Rick Strahl's Web Log

Rick Strahl's Weblog

Wind, waves, code and everything in between...
.NET • C# • Markdown • JavaScript • Angular

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West Wind WebSurge - Rest Client and Http Load Testing for Windows

Integrating Long Path Names in Windows Applications

January 03, 2022 - Maui, Hawaii

Long Path Names in Windows are a pain in the butt, but Windows 10 recently starting adding better support for Long Paths in Version 1607+ which for now has to be enabled explicitly. It also requires an application configuration switch in the manifest file. As nice as that support is, it doesn't solve all problems especially when integrating with other components or external applications that don't support long paths. In this post I describe what works, what doesn't and a few hacks to make most things work.

Connection Failures with Microsoft.Data.SqlClient 4 and later

10 comments

December 07, 2021 - Maui, Hawaii

After a recent update to `Microsoft.Data.SqlClient` version `4.0.0.0` I ended up not being able to connect to any of my SQL Server databases. Turns out Microsoft has made some default settings changes in the updated provider and these settings are likely going to break connections.

Windows Authentication with HttpClient

3 comments

November 27, 2021 - Maui, Hawaii

In this short post I review how to use HttpClient with Windows Authentication security using Negotiate or NTLM authentication schemes, which oddly is not documented in the official documentation for the `CredentialCache` class used to handle authentication header generation in HttpClient.

Back to Basics: Add an ASP.NET Runtime Information Startup Banner

1 comment

November 09, 2021 - Maui, Hawaii

In almost every .NET Core Console application I end up adding a startup banner with some basic runtime information so I can see at a glance what environment I'm running in. I also add the URLs and any other application specific information that might be useful. In this short post I show a few things I display and how I reuse this functionality since it practically goes into every application I run.

Discovering new C# String Pattern Matching Features

4 comments

November 04, 2021 - Maui, Hawaii

I admit it: I haven't been using the new C# pattern matching features a lot, but every once in a while ReSharper smacks me in the head and points out a good pattern that not only makes the code more compact, but also makes it more readable. In this post I talk about a few patterns that help with null and string casting and with comparing values in a more natural way.

WebView2 Flashing when changing TabControl Tabs

2 comments

October 04, 2021 - Hood River, Oregon

I've been running into major issues with the WebView control and TabControls in WPF where switching between tabs that contain WebView controls causes a very annoying white flash. In this post I demonstrate the problem and provide an arcane fix that works around this frustrating issue.

Launching Visual Studio Code cleanly from a .NET Application

September 03, 2021 - Hood River, Oregon

Visual Studio Code has become the mainstay editor for many developers. If you have developer focused applications and you need to externally display text or code content, it would be very useful to pop open VS Code to display external text/code content. This sounds simple enough, but Code both on Windows and Mac has some peculiar launch behaviors that make this a little more tricky than you might think, especially if you need to make sure that you can do it across platforms.

Using the WebView control to capture HTTP Request Content

August 18, 2021 - Hood River, Oregon

Need to capture requests when navigating the new Edge WebView2 control? The control supports this but the way that you do this is a little less obvious than you might be used to from other browser controls. Here's how to do it.

WebView and Modal Dialogs in WPF Async Code

August 16, 2021 - Hood River, Oregon

Another day another problem with the WebView control - this time dealing with certain Windows dialogs crashing the WebView control and making it unresponsive so that the control has to be reloaded or - more commonly the application has to be restarted.

Markdown Monster 2.0 is here

July 22, 2021 - Hood River, Oregon

It's been a long slow road but Markdown Monster 2.0 is finally here. This update features a number of internal updates to facilitate future development improvements. In this post I go over some of the changes in the new release and some of the challenges that had to be worked through to get here.

Thoughts on Async/Await Conversion in a Desktop App

9 comments

July 07, 2021 - Hood River, Oregon

I spent the last month or so working through Markdown Monster's code to switch from mostly sync code to async code. This change was forced on me by an Async Cascade triggered by a third party dependency of a component (the WebView2 control) and ended up requiring massive changes throughout the app. In this post I go over some of the issues I ran into converting from sync to async along with some thoughts on the pitfalls.

Locked Files When Publishing .NET Core Apps to IIS with WebDeploy

3 comments

June 20, 2021 - Hood River, Oregon

When using Visual Studio's Publish Web Site feature with ASP.NET Core you may get frustrating errors when publishing to already running sites as files on the server are locked and can't be updated until the site is shutdown. Turns out the default settings don't unload the application before publising, but there's a simple solution to unload before publishing and the restart the application.

Running .NET Core Apps on a Framework other than Compiled Version?

4 comments

June 15, 2021 - Hood River, Oregon

I get asked frequently about whether a lower version of .NET Core will run on a machine that only has a more recent version of the .NET Core runtime installed. The short answer is 'No it won't run' but there are a few nuances to this simple answer.

