May 19, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
Struggled today with launching WSL from a Windows application to automate an external build process. Turns out this was a lot harder than it should have been due to some quirks on how the `wsl.exe` and `bash.exe` are registered by the Windows Sub System for Linux.
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May 04, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
I ran into an ugly problem today with an application where nested static constructors where not doing the expected thing - failing to provide a value when one should be available. It turns out the issue has to do with constructor calls nesting and the order in which auto-initialized values are assigned.
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April 13, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
On several of my machines I've found that the 'Sharing Tab' in Explore had gone missing and I've been unable to create a share through the Windows UI. Apparently some update or software installed mucked with my settings that created an explicit exclusion to disable this Shell Addin. In this post I describe how to fix this problem and then offer several solutions: Fixing the UI problem and maybe more usefully show how you can use Powershell to share a folder or drive instead of the Windows UI.
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April 06, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
The Windows Forms designer sometimes feels very dumb - one of those times is when dealing with nested properties on a control which by default is not displayed as an expandable property that you can just dig into. Instead you have to do a bit of busy work using a TypeConverter to make it possible to create an expandable property in the designer. Here's how.
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March 29, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
If you're creating middleware components you might need at some point to inject content in the existing HTTP output stream in ASP.NET Core. In this post I discuss how to intercept Response output by using a customized stream, modify the data and update the final output generated, effectively providing response filtering.
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March 13, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
Sometimes in an application you need to take over the routing process with some custom processing that acts on an incoming URL and actually has to go to another URL. This can be a simple relinking task from old content to new, or it can be more complex where you access a specific URL on the public site that actually needs to be processed by another URL altogether.
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March 02, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
Windows long has had problems making machines stay in Sleep mode. In this post I describe some of the problems and likely solution by using `powercfg.exe` to hunt down and disable devices that can wake the computer from sleep.
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February 26, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
In ASP.NET Core 3.x Microsoft introduced a new `IWebHostEnvironment` to replace the obsoleted `IHostingEnvironment`. While that works for top level applications this can cause some complications for multi-targeted libraries that need to support both .NET Core 2.x and 3.x. This post describes the problems and offers a few workarounds.
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February 24, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
ASP.NET Core's default API handlers return an HTTP 204 response for null value results. This is meant to be a convenience feature, but if your calling API depends on a proper JSON response or an HTTP 200 result code, it can cause applications to break. In this post I'll describe why this can be a problem and how you can return proper JSON results for null values.
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February 10, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
Ever have a problem not being able to delete a file or folder because the filename is invalid? You see it in Explorer, but you can't delete or move the file? Well I just ran into this issue and after some digging figured out that you use extended path syntax `\\?\` to get around some interesting naming and sizing issue with Windows path operations.
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February 06, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
The new Chromium based Microsoft Edge browser was recently released. One of the legacy features supported by the new Edge (as with the old Edge) is for Internet Explorer compatibility mode. As much as I hate Internet Explorer I frequently have a need to use it for testing local Web Browser control content as well a number of legacy customer sites that rely on plugins and IE specific features. Here's how to enable this functionality as it's not available by default currently.
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January 14, 2020
- Maui, Hawaii
Ran into a nasty little issue with a hosted ASP.NET Core 3.1 application where InProcess hosting was not working. It turns out I hit a regression bug in 3.1 that causes InProcess hosting to fail if there are certain dependencies.
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December 30, 2019
- Maui, Hawaii
In this post I describe a small, very specialized addon component for the HighlightJs Syntax highlighter that displays a badge that lets you copy the code snippet and displays the syntax language. The post covers how to use this simple component, and a look behind the scenes on how it works.
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December 18, 2019
- Maui, Hawaii
Ran into a problem with updating a Visual Studio extension today where the VSIX installer first failed to install for the latest version of Visual Studio and then failed to enable the option to install for that same version. Turns out it was related to incorrectly specifying the right version number for VS 2019 and in this post I show how to use the correct (and somewhat unexpected) version syntax.
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November 18, 2019
- Maui, Hawaii
Validations are a key feature of any business application and in Angular there's an infrastructure for building validators built in. A number of existing validators provide the basics but if you have custom business logic to process for validation you'll need to create custom Validators. In this post I describe how to create both sync and asycn Angular Validators for use in declarative forms.
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November 14, 2019
- Maui, Hawaii
Ran into issues today with Windows Authentication and FireFox in a ASP.NET Core application where auth was working with all browsers **except** for FireFox. Firefox would just throw up endless sequences of login dialogs or in some cases just show the default ASP.NET Core 'UnAuthenticated' dialog. Here's what this looks like and how to work around it.
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November 05, 2019
- Maui, Hawaii
I've been working on some tools that create generic, standalone Web servers using ASP.NET Core, in various configurations. One of the versions I'm building also supports Razor Pages and while genericallly hosting Razor Pages out of a locally run folder, there are some complications that arise out of dynamic runtime compilation. In this post I look at how to dynamically load assemblies at runtime.
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October 19, 2019
- Maui, Hawaii
If you're working with Windows authentication to access Windows or Active Directory groups be aware that there's a gotcha with newly added groups when users are automatically logged into the Web browser.
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September 30, 2019
- Maui, Hawaii
ASP.NET Core makes it easy to create a new Web site, but by default the location of where the application runs and serves files from is pretty static and pinned to the startup folder of the application. In this post I discuss another usage scneario of building a generic local Web Server that can start serving files out of **any** folder.
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September 24, 2019
- Maui, Hawaii
.NET Core 3.0 is here and in this post I describe the process of updating an existing ASP.NET Core Angular API application to this latest release. For the most part the update process is very smooth with a few configuration changes required, but there are also a few gotchas that have bitten me and I'll cover those here.
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September 10, 2019
- Maui, Hawaii
Windows is making it harder to find classic Control Panel windows and the Internet Settings dialog is no exception. The Networking options no longer have a link to it, so you have remember where to look for it. Here's a quick way to get to it.
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September 03, 2019
- Maui, Hawaii
The new Windows Terminal provides many cool new features and much improved Terminal performance which makes it very desirable to use even in its current preview state. However, unfortunately the Terminal currently lacks a command line interface to control startup, do if you want to externally launch a shell some workarounds are required to get it to start out of a specific folder.
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September 02, 2019
- Maui, Hawaii
I've recently had a large uptick of errors in my Markdown Monster logs that complain about `Cannot set Visibility to Visible or call Show, ShowDialog, Close, or WindowInteropHelper.EnsureHandle while a Window is closing`. This error can crop up with nested or parallel window closing operations, which might not always be obvious when they happen. I'll show some of the issues and the hacky by easy to implement work around.
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August 21, 2019
- Maui, Hawaii
Recent upgrades to Visual Studio 2019.2 seem to have broken projects that use the 3.0 .NET SDK as Visual Studio is defaulting to a pre-3.0 version of the SDK tools and compilers. The end result is that projects even fail to load in Visual Studio. There are workarounds but ultimately this an issue that Microsoft needs to address better in future updates.
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August 20, 2019
- Maui, Hawaii
Ran into an interesting problem with the Uri class and local file URLs today. The problem is that Urls were not properly Url encoding and decoding with the Url treated incorrectly. After a bit of experimenting it turns out that the way the file URL is created is critical to the Url parsing behavior of the Uri class.
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