Cryptographically Secure Random String I’ve been trying to generate unique referal codes composed of uppercase letters for a project and although it’s not really necessary I wanted to make these as cryptographically sound as possible so I could reuse the code later in a personal password generator project. Turns out Read more…
Using NPM and Gulp in Visual Studio 2017 By default new Web Applications created in Visual Studio 2017 use Bower for managing external libraries such as jQuery and Bootstrap, however Bower is no longer best practice (and seemed a bit flaky in Visual Studio anyway) and so for new projects Read more…
Uploading Files in ASP.NET Core from an MVC View I’ve been working on creating a page for for the uploading of files to either a SQL database or Azure Blob storage which turned out to be much more complicated than initially expected. I managed to eventually piece together how to Read more…
Checking for CSV Column Headers in C# Importing CSV files into a .NET object isn’t too tricky and for this I usually use CsvHelper. However, sometimes I need to import a CSV file and only extract a couple of columns from it and these columns aren’t always guaranteed to exist. Read more…
Checking Object Equality in C# If you want to check if one instance of a custom class is equal to another instance of it you need to override the Equals operator for the class and implement your own. The code below is based on the articles The Right Way to Read more…
Recursive Object Properties I’ve been working to create a virtual file system for SQL databases and represent this in a web interface. While creating the classes in .NET I realised that I needed to be able to traverse all the ancestors of a file up to the root level and Read more…
Serializing/Deserializing XML Attribute Lists I’ve gotten so used to working with JSON that I’d almost forgotten what a chore it can be to work with XML. A case in point is the below XML sample that I’m trying to deserialize into a class, essentially I want to capture all the Read more…
List Shuffling This is just a simple extension for lists to enable the shuffling of items within it based on the StackOverflow answer here. This relies on System.Random so isn’t as random as it could be but is fine for my purposes. public static IEnumerable<T> Shuffle<T>(this IEnumerable<T> source, Random rng) Read more…
Batching and running tasks in parallel I’ve had a few projects where I’ve had a large number of asyncronous tasks to execute but haven’t wanted to execute them all at once as this would create too many threads and would result in system degredation. Initially I used something similar to Read more…
Enum JSON converter. In addition to the SingleOrArrayEnumConverter mentioned previously I’ve also created a version to translate enums to/from JSON using the name of the enum rather than it’s value as is the default. class EnumConverter<T> : JsonConverter { public override bool CanConvert(Type objectType) { return (objectType == typeof(T)); } Read more…