I would to thanks everyone who has supported and encourage me in each and every step of my journey towards F5debug.net as a blog. Though I was not active for the last couple of years due to my health issues and lack of concentration, I am coming back strong with the knowledge and enthusiasm to share my learning to the community.

Kindly watch this space for the next actions. Let us learn together. 

Regular expressions are simple but very powerful when you have n number of projects and solutions with 1000s of code base in place. With regular expressions you can customize the search and replacement in much easier and required format to satisfy any format that is required. Below is just a set of Regular expressions which you can use it to do some simple find and replace in your code base. We will see how to do that step by step.

Steps to remove Blank Lines:

1. Open Visual Studio project and collapse all the folder and make it handy.
2. Now press “ Control + Shift + H “ key combination and you can see the Popup which shows Find and Replace options.
3. In the Find place input “^&\n” combination and select Use Regular Expression checkbox without fail as this input will mainly work with the regular expressions only.
4. In the replace field leave it empty so nothing will be replaced rather remove the empty blank lines.
5. In the input Find field we have give ^ for Start of the line and $ for end of line and \n which is for new line break.

While installing Visual Studio 2015 Technical preview, if you are a Cross Platform developer then you have something new. Once the primary required files are installed the installer will look for secondary installer supporting sdks for Android development, so it prompts if additional required installers to be downloaded and to be installed as shown in the screen below.Once you install the required files, you can see the Android templates available for development in Visual Studio 2015 Technical preview.

Android Emulator: This is quite interesting to me with Microsoft support towards open source and other platforms, we already have a good Emulator for Windows Phone and Windows Store application. With the support towards developing application on Cross platform its obvious we need to have an emulator for Android and yes as same like Windows phone emulator this Android emulator is also Hyper-V based.

Enhanced Code Editor: This feature is quite impressive, when ever you see a Yellow blub in the code editor it implies the unnecessary code that is not been referred or used. Basically its the suggestion that Visual Studio gives to the developer that some code is not necessary in this project and it takes some resources. Clicking on the yellow blub will list down the suggestions, with which you can analyse and get to the code that are not required.

Shared Projects: We have been sharing the project or the business code for quite sometime across project in Universal App development or using PCLs in the previous versions. Now with this new feature we can share the project as a reference to other projects in simple way and access the properties in the class in straight forward approach. To get the shared project, simply add a new project and select Share Project template from the list of templates available.

Ok lets see a quick demo, now add a shared project and create a class Student with some sample properties. Once added, click on Add Project and add a new console application and reference the shared project. In the Add reference section you can see a new portion called Shared Project which has the reference to the shared project as shown in the screen below.

Now you can simply refer the shared project and access the class properties easily without any hassle, with this reference its easy to access the properties and use it in any of the project. Access the properties is simply by referring the class name as shown in the code below.

Above are few of the features which immediately strikes me, still there are quite a lot of new features and enhancements which we will see in upcoming posts one by one. Until then have a good day!!

Later with the upcoming versions we still have some enhanced feature where we put the set and get without separate initializers but still we should require a Constructor to initialize the property and its mandatory as shown below. Visual Studio have a short cut keys to create properties if you are not aware of, just type “prop” and press the tab button twice which create a default property code which you can customize it as per the requirement. This will be handy when creating a multiple properties for the class object.

With the newer version C# 6.0 its further enhanced and now we can set the property initializers while declaring itself without having a constructor to implement with the values. So in simple we can term now properties as well like variable fields where we can assign the property with the values while declaration itself without any separate code inside the constructor as shown below. This Auto Property initializer will be more useful for data properties which will carry data with out any specific methods or function implementation.

First copy the files to the project folder in the explorer, just copy the files alone or if required the folder as well to the project solution folder (just do a simple ctrl+c and ctrl+v) as shown below.

Once copied open the solution in Visual Studio and navigate to Solution Explorer by View—> Solution Explorer option from the menu and you can see the solution explorer opened at the right side of the Visual Studio IDE. If you navigate through the folders you will not see Menu folder (newly copied) listed in the project solution as shown below.

At the top of Solution Explorer there is an option to list down the files which are treated as Hidden or we can term it as files which are not part of solution but still resides in the folder path. The option is called “Show all files” at the top menu in Solution Explorer window as highlighted in the screen below. Click on that and you can see the menu folder listed.

