Dot Net What Not Posts

One of our main applications involves interacting with a third-party API. Whilst this is generally stable, we have had cases recently where it was throwing random exceptions. We could make the same request with the same parameters multiple times, and sometimes it would work, and sometimes it wouldn’t.

While we left the owners of the third-party API scratching their heads, we realised that the way we handled interaction with such APIs wasn’t robust enough. The first (and most obvious) improvement would simply be to try again.

As this is the sort of thing we’d want to do in a number of places, rather than repeat the same boilerplate code over and over again, we looked for a helper class.

We had a situation in which application users were not checking the customer list before adding new customers, which was resulting in multiple entries for the same customer. We wanted to make it so that when they tried to add a new customer, they would be shown a list of possible duplicates.

It turned out that finding duplicates wasn’t as easy as I thought. I ended up with a helper class that used Metaphones to find similar customers. This post describes the class, and shows how to use it.

I was working with a third-party API, and had to specify a date range object, with a start and date. The problem was, their server was throwing intermittent exceptions when I passed this date filter object as a parameter, claiming that the start date was after the end date. I checked the data, and I was definitely sending a valid date range.

The answer to the problem turned out to involve a little-known (to me at least) part of DateTime. Not the sort of thing you encounter every day, but worth knowing about for the times when it hits you.

A quick and simple way to find out which method called the current one.

I discovered a gem of a class hidden away in the .NET framework that makes parsing CSV files very simple.

Read more for details, and some sample code.