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Putting the Westwind.Scripting C# Templating Library to work, Part 2
In part 2 of this post series I look at some of the issues you may have to deal with when using the Westwind.Scripting library as an offline document or Web site creation engine. While running simple templates is easy enough, when generating static output for Web site publishing or local preview requires some special considerations.
Revisiting C# Scripting with the Westwind.Scripting Templating Library, Part 1
The `Westwind.Scripting` library provides runtime C# code compilation and execution as well as a C# based Script Template engine using Handlebars style syntax with pure C# code. In this post I discuss use cases for script templating and some examples of how I use in real-world applications, followed by a discussion of the engine's features and the new Layout, Section and Partials feature that was added recently.
Using .NET Native AOT to build Windows WinAPI Dlls
Did you know that you can use .NET AOT compilation to create native Windows DLLs to potentially replace traditional C/C++ compiled DLLs? It's now possible to build completely native DLLs that can be called from external applications and legacy applications in particular using .NET AOT compilation. In this post I show how this works and discuss the hits and misses of this tech.
Azure Trusted Signing Revisited with Dotnet Sign
In this follow-up post to my previous guide on Azure Trusted Signing, I explore how the new `dotnet sign` tool significantly simplifies the code signing process compared to the traditional `SignTool` workflow. The post identifies `dotnet sign` using `artifact-signing` as a faster, more efficient alternative.
Don't use the Microsoft Timestamp Server for Signing
The default Microsoft timestamp server frequently causes intermittent failures during the code-signing process, particularly when processing many files or large binaries as part of a application distribution. These reliability issues can be resolved by replacing the Microsoft timestamp server with a more stable, compatible third-party alternative.
Reliably Refreshing the WebView2 Control
The WebView2 control lacks a direct `Reload(noCache)` overload that forces a browser hard reload of the current page. Instead content is loaded with a soft refresh that - hopefully - reloads the current page and its dependencies dependent on WebView environment and server cache policies. In this post we'll look at how to work around this limitation and force a hard refresh in several different ways.
What the heck is a `\\.\nul` path and why is it breaking my Directory Files Lookup?
I've been trying to track down an odd bug in my logs related to Null device failures in directory lookups which have been causing application level exceptions. In some odd scenarios these null mappings are showing up for files. In this post I take a look at what they are and how to work around them for this very edge case scenario.
Embedding YouTube Videos into Markdown Documents
Embedding YouTube videos into Markdown can be surprisingly unintuitive depending on what the Markdown rendering platform supports. If the platform you're publishing your Markdown to - your own blog engine, a commercial CMS site, Wordpress, or something less mainstream - there may or may not be support for certain features, or there may be custom implementations provided by the platform. Native...
Using the new WebView2 AllowHostInputProcessing Keyboard Mapping Feature
If you've used the WebVIew2 control for a UI interactive Hybrid active you've probably run into some odd keyboard behavior, where some keys cannot be captured properly in the host application or are not forwarded quite the way they normally behave. In the newer releases of the WebView SDK there's a new option called `AllowHostInputProcessing` that allows for forwarding keyboard events more aggressively to the host which fixes some Windows behaviors and introduces some new issues.
Fighting through Setting up Microsoft Trusted Signing
It's that time of year again to update my CodeSigning certificate, only to find out that the rules have changed since I last did this. Certs now require either a physical hardware key or a online service provides the non-exportable keys to sign binaries along with massive price increases for the privilege. So I decided to give Microsoft's new Trusted CodeSigning service a try, and while that entails all the joy of setting up Azure services, at the and of the day it works and is a considerably more economical way for CodeSigning to work. In this post I describe how to set this up hopefully to help you avoid some of the pain I went through.
Centering a WPF TreeViewItem in the TreeView ScrollViewer
One of the annoying features of the TreeView in WPF is the inability to easily select and make an item prominently visible. While there is `TreeView.BringIntoView()` it doesn't do a good job dropping the item that the very bottom (or top) of the viewport with no way to center. In this post I show a few helper methods that facilitate this process and a few related tasks with some useful TreeView helpers.
Unpacking Zip Folders into Windows Long File Paths
Ah, long file paths bit me again today - this time with `ZipFile.ExtractToDirectory()` not unzipping long path files, even when specifying long path syntax for the output folder. In this post I briefly review Windows long path issues again, and describe what doesn't work and how to work around this particular problem. While specific to `ExtractToDirectory()` a similar approach might apply to other batch file based operations.
Adding Runtime NuGet Package Loading to an Application
It's not a common use case, but if you need need to dynamically add external code at runtime, NuGet packages are the most familiar way for developers to add that functionality besides old-school direct assembly loading. In this post I look at my LiveReloadServer local Web Server tool and how I integrated both external assembly loading and NuGet package support to allow extensibility for the Razor (and Markdown) scripting functionality of LiveReloadServer.
