Rick Strahl's Web Log

Rick Strahl's Web Log

Wind, waves, code and everything in between...
ASP.NET • C# • HTML5 • JavaScript • AngularJs

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Live Reloading Server And Client Side ASP.NET Core Apps

May 18, 2019 - Maui, Hawaii

Client side live reloading is one of the most compelling features of client side JavaScript development. Instant updates of any code changes in the browser are a huge productivity booster - WYSIWYG on steroids. Unfortunately for ASP.NET Core server side code and MVC apps there aren't any comparable easy solutions. In this post I show how I use Browser Sync and `dotnet watch` in combination to provide live reloading for both server and client side changes.

Accessing RouteData in an ASP.NET Core Controller Constructor

1 comment

May 15, 2019 - Maui, Hawaii

Ran into a difficulty trying to get access to RouteData() generically outside of Controller code in ASP.NET Core. Specifically I needed to get at route data to pull out a tenant ID required to set up a DbContext with the right connection string to connect to. Getting the route data as part of the DI process in the Controller constructor proved to be challenging. In this post I describe the problem and the work around.

.NET Core 3.0 SDK Projects: Controlling Output Folders and Content

3 comments

April 30, 2019 - Maui, Hawaii

I've been upgrading Markdown Monster to run on .NET Core 3.0 and one of the biggest changes is switching to the new .NET SDK style format for all projects. I ran into some issues with the Addin projects that require that output is placed in a very specific output folder and to not include output of all references. In this post describe a couple of ways to control where output goes and how to limit the output that goes to those folders.

First Steps in porting Markdown Monster WPF App to .NET Core 3.0

9 comments

April 24, 2019 - Maui, Hawaii

I spent a good part of the day today getting Markdown Monster to run on .NET Core 3.0 and in this post I packaged up my notes into a lengthy post with how went through this process. It wasn't exactly quick to make this happen but MM has a few peculiarities that made this process a little bit more trying than it could have been. I'll summarize some thoughts at the end on both the process and the relevance of this process.

Adventures in .NET Core SDK Installation: Missing SDKs and 32 bit vs 64 bit

4 comments

April 20, 2019 - Maui, Hawaii

Ran into a problem yesterday with a new installation of the .NET Core 3.0 Preview 4 installation. Installed the new preview and found that all of my .NET Core 2.x SDKs were no longer showing. A lot of back and forth later I found that I accidentally installed the wrong bitness SDK - 32 bit vs 64 bit. Here's a quick overview of how and why and why you probably NEVER want to install the 32 bit SDK.

Using the ng-BootStrap TypeAhead Control with Dynamic Data

1 comment

April 08, 2019 - Maui, Hawaii

I recently swapped my Auto complete logic in an application to use ng-bootstrap's nice and relatively easy to use TypeAhead control and I ran into a small snag trying to figure out how to bind dynamic data retrieved from the server. The examples show local data binding but fail to show how to load and update the control with remote data. In this post I show how the control works both in sync and async mode and point out the simple solution that eluded my via the Observable switchMap operator.

Creating a custom HttpInterceptor to handle 'withCredentials' in Angular 6+

1 comment

April 07, 2019 - Maui, Hawaii

Client HTTP requests often need to set a few common settings and you don't want to set them on every request. To make this process easier Angular provides an HttpInterceptor class that you can subclass and add custom behavior to for each HTTP request that is sent through the HttpClient. Here's a quick review on how to do this.

ASP.NET Core In Process Hosting on IIS with ASP.NET Core 2.2

16 comments

March 16, 2019 - Maui, Hawaii

In version 2.2 ASP.NET Core adds support for direct in-process hosting which improves throughput considerably using an easy mechanism that allows switching between in-process and out-of-process hosting. In this post I describe how to use in process hosting and how it works.

Using .NET Standard with Full Framework .NET

6 comments

February 19, 2019 - Maui, Hawaii

Using .NET Standard on full .NET Framework is a mixed bag because the behavior of .NET Standard differs depending on which version of the Runtime you are integrating with. In this post I review what .NET Standard is and how it fits in with the full .NET Framework and how you can use .NET Standard packages/assemblies in full framework along with some of the problems you have to watch out for.

WPF Hanging in Infinite Rendering Loop

2 comments

February 14, 2019 - Maui, Hawaii

Ran into a nasty WPF bug this week with Markdown Monster that caused MM to hang during startup in certain scenarios. Several users reported issues that I could not duplicate until I started playing around with my screen resolution and scaling. An obscure but insidious WPF bug can cause an application to go into an infinite loop which effectively locks up the application's UI and the app overall. Here's more info on what the problem is and how to work around it.

Ad Blockers, Brave Browser and BrainTree Credit Card Processing SDKs

2 comments

February 08, 2019 - Maui, Hawaii

Ran into an issue with my CC processing forms using Brave today. Brave is a Chromium based browser, but it includes built-in, on-by-default content blocking which apparently causes my order forms to not work as scripts and related page cookies aren't being loaded. Here's what happened and some thoughts on how to work around this.

Finding the ProgramFiles64 Folder in a 32 Bit App

1 comment

February 05, 2019 - Maui, Hawaii

.NET has the `System.GetFolderPath()` method to let you easily retrieve various system folder in a safe way. Unfortunately getting the `Program Files` folder is a bit of problem due to some complications on how the name is retrieved on 32 bit systems. If you're running an application in 32 bit mode, or have an application that can run either 32 or 64 bit, make sure you use the right way to determine where Program Files is located.

