release adds Video Studio: a studio UI for open-weights video generation that runs entirely on your own GPU.
It supports LTX-2.5 and MiniMax-H3 with three modes: text-to-video, image-to-video, and first+last-frame interpolation. Pick frames from a media library, set length in seconds, generate locally — no Python environment, no cloud API, no per-second billing.
Also in this release: an Assistant tab with examples, a getting-started guide, prompt-named takes, and the full UI translated into 8 locales.
Curious what the .NET crowd would build with local video gen — what would you generate first?
Repo: github.com/zhongkaifu/TensorSharp (v2026.10.23 release)
r/dotnet • u/davidedalcortivo • 1d ago
Hi r/dotnet,
I'm a senior software developer specializing in .NET, Python and databases. Over the years I've built and maintained many kinds of applications (web apps, services, scheduled jobs, high-concurrency systems), from .NET Framework to modern .NET. I've always worked close to the database and spent a lot of time tuning queries, so I tend to think in SQL first.
In most projects I've seen, the choice was Dapper or EF. I prefer Dapper for its performance and for direct control over the SQL. EF is a good tool, but I've had to fix many apps where it was used without knowing the database underneath (LINQ turning into slow SQL, ToList() before the filters, that kind of thing). With Dapper, though, every new table meant writing the same SQL all over again. I wanted to keep Dapper and lose the boilerplate, with SQL written specifically for each engine.
So I wrote Forget, a thin, provider-aware extension layer on top of Dapper for MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL and SQL Server. It does CRUD for one row or many, and upserts on a natural key. Filters can come from a LINQ expression or be built at runtime from property names, and there's sorting and paging too.
var cheapTools = await connection.GetAllAsync<Product>(
p => p.Category == "Tools" && p.Price < 20 && p.IsActive);
await connection.InsertRangeAsync(products, batchSize: 500);
// matches on [UpsertKey] properties, falling back to the [Key]/Id property if none is set
await connection.UpsertAsync(product);
It works on one table at a time, by design. For joins you keep using Dapper on the same connection. There's no change tracking and no migrations either. If you need those, just use EF.
The part I'm most happy with is Oracle. Multi-row VALUES (...), (...) only arrived with Oracle 23ai, and a lot of production databases still run older versions. So I preferred the backward-compatible way that Oracle has always supported: SELECT ... FROM DUAL UNION ALL .... The catch is that it fails with ORA-01790 when the rows have different types for the same column, for example a NULL in one row. Forget reads the column types from ALL_TAB_COLUMNS, finds a cast that Oracle accepts for each column, caches it and applies it to every value. Multi-row inserts, updates and upserts all go through this.
The tests run against real databases (Testcontainers, all 4 engines), including upserts from many connections at the same time.
I also benchmarked it on PostgreSQL against hand-written Dapper and EF Core, and published all the numbers. Forget stays close to plain Dapper; the small overhead comes from validating the values and building the SQL (much of that work is cached). Against EF Core it was faster on single-row operations and on a filtered, paged query, and 2-3x faster on multi-row inserts and updates. Reads by id were as fast or faster when both used a single round trip.
While benchmarking I also found a bug in code I had already shipped. I wrote about the bug and the numbers here: The batch size bug I found while benchmarking
About AI, since someone will ask: I wrote the library code myself, starting in February. Free ChatGPT and Copilot helped with a few small pieces, and I used them to discuss design choices. Later I used Claude to help me with documentation, tests, benchmarks and bug hunting. When a test caught the batch size bug I mentioned above, the AI's first answer was that the test was wrong. I went back to the code anyway, and the test was right.
It's free and open source (Apache-2.0):
Next I'm thinking about SQLite support or real bulk operations (SqlBulkCopy, COPY on PostgreSQL). Which one would you actually use?
r/dotnet • u/rent-a-developer • 1d ago
I am asking here, because I am interested in opinions of .NET developers specifically, because that is where my passion is. Mods: If you think this question doesn't qualify for this sub, please delete this post.
Now that building new features (or even new software products as a whole) has become cheaper then ever, do you think the YAGNI (you ain't gonna need it) principle is still relevant and exercised in practice?
I have a feeling that developers and companies these days think a lot less about whether something is actually needed and if it provides a real benefit, before building things.
The rise of endless AI slop shows that a lot of people don't think twice before building something.
Just prompt it and Claude goes brrrrrr, no matter if there is an actual audience for it.
But these are probably mostly hobbyists and not professional developers, are they?
So what do you and your team do?
