Microsoft releases Visual Studio 2022 version 17.2, the second supported long-term servicing channel for Visual Studio 2022. This version of Visual Studio will be supported with fixes and security updates for 18 months through January 2024. Visual Studio 2022 version 17.2 adds new improvements to the C# and .NET experiences, new Git performance and experiences, updates for C++ developers, and new Azure tools for local development and deployment.

Microsoft releases the next major version of the .NET Framework. The latest .NET Framework 5.0 also includes support for C# 9 and F# 5, along with a broad set of new features and improvements. With .NET 5 as the first release of unified implementation of .NET Framework, Microsoft targets a much larger group of developers to migrate their .NET code.

If you are looking for .NET 5.0, here you can get the links to download the latest version for Windows, macOS, and Linux. You will need Visual Studio 16.8 or later to use .NET 5.0 on Windows and the latest version of Visual Studio for Mac on macOS.

If you are using Visual Studio 2017 version 15.3, it came with new improvements on top of C# 7.0, thus changing the version to 7.1. One of the new change in C# 7.1 is 'default' literal to avoid the redundant information while writing code.

In this post, we will learn about this improvement and will also cover how to use this. Continue reading to know about it.

If you are using COM components on your .NET code, you might be already aware of the Marshal.ReleaseComObject and Marshal.FinalReleaseComObject, which are used to release the managed reference to Runtime Callable Wrapper (RCW) of the COM object.

If both are used to release COM objects from memory, and you are unsure which one to use, then this post will help you to learn the differences between the calls.

If you are using .NET Framework 2.0 or .NET Framework 3.5, and getting unexpected Runtime Error while repeatedly calling the System.Net.NetworkInformation.Ping.Send method from C# code, this is due to an issue which got resolved in .NET Framework 4.0 and above.

Today, we are going to discuss about the issue, the root cause and the workaround to resolve this issue targeting .NET Framework version older than 4.0.

It's often require to parse a string value to another data type, like integer, and there exists a confusion among the developers whether to use the Parse method or the TryParse method that the framework provides to us.

In this post, we will discuss the difference between each of those two methods and guide you to understand and pick the preferable one. Continue reading to know more.

Let's continue our 'Back to Basics' series. It's often an interview question to get an idea of the basic knowledge of a candidate. This is one of the simple question that an interviewer may ask during an interview and you should also know this while writing your code.

In this post, we are again going to discuss on the basics and this time we will learn the difference between null string and empty string.

StringCollection class is a spcialized collection type present in .NET Framework class libraries. The name itself represents it as a collection of strings. It exposes common methods and properties to manage string collection.

If you do not know about this class, in this post we are going learn about it's properties, methods and learn how to use it.

In last few articles we have discussed about NPOI libraries for .NET. There could be some cases, while reading Excel files, you may get an exception with 'The supplied spreadsheet seems to be Excel 5.0/7.0 (BIFF5) format. POI only supports BIFF8 format' as message.

In this quick tip, we are going to discuss about this issue, the way to handle it and the way to read the same Excel workbook content.

In the last two articles, we have learned how to use the NPOI library to read Excel 2007 (.xlsx) and Excel 97-2003 (.xls) file format. We have also discussed more about the APIs and shared the code snippet for you to understand it easily.

In this article, we will learn how to read Excel 95 and older workbooks easily using the free Apache NPOI libraries in your C#/.NET applications.

In the last article, we have discussed about the NPOI library and then learned how to read Excel 2007 file formats using the free, open sourced NPOI library. I hope, the code snippet was clear and easy to understand.

In this article, we will learn how to read Excel 97-2003 workbooks easily using the free Apache NPOI libraries in your C#/.NET applications.

Recently, we have learned how to read Excel workbooks using the Microsoft Office COM APIs. As you may already know that the COM APIs are slow while performing operation, we will see another way to read the content which is faster.

In this article, we will learn how to read Excel 2007 workbooks using the Apache NPOI libraries which is available freely to use in your application.

Recently we learnt how to read Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel document contents (text only) using the interop APIs exposed by Microsoft. Now, what about reading the text content from PowerPoint slides? This can be achievable using another interop assembly file.

Today we will discuss how to extract the texts available in PPT files using 'Microsoft.Office.Interop.PowerPoint.dll'. Code has been shared for your easy reference.

Recently, we learned how to read text contents of Microsoft Word document from a .NET application using the APIs exposed in 'Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.dll'. There may be a business requirement to read contents of Excel sheets too.

Today we are going to learn how to read Microsoft Excel documents. The complete source code has been shared for your easy reference.

There could be some possible business needs for your .NET application to read the text contents from a Microsoft Word document. This can be simply done using the APIs exposed in the dll named 'Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.dll'.

Let's have a quick look on how to do it using C#/.NET. Also find the complete source code shared here for your easy reference.

Recently in a blog post, we discussed, how to detect whether an assembly is digitally signed using the C# programming language and System.Management.Automation.dll from Microsoft. That was one way to get the status of the digital signing.

Today we will learn another method to detect the same without using any additional dll references in our project. I hope that, it will much more interesting to learn.

Digital signatures are the public-key primitives of message authentication. In common words, hand written signatures are defined to put authenticity of a file. In digital word, it’s the digital signature binds a person/entity to the digital data.

In this blog post, we will learn how to detect whether an assembly (.dll or .exe) is digitally signed. We will use .NET/C# to identify the same. Continue reading to know more on this topic.

In the last blog post, we discussed the C# code to detect whether any antivirus product is already installed in the system. In today's blog post we will learn how to retrieve the installed antivirus software name from the Security Center.

Continue reading to grab the source code and discuss more on the API set exposed by the Framework. If you have any queries, do let me know.

Many time during app development, developers need to find out whether any Antivirus software is installed in client's operating system. In case it is installed, we may want to know the installed antivirus software name.

If you are looking for such code (using .NET/C#), you came to the right place. Here we are going to see the code to retrieve this information.

Microsoft .NET Framework is a programming infrastructure created by Microsoft for building, deploying and running applications & services that use .NET technologies, such as desktop applications, web applications and Web services.

In this post, I am going to list down the history of .NET Framework along with the key features which has been introduced with each version of the framework.