Rick Strahl's Web Log

Opening a Web Browser with an HTTP Url from Visual Studio Code

Friday - Maui, Hawaii

Here's a quick tip on how you can create a project specific Visual Studio Task that can launch a Web Browser to a specific page quickly and easily.

A few notes on creating Class Libraries for ASP.NET Core

5 comments

September 26, 2017 - Maui, Hawaii

I recently started to collect some of my ASP.NET Core utilities into a helper support library as I tend to do. In the process I ran into a few snags and I realized I was making a few non-obvious mistakes right from the start. In this post I discuss a few of the issues with dependencies and how to deal with them.

WPF Slow Window Loading due to Invalid SpellChecking Dictionaries

3 comments

September 25, 2017 - Maui, Hawaii

I ran into a nasty problem with spell checking on WPF, which caused any form that uses spell checking to load extremely slow. It turns out the problem was caused by errant entries in the global Windows dictionary key in the registry. This post describes the problem and how to find and fix your global Windows dictionary settings.

Conditional TargetFrameworks for Multi-Targeted .NET SDK Projects on Cross-Platform Builds

8 comments

September 18, 2017 - Maui, Hawaii

If you build multi-targeted .NET SDK projects on multiple platforms you're going to find out that certain targets can't be build on certain platforms. If you target NetStandard and Net45 on a Mac, Net45 is going to fail. In order to get around this you need to conditionally build per platform. Here's how.

Accepting Raw Request Body Content in ASP.NET Core API Controllers

1 comment

September 14, 2017 - Maui, Hawaii

When posting raw body content to ASP.NET Core the process is not very self-explanatory. There's no easy way to simply retrieve raw data to a parameter in an API method, so a few extra steps are provided using either manual handling of the raw request stream, or by creating custom formatter that can handle common 'raw' content types in your APIs via standard Controller method parameters. In this post I look at various permutations and how you can access the raw data in your code.

A Literal Markdown Control for ASP.NET WebForms

September 13, 2017 - Maui, Hawaii

Spent some time last night creating a small ASP.NET Server control that can render literal Markdown text inside of ASPX pages and turn the literal text into Markdown. It's a very simple control, but it makes it lot easier to edit documents that contain simple formatted text content without having to deal with angle brackets for lengthier text.

Configuring LetsEncrypt for ASP.NET Core and IIS

4 comments

September 09, 2017 - Hood River, OR

LetsEncrypt makes it easy to create SSL certificates for your applications for free and lets you automate the process. When using LetsEncrypt with IIS and ASP.NET Core however a few extra steps are required to make an ASP.NET Core site work with LetsEncrypt. I show you how in this post.

Handling HTML5 Client Route Fallbacks in ASP.NET Core

1 comment

August 07, 2017 - Hood River, OR

HTML5 client routes work great on the client, but when deep linking into a site or pressing refresh in the browser, HTML5 client side routes have a nasty habit of turning into server HTTP requests. Requests to routes that the server is likely not configured for. In this post I look at why HTML5 client routes require server cooperation to handle and how to set them up on IIS and/or ASP.NET Core.

Updating Windows Applications and Installers for non-Admin Installation

3 comments

July 17, 2017 - Hood River, OR

I recently updated Markdown Monster to run as a non-admin installation even when running the full installer. There have been many requests for this functionality and in this post I describe several of the updates required in order to make this work.

JavaScript Debugging in a Web Browser Control with Visual Studio

3 comments

July 06, 2017 - Hood River, OR

Debugging a Web Browser Control embedded in a Windows application can be a bear because there's no obvious way to debug the the JavaScript code or HTML DOM/CSS inside of the application. Although the Web Browser uses the Internet Explorer Engine for HTML rendering and JavaScript execution and provides most of the engine features, the Debugger and F12 are not part of that. As it turns out you can use Visual Studio to hook up a script debugger and provide a rich debugging experience with the full IE debugger, Console and even a DOM/CSS Explorer. In this post I show how.

Debouncing and Throttling Dispatcher Events

6 comments

July 02, 2017 - Hood River, OR

In UI applications it's not uncommon for a number of UI events to fire more events than your application can handle. In order to limit the number of events it's often a good idea to throttle or 'debounce' events so that only a single event is fire for a given period. In this post I describe a Dispatcher based implementation for debouncing and throttling UI events in WPF applications.

Multi-Targeting and Porting a .NET Library to .NET Core 2.0

14 comments

June 22, 2017 - Hood River, OR

I've been holding off porting any of my full frameworks to .NET Core. With the latest .NET Core 2.0 and .NET Standard 2.0 releases and their vastly larger footprints that match more closely with what we expect of the .NET Framework feature set, migrating looks a lot more appealing. In this post I describe the process of porting one of my general purpose full framework libraries to .NET Standard 2.0 and in the process also creating a multi-targeted project that compiles .NET 4.5, 4.0 and .NET Standard projects.

Bypassing IIS Error Messages in ASP.NET

5 comments

June 01, 2017 - Hood River, OR

IIS Error handling is the source of lots of confusion. I've been using IIS for nearly 20 years now, and figuring out the right combination of error configuration settings and code to properly serve custom error pages or error responses in API still makes fumble a few times before I get it just right. This post provides a few hints and some background on how to deal with error handling.

