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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Creating a generic Markdown Page Handler in ASP.NET Core

April 18, 2018 - Maui, Hawaii

I've been talking about Markdown a lot in recent blog posts and this time I'll cover a generic Markdown page handler that you just drop into any site to handle semi-static page editing more easily with Markdown from within an ASP.NET Core application. While Markdown is common fare in CMS or blog applications, it's not so apparent how to get similar generic Markdown document rendering within the context of an existing application. The middleware I describe here allows you to simply drop a markdown file into a configured folder and have it rendered into a stock template. Simple but very useful.

Getting the .NET Core Runtime Version in a Running Application

3 comments

April 12, 2018 - Maui, Hawaii

Microsoft has a long history of not providing a reasonable way of looking up the version of the runtime that is hosting your applications. .NET Core is no different and in this short post I show one way you can capture a descriptive name of the runtime executing that's suitable for displaying in your application's info page.

Creating an ASP.NET Core Markdown TagHelper and Parser

3 comments

March 23, 2018 - Maui, Hawaii

A couple of months ago I wrote about creating a WebForms based Markdown control. This time around I'll build an ASP.NET Core MVC TagHelper that performs similar functionality for embedding Markdown text into a content area of a Razor page. The component also includes easy access to a Markdown parser using the blazing fast MarkDig Markdown parser.

Accessing Configuration in .NET Core Test Projects

7 comments

February 18, 2018 - Maui, Hawaii

.NET Core provides a clean configuration system and in ASP.NET Core that code is automatically configured for you. In test and other non-Web projects however you have to manually configure the configuration provider yourself. In this post I look at a couple of ways to set up a configuration provider both using raw configuration objects or by explicitly configuring through the depedency injection system.

Distributing Content and Showing a ReadMe file in a .NET Core Nuget Package

5 comments

January 29, 2018 - Maui, Hawaii

.NET SDK style projects no longer support packaging NuGet content into projects as older projects did. So if you need to ship some dependent content with your library you need to find a different way to do so. In this post I look at a specific example of library that requires additional content and look at how to distribute the extra content as well as displaying a readme file to link to instructions when the NuGet package installs

Code Magazine Article: Securing IIS Web Sites with Let’s Encrypt Certificates

9 comments

December 26, 2017 - Maui, Hawaii

Lets Encrypt makes it very easy to create free TLS certificates for your Web site. In this CODE magazine article Rick reviews some of the history of Lets Encrypt and then shows how you can easily take advantage of it to create free and automatically installed and updated certificates for your Windows based IIS Web servers.

Easy Configuration Binding in ASP.NET Core - revisited

8 comments

December 12, 2017 - Maui, Hawaii

In this post I'm taking another look at using strongly typed configuration settings in ASP.NET Core, using a slightly simpler approach that foregoes using IOptions in favor of directly using a configuration object instance. In the process I review the various approaches as a summary for getting configuration settings into .NET types.

Working around the lack of dynamic DbProviderFactory loading in .NET Core

1 comment

November 27, 2017 - Maui, Hawaii

.NET Core and .NET Standard are missing the DbProviderFactories class which is used to dynamically load ADO.NET DbProviderFactory instances which in turn are used to gain access to the various ADO.NET intrinsic objects generically without requiring an explicit reference to the data access provider. In this post I describe why this can be a problem for libraries that use multiple data providers and show a workaround for loading a DbProviderFactory without taking an explict dependency on the provider assembly.

Using Gists for General Purpose Web Pages with Markdown

November 20, 2017 - Maui, Hawaii

Most of you probably know and use Github Gists for sharing Code snippets. But did you know that Gists also support Markdown? Using Markdown makes it easy to create much richer code shareable code and even allows for an easy way to create self-contained Web content.

Flexing your HTML Layout Muscles with Flexbox

November 11, 2017 - Maui, Hawaii

Flexbox is a CSS based technology that makes it much easier to create structured layouts with HTML and CSS. Based on a containership hierarchy, Flexbox combines the structured features of tables with the free form layout capabilities of arbitrary HTML elements that make it possible to create complex , yet flexible HTML designs much more easily that was otherwise possible. My article in CoDe Magazine describes the reasons for Flexbox, the basics of operation and few practical examples you can use today to put flexbox to use.

