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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Back to Basics: Rendering Razor Views to String in ASP.NET Core

9 comments

June 21, 2022 - Hood River, Oregon

Rendering a Razor View to string can be very useful to create string output from Views that you can capture and then use for things like Email confirmations or saved receipts that can be accessed 'offline' from the application. In this post I show you how to capture views to string and a few caveats you have to watch out for if you're generating self-contained HTML output to string.

Runtime C# Code Compilation Revisited for Roslyn

4 comments

June 07, 2022 - Maui Time, Hawaii

Recently I needed to update my scripting tools that are integrated into Markdown Monster, in order to support .NET Core. The old CodeDom compiler APIs I'd been using as part of my `Westwind.Scripting` library aren't supported in Core and so I ended up updating to the newer Roslyn CodeAnalysis APIs. In this post I discuss how the Roslyn compilation APIs work, and how I built and updated the Westwind.Scripting library to provide an easy to use wrapper around these tools.

Async and Async Void Event Handling in WPF

5 comments

April 22, 2022 - Maui Time, Hawaii

When running WPF and WinForms applications with async operations, I've run into a number of issues with event handling 'hanging' the UI thread in unexpected ways, where the UI hangs until the mouse is moved or a key is pressed. A lot of times these issues are associated with events that fire async code, and in this post I take closer look at one scenario that can cause these hang ups along with a workaround that has proven useful in a number of occasions for me.

Use CSS.escape() to escape QuerySelectorAll()

April 10, 2022 - Maui Time, Hawaii

Ran into an issue recently where a querySelector operation was failing in document link navigation when navigating hashes. There are a few issues at work when using Hash navigation but one issue i didn't expect to run into was a naming conflict of a hash tag that interfered with CSS operators. Turns out there's an easy solution around with with CSS.escape - if you can make the connection. In this post I talk about the problem how it might show up and how to fix it.

Combining Bearer Token and Cookie Authentication in ASP.NET

8 comments

March 29, 2022 - Maui, Hawaii

In some situations you might need to use both Bearer Token and Cookie Authentication in a single application. In this post I look at a few scenarios where this is required and show how to configure your Authentication to let you access your site with either authentication scheme.

Creating a Static Web Content Project for Publishing with WebDeploy

2 comments

March 03, 2022 - Maui, Hawaii

Static content projects are more and more common and if you need to publish directly to an IIS Web Server using WebDeploy is one of the options you have. If you're building .NET projects there are many ways to publish projects from Visual Studio and the `dotnet` CLI. Unfortunately there currently is no .NET/Visual Studio project type that works out of the box for Static Site content - if you need to use WebDeploy. In this post I discuss how to hack a .NET Web project to work with static content only.

Escaping Markdown Code Snippets and Inline Code as Markdown

February 16, 2022 - Maui, Hawaii

If you write Markdown for code related documentation it's not uncommon that you need to create code snippets or inline-code blocks that contain the Markdown code block delimiters namely the back tick. If you need to embed a Markdown code block as documentation in another code block or if an inline code block simply contains a ` you run into rendering problems. In this code I tackle escaping Markdown code for nested code blocks and escaping the pesky back tip character.

West Wind WebSurge 2.0 is here

4 comments

February 01, 2022 - Maui, Hawaii

I've just released West Wind WebSurge 2.0. WebSurge is a REST Client and Load Testing tool for Windows and in this post I provide a short overview, a link to a new YouTube Getting Started video, and some background on this release

Fixing Windows Control Focus on Toolbar and Menu Controls

2 comments

January 25, 2022 - Maui, Hawaii

You ever run into a problem in a Windows application where saving data off a Menu or Toolbar doesn't save the last changed value? Well, it's a pretty common problem in Windows Applications that's due to the fact that these controls don't change the active control focus which in turn can fail to update data binding from updating the underlying data source. In this post I go into detail on why this happens and describe a few workarounds.

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

15 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

6 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.