Tagged articles - C#

HTML is a markup language same as XML, but still there are differences which make dealing with them a bit different. Basically HTML is a strict structure in terms of node sets and attribute sets, but in general more documents online are not exactly following the proper structure since browsers usually manage to deal with rendering out the document in UI. However, this makes it more difficult to read them in case you want to from website itself as you cannot apply all XML rules since structure is not strictly followed. ...read more

Of course, the best way to make you web application work fluent is to write the code properly and design the architecture of application to meet requirements and certain load depending of the type of application. But even though architecture is good, you can always improve performance by reducing processing in application code itself. Caching is the best way to boost web application performance and reduce load of both application (IIS) and data servers (SQL Server) ...read more

Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) means that page from other domain can make request to some resource which is on other domain. For example, if you try to invoke some WEB API method which is running on different domain you will get exception in the script. By default CORS are disabled in ASP.NET bot you can easily enable them just by modifying web.config for IIS7 and newer versions pf IIS. ...read more

Generating Zip archives has always been a great thing if you need to generate different content for the request depending on some parameters. In case you need to return multiple files this is one approach to go with. ...read more

Recently I started a small free service app for extracting icons from application files .exe and .dll. It is called IconExtract and it is hosted at http://iconextract.dejanstojanovic.net/ It basically takes application file you submit, extracts icons and returns them zipped, so beside long running upload there is some processing on the back-end when file is uploaded as well. ...read more

Creating image thumbnail on the fly is pretty easy in ASP.NET whether you are still using WebForms or MVC. There is even a methods introduced in .NET 4.5 framework for generating thumbnail image from a Bitmap class instance. You can easily create and action in a controller and generate and return thumbnail image on the fly...read more

HTTP compression is a simple way to improve site performance and decrease bandwidth, with no configuration required on the client side. If you test your website through Google PageSpeed Insights, HTTP compression will be one of the points recommended to be used to increase website performance. Luckily for .NET developers IIS supports it out of the box...read more

If you were planning to create sitemap.xml in Umbraco, you most probably were doing it with HttpHandler. This was fine until Umbraco version 6.2.2. If your website was running in lower version, most probably after update your HttpHandler were crashing since UmbracoContext.Current returns null. ...read more

Working with any collection which implements IEnumerable is pretty easy in C#, plus if you are using LINQ you can easily manipulate with collection data. Recently I was doing some filtering with some in-memory collections and I had to check whether one collection contains same elements as some other collection with elements of the same type. At first sight this looks pretty simple, but first problem is that collection elements might not be in the same order in both collection. ...read more

Entity framework is an awesome tool for working with database in .net, but sometime you have to get back to old fashion ADO for the performances. The bad thing is that as soon as you get back to ADO, you have to deal with SqlDataReader, DataTable and DataSet classes...read more

Passing complex data to and from stored procedures has always been a tricky one. The most elegant way to pass values to a stored procedure is to use predefined data types in SQL Server...read more

Managed Extensibility Framework or MEF is a library introduced in .NET Framework 4 which allows developers to easily create plugin based applications. It lives in System.ComponentModel.Composition namespace and before start working with MEF reference to this assembly needs to be added in a project.It is basically an implementation of IoC (Inversion of Control) pattern with few core functionalities such as assembly loading...read more

I don't work with random values very often but recently I had to write some small function that returns random value from an array. It sounded like a good idea to write it as an extension method to make it reusable for other projects...read more

Basically all Dictionary collections in .NET internally implement Hashtable wrapped, so in terms of mechanism they are pretty much the same. The difference is that Dictionary exposes strong types while Hashtable uses object-object keyvalue pair which is much harder to work with because you need to know what is the actual type of the object stored in a key or value. Often casting will probably be required. In multithread code environment locking is considered by default when accessing any shared resource...read more

In many cases serialized data is returned in a form of string although the actual type of data is different. The problem begings when you want to use data in it's original type becaus direct cast is not allowed in C# as it is in VB.net. This is why you have to use TryParse and safely parse the value to it's original type...read more