If you see the Solution explorer windows there are files with icon transparent or we can term as inactive icons. Those are the files which are not included in the project, our menu folder is one such of the files and folders listed which you can see in the screen. Now select the folder, right click on it and we can see the option “Include in Project” which does the job to include the files that are available in the folder to the solution without any hassle as shown in the screen below.

I hope this short tip will be more helpful and productive to most of the developers!!! Thanks and see you all in my next blog post, until then have a nice day!!

Friends first of all Happy New year 2015, on this new year I am starting this series of tutorial to discuss about the latest release of C#.Net and what improvements does it comes with. This series will cover all the new features and enhancements that are released with this version of C#. Microsoft is really focusing closely on the improvements of C# by fixing most of the know items and providing enhanced code. This progress provides developers a new look towards writing the code in a different way rather writing the lines of code each and every time. C# 6.0 is under CTP3 and to get your hands on you can download Visual Studio 2015 or installing Roslyn package to your existing Visual Studio 2013 version as well to get the updates.

Evolution of C#:

C#.Net we normally term as the successor of VB.Net was first introduced in 2002 with as C# 1.0 with .Net framework 1.0 and Visual Studio 2002, later on with a successive release of the newer versions with enhanced features and improvements has placed the language in higher level for Microsoft to use across its products. Before this release of C# 6.0, if you see the existing versions and way Microsoft has taken C# for the last 12+ years its already a matured language with most of the much needed language capabilities are added. If we need to point some killer feature that has been released on each and every version of C# we can point few but with this release there is no specific one which can really be pointed, but still there are quite a good amount of new features and enhancements still shown. Below figure implies how C# has been evolved with the year of the release and major feature which can be termed “Killer”.

What’s new in C# 6.0?

In this release there are quite a few number of improvements which we can be shown as a good note that Microsoft has taken the feedbacks from developers, but as mentioned there is nothing quite interesting or to term “WOW” with this release. Yes we need to accept to the fact that C# as a 12  year old product its already matured and the scope towards improvement is already limited with Microsoft already taking advantage on releasing every versions with major enhancements. Below is the list of new features that are released with C# 6.0, we will see each of the feature in detailed in this series.

• Auto Property Initializer
• Primary Constructors
• Explicit Constructors
• Adding Extensions
• Using Static
• Literals and Seperators
• Dictionary Initializer
• Declaration Expressions
• Conditional Access Operator
• Await Inside Catch/Finally Block
• Exception Filters
• Expression Bodied Members
• Nameof

Watch this space, we will link the articles on each of the feature to this space for the readers to get easy access to them.

You can watch the recorded session here.

Once you download the package, follow the below steps to use this component and send emails from Windows Store application.

Step 1 – Open Visual Studio 2013 and and create a new Windows Store Project using C# and Xaml  or open your existing application from which you want to send emails using this component.

Step 2 – Add the reference to the dll which we downloaded from the link by Clicking on Add reference in Visual Studio and pointing the appropriate dll file (MailForWindowsStore.dll).

Step 3 – Add the below namespaces to the code behind, which are basically required to build the application. These namespaces are for the component which we are using to build the email procedure and send across. In this example on a button click we will write the code which can be used in any layer at any part of the code.

using Limilabs.Client.SMTP;
using Limilabs.Mail;
using Limilabs.Mail.Headers;

Step 4 – Now in the button click event lets write a sample code which is basically we hard code the content, body, subject, to and from email ids etc. In real time you can get user specific information and assign to the specific fields before sending the email to the customer.

private async void Button_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
        {
            MailBuilder mbBase = new MailBuilder();
            mbBase.Html = “This is the Body Content”;
            mbBase.Subject = “This is the Subject Content”;
            mbBase.To.Add(new MailBox(“Karthikeyan@f5debug.net”));
            mbBase.From.Add(new MailBox(“Karthik@f5debug.net”));

            IMail iemail = mbBase.Create();

            using (Smtp smtpBase = new Smtp())
            {
                await smtpBase.Connect(“smtp.gmail.com”, 587);
                await smtpBase.UseBestLoginAsync(“Karthikeyan@gmail.com”, “Password123”);
                await smtpBase.SendMessageAsync(iemail);
                await smtpBase.CloseAsync();
                MessageDialog Mymsg = new MessageDialog(“Mail sent!!”);
                Mymsg.ShowAsync();
            }
        }

Now we are done with the code, in the above code MailBuilder class is the 3rd party component class which is used to get the collective information that is required to send the email. IMail class is to create the instance to push the email to the customer and SMTP class to set the email with the base credentials.

