.NET Core MVC - How to Access appsettings.json

 Posted on Nov 9, 2020  |  724 words

Well, once again I’ve fallen off of the blogging wagon. And once again I am now getting back on said aforementioned wagon. Let’s try and make this a more regular thing than once a year or so, shall we? I recently built a quick little hobby site / side project with .NET Core MVC. I have a lot of experience with ASP.NET MVC but I was totally new to .NET Core MVC. [Read More]
dotnet  core  csharp  mvc  json 

.NET Core Azure Functions Tutorial

 Posted on Nov 19, 2018  |  2184 words

In this post I’d like to show you how I ported an Azure Classic Cloud Service application (which cost me $16 USD a month by the way) to a .NET Core Azure Function, and now host it in Azure for $0 a month! That’s right - Azure Functions are both awesome and (usually) free! Introducing realDonaldTron So back in late 2016, when our dear leader was elected president, I decided to have a little fun at his expense. [Read More]
dotnet  core  csharp  azure  functions 

C# Probably Getting New "Safe Navigation" Operator "?."

 Posted on Feb 28, 2014  |  448 words

It looks as if the Visual Studio dev team may be implementing a new operator in a future .NET release. This is due in large part to community demand, which is pretty cool because it shows that the VS team is listening to their customer base; a key part of a successful product. This new operator is likely going to take the syntax of ?. and is known as the Safe Navigation Operator. [Read More]
dotnet  csharp  programming 

Trigger IValidatableObject.Validate When ModelState.IsValid is false

 Posted on Feb 5, 2014  |  509 words

I recently came across an ASP.NET MVC issue at work where the validation for my Model was not firing correctly. The Model implemented the IValidatableObject interface and thus the Validate method which did some specific logic to ensure the state of the Model (the ModelState). This Model also had some DataAnnotation attributes on it to validate basic input. Long story short, the issue I encountered was that when ModelState.IsValid == false due to failure of the DataAnnotation validation, the IValidatableObject. [Read More]
dotnet  csharp  mvc  programming 

MVC4 Conditional HTML Attributes

 Posted on Nov 27, 2013  |  169 words

MVC4 made one simple and yet awesome improvement to View rendering that I don’t think many people are aware of. Have you ever had to conditionally add an attribute to an HTML element in your MVC View based on the presence of a variable? The typical use case is applying a CSS class to a div. Most of the time that code looks something like this: <div @(myClass == null ? [Read More]
dotnet  csharp  mvc  programming  razor 

Automatically Generate POCOs From DB With T4

 Posted on Oct 16, 2013  |  859 words

The T4 template engine is insanely powerful. I didn’t really realize just how powerful it was until I had a use case for it today. I stood up a database with about 40 tables in it, and planned to use an ORM to access the database. To use the ORM, I needed POCOs (Plain Old C# Objects) that represented my database. Some of these tables had 30-50 or so columns and I didn’t want to code all of this by hand – it would take literally days. [Read More]
dotnet  csharp  programming  sql  t4  visual studio 

Web API Mapping QueryString/Form Input

 Posted on Jul 24, 2013  |  193 words

If you’re using the Web API as part of the MVC4 framework, you may encounter a scenario in which you must map parameters of strange names to variables for which characters of the name would be illegal. That wasn’t very clear, so let’s do this by example. Consider part of the Facebook API: Firstly, Facebook servers will make a single HTTP GET to your callback URL when you try to add or modify a subscription. [Read More]
dotnet  csharp  mvc  programming  webapi 

Generic Comparer

 Posted on Apr 22, 2013  |  187 words

Have you ever had to write a comparer for a specific type, only to be frustrated when you needed to write a second and third comparer for other types? Fear not, a generic comparer can take care of this for you! /// <summary> /// Compares two objects of any type. /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="T">The type to be compared.</typeparam> public class GenericComparer<T> : IComparer<T> { // The compare method private readonly Func<T, T, int> _compareMethod = null; /// <summary> /// The constructor. [Read More]
dotnet  csharp  generics  programming 

Make Mostly Read, Seldom-Written Lists Much More Efficient

 Posted on Mar 15, 2013  |  1703 words

One of the many things that I do at work is run a full-blown Search Engine which I also developed from scratch. This Search Engine feeds all product related information to our websites. A search index consists of a pre-computed collection of products, their properties, a list of words that are correctly spelled, and some pre-computed faceted/guided navigation. A search index, until this week, took up approximately 10.7 gigs of memory. [Read More]
dotnet  csharp  memory  performance  programming