Tips and tricks in C# .NET
February 8, 2016 4 Comments
Introduction
In the previous post we added a couple of components necessary to add client certificate authentication into the OWIN middleware chain. We haven’t yet put the elements to work though. That is the main topic of this post which will finish this series. We’ll also run a couple of tests.
Have the demo application open in Visual Studio in administrator mode.
February 5, 2016 Leave a comment
A Lookup in .NET is one of the lesser known data structures. It is similar to a Dictionary but the keys are not unique. You can insert multiple elements for the same key.
Say you have the following object and collection:
February 4, 2016 6 Comments
Introduction
In the previous post we started adding the necessary OWIN-related libraries to our Web API project: a couple of NuGet libraries and the Startup class. We publish our application to the local IIS and it doesn’t allow us to break the code within Startup.cs. We’ll soon see that we can still debug the OWIN components further down the call stack.
In this post we’ll add the necessary elements to a client certificate based authentication in .NET MVC with OWIN.
February 3, 2016 Leave a comment
The Process object in the System.Diagnostics namespace refers to an operating-system process. This object is the entry point into enumerating the processes currently running on the OS.
This is how you can find the currently active process:
Process current = Process.GetCurrentProcess(); Console.WriteLine(current);
…which will yield the name of the process running this short test code.
February 2, 2016 Leave a comment
Say you have a sequence of objects that you’d like to convert into a Dictionary for efficient access by key. Ideally the objects have some kind of “natural” key for the dictionary such as an ID:
public class Singer
{
public int Id { get; set; }
public string FirstName { get; set; }
public string LastName { get; set; }
}
IEnumerable<Singer> singers = new List<Singer>()
{
new Singer(){Id = 1, FirstName = "Freddie", LastName = "Mercury"}
, new Singer(){Id = 2, FirstName = "Elvis", LastName = "Presley"}
, new Singer(){Id = 3, FirstName = "Chuck", LastName = "Berry"}
, new Singer(){Id = 4, FirstName = "Ray", LastName = "Charles"}
, new Singer(){Id = 5, FirstName = "David", LastName = "Bowie"}
};
February 1, 2016 Leave a comment
Introduction
In the previous post we accomplished a couple of things. First we secured our demo Web API website with a client certificate. Second we enabled client certificates for it so that IIS doesn’t just ignore them. Finally we saw that the client certificate is also picked up in the customers controller when sent in code in a web request.
In this post we’ll start discussing how to add client certificate handling as an OWIN middleware component.
Make sure you open the demo Web API project in Visual Studio as an administrator.
January 31, 2016 Leave a comment
Introduction
In the previous post we looked at a special group of class level methods called setters. We saw that they were really not different from other class level methods. The single major difference lies in the purpose of setters, which is to let external users of a class provide a value for a class property. We also discussed that a setter may not be available for immutable, read-only or otherwise complex class properties.
In this post we’ll look at the counterpart of setters called getters.
January 29, 2016 Leave a comment
Users can stop and close a console application by any of the following methods:
Occasionally you might want to check whether the user has pressed either ctrl+c or ctrl+break. The following code sample will show you how to do that.
January 28, 2016 10 Comments
Introduction
In the previous post we investigated how to attach a client certificate to the web request and how to extract it in a controller. We faced an issue that by default client certificates are ignored by IIS so we couldn’t actually read the certificate.
We’ll solve that problem in this post.
January 27, 2016 1 Comment
The Environment class holds a range of properties that help you describe the system your app is running on. Here come some examples with inline comments:
//returns true on my PC as it is a 64-bit OS
bool is64BitOperatingSystem = Environment.Is64BitOperatingSystem;
//returns the machine name, in my case ANDRAS1
string machineName = Environment.MachineName;
//returns information about the operating system version, build, major, minor etc.
OperatingSystem os = Environment.OSVersion;
//returns the platform id as an enumeration, in my case it's Win32NT
PlatformID platform = os.Platform;
//the currently installed service pack, Service Pack 1 in my case
string servicePack = os.ServicePack;
//the toString version of the OS, this is "Microsoft Windows NT 6.1.7601 Service Pack 1" on this PC
string version = os.VersionString;
//I have 4 processors on this PC
int processorCount = Environment.ProcessorCount;
//returns 2 logical drives: C: and D:
string[] logicalDrives = Environment.GetLogicalDrives();
//this is how to find all environmental variables of the system and iterate through them
IDictionary envVars = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariables();
foreach (string key in envVars.Keys)
{
//e.g. the JAVA_HOME env.var is set to "C:\Progra~1\Java\jdk1.7.0_51\"
Debug.WriteLine(string.Concat("key: ", key, ": ", envVars[key]));
}
//retrieve the current CLR version, in my case it's "4.0.30319.18444"
Version clrVersion = Environment.Version;
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