WebView2 Home and End Key Problems inside of WPF TabControl Containers

1 comment

May 25, 2021 - Hood River, Oregon

Another day another WebView2 quirk to work around: This time running into issues with the WebView2 not processing Home and End keys properly as they are being hijacked by a parent TabControl and its TabNavigation keystroke handling.

Async/Await Calls Gotcha with the CSharp ? Null Propagator

9 comments

May 15, 2021 - Hood River, Oregon

Null propagation in C# allows for short circuiting of void method calls, but when using result-less `await` async calls, this behavior works decidedly different, resulting in null exception runtime errors. While this behavior makes sense when you break down the command, it's certainly not obvious. In this post I break down the how and why of the failure and how to work around it.

Taking down the Markdown Monster Source Code

May 05, 2021 - Hood River, Oregon

With a heavy heart and a lot of hand wringing, I decided last week to take down the Markdown Monster source code from the public GitHub repository due to rampant abuse of the code to get around licensing restrictions. In this post I give some insight on why I made this decision and provide some general thoughts around the state of software development for software tools.

WebView2: Forwarding Alt Keys to a Host WPF Window

April 15, 2021 - Maui, Hawaii

I've been puzzling over how to reliably integrate keyboard forwarding from the WebView2 control into WPF host forms. Unlike the IE WebBrowser control the WebView2 doesn't automatically forward Alt keys to the host form so special handling is required. In this post I describe why this is a problem and show the workaround to make this work.

LiveReloadServer - A Generic Local Static Web Server with Live Reload based on .NET

3 comments

March 23, 2021 - Maui, Hawaii

I've released v1.0 of my LiveReload Web Server which is a local static file Web server that includes support for LiveReload, plus some optional dynamic features for rendering self-contained RazorPages and Markdown content. This Dotnet Tool is fast, easy to use and includes a host of convenience features that try to make the process of working with local Web content quicker and easier.

Role based JWT Tokens in ASP.NET Core APIs

21 comments

March 09, 2021 - Maui, Hawaii

ASP.NET Core Authentication and Authorization continues to be the most filddly part of the ASP.NET Core eco system and today I ran into a problem to properly configure JWT Tokens with Roles. As I had a hard time finding the information I needed in one place and instead ended up with some outdated information, I'm writing up a post to hopefully put all the basic bits into this single post.

Opening an Admin Windows Terminal from Visual Studio

1 comment

February 04, 2021 - Maui, Hawaii

Opening Windows Terminal from another application is a bit of a pain. In particular I wanted to open Windows Terminal as an External Tool from Visual Studio and found it wasn't as easy as referencing the `wt.exe` executable. Opening as an Administrator adds additional complexity. In this post I'll talk about the use case of an External Tools and the settings to launch both a regular and admin Windows Terminal instance from External Tools.

Chromium WebView2 Control and .NET to JavaScript Interop - Part 2

25 comments

January 26, 2021 - Maui, Hawaii

In part 2 of this post series I take a look at how to use the new Chromium WebView2 to interact with the DOM document and interoperate between .NET and JavaScript, both calling into JavaScript from .NET, and calling into .NET from Javascript

Taking the new Chromium WebView2 Control for a Spin in .NET - Part 1

42 comments

January 14, 2021 - Maui, Hawaii

This is Part 1 of a two part article that gives an overview of the new WebView2 Web browser control that is based on Edge Chromium. In Part 1 I look at the basics of what's needed to run the control using the WebView runtime, and how to get the control embedded and configured to use for basic HTML tasks. In Part 2 I look at interaction between the .NET application and WebBrowser and Javascript.

Blank Zero Values in .NET Number Format Strings

4 comments

January 05, 2021 - Maui, Hawaii

Recently needed a way to display a set of numbers in a WPF List display that required that values with a value of `0` display blank - using no explicit code or model changes. I learnt something new today: There's actually a way to use C# format strings to format numbers separately for positive, negative and zero values. Here's how that works.

Watch out for .NET Core Runtime Bitness for IIS Installs

2 comments

November 25, 2020 - Maui, Hawaii

I recently ran into a snag with one of the my Windows Server installs of an upgraded .NET Core 5.0 application. It turns out I didn't install .NET Core 5.0 correctly because I made some bad assumptions of what I needed to install to run my application, even though it previously ran on .NET Core 3.1. Here's more detail on what the failure looks like and how to properly install .NET Core 5.0.

Upgrading several of my Applications and Libraries to .NET 5.0

2 comments

November 24, 2020 - Maui, Hawaii

Over the last week I spent some time upgrading several .NET Core Web applications and libraries from .NET Core 3.1 to .NET 5.0. I'm happy to say that this was always a non-event as the process went very smooth for once. In this post I'll talk about what I found and also offer some commentary why we should celebrate this update and push Microsoft to continue along this path.