CSS Blogs & News @CODEKICKER

9

DbProviderFactories & ODP.NET: When even Oracle can be tamed

Oracle and .NET: Tales from the dark ages Each time when I tried to load data from an Oracle database it was a pretty terrible experience. I remember that I struggle to find the right Oracle driver and even when everything was installed the strange TNS ora config file popped up and nothing worked. It can be simple… 2 weeks ago I had the pleasure to load some data from a Oracle database and ...

01.06.2018 | 236 1 | Code-Inside Blog

9

CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo() vs. new CultureInfo() - what's the difference?

The problem The problem started with a simple code: double.TryParse("1'000", NumberStyles.Any, culture, out _) Be aware that the given culture was “DE-CH” and the Swiss use the ‘ for the separator for numbers. Unfortunately the Swiss authorities have abandoned the ‘ for currencies, but it is widly used in the industrie and such a number should be parsed or displayed. Now ...

29.05.2018 | 278 0 | Code-Inside Blog

6

.editorconfig: Sharing a common coding style in a team

Sharing Coding Styles & Conventions In a team it is really important to set coding conventions and to use a specific coding style, because it helps to maintain the code - a lot. Of course has each developer his own “style”, but some rules should be set, otherwise it will end in a mess. Typical examples for such rules are “Should I use var or not?” or “Are _ still OK for private fields?”. ...

01.05.2018 | 368 0 | Code-Inside Blog

11

Did you know that you can run ASP.NET Core 2 under the full framework?

This post might be obvious for some, but I really struggled a couple of month ago and I’m not sure if a Visual Studio Update fixed the problem for me or if I was just blind… The default way: Running .NET Core AFAIK the framework dropdown in the normal Visual Studio project template selector (the first window) is not important and doesn’t matter anyway for .NET Core related projects. ...

01.04.2018 | 611 0 | Code-Inside Blog

6

Windows Fall Creators Update 1709 and Docker Windows Containers

Who shrunk my Windows Docker image? We started to package our ASP.NET/WCF/Full-.NET Framework based web app into Windows Containers, which we then publish to the Docker Hub. Someday we discovered that one of our new build machines produced Windows Containers only half the size: Instead of a 8GB Docker image we only got a 4GB Docker image. Yeah, right? The problem with Windows ...

28.02.2018 | 111 0 | Code-Inside Blog

7

WCF Global Fault Contracts

If you are still using WCF you might have stumbled upon this problem: WCF allows you to throw certain Faults in your operation, but unfortunatly it is a bit awkward to configure if you want “Global Fault Contracts”. With this solution here it should be pretty easy to get “Global Faults”: Define the Fault on the Server Side: Let’s say we want to throw the following fault in all our ...

01.02.2018 | 143 0 | Code-Inside Blog

8

First steps to enable login with Microsoft or Azure AD account for your application

It is quite common these days to “Login with Facebook/Google/Twitter”. Of course Microsoft has something similar. If I remember it correctly the first version was called “Live SDK” with the possibility to login with your personal Microsoft Account. With Office 365 and the introduction of Azure AD we were able to build an application to sign-in with a personal account via the ...

31.12.2017 | 152 0 | Code-Inside Blog

8

Signing with SignTool.exe - don't forget the timestamp!

If you currently not touching signtool.exe at all or have nothing to do with “signing” you can just pass this blogpost, because this is more or less a stupid “Today I learned I did a mistake”-blogpost. Signing? We use authenticode code signing for our software just to prove that the installer is from us and “safe to use”, otherwise you might see a big warning from Windows that the ...

02.12.2017 | 671 0 | Code-Inside Blog

10

Signing with SignTool.exe - don't forget the timestamp!

If you currently not touching signtool.exe at all or have nothing to do with “signing” you can just pass this blogpost, because this is more or less a stupid “Today I learned I did a mistake”-blogpost. Signing? We use authenticode code signing for our software just to prove that the installer is from us and “safe to use”, otherwise you might see a big warning from Windows that the ...

01.12.2017 | 134 0 | Code-Inside Blog

8

Introducing Electron.NET - building Electron Desktop Apps with ASP.NET Core

The last couple of weeks I worked with my buddy Gregor Biswanger on a new project called “Electron.NET“. As you might already guess: It is some sort of bridge between the well known Electron and .NET. If you don’t know what Electron is: It helps to build desktop apps written in HTML/CSS/Javascript The idea Gregor asked me a while ago if it is possible to build desktop apps with ASP.NET ...

01.11.2017 | 816 0 | Code-Inside Blog

10

dnSpy - a OSS IL decompiler and debugger

My colleague was fighting against a nasty bug, that only occures on one machine. Unfortunatly this machine was not a development machine (no VS installed) and we didn’t want to mess with VS remote debugging, because (AFAIK) his would need some additional setup but we were not allowed to install anything. Soooo… he searched around and found this: dnSpy - a .NET assembly editor, ...

01.10.2017 | 439 1 | Code-Inside Blog

4

IdentityServer3 with WindowsAuthentication with ASP.NET WebApi & ASP.NET & WPF App

Please note: In my sample and in this blogpost I cover IdentityServer 3, because last year when I was working on the sample and our real implementation IdentityServer4 (a rewrite of IdentityServer 3) was in beta. My guess is, that most stuff should still apply even if you are using IdentityServer4, but I didn’t test it. Also: I’m not a security expert - this might be all wrong, but ...