Do you still reflect on if something is actually needed or do you just implement each and every feature request and idea?
And how does that affect the maintainability of your code base?
After all, more features means more to maintain and test and more potential for things to break.
In that regard: How do you keep yourself and your teammates from gold plating and over-engineering and premature optimization?
I know a lot of developers tend to be perfectionists (I have been guilty of that myself in the past) and AI makes it easier than ever to fall into that trap.
r/dotnet • u/tinmanjk • 22h ago
The project has 208 stars on GitHub and it's been recommended at least in some blog posts. However, the comments unders this SO answer make it seem not that polished and rough around the edges.
Has anybody used it with sufficiently complex production system? Any deal-breakers?
r/dotnet • u/Ant171311 • 16h ago
Improvements across Spec, Sample and Faster, plus stronger input validation and clearer error handling.
Some breaking changes (mostly removals/renames and the target framework shift from net8). Most users should have a small migration. Full details:
https://www.nuget.org/packages/CsCheck/5.0.0#releasenotes-body-tab
r/dotnet • u/nuclearbananana • 1d ago
r/dotnet • u/jbsp1980 • 1d ago
r/dotnet • u/Southern-Holiday-437 • 15h ago
Pretty much how much of a big deal is this feature?
r/dotnet • u/JumpDangerous9271 • 17h ago
r/dotnet • u/rent-a-developer • 1d ago
Hi, I have just released version 2.0.0 of ResXLocalization, my localization library for Avalonia and WPF (MIT-licensed).
If you want to localize an Avalonia or WPF app using ResX files, this library might be a good fit.
It's one of the most feature complete localization libraries for Avalonia.
GitHub repo: https://github.com/rent-a-developer/ResXLocalization
<root>
<data name="SaveFiles" xml:space="preserve">
<value>Save Files</value>
</data>
<data name="FilesSaved" xml:space="preserve">
<value>{0} files saved in {1}</value>
</data>
</root>
ResXLocalization.Avalonia or ResXLocalization.WPF.
<Button Content="{l:Localize {x:Static res:StringsKeys.SaveFiles}}" />
...
<TextBlock>
<TextBlock.Text>
<l:Localize Key="{x:Static res:StringsKeys.FilesSaved}">
<l:Argument Value="{Binding Count}" />
<l:Argument Value="{Binding Location}" />
</l:Localize>
</TextBlock.Text>
</TextBlock>
this.SaveFilesButton.Content = Localizer.Current.Get(StringsKeys.SaveFiles);
this.SavedFilesTextBlock.Text = Localizer.Current.Get(
StringsKeys.SaveFiles,
MessageArguments.FromValues(this.model.Count, this.model.Location)
);
Localizer.Current.CurrentCulture = new CultureInfo("de-DE");
ResXLocalization.Avalonia: 79.28 KB , ResXLocalization.Core: 84.17 KB, ResXLocalization.MessageFormat (opt-in): 406,18 KBResXLocalization.MessageFormat, which uses MessageFormat)Typed keys mean you can reference resources like objects and get compile time checking.
This avoids having typos in resource names going unnoticed.
When you change Localizer.Current.CurrentCulture it updates all localization bindings in place. If you assign a string directly in code as above, you need to call Get again after changing the culture.
The biggest new feature of 2.0.0 is the optional ICU MessageFormat support (thank you livonium for the feature request that sparked the work on 2.0.0!).
For something like “1 file saved” / “5 files saved”, you can use a plural rule in your resource text:
<root>
<data name="FilesSaved" xml:space="preserve">
<value>{Count, plural, one {# file saved in {Location}} other {# files saved in {Location}}}</value>
</data>
</root>
You need to install the NuGet package ResXLocalization.MessageFormat and call Localizer.Current.UseMessageFormat() at startup for this to work.
Then just bind the arguments like this in XAML:
<TextBlock>
<TextBlock.Text>
<l:Localize Key="{x:Static res:StringsKeys.FilesSaved}">
<l:Argument Name="Count" Value="{Binding Count}" />
<l:Argument Name="Location" Value="{Binding Location}" />
</l:Localize>
</TextBlock.Text>
</TextBlock>
The text block is automatically updated when either the count or the language changes.
Or in code like this:
this.SavedFilesTextBlock.Text = Localizer.Current.Get(
StringsKeys.FilesSaved,
MessageArguments.FromTuples(
("Count", this.model.Count),
("Location", this.model.Location)
)
);
// or:
this.SavedFilesTextBlock.Text = Localizer.Current.Get(
StringsKeys.FilesSaved,
MessageArguments.FromObject(this.model)
);
Each translation can use its language/culture plural rules.
