I was considering adding obfuscation to a major project I was about to publish when I was offered the chance to review Crypto Obfuscator for .Net. I’ve used .Net Reactor in the past, but it had been a lot of work to integrate into an automated build and certain features simply hadn’t worked in some […]
Regular expressions are a great, albeit sometimes overused, tool for parsing and extracting text data. Sometimes I find myself looking at a list of data that I want to execute a regular expression against. I could do a for loop or encode a Regex match in a lambda but both interrupt the flow and require […]
Lately at work I’ve had to pull data from a variety of Excel worksheets. Excel interop is quite handy, but making sure to release the used COM objects and dealing with ranges can be quite a pain. I found a nice little article that shows a basic example of loading all the data from a […]
Steve McConnell’s Code Complete is a classic work in computer science. A friend sent along these quotes. The penalty for failing to define the problem is that you can waste a lot of time solving the wrong problem. This is a double-barreled penalty because you also don’t solve the right problem. And a corollary: Paying […]
There are two general strategies to outputting to a PDF in WPF. One is to output directly to a PDF which requires you traverse a visual or flow document and translate to a PDF. But the other and more common method is to output to XPS as an intermediary and then convert the XPS file […]
If you’re like me—writing internal apps for a small company—you create your own self-signed certificates when publishing a ClickOnce application. Visual Studio will create these certificates for you automatically on the first publish, but they’ll only be good for a couple of years. That’s when you find yourself under pressure, updating a malfunctioning application, and […]
Awhile ago I wrote about how I used msbuild tasks to support obfuscating a project before generating a publish manifest and publishing a project using ClickOnce. It had some limitations but it has served me well for a long time. I recently upgraded to VS 2010 and found that the old targets didn’t work. Some […]
While still in the dark woods of learning WPF, I was completely lost trying to fulfill a requirement to make an editable label that showed a formatted value when not selected. In my case, the formatted value would round a decimal value to a few digits to make long number more readable. I asked over […]
So we’ve all had the situation where we’d like to get an input from the user and we’re not too keen on creating a form, adding controls, and writing all the other underlying functionality. Many times, it’s just a lot easier to use an InputBox and validate the data afterward. Usually everything will go smoothly, […]
Inspired by: Steve Novoselac’s Post on SqlBulkCopy I had a lot of data that I wanted to dump from a wide range of flat text file databases. I already had classes that stored the schema for the tables and some of the formats were weird (i.e. custom date stored as a single), and rather than […]