Another programming blog

Using powershell to look for files and versions

2021-12-09T10:53:00.000+00:00

Yesterday I had a runtime problem which required me to find a file with a particular version because it wasn't clear where or how this error was being produced. I used powershell to find files of name x and list their versions.

Get-Childitem C:\Projects -Include system.linq.dll -Recurse | Foreach-Object { "{0}`t{1}" -f $_.FullName [System.Diagnostics.FileVersionInfo]::GetVersionInfo($_).FileVersion }

Accidental stash delete?

2021-09-15T14:20:00.004+01:00

If you've accidentally deleted a stash then worry not, you can recover it like this (thanks to my colleague Matt for this tip):

Run this in Git Bash terminal

git fsck --unreachable | grep commit | cut -d ' ' -f3 | xargs git log --merges --no-walk

It'll return a list of deleted stashes, ordered by date.
Find the commit hash in the response and then update the commit hash in the below cmd and run it

git update-ref refs/stash 4b3fc45c94caadcc87d783064624585c194f4be8 -m "My recovered stash"
Refresh your git client (sourcetree/gitkraken) and it should now be listed again under 'Stashes'!

Select certificate from store by friendly name

2021-04-23T11:06:00.002+01:00

Insert list of strings into temp table

2021-03-31T09:57:00.002+01:00

create table #tempListOfThings ( thing varchar(50) )

INSERT INTO #tempListOfThings (thing) VALUES ('val1'), ('val2'), ...

Sql where datetime = today

2021-03-24T08:09:00.001+00:00

Decompress a compressed db field

2020-06-11T09:28:00.001+01:00

Deleting a windows service

2020-01-21T12:15:00.000+00:00

There seems to be more than one way to do this, but is a nice easy one:

sc delete "My Service"

Comparing file versions

2019-11-22T09:53:00.000+00:00

Here's a good way of comparing file versions. I had to use this in a recent service installer.

Re-install nuget packages

2019-11-06T13:30:00.000+00:00

Here's how to reinstall nuget packages for your solution:

Update-Package -reinstall

Windows exe with optional console

2019-10-30T06:49:00.002+00:00

Today I had to change the console app I'd already built into something more silent, but a console was still required in some circumstances.

All I had to do was switch the output type (Properties > Application) to 'Windows Application' and add the following code:

Configuring SignalR

2019-06-07T11:16:00.000+01:00

Each host has access to an IConfigurationManager which allows you to tweak some default SignalR settings. Some things that can be tweaked are:

ConnectionTimeout - Represents the amount of time to leave a connection open before timing out. Default is 110 seconds.
DisconnectTimeout - Represents the amount of time to wait after a connection goes away before raising the disconnect event. Default is 30 seconds.
KeepAlive - Representing the amount of time to wait before sending a keep alive packet over an idle connection. Set to null to disable keep alive. This is set to 30 seconds by default. When this is on, the ConnectionTimeout will have no effect.

Automapper ignore properties

2018-12-11T11:22:00.004+00:00

.ForAllOtherMembers(opt => opt.Ignore());

Ignoring a property in Fixture

2018-08-07T15:58:00.001+01:00

I've been using Fixture for unit testing, and today I needed to ignore a property in a model. This is how its done:

Querying an IIS Express site over the LAN

2018-06-26T10:18:00.002+01:00

Open this file:

C:\Users[YourName]\Documents\IISExpress\config\applicationhost.config

Add this row to the bindings element

<binding bindinginformation="*:yyyy:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" protocol="http" />

where yyyy is your chosen port number and xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is IP address on your network.

Run these two commands in a admin cmd prompt

netsh http add urlacl url=http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:yyyyy/ user=everyone

netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="IISExpressWeb" dir=in protocol=tcp localport=1914 profile=private remoteip=localsubnet action=allow

EF edmx update wizard not responding when updating models from SQL Server 2017

2018-02-20T10:02:00.001+00:00

Recently when updating my db-first edmx from my SQL Server 2017 database, the update wizard would hang. I overcame this problem by temporarily changing the compatibility level of the db to 2012 like so:

So far this seems to have no ill-effects.

Completed 406 Not Acceptable with Devise

2018-02-03T21:51:00.002+00:00

I had some trouble after an update of ruby/rails/gems on a something I hadn't worked on for ages. When register a user with Devise it would error with a Completed 406 Not Acceptable with Devise
As usual Stack Overflow came to the rescue, where I found this: "Devise responding to json by default has been removed from version 2.2" The fix was simple, I added this to my confif/application.rb and everything was working fine again:

config.to_prepare do
      DeviseController.respond_to :html, :json
    end

C# casting from parent to child object

2018-01-22T13:06:00.003+00:00

For some reason I've never had to do this before (not that I can remember anyway), and it feels like I should have. I have a Child object that inherits from Parent. I want to turn an instance of a Parent object that I already have into a Child. I thought this might just be a simple cast but it doesn't work.

