Tagged articles - .NET

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

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

Minification of Cascade Style Sheet (CSS) and Java Script (JS) should be on a TODO list for every web application. The minification of CSS and JS can be easily one on the runtime with ASP.NET bundling which is build in in ASP.NET framework, but in case of distributing your resource files over CDN you cannot use the runtime minification. You physical files need to be minified...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

Sending email after and even before a long running PowerShell script is a logical thing to do to notify users which are responsible for taking actions for the specific operation. PowerShell starting from version 3.0 has build in cmdlet Send-MailMessage for sending emails. ...read more

Finding out installed .NET Framework version on the host Windows OS is not an everyday job, but when it comes to deployments of the .NET application it is needed to check if the host supports targeting .NET Framework version. Starting from .NET Framework 4.5, Microsoft is storing .NET Framework version as a key in registry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\NET Framework Setup\NDP\v4\Full\Release ...read more

When creating new website with new application pool, bu default IIS sets your application pool in a way to save resources when inactive. This is because it does not want to run your website all the time if is there is no activity on it and keep using resources on the host for idle worker processes (w3wp.exe). This is the reason you might experience slow response when opening your website URL from time to time especially if your website has low traffic. ...read more

More often you will need a list of strings from a single string with a Split method, not so often you need to get a single string from an IEnumerable of strings, but still those requirements exist form time to time. This does not look like a complex tasks, but still there are several ways to achieve this. ...read more

MSMQ (Microsoft Message Queuing) is a built in Windows component. It is not so popular now days as there are more efficient and robust solutions available. However, it still has it's place in application architecture as a simple queueing system, plus as I mentioned, it comes out of the box with Windows operating system as a Windows component.This means it is still widely used Windows based applications mostly for internal notifications and services between components of the solution...read more