Dev Intersection 2017 Session Slides and Samples Posted

2 comments

November 08, 2017 - Maui, Hawaii

I've posted my Session Slides and code samples from last week's DevIntersection conference on GitHub.

.NET Core 2.0 and ASP.NET Core 2.0 are Here

10 comments

October 22, 2017 - Maui, Hawaii

After a long wait .NET Core and ASP.NET Core 2.0 are finally here. This release is a major update from Version 1.0 that brings back a ton of functionality that was originally missing in .NET Core 1.x. With closer compatibility to full framework .NET it's much easier to port existing code to .NET Core, as having a much larger API surface to use in your applications. There are many usability improvements that make it easier to get started using considerable less fanfare. In this post I describe some of what's new and what's great and also a few things that are not so great.

Opening a Web Browser with an HTTP Url from Visual Studio Code

1 comment

October 13, 2017 - Maui, Hawaii

Here's a quick tip on how you can create a project specific Visual Studio Task that can launch a Web Browser to a specific page quickly and easily.

A few notes on creating Class Libraries for ASP.NET Core

6 comments

September 26, 2017 - Maui, Hawaii

I recently started to collect some of my ASP.NET Core utilities into a helper support library as I tend to do. In the process I ran into a few snags and I realized I was making a few non-obvious mistakes right from the start. In this post I discuss a few of the issues with dependencies and how to deal with them.

WPF Slow Window Loading due to Invalid SpellChecking Dictionaries

4 comments

September 25, 2017 - Maui, Hawaii

I ran into a nasty problem with spell checking on WPF, which caused any form that uses spell checking to load extremely slow. It turns out the problem was caused by errant entries in the global Windows dictionary key in the registry. This post describes the problem and how to find and fix your global Windows dictionary settings.

Conditional TargetFrameworks for Multi-Targeted .NET SDK Projects on Cross-Platform Builds

8 comments

September 18, 2017 - Maui, Hawaii

If you build multi-targeted .NET SDK projects on multiple platforms you're going to find out that certain targets can't be build on certain platforms. If you target NetStandard and Net45 on a Mac, Net45 is going to fail. In order to get around this you need to conditionally build per platform. Here's how.

Accepting Raw Request Body Content in ASP.NET Core API Controllers

12 comments

September 14, 2017 - Maui, Hawaii

When posting raw body content to ASP.NET Core the process is not very self-explanatory. There's no easy way to simply retrieve raw data to a parameter in an API method, so a few extra steps are provided using either manual handling of the raw request stream, or by creating custom formatter that can handle common 'raw' content types in your APIs via standard Controller method parameters. In this post I look at various permutations and how you can access the raw data in your code.

A Literal Markdown Control for ASP.NET WebForms

September 13, 2017 - Maui, Hawaii

Spent some time last night creating a small ASP.NET Server control that can render literal Markdown text inside of ASPX pages and turn the literal text into Markdown. It's a very simple control, but it makes it lot easier to edit documents that contain simple formatted text content without having to deal with angle brackets for lengthier text.

Configuring LetsEncrypt for ASP.NET Core and IIS

4 comments

September 09, 2017 - Hood River, OR

LetsEncrypt makes it easy to create SSL certificates for your applications for free and lets you automate the process. When using LetsEncrypt with IIS and ASP.NET Core however a few extra steps are required to make an ASP.NET Core site work with LetsEncrypt. I show you how in this post.

Handling HTML5 Client Route Fallbacks in ASP.NET Core

1 comment

August 07, 2017 - Hood River, OR

HTML5 client routes work great on the client, but when deep linking into a site or pressing refresh in the browser, HTML5 client side routes have a nasty habit of turning into server HTTP requests. Requests to routes that the server is likely not configured for. In this post I look at why HTML5 client routes require server cooperation to handle and how to set them up on IIS and/or ASP.NET Core.

Updating Windows Applications and Installers for non-Admin Installation

3 comments

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.

JavaScript Debugging in a Web Browser Control with Visual Studio

3 comments

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.

Debouncing and Throttling Dispatcher Events

6 comments

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.

Multi-Targeting and Porting a .NET Library to .NET Core 2.0

19 comments

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.

Bypassing IIS Error Messages in ASP.NET

5 comments

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.