This SO post was most helpful, and the neatest solution seemed to be this technique, serializing to json, and then back again:

 var serializedParent = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(parentInstance); 
 Child c  = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<child>(serializedParent);

Rebuild all indexes in your database

2017-12-05T16:02:00.003+00:00

Exec sp_msforeachtable 'SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON; ALTER INDEX ALL ON ? REBUILD'
GO

Global error handling in filter attribute MVC Web api

2017-10-04T15:21:00.000+01:00

When I inherited the first skeleton iteration of the api I'm working on every action was populated with largely repeated code whose function was to capture and log errors. I centralized all this into an attribute filter class called GlobalExceptionFilterAttribute, inheriting from ExceptionFilterAttribute, that looks a bit like this:

And then applied it to all actions with this line in WebApiConfig.cs:

config.Filters.Add(new GlobalExceptionFilterAttribute());

Then, throughout the app, we can throw different types of error pretty much anywhere and this will ultimately be captured by the filter attribute. So, for instance most of my service layer methods look like this:

Capturing raw data in Web Api controller

2017-08-15T12:38:00.000+01:00

I needed to capture raw POSTed data in a Web API controller endpoint. This is how it's done:

using (var contentStream = await this.Request.Content.ReadAsStreamAsync())
            {
                contentStream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
                using (var sr = new StreamReader(contentStream))
                {
                    string rawData = sr.ReadToEnd();
                }
            }

Sourcetree error "remote: empty password" after updating to new version 2.1.10.0

2017-08-14T11:43:00.002+01:00

I updated my Sourcetree installation today and could no longer push to my Bitbucket repositories. Seems like I'm not the only one who gets the error

remote: empty password

A workaround until they fix this bug is this - copy the first line of the Sourcetree error message (which is the Git command that failed), open a new terminal window (Shift-Alt-T on Windows), and paste it in, hit return. This will run the Push command and ask you for your password.

UPDATE: Here's a permanent fix - delete the file named passwd located in AppData\Local\Atlassian\SourceTree

Crystal report ExportToDisk as PDF loses barcode font

2017-07-20T12:44:00.000+01:00

I've been working on a .Net MVC Web API, part of which takes some data and produces a PDF using ExportToDisk provided by CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine.dll.

This proved to be relatively easy, as did the inclusion of a barcode font in the report, along with some vb code in a forumula field, that cleverly takes a supplied number and renders it as a barcode.

A problem arose when exporting a report containing this barcode to PDF - the barcode was not visible in the PDF. This seems to be a common problem with what feels like a rather hacky fix - adding a registry key. This is how it's done:

Open up registry editor (regedit) and navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SAP BusinessObjects\Crystal Reports for .NET Framework 4.0\Crystal Reports\Export. Add a new key called PDF, and a new value to it of Type 'DWORD' and name 'ForceLargerFonts' and value '1'. It should look like this when you've done:

Writing ProductVersion to a text file during installation

2017-06-02T14:02:00.002+01:00

Today I was tasked with creating a text file during the running of an MSI installer, and writing the app's ProductVersion to it, so that our remote admin tools could read at a glance what versions our users were running.

First of all I needed to create an Installer Class in the app, and then override the Install method like so, capturing an input parameter and writing it to a text file:

 public override void Install(IDictionary savedState)
        {
            base.Install(savedState);

            string version = Context.Parameters["Version"];

            string path2 = "C:\\MyFile.txt";

            try
            {
                FileStream fs1 = new FileStream(path2, FileMode.OpenOrCreate, FileAccess.Write);
                StreamWriter writer1 = new StreamWriter(fs1);
                writer1.Write("Version:" + "\r\n" +
                             version);
                writer1.Close();
            }
            catch (Exception)
            {
               //do something here if you need to
            }
}

Then, in the Setup project, I added Custom Action. Right-click on the project, go to View > Custom Actions. Right-click on the install folder, and select Add Custom Action. Browse to the Application folder, select the primary output, and click 'Add Output'. Then, select the thing you've just added, and in the properties window, do the following:

Visual Studio 2017 freezes / crashes when I open the toolbox

2017-05-18T10:18:00.001+01:00

I recently installed VS 2017 on a new Win 10 machine, and I had a problem when trying to open the toolbox window - the whole IDE would just freeze and never recover.

This is a problem with the Xamarin extension that is yet to be fixed, apparently it is trying to warn us something about the Android SDK (that it might not be installed?), but instead it brings the whole thing to a halt. The quick fix is to disable the Xamarin extension - but I guess installing the Android SDK may fix it too.

Visual Studio 2017 install stuck on Applying Microsoft.VisualStudio.Debugger.JustInTime

2017-03-10T16:58:00.002+00:00

This happened to me and I tried lots of things to overcome the problem - eventually I found I had to this:

Switch off AVG antivirus protection
Switch off 'Real-time protection' on your Windows Defender settings
Restart

After restart my install started where it left off and didn't get stuck again!