Automating IIS Feature Installation with Powershell

4 comments

May 25, 2017 - Hood River, OR

IIS often gets a bad wrap for being diffcult to install and configure. However, using some of the built-in tooling for administration using PowerShell it's actually quite easy to configure IIS and even set up a new site and application pool with a few short scripts that are much quicker, and more repeatable than using the various Windows UI features. Here's how.

Upgrading to .NET Core 2.0 Preview

27 comments

May 15, 2017 - Hood River, OR

With the release of the first preview of .NET Core 2 and ASP.NET Core 2.0 I decided to upgrade my AlbumViewer sample application to the latest bits and preview tools. Overall the experience was pretty smooth, but I ran into a couple of breaking changes and a few tooling snags that I'll describe in this post.

IIS and ASP.NET Core Rewrite Rules for Static Files and Html 5 Routing

12 comments

April 27, 2017 - Hood River, OR

If you're running ASP.NET Core under Windows with IIS, you'll want to take advantage of letting IIS serve up your static content and handle your HTML 5 Client and home routes. IIS is very efficient at handling static content and content re-routing and in this post I describe how you can properly configure ASP.NET Core applications using the AspNetCoreModule and IIS Rewrite Rules

Creating a Markdown Monster Addin: Save Images to Azure Blob Storage

1 comment

April 17, 2017 - Maui, Hawaii

The Markdown Monster Markdown Editor and Weblog Publishing tool has a .NET based addin model that makes it relatively easy to extend its core feature set with custom functionality. In this post I show how you can quickly create an addin of your own, and then show a practical example that demonstrates how add Image uploading to Azure Blob storage as an interactive addin.

Running .NET Core Apps under Windows Subsystem for Linux (Bash for Windows)

8 comments

April 13, 2017 - Maui, Hawaii

The Windows Shell for Linux (WSL or Bash on Ubuntu on Windows) provides a nice way for Windows and Linux to interact without the overhead of dealing with a separate VM. Using the WSL you can now also run your .NET Core applications directly under Linux without requiring a VM or Docker. In this post I demonstrate how the shell works and how you can run your .NET and ASP.NET Core applications to test operation under Linux.

Virus Scanning Madness for Software Distribution

1 comment

April 02, 2017 - Maui, Hawaii

I've been having having lots of problems recently with VirusTotal, which is used by Chocolatey to scan for malware in Chocolatey distribution packages. VirusTotal is a Web based service that aggregates around 60 virus scanners against an installation binary. The problems is that I frequently see random malware hits by various obscure scanners. In this post I describe the problem and the farce that this has become as some of the malware hits are obviously false positives that actually reverse in a rescan.

Updating my AlbumViewer Sample to ASP.NET Core 1.1 and Angular 4

21 comments

March 31, 2017 - Maui, Hawaii

I updated my AlbumViewer sample application recently to the latest versions of ASP.NET Core (1.1) and the new .csproj project as well Angular 4

More on ASP.NET Core Running under IIS

14 comments

March 16, 2017 - Maui, Hawaii

Since my last post about hosting ASP.NET Core on IIS I've gotten quite a few questions and comments in regards to working with this mixed IIS/Kestrel hosting environment. There are quite a few not so obvious arrangement in this set up and some surprising discoveries in terms of performance and segragation of feature usage between IIS and Kestrel.

Dragging and Dropping Images and Files into the Web Browser Control

March 10, 2017 - Maui, Hawaii

Dragging content into the Web Browser control and capturing the content dropped can be tricky. The Web Browser Control is based on Internet Explorer and is actually an ActiveX control hosted inside of a container and because of that is difficult to deal with. In this post I describe how you can get around this issue and still capture images and files dropped on the control and handle the drop operations.

Debugging the Web Browser Control with FireBug

7 comments

March 08, 2017 - Maui, Hawaii

If you need to debug JavaScript code or layout issues in a Web Browser control inside of a Windows desktop application, you've probably found that the experience sucks. Although Internet Explorer on which the control is based suppports rich developer tools, those are not available in the Web Browser control. Enter an oldie but goodie: FireBug which is an embeddable Console implementation that provides a lot of the features that you find in modern browser developer tools and with a couple of lines of html you can add this debugger into your application.

Getting JavaScript Properties for Object Maps by Index or Name

3 comments

March 04, 2017 - Maui, Hawaii

Getting value out of maps that are treated like collections is always something I have to remind myself how to do properly. In this post I look at JavaScript object iteration and picking out values from a JavaScript object by property name or index.

Video Rendering Issues for WPF Windows

2 comments

February 13, 2017 - Maui, Hawaii

Recently I ran into a few reports of black screen of death rendering of Markdown Monster when starting up from a very few users of the application. They reported the screen just shows black, while actually being responsive to moving and showing menus etc. Also moving to another screen often fixes the problem. It turns out this is a hardware related issue with WPF with certain video hardware/monitor combinations. In this post I describe the problem and the workaround to get the application to render properly even on compromised hardware.