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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Avoid WebDeploy Locking Errors to IIS with Shadow Copy for ASP.NET Core Apps

4 comments

November 07, 2022 - Maui, Hawaii

If you're self-hosting ASP.NET Core applications on IIS and using WebDeploy to publish to the server, you've very likely run into the dreaded locked file problem on the server. In this post I show you how you can work around locking problems with the base WebDeploy configuration and by using a new experimental feature in ASP.NET 6.0 to Shadow Copy deploy binaries. As a bonus this post also describes setting up and using Web Deploy in some detail.

Fix automatic re-routing of http:// to https:// on localhost in Web Browsers

October 24, 2022 - Maui, Hawaii

If you're doing local Web develop with multiple development tools you've probably run into a problem where you end up not being able to access a local site via unsecured `http://` requests and automatically get redirected to `https://` no matter what you try. If you don't have a certificate set up for the site you may not even be able to access the site at all. Turns out this usually is due to HSTS which is a nasty little bugger of a security protocol that is applied universally to a domain even in applications that don't use HSTS. In this post I discuss how HSTS works and why it can be a problem for local development as well as how to clear out the HSTS cache or avoid using it locally.

Testing HttpRequest.Form Variables in Unit Tests for ASP.NET Core Components

September 18, 2022 - Hood River, Oregon

Here's a quick post that shows how to create a testable HttpRequest.Form collection so you can test form variables in a unit test.

Referencing a Local Private NuGet Package in your Solution

4 comments

September 11, 2022 - Hood River, Oregon

I recently needed to add a local reference to my project and I couldn't quite figure out the best way to do it in a transparent way to consumers of the repository, so that they wouldn't have to explicitly configure additional build settings in order to find dependencies. In this post I discuss how to add local references or use a local Nuget source to add non-public packages to your projects without explicit package feed configuration.

Keeping Content Out of the Publish Folder for WebDeploy

1 comment

August 24, 2022 - Hood River, Oregon

Sometimes when you publish a project to the server, you need to keep certain content that's part of your local development from publishing to the server. You can control how MSBuild publishing handles file output in a myriad of ways and it can be confusing if you don't know the exact settings you need to set for each scenario. In this post I discuss various options available include using the project item settings and the options in the pubxml file along with some commentary on when you might need this functionality.

Mapping Multiple Static File Folders in ASP.NET Core

1 comment

August 23, 2022 - Hood River, Oregon

Recently I needed to map an external folder as a 'virtual' directory in an ASP.NET Core application to include externally added content into the main Web application. ASP.NET Core's Static File Middleware provides easy mapping of a folder for static file serving, but it's not so obvious to add additional folders for static file serving. In this post I'll show you how to do this and a few other thoughts around this topic most common when physically hosting on a server.

ASP.NET Core MVC Views not Resolving Partial Views outside of the default ControllerContext

August 08, 2022 - Hood River, Oregon

I recently ran into a problem with ASP.NET Core MVC views where rendering a Parent View in a Controller Context other than the originally designed context won't find Child Views that are referenced with no or local or relative paths. It turns out that ASP.NET Core MVC does not resolve local View paths as expected when rendering a View from a different ControllerContext instead using the current controller's context paths, rather than the view relative paths. In this post I describe why this can be a problem and several ways to work around this problem.

Fighting WebView2 Visibility on Initialization

5 comments

July 14, 2022 - Hood River, Oregon

The WebView2 control has a clever 'feature' that doesn't fully initialize the WebView control if it's not UI visible. While this can save resources in some scenarios it can also make for some very annoying behavior that causes startup timing and flickering issues. In this post I describe a few scenarios where this initial visibility delay loading can cause issues and show a trick you can use to get around it if this 'feature' causes a problem.

Back to Basics: Custom HTTP Response Header Manipulation in ASP.NET Core

1 comment

July 07, 2022 - Hood River, Oregon

HTTP Headers are a core part of the HTTP protocol and while applications rarely need to deal with them, when you need to set them - especially globally - ASP.NET Core doesn't have an obvious, built-in way to add headers to every request. In this back to basics post I describe what HTTP header, why you might set them and show how to set them as part of individual requests as well as globally for every request in your site.

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

10 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

10 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

6 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

9 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

5 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

16 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

9 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

3 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.