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Recently I wrote and article about setting up and using Google reCAPTCHA v2, better known as "I'm not a robot" validation. If you were setting up reCAPTCHA v2, you probably noticed that there is an option for "Invisible reCAPTCHA" option. This type of validation, instead of asking user to interact with the UI in order to be identified as a human, does not require any direct interaction which can help building better user experience for your visitors...read more

In case you have any page on your website which allows anonymous users to POST data to your web application, you should always use any kind of bot protection. Usually that is any kind of CAPTCHA implementation...read more

Even before popularity of micro service approach, for even monolithic applications you needed to have health-checks (Google Compute Engine) or health-probes (Microsoft Azure) for load balancing. Basically in load balancing scenario, these endpoints are used to tell load balancer whether instance can handle requests or not. Since handling of requests may consider several components, these endpoints either return 200 OK HTTP response or any other response like 500 Internal Server Error with optional payload message describing the issue and each component status. ...read more

Saving an object to distributed cache store in .NET Core requires your object to be serialized to byte array in order for SetAsync method on Microsoft.Extensions.Caching.Distributed.IDistributedCache interface implemented instance to save your object to the injected cache store instance. This means that what ever instance you have, you need to serialize it first to byte array. Similar, just reversed process applies for the process of reading an object from the distributed cache store. ...read more

Unlike Entity Framework 6, EF Core and whole .NET Core relies on dependency injection. For example, configuration is expected to be injected from the calling assembly instead of being available at any time. This is one of the reasons Migrations in Code First approach do not work out of the box for EF Core...read more

Both Web API in .NET 4.5 and later and Web API in ASP.NET CORE have great error handling support out of the box. You can specify you global handler and control your response to a client when exception happens. ...read more

Recently I needed to set redis key if it is not present with specific expiry time to use it as some logical flag. I knew tat you can use SETNX command for this but did not have any info how to set the expiry time. After some time going through redis documentation and articles found online I found a SET method overload for the redis-cli. ...read more

If you are dealing with pure JavaScript without using any library, you probably want to trigger your custom actions on some element event. This is easily done with addEventListener which is in general supported by all now days browsers. ...read more

JSON is the most commonly used data fromat nowdays. It is lighter than XML, more readable and it's sindax complies with most OOP C-Like lnguages such as Java, JavaScript and C#. There is not really many downsides of using JSON, so that is one of the rasons everyone is using it in one way or another. ...read more

Often case when you need to convert String to a different type which is most of the time a primitive type in C# is when you are reading values from configuration. In both .NET and .NET Core, reading from configuration return plain String value...read more

Authentication in web services is a bit more different than with web pages because of one simple reason. There is no UI for entering credentials to authenticate to consume service...read more

GIF image format is most commonly used format for online advertising, especially since all browser starting from major onces stopped supporting Flash animations because of their infamous security vulnerabilities and issues. After going through different articles I found online, I came up with the class which exposes following GIF image properties. ...read more

I am pretty sure any of us used Thread.Sleep method to pause the current thread execution. Mostly this is used to simulate long running process during the test or debug. While this is fine to use for testing, if your intention is to actually schedule thread execution this is probably wrong way of doing it, simply because Thread.Sleep does not actually take as many milliseconds as you pass to the method as a parameter...read more

One of the reasons JSON is used rather than XML is it's simplicity in notation. However XML is claimed to be more human readable than JSON and JSON is easier to parse for machines, so basically we switched from XML in favor to machine processing. If you take a C# class and serialize it to JSON string you still find it quite readable since we kept all nice property names in the JSON output...read more

Recently I wrote an article on how to Send data to Azure Log Analytics from C# code which is demonstrating pushing data from your code to Microsoft Azure Log Analytics and simple quering the data from the Log Analytics. Azure Log Analytics are extremely helpful for storing application logs because they provide transformation of the raw data into queriable columns, you can easily query your logs stored in Log Analytics and export to Excel format if you need to share the data or you just want to make some offline data analysis. ...read more