Rick Strahl's Web Log

Rick Strahl's Web Log

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

Ad-free experience sponsored by:

ASPOSE - the market leader of .NET and Java APIs for file formats – natively work with DOCX, XLSX, PPT, PDF, images and more

Programmatically Opening Windows Terminal in a Specific Folder

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.

WPF Window Closing Errors

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.

Visual Studio 2019.2 and .NET 3.0 SDK Projects not Loading

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.

Uri.AbsoluteUri and UrlEncoding of Local File Urls

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.

Building a Live Reload Middleware Component for ASP.NET Core

2 comments

June 03, 2019 - Maui, Hawaii

In my last way I showed how to use Live Reload in ASP.NET Server side applications using a tool called BrowserSync. In this post I replace BrowserSync's functionality with a custom Live Reload Middleware component for ASP.NET Core that's more efficient and doesn't require installing and running a separate tool. I'll show how Live Reload works, and how to implement the component in some detail.

Live Reloading Server And Client Side ASP.NET Core Apps

1 comment

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

4 comments

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

36 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

10 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

3 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

4 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.