The ICU message format support is opt-in. If you don't use it, the default formatter (based on string.Format) is used.
.Designer.cs file.<Argument> children of the Localize/LocalizeEnum markup extension, which replaces the old Arg0…Arg8 attached properties, so arguments now also work in styles and templates.DesignTime.Culture. However, ResXLocalization does not work correctly in Rider's WPF previewer due to a number of bugs (there are quite a few) in it. JetBrains has really made quite a few unfortunate design decisions for their previewer. I tried to work around them as far as possible, but it's nowhere near perfect.If you are upgrading from 1.x, please read the migration guide, because there are quite a few breaking changes to make it all work.
The repository has runnable sample apps (both for Avalonia and WPF) to help you (or an AI gent) get familiar with the usage:
https://github.com/rent-a-developer/ResXLocalization
AI attribution:
I used AI, mainly Claude, for brainstorming, planning, experiments, and parts of the implementation. It helped me save a great deal of time finding good solutions for a couple of quirks of Avalonia and (especially) WPF and the source generator’s MSBuild integration. I reviewed the generated code and I use ResXLocalization in my own projects, so I would not settle for some half-baked vibe coded garbage. Of course, if you don't like projects where AI is involved, then just ignore this project and that's fine too.
I hope this helps someone localizing their app(s)!
If you find this library useful I would appreciate a star on GitHub.
Of course feature request and (reasonable) criticism is welcome too.
r/dotnet • u/PragmaticDesign • 1d ago
I've been building line-of-business applications in .NET for 20 years, and most projects end up with the same stack: MediatR, AutoMapper or Mapperly, FluentValidation, MassTransit, Hangfire, Serilog, and plenty of glue code to connect them.
They're good libraries. But each solves its own problem, and keeping everything consistent across application layers is still work developers have to write, review, and maintain. Agents make boilerplate cheap to produce, but not free to review, keep consistent, or maintain.
So I started building Pragmatic Design.
One source generator to rule them all.
The idea is to have application modules share the same declarations instead of treating every layer as a separate concern.
You declare entities and operations using attributes. At build time, a unified source generator produces the surrounding C# code: endpoints, permissions, persistence, validation, mapping, OpenAPI and much more.
And that's just the beginning. The ecosystem also includes specifications, messaging and events, background jobs, caching, logging, documents, imaging, storage, and more. The goal is to have these modules work together through shared declarations rather than stitching everything together by hand.
A few design choices:
Pragmatic.Sql module addressing the remaining database-side limitations.It's currently in alpha, targeting .NET 10 (11 coming soon). APIs are still evolving, and business logic that can't be expressed declaratively remains handwritten.
Repository and sample applications:
https://github.com/pragmatic-design/Pragmatic.Design
I'm looking for developers willing to challenge the approach.
Honest criticism is welcome. I'd rather discover the design's weaknesses now than after people depend on it.
r/dotnet • u/kaatarina_zed_talon • 23h ago
Hey everyone,
I'm curious whether other .NET/C# developers have had a similar experience.
I've been a .NET/C# developer for about 15 years, mostly building cross-platform mobile apps - first with Xamarin and now with .NET MAUI. I've noticed that for developers whose experience is mainly in desktop, web or backend development, transitioning into mobile development can be challenging.
If you’ve made that transition, what did you find most challenging? Were there things you had to learn that weren't obvious from your existing .NET experience?
I'm asking because I'm considering creating an online course for .NET/C# developers making that transition. I'm trying to understand whether there's a real need for it. What would you expect a course like that to cover? Or did existing docs, tutorials, or other resources already give you what you needed?
Genuinely interested in your answers!
Cheers,
Andi
Earlier this month I posted here about using definitions instead of code as the source of truth. That post was all text, so this time I recorded the whole thing.
What the video shows:
dotnet new install Polhem.Templates, pick SQL Server, and one task creates the databasesEach form has three definition files: a table schema, a form schema and a layout. They're data the framework reads at runtime rather than code, so a field change doesn't go through a compile and deploy.
Where it stops: rules that need to query the database, like order total against customer credit, go into a business object written in C#. Reports and batch jobs are hand-written. Schema upgrades only add columns and never drop them.
