C#

I’ve been using GitHub Copilot, Claude, and ChatGPT to help me code for a couple of years now. But AI has always been in the assistant role – I was the one in the driver’s seat, asking technical questions or letting GitHub Copilot generate sections of code based on what I was writing. It makes you a more productive developer because it’s faster than Googling, but at the end of the day, I was still the one fundamentally coding, just with better tooling. ...

First things first…YamlDotNet is a great library and I’m thankful it exists and is so well maintained. Also, this is just how I figured out a solution to my requirement. I’m fully open to and would welcome suggestions on a simpler way to do this. I was recently trying to find a way to do some configuration definitions in as clean a manner as possible. Generally, I’m not a fan of YAML and agree with many of the complaints about YAML. But YAML is probably the most plain english and clutter free model for defining a configuration. XML and JSON are much preferred - in my developer brain - but JSON is harder to write by hand and XML seems to have fallen out of favor. (Personal note: I still have a love for XML and XML Schema.) ...

I’ve become a big fan of extension methods over the years to make my development work in Dynamics CRM, easier to implement and easier to read (i.e., easier to support.) Extension methods allow us to, exactly as the name implies, extended an existing class or interface with new methods - its a simpler version of implementing a derived class. Anyone familiar with developing .NET code for Dynamics CRM will be familiar with the IOrganizationService interface and its varied implementations. While in most cases I’m a fan of implementing my own version of IOrganizationService, often for code-base simplicity I’ll rely on some extension methods for my code. ...