Distinguished Name on FileZilla Server Self-Generated Certs
Renewing Filezilla certificates I've run into a 'huh?' moment a few times trying to renew the self-signed certificates for the Administration interface. Trying the obvious entries of putting in the DNS names results in an error that's not perplexingly is fixed by providing a full Common Name instead.
Configuring Microsoft.AI.Extensions with multiple providers
Microsoft.Extensions.AI is the new base library for creating AI clients in an abstracted way. While the library does a great job with the abstraction of the interfaces it works with, the provider interfaces that create the intial abstractions like IChatClient are a lot less user friendly with hard to discover syntax based on extension methods and different syntax for each provider. In this post I review three providers and how to get them instantiated along with a small streaming example to use them.
Lazy Loading the Mermaid Diagram Library
The Mermaid library is a large beast, and if you're using it selectively in your Web content you probably want to make sure you don't load it unless you actually need it, due to it's download footprint and load time. If you're loading Mermaid with server only code it's pretty straight forward, but if you use it on the client there you may want to delay loading the library until you actually need to display a diagram.
WebView2: Waiting for Document Loaded
WebBrowser loading is always async and the WebView2 control is no different - in fact it's more complex as there a number of events that need to be handled in order to properly handle loading the control. In this post I describe how you can create a simplified load checking routine, or use the Westwind.WebView library and WebViewHandler to wait on content and process document access using linear `await` syntax.
Avoiding WPF Image Control Local File Locking
WPF locks local images when referenced via a Source attribute. In this post I discuss why this might be a problem and how you can work around it using native XAML and custom binding converter that provides a consolidated approach that includes image caching for better performance of reused images.
The Strong ARM of .NET: Wrestling with x64 and Arm64 Desktop App Deployment
.NET works great for cross-platform development making it easy to build apps that are cross-platform and cross-architecture specifically for x64 and Arm64. However, building a distributable application that can install and run out of box on both of these platforms, that's a bit more effort. In this post I discuss some of the gotchas and how to work around them to distribute apps that run out of the gate on both platforms.
Westwind.Scripting Templating Library: Adding Support for Layouts, Partials and Sections
The `Westwind.Scripting` library provides runtime C# code compilation and execution as well as a C# based Script Template engine using Handlebars style syntax with pure C# code. In this post I discuss use cases for script templating and some examples of how I use in real-world applications, followed by a discussion of the engine's features and the new Layout, Section and Partials feature that was added recently.
Using Windows.Media SpeechRecognition in WPF
Windows has a pretty capable SpeechRecognition engine built-in via Windows Media services. In .NET these features are accessible via the Windows SDK (WinSdk) that expose these Windows features to .NET applications. In this post I discuss how you can integrate these features into a WPF application, and discuss some of the pitfalls along the way that you have to watch out for related to the SDK integration 'features'.
Making Html Input Controls Truly ReadOnly
A discussion of how to show readonly controls in user interface and ensuring that they are not UI activated. This post discusses readonly and disabled behavior and how you can make readonly behave better if you choose to use it over disabled.
Accessing Windows Settings Dialogs from Code via Shell Commands
Windows has support for an `ms-setting:` Protocol Handler/Uri Scheme that allows you to directly open most Windows settings dialogs directly via simple Url based shell commands.
Resolving Paths To Server Relative Paths in .NET Code
ASP.NET Core has support for resolving Urls in Controllers and Razor Pages via embedded `~/` links in Views and via `Url.Content()`. But, these features are tied to Controllers or Razor Pages - what if you need to resolve Urls elsewhere, in middleware or even inside of business logic? In this post I describe how you can build a couple of helpers that are more flexible and also provide some additional functionality of resolving site root and relative paths to full site root paths.
Inline Confirmations in JavaScript UI
Confirmation dialogs or modal popups can be annoying in HTML applications. What if you could instead use an inline UI to confirm an operation? In this post I describe a simple way you can use an inline UI to confirm an operation that can be easily implemented with a few lines of code and a couple of binding directives.
Retrieving Images from the Clipboard Reliably in WPF Revisited
The WPF Clipboard is notoriously bad for retrieving image data, mainly because of the funky behavior of the ImageSource control into which clipboard data is loaded. WPF cuts a lot of corners when retrieving images and there are many scenarios where Clipboard.GetImage() either crashes or doesn't render the supposedly successfully retrieved image. In this post I review some of the challenges and how you can work around the retrieving an ImageSource with an intermediary load of a bitmap in between to provide reliable image retrieval from the clipboard in WPF.
