Benefits of choosing async programming

Asynchronous programming is a powerful paradigm that can significantly enhance the performance, scalability, and responsiveness of complex industry applications, particularly those with concurrent and resource-intensive tasks.

Asynchronous patterns are essential for handling a large number of concurrent connections or requests in systems like web servers, making applications more scalable.

Many developers find that the benefits of asynchronous programming, such as improved performance and responsiveness, outweigh the downsides. Careful design, coding practices, and proper training can mitigate many of challenges associated with asynchronous programming (fe. complexity, debugging complexicity, increased development time).

Despite their distinctions, asynchronous (async) and synchronous (sync) methods offer advantages tailored to different stakeholders: Async benefits users, while sync eases the workflow for developers.

What is .NET MAUI?

.NET MAUI (Multi-platform App UI) is the highly anticipated open-source cross-platform application building tool to succeed Xamarin, which in .NET MAUI was extended with desktop scenarios. .NET MAUI provides a single project that handles all the multi-targeting across devices and their platforms. In .NET MAUI you can develop applications for the following platforms:

• Windows 11 and Windows 10 version 1809 or higher, using Windows UI Library (WinUI) 3,
• macOS 10.13 or higher, using Mac Catalyst,
• iOS 10 or higher,
• Android 5.0 (API 21) or higher

and additionally:

• Tizen, supported by Samsung,
• Linux, supported by the community.

Android and iOS applications with an interface built by MAUI technology can be created in Visual Studio for Windows and Mac in the Visual Studio 2022 in 17.3 version (on Mac it needs also Xcode 13.0 or higher), while creating applications for Windows and macOS is possible just in Visual Studio for the right system.
.NET MAUI is a part of .NET Core (currently renamed as a .NET 6) and it has been released on 9th of August for Windows. Microsoft’s developers are still working to release many of these amazing tools for Mac developers as well, but now it is still only available in preview version for them.

How does .NET MAUI work?

Basically, .NET MAUI is all about the unification of the above mentioned platforms’ APIs into a single API.

As was already mentioned, .NET MAUI is part of .NET 6, which provides platform-specific frameworks for creating apps: .NET for Android, .NET for iOS, .NET for macOS, and Windows UI 3 (WinUI 3) library. The library which connects all of them is .NET 6 Base Class Library (BCL) based on Win32 with UWP in Windows and Mono Runtime in rest systems. This library abstracts the details of the underlying platform away from your code and allows for sharing common business logic between them. But all platforms have different approaches to defining the UI of an application. So the developer can create the UI for each of them separately using the platform-specific framework.

.NET MAUI provides a single framework for building the UIs for mobile and desktop apps.

It unifies systems which allow to create applications with graphical user interfaces for the above mentioned platforms in XAML. But it is not a one and only possibility. The new thing is that you can use Blazor as well (which is associated mostly with Web applications) for this.

Apart of graphical aspects of applications, .NET MAUI also unifies some other parts of applications like access to sensors, e.g. gyroscope or accelerometer, file access and data storage mechanisms, network state tracking or access to device information.

Thanks to that, native client apps can be build with a single codebase (with some platform-specific files just in case, without separating that in different projects). This can be really helpful and means that, to some extent, an application can be written without taking care of differences in code for other platforms. Such an approach is known as ‘write-once, run-anywhere’ (WORA) which has been known in software developing for a long time.

The conclusion is that you write code which is able to interact with .NET MAUI API, and then it directly consumes the native platform APIs. In addition, app code may directly exercise platform APIs, if required. Quite simple, isn’t it?

Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) is the name for a set of technologies based on the integration of query capabilities directly into the C# language. It is used to write queries against strongly typed collections of objects. For a developer who writes queries, the most visible “language-integrated” part of LINQ is the query expression. However, even with the LINQ standard query operators, used to create these queries, it is easy to misuse these operators unless you have a solid understanding of how they work internally.

Such misuse leads to inefficient queries that are slower – in some cases much slower – than the equivalent properly tuned query. This article contains a list of tips that you can use to tune your queries to yield results faster.

Kamil started his adventure with Macrix in March 2020 as a Software Developer. In 2021, he became a team leader after successfully completing the selection process for this role. At the beginning of this year, Kamil was promoted to Senior Software Developer. From the very beginning of his time at Macrix, Kamil has been actively involved in the life of the company and in building positive relations between employees. 

Kamil, how did you become team leader of one of the Macrix teams?