31.08.2017 | 398 0 | Code-Inside Blog

6

How to convert .crt & .key files to a .pfx

The requirements are simple: You will need the .cer with the corresponding .key file and need to download OpenSSL. If you are using Windows without the awesome Linux Subsystem, take the latest pre-compiled version for Windows from this or this site. Otherwise with Bash on Windows you can just use OpenSSL via its “native” environment. Thanks for the hint @kapsiR After the download ...

01.08.2017 | 821 2 | Code-Inside Blog

12

Non-cryptographic hash functions for .NET

Creating hashs is quite common to check if content X has changed without looking at the whole content of X. Git for example uses SHA1-hashs for each commit. SHA1 itself is a pretty old cryptographic hash function, but in the case of Git there might have been better alternatives available, because the “to-be-hashed” content is not crypto relevant - it’s just content marker. Well… in ...

30.06.2017 | 219 0 | Code-Inside Blog

8

Using Visual Studio Code & Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC)

Recently we start working on a Angular 4 app but all other parts of the application (e.g. the backend stuff) were stored in a good old TFVC based repository (inside a Team Foundation Server 2015) . Unfortunately building an Angular app with the full blown Visual Studio with the “default” Team Explorer workflow is not really practical. Another point for using Visual Studio Code was ...

30.05.2017 | 359 0 | Code-Inside Blog

4

.NET CultureInfo in Windows 10

Did you know that the CultureInfo behavior with “unkown” cultures has changed with Windows 10? I stumbled two times about this “problem” - so this is enough to write a short blogpost about it. Demo Code Lets use this democode: try { // ok on Win10, but not on pre Win10 if culture is not registred CultureInfo culture1 new CultureInfo("foo"); CultureInfo culture2 new ...

24.04.2017 | 593 0 | Code-Inside Blog

7

How we moved to Visual Studio 2017

Visual Studio 2017 has arrived and because of .NET Core and other goodies we wanted to switch fast to the newest release with our product OneOffixx. Company & Product Environment In our solution we use some VC projects (just for Office Development & building a .NET shim), Windows Installer XML & many C# projects for desktop or ASP.NET stuff. Our builds are scripted with CAKE (see ...

28.03.2017 | 346 0 | Code-Inside Blog

4

HowTo: Get User Information & Group Memberships from Active Directory via C#

I had to find a way to access all group memberships from a given Active Directory user. The problem here is, that groups may contain other groups and I needed a list of “all” applied group memberships - directly or indirectly. The “fastest” solution (without querying each group) is to use the Token-Groups attribute, which already does this magic for us. This list should contain all ...

03.03.2017 | 304 0 | Code-Inside Blog

7

HowTo: Get User Information & Group Memberships from Active Directory via C#

I had to find a way to access all group memberships from a given Active Directory user. The problem here is, that groups may contain other groups and I needed a list of “all” applied group memberships - directly or indirectly. The “fastest” solution (without querying each group) is to use the Token-Groups attribute, which already does this magic for us. This list should contain all ...

03.03.2017 | 289 0 | Code-Inside Blog

13

Create NuGet packages with Cake

This blogpost is a follow up to these Cake (C# Make) related blogpost: Building with Cake Build & run xUnit tests with Cake Scenario Let’s say we have this project structure. The “Config”, “Result” and “Engine” projects contains a corresponding .nuspec, like this: ?xml version "1.0"? package metadata id Sloader.Config /id version version /version title Sloader.Config /title ...

14.02.2017 | 752 0 | Code-Inside Blog

9

Build & run xUnit tests with Cake

Last year I already covered the basic usage of Cake, which stands for “C# Make”. This time we want to build and run xUnit tests with Cake. Scenario Let’s say we have this project structure. Be aware that all our tests have the suffix “Tests” in the project name. The files are organized like this, so we have all “Tests” in a “tests” folder and the actual code under “src”: ...

08.02.2017 | 563 0 | Code-Inside Blog

6

GitHub API: Create or update files

This blogpost covers a pretty basic GitHub topic: Creating and updating content on GitHub. Of course, there are many ways to do it - e.g. you could do the full Git-ceremony and it would work with all Git hosts, but in my case I just wanted to target the offical GitHub API. Prerequisite: A GitHub User, Repo and Token To use this code you will need write access to a GitHub repository and you ...

03.01.2017 | 481 0 | Code-Inside Blog

6

DbProviderFactories: Write database agnostic ADO.NET code

Recently I needed to write a module that needs to connect to a wide range of SQL-DBs, e.g. MySQL, MS SQL, Oracle etc. Problem: Most providers will use their concret classes If you look at the C# example on the MySQL dev page you will see the MsSql-Namespace and classes: MySql.Data.MySqlClient.MySqlConnection conn; string myConnectionString; myConnectionString "server ...

31.12.2016 | 1077 0 | Code-Inside Blog

8

Enable SSL with custom domains on GitHub Pages via Cloudflare

Two weeks ago I decided (finally!) that I should enable SSL on this blog. Problem: GitHub Pages with a custom domain This blog is hosted on GitHub Pages with a custom domain, which currently doesn’t support SSL out of the box. If you stick with a github.io domain SSL is not a problem. Cloudflare to the rescure I decided to take a deeper look at Cloudflare, which provides DNS, CDN and ...

15.11.2016 | 463 0 | Code-Inside Blog

9

Writing loops in T-SQL

The topic is quite old, but I found it really helpful, so be warned. Scenario: Iterate over a result set and insert it in a new table in T-SQL I had to write a SQL migration script to move date from an old table into a new table with a new primary key. Update! I discovered that my problem would have been solved with a much simpler SQL script (INSERT INTO x …(SELECT … FROM Y)). So my example here ...