Azure, DevOps and .NET articles

Mapping objects with AutoMapper can save you a lot of time and repeated code. However, some mappings are more tricky than others. Consider the example where we want to map two lists of objects and moreover, a specific property of each of these list-objects should contain the value of a property from a parent object.

Let us see this scenario with a concrete example:

Records were introduced in C# 9.0 and are a handy way of holding data, instead of using properties of classes. I recently came along the task of mapping one record of one type to one of another type by using AutoMapper. At first I thought I will map them exactly as I would map the properties of two different classes. However, it was trickier than that :)

When parsing and reading XML files in your C# code, you can use the XDocument or XElement objects to access it with LINQ and the Descendants or Elements properties. However, there is another option; you can use XPATH for traversing the XML. In this example we are going to see how you access a value of an XML-element, by matching the value of another element with a value given from the user.

When using the Moq framework for mocking your C# classes, you will have do define what dummy value or values a method of the mocked classes returns. For that we use the Setup method and in the Returns method we define the returned value. The question now is, which dummy value to return when your methods return a IReadOnlyCollection collection.

While using AutoMapper for mapping different objects in your application, you might encounter situations where you need business logic from other services during the mapping process. To handle this, you can inject these services into your Profile class.