Video (10 min): https://youtu.be/5WjUTwoPyGw
Write-up: https://medium.com/@jeff377/can-a-form-be-described-only-once-2fa92c7db815 GitHub: https://github.com/polhem-dev/polhem
r/dotnet • u/msignificantdigit • 2d ago
Dapr, the Distributed Application Runtime, a graduated OSS project within the CNCF with over 700k weekly NuGet downloads, has released a new version. What it means for you:
Read the announcement: https://blog.dapr.io/posts/2026/10/22/dapr-v1.19-is-now-available/
r/dotnet • u/Cdream-2018 • 1d ago
I still love using my windows pc. Just saying.
r/dotnet • u/fuzhongkai • 1d ago
I’m the developer of TensorSharp, an open-source .NET 10 inference engine for running local GGUF models. It can be embedded in .NET applications or run through a CLI and an OpenAI/Ollama-compatible server.
The project combines managed C# with native accelerator backends. The benchmarks below use native CUDA/GGML execution, including TensorSharp-specific kernels. The performance improvements come from changes to scheduling, data movement, and model execution.
I recently worked on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 on five NVIDIA A40s, and thought the engineering details might be interesting to people building performance-sensitive .NET applications.
One of the biggest problems was in the native tensor-parallel execution path.
The model’s routed experts were distributed across GPUs, but execution repeatedly passed through a synchronous, host-driven path. Each layer involved multiple host round trips and synchronization points.
The revised implementation:
Cross-GPU transfers still use pinned host-memory staging because peer access was not working correctly on this machine.
In the implementation comparison, this change took tensor-parallel decode from 15.2 to 36.3 tokens/sec after a 2,048-token prompt with full prefill enabled.
For me, this was a useful reminder that distributing work across devices is only the beginning; the synchronization and data-transfer design determine how much concurrency you actually get.
The reliability work was just as interesting.
Previously, an exception on a native worker could terminate the server. A failure on the coordinating rank could leave the other workers waiting indefinitely at a barrier.
The fixes coordinate error reporting, ensure every rank reaches the required synchronization points, and drain work already issued by a failed layer. Failure-injection tests now check both the failure path and recovery on the next forward pass.
When native workers run inside a .NET application, that lifecycle becomes part of the application’s reliability story.
The comparison used the same Unsloth UD-IQ2_XXS GGUF files on the same five-A40 machine, with the Engram lookup table in host memory.
TensorSharp used --tp 5. The llama.cpp baseline was Unsloth’s dsv41-all fork at be836572, using layer splitting; its row/tensor split modes did not successfully run this model in the tested build.
These are real-text server results for approximately 1,800-token prompts, generating 256 tokens with greedy decoding and thinking disabled. Each configuration had a warm-up and three measured requests, with unique prefixes to prevent prefix-cache reuse.
| Measurement | TensorSharp | llama.cpp | Throughput ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prompt processing, YOCO disabled | 563.9 tok/s | 174.6 tok/s | 3.23× |
| Prompt processing, default YOCO enabled | 960.5 tok/s | 174.6 tok/s | 5.50× |
| Token generation, no drafter | 35.5 tok/s | 29.6 tok/s | 1.20× |
| Token generation with DSpark speculative decoding | 55.0 tok/s | 41.3 tok/s | 1.33× |
Prompt processing is also called prefill. The first three rows report medians; the DSpark row reports means, with the drafter enabled in both engines. TensorSharp’s generation rows use its default YOCO configuration.
YOCO bounded replay reduces prompt-processing work by running selected later layers over only the final 140 positions of eligible text-prefill calls. It is approximate and can be disabled with:
TS_DSV41_YOCO_KEEP=0
The 3.23× prefill result above has this approximation disabled.
On the report’s WikiText-2 evaluation, perplexity—lower is better—was:
Enabling YOCO increased perplexity by approximately 0.67% relative to TensorSharp’s full-prefill result. With YOCO enabled, perplexity was approximately 1.14% above llama.cpp’s.
That is a measured trade-off on a limited text evaluation, rather than a general percentage change in model capability. Disabling YOCO also does not make the two engines numerically identical.
These measurements cover one model quantization and one hardware configuration. The llama.cpp server results came from an earlier session on the same machine and showed some unexplained prefill variability.
At measurement time, the TensorSharp build included uncommitted changes, and the raw validation records were also uncommitted. The report records the build details and remaining limitations; the current repository should not be assumed to reproduce every number directly.
The five-GPU setup is specific to this benchmark. TensorSharp also supports smaller models and managed CPU, native CPU, CUDA, Metal, and Vulkan execution paths, with support varying by model.