Comparing Raw ASP.NET Request Throughput across Versions: 8.0 to 9.0 Edition
Once again I'm taking a look at the newish .NET release and how it compares to the previous release - this time .NET 9.0 from .NET 8.0. I'll run my simple load tests to compare performance and also discuss a number of anecdotes from running .NET 9.0 in production apps for the last couple of months.
Back to Basics: Using the Parallel Library to Massively Boost Loop Performance
I recently had another occasion to add Parallel.ForEachAsync() into an application to improve performance of an Http look up operation drastically. When I tweeted a note on X there was quite a bit of response, so I thought I follow up and discuss Parallel use in this use case and when it makes sense to use Parallel in applications.
Getting the Current TabItem when the Tab is not selected in WPF
There's no direct support in WPF to find the control that the mouse is hovering over in Items controls like the TabControl, so if you need to bring up context sensitive information like a context menu or tooltip it takes a little extra effort to get the correct item to work with in this case ContextMenuOpening.
Using SQL Server on Windows ARM
I recently got a SnapDragon X Elite ARM device to play with and while I've been impressed with all things that work very well on it, one thing did not install easily: SQL Server. There's no ARM version of SQL Server and the x64 versions don't run on ARM devices. Docker images are also amd64 so that didn't work well either. Turns out you can use LocalDb onin emulation mode, but setting it up is anything but intuitive. In this post I discuss how to get SQL Server to run on a Windows ARM device.
Getting the ASP.NET Core Server Hosting Urls at Startup and in Requests
Ever need to retrieve an ASP.NET application's hosting Urls? There are million ways to set these URLs but there's no easy fixed location where you can pick the addresses up from. Instead you have to go through a bit of a dance, and use one of two approaches depending on whether you need the addresses during startup or inside of a request.
Nuking Local Nuget Package Sources to show newly Published Packages
Every once in while when I publish a NuGet package and then try to use the published package in another project I end up with a situation where the new package simply is not recognized. Most of the time it shows up after a few minutes, but on more than a few occasions I've stuck waiting for quite a while waiting for the package cache to refresh. Luckily there's a way to nuke the cache and force Nuget to re-read local packages and while that is the nuclear option that requires downloading a lot of packages it works to make your project compile - right now!
Create a .NET PlantUML Markdown Render Extension
PlantUML is a Web based diagramming markup language that can be used to create diagrams using text descriptions that are rendered into images via a PlantUML server. In this post I describe how you can integrate PlantUML image rendering into your .NET application, specifically from a Markdown rendering perspective as Markdown documents are the most common mechanism that PlantUML output is delivered.
Back to Basics: Await a Task with a Timeout
Sometimes it's useful to call async methods and be able to stop waiting after a given timeout period. Unfortunately there's no native support on Task to provide this. In this short post I show how you can simulate timeouts and provide a couple of helper methods to make the process generically available.
Work around the WebView2 NavigateToString() 2mb Size Limit
The WebView2 control's NavigateToString() method has a limit for the string size of 2mb, which can be a problem especially for HTML pages with embedded content. In this post I'll describe how this problem can show up and show a couple of ways to work around the issue.
Dealing with Platform Specific Classes and Methods in CrossPlatform .NET
If you deal with old .NET library code that is sprinkled with some Windows specific code in places you've likely run into places where the Windows specific code is throwing up unwanted compiler warnings. Sometimes that matters, but often times these warnings are annoyances as these methods are highly unlikely to get called from x-platform code. In this post I describe some annoyances, how you can work around them and eventually fix the issues without throwing everything out the window.
C# Version String Formatting
I'm tired of trying to format versions for user facing interfaces after fumbling with it again and again. In this short post I show a small helper extension method that lets you configure how to form user friendly version strings to display to end users.
Mime Base64 is a Thing?
Ran into an old legacy application recently that required that attached data was preformatted to Mime Base64 which I never even heard of before. Turns out it's a 'url-safe' version of base64 that replaces certain characters that can be present in base64 with 'safe' characters. In this short post I show a small helper that handles several Base64 Mime operations.
Speed up your Start Menu by disabling Web Search
If you're like me, you've probably cursed the Windows Start menu from time to time, when it's either very slow to pop up, or in some instances fails to pop up at all when you press the Windows key. This simple tip can drastically improve performance of your Windows Start Menu by simply disabling Web search.
ASP.NET Core Hosting Module with Shadow Copy Not Starting: Separate your Shadow Copy Folders!
I recently ran into a major failure related to Shadow Copying for an ASP.NET Web app on IIS which was caused by corruption of the Shadow Copy directories. The app starts with the dreaded white ANCM Error page and event log entries that point at missing application folders. It turns out that this is caused by interference of multiple applications using the same shadow copy folder. In this post I describe the problem and how to work around it.