.NET

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

Downloading large files from your code may cause problems due to limitations in your network or system where your code is executing. For example, some systems limit the size of the file you can download through the network...read more

Enums in C# can contain multiple values if they are decorated with [Flags] attribute. However, Flag Enums are not recommended to be used in web api action method signatures...read more

Cross-site Scripting (XSS) refers to client-site code injection attack where an attacker can execute malicious scripts into a web application. Basically attacker manages to upload malicious script code to the website which will be later on served to the users and executed in their browser...read more

WebP is an image format introduced by Google Developers and it provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. Using WebP, webmasters and web developers can create smaller, richer images that make the web faster...read more

Starting from few years ago, Google enforces secured over unsecured website traffic. However it is an ongoing process since both publishers and advertisers need to implement HTTPS in order to avoid mixed contnet exception in a browser and preventing ads to load on a website. ...read more

Some time ago I wrote an article on how to export data to Excel from C# code. Essentially it exports data to file which can be opened in Excel but it does not produce the actual Microsoft Office Excel document. I recently wrote an article on Working with Excel files in .NET without using COM in C#, so I decided to use this approach to create extension methods for DataTable and DataSet classes...read more

When I searched for exporting s to HTML table in C# I found a lot of articles and code snippets which are basically doing string concatenation or String.Format on the hard-coded HTML String to generate HTML string of the table. To me this approach is a bit like a workaround and I was never a fan of hard-coding values. In addition, code with a lot of hard-coded value end up as hardly maintainable code...read more

Excel is a common format for storing tabular data. It is a powerful tool from Microsoft Office package. Since it is often format for string data, it is often required to work with this data from the third party applications...read more

Configuration files are a useful place too keep any related configuration settings. It provides easy to use configuration fetching which you can invoke from any part of the application. However it does not support many stuff out of the box, but on the other hand it is pretty flexible and expendable. One of the things that are not there built in is support for lists. ...read more

Azure as a part of Microsoft Operations Management Suite provides data collection and insight services inside Azure cloud platform. It allows you to: ...read more

Taking out business logic from the application allows different clients running on a different platform to use same logic. REST API is a great way to decuple business logic and make it available to different clients on a different platforms. To upload files using WebApi we first need to define an action in a WebApi controller to handle files posted to the endpoint. ...read more

Microsoft .NET framework comes with a really good support for Windows services. Regarding the project itself, Visual Studio IDE comes with build in project template for Windows service. .NET framework itself comes with a built in tool installutil for deploying the Windows Service project...read more