To access the location information from the Windows store app we need to access using the GeoLocator class which has the property to get us the information of Latitude and Longitude of the specific location. Ok Lets see the code, before starting first step is to enable the capabilities for the application to access the location. To do that go to the Solution Explorer of the application and open the Package.appxmanifest file and navigate to the Capabilities tab to activate Location capability as shown in the screen below.

Now from the code, access the Geolocator class and create an instance with the instance you can get the desired location by accessing the GetGeoPositioAsyn method and get the position information which is basically Latitude and Longitude information of the location. Geoposition will get the accurate information unless providing the Accuracy to High or Default.

Code:

private async void Button_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
       {
           var geoLoc = new Geolocator();

           geoLoc.DesiredAccuracy = PositionAccuracy.High;
           Geoposition pos = await geoLoc.GetGeopositionAsync();
           txt1.Text = "Latitude: " + pos.Coordinate.Latitude.ToString();
           txt2.Text = "Longitude: " + pos.Coordinate.Longitude.ToString();
          
       }

Now build and execute the application, first the app will request the user for permission to get the location enabled in the device. Upon acceptance you can get the location information (Latitude and Longitude) as shown in the screens below.

Now with Windows Phone, how we can have a QR Code generated automatically based on some action or to assign a transaction. Lets not over complicate it, lets take a simple scenario of how to first generate a QR code which does the process of electronic responsiveness. For Windows Phone 8 there is a free component called “ZXing.Net” which reduces our hassles of generating a QR code with some simple and easy steps. We are going to see how to use this third party control and generate a QR code easily.

Steps to Generate QR Code:

Open Visual Studio and open the project which needs to have the QR code generated. Let us open a new project and assign a simple button and a image where button is used to trigger the event to generate an action to generate the QR code and the image to show the QR code to the users. Now to use the third party component ZXing.Net, go to http://zxingnet.codeplex.com/ and download the dll and refer it to the project solution file as a reference.

Now in the page where you want the QR code to be generated, first add the namespace for ZXing.net and Imaging since we need to generate the QR code and then assign the code as an image to the image control which is placed below the button. So add the below 2 namespaces

using System.Windows.Media.Imaging;
using ZXing;

Now add the below code which is basically a method which is called as and when a QR Code should be generated from an application. If in case we need to have static QR code we can pass a static hard coded value and there is a possible way the QR code remains the same. In case for each of the transaction you need to have different QR codes then you need to assign the value to the method so that you can generate the QR code based on the value passed. In the below code we create an instance of BarcodeWriter class and assign the properties that are very much required in getting the Barcode image generated. The write method has an input value hardcoded (“Karthikeyan Anbarasan”) which we can pass on a dynamic value and get the image as per the passed value. At the background they have different decoders which uses an algorithm (machine learning) to get this operated and understandable by the system.

Code:

private void GenerateQR_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
        {
            var image = GenerateQR();
            codeImage.Source = image;
        }

static WriteableBitmap GenerateQR()
        {
            BarcodeWriter BcWriter = new BarcodeWriter();           
            BcWriter.Format = BarcodeFormat.QR_CODE;
            BcWriter.Options.Height = 350;
            BcWriter.Options.Width = 350;
            BcWriter.Options.Margin = 1;

            var barcodeImage = BcWriter.Write(“Karthikeyan Anbarasan”);

            return barcodeImage;
        }

Now lets run the application and try to generate the QR code for the name which is hardcoded, for running the application try using Emulator or the device directly (if device then the device need to be unlocked) and generate the QR Code

Now we can see the QR code is automatically generated with the help of the third party component, lets not consider much. Now we need to add some more stuffs like we need to change the color of the Bar code that I want to have in some other color to the code. Add the below lines of code in the generate QR method as shown in the screen shot below.

Code:

BcWriter.Renderer = new ZXing.Rendering.WriteableBitmapRenderer()
            {
                Foreground = System.Windows.Media.Color.FromArgb(100, 150, 200, 250)
            };

Now let us run the application and see the result in very colourful way as shown in the screens below. Likewise we can operate in such a way we can customize and have our own properties and extended method as the third party component is available as a free open source license.