COM Object Access and dynamic in .NET Core 2.x

1 comment

January 22, 2019 - Maui, Hawaii

I was surprised to find out that COM Interop works in .NET Core when running on Windows. It's possible to access COM components via Reflection easily enough in .NET Core 2.x. Unfortunately use of the `dynamic` keyword does not work in .NET Core 2.x so for the moment COM interop is limited to using Reflection.

Back to Basics: Non-Navigating Links for JavaScript Handling

5 comments

January 21, 2019 - Maui, Hawaii

When you're creating HTML Anchor links that are non-navigating and handled via script code or through some JavaScript framework, what's the best way to handle the `HREF` navigation link in the HTML? In this back to basics post I look at a few different approaches and what works best.

A Visual Studio to Visual Studio Code Snippet Converter

1 comment

January 14, 2019 - Maui, Hawaii

Visual Studio Code Snippets are very useful and a great productivity enhancing tool for templating reusable code blocks into the editor. I have tons of snippets I use all the time for great productivity savings. Over the last couple of years I've been increasingly using Visual Studio Code and JetBrains Rider and I found myself missing my nearly 150 code snippets from Visual Studio, so I created a small hacky utility to move code snippets from Visual Studio to VS Code and with more limited features to Rider.

Don't let ASP.NET Core Console Logging Slow your App down

2 comments

December 31, 2018 - Maui, Hawaii

Today I ran into a self-inflicted problem with Console logging while playing with a toy test project. By accident I ran the application under load and Console Logging was on and performance was horrendous. In fact nearly 40x slower horrendous. Although my error, there are a few ways this can happen and it's important to understand that Console logging is very, very slow and in this post I show how this happened and why you want to be careful with Console logging in production.

Updating Westwind.AspnetCore.Markdown with Markdown from Files and URLs

December 20, 2018 - Maui, Hawaii

In the last week I've had a need to add some additional features to my Westwind.AspnetCore.Markdown library that provide easier access to Markdown from files and urls as well as the ability to replace the default Markdown parser in the library. In this post I'll discuss some of the feature additions including some implementation notes.

Returning an XML Encoded String in .NET

November 30, 2018 - Maui, Hawaii

XML is not as popular as it once was, but there's still a lot of XML based configuration and data floating around today. Today I ran into a recurring issue where I needed to convert a string to a properly encoded XML string. Seems simple enough but it's not as straightforward as you might think to generate an XML Encoded string properly. This post shows a few different ways to retrieve a string and discusses advantages of each.

Creating a .NET Global Tool from an existing Console Application

2 comments

November 05, 2018 - Maui, Hawaii

.NET Core doesn't support creating executables directly, but it does have support for **Global Tools** which provide a mechanism to register a console application and make it easily accessible using a simple command line command rather than a complex `dotnet.exe` command.

Creating an HTML Packager

November 01, 2018 - Maui, Hawaii

Recently I needed to add the ability to save HTML documents in Markdown Monster. Saving raw rendered Markdown is not really sufficient and so I set out to create an HTML packager that can package an HTML Web endpoint into a self-contained local package either as a single self-contained file, or an HTML document with all dependencies localized. In this post I discuss why this is needed and how to implement and use this library to capture HTML output in a few different ways.

Slow Connections with Sql Server

5 comments

October 26, 2018 - Maui, Hawaii

Ran into a problem with extremely slow SQL Server connections when connecting to the server. Connections would take 2 seconds or more even on repeat connections. It turns out the problem is related to missing TCP/IP protocol support which is disabled by default.

Tip: Open Visual Studio Code from Visual Studio as an External Tool

5 comments

October 06, 2018 - Maui, Hawaii

I use both Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code in my development. Although I tend to still default to the full version of Visual Studio, I tend to run Visual Studio Code side by side with Visual Studio and flip back and forth a lot. To make things a little easier and being able to jump directly to a document in VS Code from full VS you can create an External Tool entry and a shortcut mapping to quickly open documents and/or folders in VS Code.

Getting around Chrome POST XSS Protection

September 22, 2018 - Maui, Hawaii

Ran into an unusual issue where Chrome is blocking user input from a TextArea that includes HTML form and input control input - on the client side. While I'm familiar with server side input validation, this is client side validation that causes the response to be rejected. Here's more info on the error and how to get around it when necessary.

Markdown and Cross Site Scripting

4 comments

August 31, 2018 - Hood River, Oregon

I've been getting a number of requests for providing XSS support in my various Markdown components. While Markdown itself makes no provision for HTML Sanitation, if you use Markdown for capturing user input some sort of sanitation is required to avoid potential XSS attacks. In this post I look at XSS scenarios and show how the `Westwind.AspnetCore.Markdown` package deals with removing script tags from rendered Markdown content.

Fixing Visual Studio Intellisense Errors

3 comments

August 07, 2018 - Hood River, Oregon

I ran into a problem in one of my applications where Visual Studio was showing errors that were clearly not actual errors. A new feature in Visual Studio now shows separate error listings for Build and IntelliSense errors and it turns out the errors are Intellisense errors. Here's how to fix them and get Visual Studio back onto the straight and narrow.