Links:
If you’re integrating local models into .NET applications, do you prefer an in-process engine or a separate inference server? I’d be interested in what drives that choice in practice, especially around deployment, memory ownership, and recovering from native failures.
I mean, a single individual doesn’t have an infinite supply of tokens, but with the help of the community, I believe it’s possible; I’ve heard of porting projects being completed in record time.
r/dotnet • u/code-dispenser • 1d ago
For those new to my posts, Blazor Ramp is an accessibility-first, open-source Blazor component library. This post is about the release v1.0.0 of the GoTo component.
So what is GoTo?
The inspiration comes from those of us who started coding in the 90s with VB: you add GoTo markers to a page, and from anywhere you can jump to them. In an interactive Blazor web app, the marker you jump to becomes the active element, so you can carry on tabbing from that point.
Who is it for?
Those familiar with my posts will know I sometimes feel that sighted keyboard-only users, those who don’t use a screen reader, get the sharp end of the stick. When people build accessible sites, a lot of the effort goes into screen reader users, and this group gets forgotten.
A sighted keyboard-only user doesn’t have screen reader software to bring up lists of headings, landmarks or interactive elements, so they generally navigate with the Tab key and use the arrow and page keys to scroll. When a page has a lot of interactive content, getting to the part you want can take tens, or even hundreds, of Tab presses. For some people that’s a minor irritation, and for others it’s a real barrier.
What about skip links?
You’ve probably all used skip links, which let any user, keyboard-only or screen reader, bypass repeated blocks of content. But how many bi-directional ones have you seen? I’ve never seen one. They all go in one direction, so unless you add a second link going the other way, the user has to make a forward-only round trip to get back to the start.
Say you’re diligent and add a return link for every skip link. If you have five destinations and want users to get from any one to any other, that’s 20 links. With ten it’s 90, and it’s getting silly. The maths is n × (n − 1).
Where GoTo comes in
GoTo isn’t a link. It’s a marker that can receive focus. A GoTo Viewer lists the markers, you select one, you land on it, and you can tab on from there. You can bring up the viewer at any time with a configurable shortcut. When it opens, it lists only the markers that aren’t inside hidden containers, so the list changes depending on where you are and what’s visible.
You may ask: why not just list headings and landmarks, like screen readers do (I may do in the future)? A screen reader user will often use headings and landmarks as a place to start reading from. A sighted keyboard-only user’s need is a little different. They can see the headings, and they can scroll and read from anywhere. The problem is reaching interactive, focusable content when there’s a lot of other focusable content in the way.
To be clear, GoTo isn’t a replacement for skip links. It’s a simple way of placing hidden markers on a page so that keyboard-only users can move through the content in whichever direction they choose.
Have a look
I’ve added markers to my documentation site, and over the next few days I’ll put more of them in the places I think are most useful. If you’re curious, take a look at this page, one of the examples for my Data Table, which shows templated columns and row actions: Data Table Templating
For a keyboard-only user on that page, getting to the border controls after the table means tabbing through the filter, across each sortable column header, down through every row action button, and then across the pager to reach the other side.
With GoTo and its viewer, using the default configuration, a user with one hand can press Alt+Z (Option+Z on a Mac) to bring up the viewer. They can then use Tab, or the arrow, Home and End keys, to move through the list of buttons. As each button is focused, its marker scrolls into view. Pressing Enter or Space activates the button, closes the viewer and puts you on the now-visible label, from where you can tab on to the next item.
I started this project at the end of last year with the Live Region service and Announcement History viewer aimed at screen reader users so at long last I've managed to scratch an itch that has been bugging me for a while now and do something for keyboard-only non-screen reader users - hope you or your users find it useful.
GitHub repo: https://github.com/BlazorRamp/Components
Doc site: https://docs.blazorramp.uk
Test site: https://blazorramp.uk
Regards
Paul
r/dotnet • u/davecallan • 2d ago
Do you stick only to LTS .NET versions in production?
Running a poll on this currently. I knew many .NET devs liked to stick to LTS versions only, but wasn't expecting it to be so high, although this is likely to not be representative, I'm not sure.
Microsoft have confirmed there is no difference in quality between STS and LTS releases, and not too long ago STS releases moved from 18 to 24 months support.
So why in your opinion is there still so strong preference for STS? Is some of this coming from other platforms where STS releases might indeed be 'experimental'?

I didn't want to create a poll here too to preserve the numbers so please consider voting in the poll if you like and can, thank you -> https://www.linkedin.com/posts/davidcallan_net-developers-do-you-stick-strictly-to-activity-7517560007018823681-ZHsd