WPF Series -1- Project Setup
Before starting development we first had to set up a new WPF project. The projects target framework is .NET Framework 4.6.2 and we used Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2015 as […]
WPF Series – Introduction
In the first half of 2017 we implemented a WPF project for one of our customers. The aim of the project was to develop a Surface Pro compatible desktop application for data collection in context of civil engineering. The application allows the user to create, save, edit and export protocols of specific buildings. Furthermore it’s possible to create a PDF […]
[HOWTO] Control the GPIO Interface of a Raspberry Pi 3 using UWP
In a project of ours I stumbled across the topic on how to control the GPIO interface of a Raspberry Pi 3 using the Windows.Devices.Gpio namespace. The mentioned namespace contains a class called GpioController. This class enables you to establish connection to any pin on the Raspberry Pi. You have to use the static method GpioController.GetDefault() to get an instance […]
Fix Null Reference Exception in XAML Designer
During developing a user control for a WPF UI I encountered a strange null reference exception in the XAML designer. Strange thing was, that when I started the application and switched to the control which contained the user control, everything worked fine. I could’ve just ignored this problem. However since it is very inconvenient writing XAML code without getting a […]
Manual JWT Validation against Azure Active Directory
For our current WebApi project we decided to implement OAuth2 authentication with Azure Active Directory. As our API needs to support other authentication mechanisms like Basic and Negotiate beside OAuth2 we implemented multiple authentication filters that, where each filter is responsible for a specific authentication mechanism. One of these authentication filters, the BearerAuthenticationFilter, is responsible to handle requests that contain […]
[HOWTO] Set Cookie Header on DefaultRequestHeaders of HttpClient
For one of our customers we had to implement Cookie handling for authentication purposes. This means reading the session token out of the Set-Cookie header and send the session token in the Cookie header of every request. When using the HttpClient from System.Net.Http there are two possibilites to do that. Either by passing a HttpClientHandler with a CookieContainer to the […]
d-fens Hackathon 2016
On Monday and Tuesday, the 21st and the 22nd of November, our company organized an event. A Hackathon. What’s a Hackathon? “A hackathon (also known as a hack day, hackfest or codefest) is a design sprint-like event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development, including graphic designers, interface designers, project managers, and others, often including subject-matter-experts, collaborate […]
Replacing MEF with StructureMap
The title of today’s post might sound a little bit provoking, as originally MEF and StructureMap are not meant for the same use cases. However, as there is a great deal of overlapping functionality in StructureMap over MEF (and chances are high one is using an IoC framework anyway), it makes sense to check if we can reduce our arsenal […]
How to Write a PowerShell Binary Module – revisited
Recently I started writing a PowerShell binary module in C# (mainly due to facilitate testing and move away from Pester limitations). In this post I will describe the format of […]
[NoBrainer] Using TeamCity Build Parameters with Environment Variables in C#
When integrating back end systems we very often would like our build server to run integration tests against our test evironments. The problem is that we do not want to […]
[HOWTO] Automatically applying PSDefaultValue to C# based PSCmdlet Parameters
One of the cool features of PowerShell script based Cmdlets is the possibility to define default values for Cmdlet parameters. This is typically done like this: Whenever we invoke such a Cmdlet without specifying the Name parameter the PowerShell runtime will insert the value my default value into that parameter. C# based PSCmdlet provide a similar approach to this by […]
Unit Testing C# binary PowerShell Modules
For years all our PowerShell modules we released were script modules (i.e. they were written in PowerShell). However, it is certainly possible to write PowerShell modules in C# as binary modules. Of course there are already plenty discussions whether one or the other approach is better. It really depends on the exact requirements. For us the limitations of Pester (especially […]
Use Strong Name Key on TeamCity for Digital Signature
We started using strong names for some of our assemblies. Strong named assemblies are assemblies, that get digitally signed with a strong name key to ensure its uniqueness (i.e. in […]
[HOWTO] Parsing DateTime with TimeZone information in Newtonsoft.Json
If you have been working with C# and JSON you mmight probably resorted to Newtonsoft.Json, the defacto standard in .NET for handling JSON related data. However, when it comes to […]
[NoBrainer] PUT/PATCH/MERGE with OData Service Client
Visual Studio supports the generation of data service clients (Service references) for OData services. A data service client is a .NET class that contains methods for accessing the OData service and gets generated based on the metadata provided by the OData service. The client acts as a proxy and translates the method calls into HTTP requests. Mike Wasson describes in […]
[HOWTO] Execute C# build from PowerShell on Jenkins
At d-fens we usually use JetBrains TeamCity as a build server. Because one of our customers uses Jenkins as build server I had the chance to set up a build job for one of our C#/.NET projects on Jenkins. The project I mentioned is a C#/.NET Web Application built with Visual Studio 2013. For testing we make use of the […]