It started when the Macrix Board decided to change the organizational structure of our company. The Development Department was constantly growing and became too big for the flat structure that we had at that time. The internal recruitment process started, and I was convinced to take part in it. The final decision was positive, and I was chosen along with five other colleagues to become the first team leaders in the company. We now already have eight teams and everything indicates that they will grow rapidly.

What prerequisites did you have to meet to become a team leader at Macrix?

It’s hard to say. I didn’t have any experience in management, but it was helpful for me that I was a trainer in my previous company, so I already knew something about working with people and guiding them. I think that some of the values that the recruitment team was looking for were empathy, enthusiasm, and openness.

Do you enjoy being a team leader? What are your responsibilities?

Definitely, I do! I derive a lot of satisfaction from working with people, by supporting colleagues at their daily work. In general, I have one major duty – to take care of my teammates’ satisfaction. This was one the main reasons for establishing functional teams and all my actions are directed at maintaining a high level of satisfaction. This includes forwarding two-way feedback during evaluation meetings, interacting in situations when colleagues need support, trying to recognize potential issues, keeping an eye on their moods, and organizing team building evenings. All my actions focus on the wellbeing of the team.

How much time do you spend on team leader duties? Do you have to define time frames?

Usually, this takes about 10% of my time per week. However, it can also be more, depending on if there are any onboardings, evaluation meetings or similar situations that requires my involvement.

Did you always know that you want to be a leader?

I always was finding myself in leading roles at school, so I guess somehow, I have this need. However, when joining Macrix, I didn’t assume that I will take on leadership responsibilities. As I said at the beginning, someone had to convince me to take part in the recruitment process because even then I didn’t plan that. Now I am happy that I took the opportunity.

Was there any situation that was exceptionally satisfying to you?

A few times I was able to help colleagues in the team to solve issues and made them comfortable again at Macrix. In those situations, I felt that I made a difference, which was very satisfying to me. In general, the team leaders have already recognized and fixed a number of issues that would have gone unnoticed in the previous flat structure that we had at our company. It makes me proud of the team leaders group.

For you personally, what are the perks associated with the team leader function?

I appreciate working closely with people. I learn how to work with different types of characters or how to fight for my and my team’s interest. The role also helps me to strengthen my assertiveness. Also, being a leader forces me to balance between project and team duties. I have the opportunity to work on some skills that I never would have a chance to improve being just a developer.

What’s your “recipe” for being a good leader?

I have the principle that I am a team leader first and then I am a developer. I hope that my teammates remember that they can come to me at any time, and that they are my priority.

What challenges do you face managing your team? How do you handle them?

The last two and half years forced us to move our daily work at least partly to home and to communicate via chats or video calls. It is harder to build relationships, especially from the team leader’s perspective who should be close to his team, gauge people’s moods and help whenever they need assistance. To overcome this, I try to convince colleagues working remotely to come to the office from time to time, organize integration evenings or catch colleagues at work for chatting.

What do you think is the most essential aspect of good team management?

There are two fundamentals that I prioritize: honesty and trust. Honesty is a value that a team leader should spread in the team from the very beginning. After some time, honesty will earn trust. Having these two is essential to build a strong team.

What else is important that someone who aspires to become a leader should now?

Our life never is black and white. It’s important to consider all options and learn all perspectives and points of view. Acting on emotions will only cause problems. There is one sentence said once by one of the team leaders: if you make a mistake in the code then it’s easy to fix. If you make a mistake working with people, then it’s hard to build trust again. I think any potential leader should take this thought to heart.

The world of cybercrime

Back in the days when the Internet was just beginning to explode, the stereotypical hacker was often portrayed as a hooded guy, working on his PC in a dark room to steal your data. In the modern world things get a little bit more complicated: often, cybercriminals do not act as single persons, but as groups of people with different skills and knowledge.

Cybercriminals mostly fall in one of these categories:

• Access broker – someone with good technical or soft skills (often both), specialized in getting access to accounts or infrastructures via hacking or social engineering, but all they do is sell the access to the highest bidder.
• RaaS operator – a Ransomware as a Service operator is someone who develops and maintains ransomware tools. They provide them to cybercriminals as a service, often taking some percentage from the ransom from cyberattacks. They are often the one negotiating with the victim of the attack as a proxy. 
• RaaS affiliate – this the actual attacker who gets inside the infrastructure, looks through the network, moves laterally (getting more and more privileges and access) and in the end deploys the ransomware software.
• Script kiddies – this is a mocking term for an inexperienced hacker who only knows how to use already existing tools and scripts to gain access to IT systems.