Caring Programmer

Alternative for .NET reflector

2012-12-18T05:04:00.005-08:00

As .Net reflector went to commercial i was looking for an alternative for getting the .NET code out of exe or dll. Sometimes you just need it :)

Well there is usefull free alternative named ILSpy.

ILSpy is the open source.NET assembly browser and decompiler.

My recomendation is to try it if you need something like that for free.

Link to page:

http://ilspy.net/

Jquery Nggallery Cycle Wordpress plugin- rotating images

2012-12-18T02:55:00.003-08:00

Jj-ngg-jquery-cycle wordpress plugin is plugin for linking to created nggallery in wordpress and showing it as
dinamically moving images.

Shortcode for plugin to use on page is:

[jj-ngg-jquery-cycle html_id="about-cycle" gallery="1" width="600" height="400" timeout="2000" speed="1000" fit="1" ]

and this assumes that you have created nggallery with id = 1 and put some images inside.

There is also a posibility to use onBefore callback of this plugin. It lets you do something before images changes.

If you look at your page source where you have put the plugin it will show you something like this:

jQuery('div#about-cycle').jjcycle({timeout: 2000,speed: 1000,height: 400,fit: 1});

This is the code that plugin inserts into html of your page. To use onBefore Callback you can add to your page something like this

jQuery(document).ready(function(){

jQuery('div#about-cycle').jjcycle({before:onBefore});

});

function onBefore() {

//do something here before image changes

}

Simple plugin yet creative.

You can read more about this plugin on

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/jj-nextgen-jquery-cycle/

Wordpress plugin for redirecting page review

2012-12-17T15:21:00.000-08:00

PAGE LINK TO plugin is a wordpress plugin that allows you to as the title says link page to another page
(either worpress internal or external) .
The primary use of this pugin for me was that i have used it in navigational menus to link parent to specific sub page
if parent doesnt contain any relevant content.

Simple and GREAT A++.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/page-links-to/

2012-12-17T15:16:00.001-08:00

So...

Lately i have been orienting to wordpress and i will have couple of interesting things to share with you

I will in some cases dive deep into wordpress and in some it will be just simple example of of using worpress plugins that i found useful

Javascript checking HTML element type

2012-02-05T17:12:00.001-08:00

So how to check HTML element type in Javascript.

Where here is what i found to be the best way..at least for necessity of my project

NOTE: tested in Mozzila Firefox

Code snippet - Javascript checking HTML element type on Snipplr

C# convert BitmapSource to Bitmap

2012-02-05T07:37:00.000-08:00

Also to put the code how to convert BitmapSource to Bitmap. I forgot that in previous post.

Code snippet - How to convert BitmapSource to Bitmap on Snipplr

C# how to read tiff and crop it

2012-02-03T11:32:00.000-08:00

This is very simple and it is final step of my pdf extracting garbage characters.

I will put code here so you have example how to do it.

Code snippet - How to read tiff in C# and crop it on Snipplr

.NET The specified module could not be found error project

2012-02-03T05:06:00.000-08:00

While doing some of my projects i encountered this error.

It happens mostly because some of dlls used in .net application are missing are or built with one configuration and your project is built with another configuration.

One of the solution is to download

http://www.dependencywalker.com/

and to check the dll that is giving the error for dependencies..if some of the dependencies are missing add them to right path.

Another problem is that if you are using dll that is built for ex for 32 bit system and you are building your project with Any CPU this wont work on 64 bit systems.

You have to build your project also for X86 architecture so you can use that 32 bit dll normally in your project.

You can set the architecture for you project for specific architecture in VISUAL Studio .NET like this:

Right Click on Solution -> Properties -> Configuration Properties -> Configuration Manager

If you dont have for ex X86 architecture go to Configuration Manager , click on Platform and select New.

You can then choose which platform you want to create.

C# converting pdf to image

2012-02-03T04:37:00.000-08:00

This is continue of my post when i was extracting non standard text from pdf.

Bassically i didnt succeded in doing that the way i wanted but i was lucky that all of the pdfs where the same format.

So i came to idea that i transfer pdf to image and then extract the portion of "text" as image ...bassicaly to crop the image in the rectangle where the text is.

To complete this task i have used ghostscript library
http://www.ghostscript.com/download/gsdnld.html

Also good article how to implement this in C# is on CodeProject
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/32274/How-To-Convert-PDF-to-Image-Using-Ghostscript-API

With this two i have managed to convert PDF to image. But what format?

Well i have tested with CodeProject application from article and i have found out that the most clearest text i can get is when using TIFF format which is not such a strange thing becuse it is used for printing widely.

So the next step was to read the TIFF into C# application and crop the image.

NOTE: there is also a good library for converting pdf to image named imagemagick which also has wrapper in C#
http://imagemagick.codeplex.com/

It has also lot of other capabilities like resizing,cropping etc.
But i didnt used it because after setting up the project for testing with this library and trying how it converts pdf to image i wasnt very satisfied because of the time it needs to convert so i decided to go with ghostscript.

C# extracting garbage characters from PDF

2012-02-03T03:57:00.000-08:00

This week i encountered interesting problem.

How to extract garbage characters from PDF and use them in C#.

What are garbage characters in pdf?

Bassically when you select some portion of text in any kind of pdf reader (Foxit Reader, Adobe Reader, Nitro Pdf Reader) and pase them to some plain text editor like notepad that the characters are not recognized...there are some boxes, music keys etc

So i wondered what is happening and can i solve it. Well i thought i can but i was wrong.
I have investigated the PDF with lot of tools also looking inside of pdf format to figure out how to get those characters into my C# program.

You may ask yourself how can i see those characters in the reader but i cant extract them?

Well the thing is readers are not showing plain text..they are showing glyphs which are like small shapes defined in the font that reader uses to represent the text.
Glyph is normally connected to Unicode character with ToUnicode table inside PDF format. So each glyph can be represented with some Unicode character.

When the characters are garbage characters it means that for that font and those glyphs the Unicode table is either corrupted or is missing.

So when you try to copy paste the text from reader it also uses the ToUnicode table to "map" the glyphs copied to Unicode characters. When he cant succeed he produces garbage characters.

Ok so bassically i didnt succeed that. But what i have done next to get myself out of the problem?

Well i was lucky that project didnt require the manipulation of text and that the coordinates of desired text were practically the same for each pdf that i encountered so i have gone into solution to convert pdf into image, extract that portion of text as an image and show it in the form.

I will talk about this in my next posts.

Btw...i use notepad ++ as editor for this things and i must say it is great for me.

Here is the link: http://notepad-plus-plus.org/ if you want to try it.