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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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February 12, 2017
- Maui, Hawaii
Recently I had to deal with an ASMX Web Service that was receiving empty SoapActions from the client. ASMX doesn't like that, but luckily there's an easy work to strip out the errant Soap header.
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January 29, 2017
- Maui, Hawaii
Chocolatey is an awesome tool to install software. As a publisher you have a lot of choices of how to create packages and in this post I describe the two packages that I use with Markdown Monster, which is a full downloaded installer package and a fully self contained embedded portable package. Here I cover the basics of Chocolatey package creation and some of the steps required to create a portable package from a full installation and some of the challenges you might run into along the way.
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January 25, 2017
- Maui, Hawaii
Visual Studio has a boat load of ways to add new files to a project and various extensions and tools provide even more ways to do the same. Even so the experience to add new files to a project in Visual Studio is one of the most tedious tasks. Here's what bugs me and how I try to work around the verbosity of it all.
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January 12, 2017
- Maui, Hawaii
The latest issue of CODE magazine features my `Getting down to Business with ASP.NET` Core article as the cover article. The article focuses on building an ASP.NET Core backend for an Angular 2 front application, covering all aspects of separating business and Web app logic, dealing with EF Core data access in related tables, CORS to be able to run across domains and simple authentication in a client centric REST service application. Check it out.
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January 09, 2017
- Maui, Hawaii
I've been struggling with DPI Scaling issues in WPF in Markdown Monster and .NET 4.6.2 has a few fixes that address the problems I've been working on. However, requiring 4.6.2 is a problem due to lowish adoption rates and skittishness about installing new versions of .NET. In this post I show a little hack that allows me to compile my app to .NET 4.6.2 but don't require user to have that version installed so those that have it can take advantage of the updates.
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December 27, 2016
- Maui, Hawaii
String Interpolation provides string templating for string literals in C#. Rather than using string.Format you can use string interpolation to produce much more readable code that embeds expression values directly into string literals rather than escaping numeric arguments as you do with string.Format(). In this post I look at how string interpolation works, what the compiler does under the covers and some common use cases where it makes life easier.
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December 23, 2016
- Maui, Hawaii
Recently while working on Markdown Monster I ran into some odd crashes and behaviors when interacting with the Web Browser control in this WPF application. It turns out that some of these inconsistent behaviors are apparently caused by running hte application in 64 bit mode. Switching to 32 bit mode has made the application and Web Browser interaction much more responsive and has stopped the nagging unexplainable crashes. In this post I look at 32 and 64 bit applications in .NET and outline some of the issues I ran into and how I fixed the problem by switching to building a 32 bit app.
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December 19, 2016
- Maui, Hawaii
Recently while debugging a 64 bit application I found out the hard way that Visual Studio by default will use 32 bit debugging even when running what would otherwise be a 64 bit .NET application. There are a number of options that determine the bitness of your application, but the debugger often behaves differently than your standalone application. In this post I describe, why this might be a problem in some situations and how you can get the debugger to run in 64 bit.
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