Cross a bridge at night
OK, here is a scenario. Four people on a journey together need to cross a bridge at night as quickly as possible. Among the four of them, they have one flashlight. They cannot continue their journey...
View ArticleThe final word on .NET background processing (for now)
While snooping around for information on .NET background processing, I came across a bunch of interesting articles by .NET MVP Stephen Cleary that go into great detail about using Task.Run vs. a...
View ArticleError 404 on web service with map route
If you are getting an error 404 on your web service with a map route decorator on your methods, you might want to check your IIS settings to make sure that it is configured correctly. Apparently, your...
View ArticlePlain ol’ XML
So let’s say you are working on an application in the .NET sphere of influence, and you have an object that you want to turn into XML. However, you shoot it through an XmlSerializer and you think you...
View ArticleLINQ to SQL DBML file shows up as XML code in Visual Studio Community 2017
I have a project from a few years ago that I am looking back into again, and while it builds just fine in Visual Studio Community 2017, when I open the DBML file, I get a big XML file instead of a nice...
View ArticleVisual Studio 2017 launches to a black or invisible screen
So I am working along on a .NET project in Visual Studio 2017 on my Windows 10 Pro laptop, and all of a sudden when I launch the application, I get either a black window where the IDE should be, or the...
View ArticleVisual Studio 2017 launches to a black or invisible screen, part 2
It turns out that disabling the Intel and Nvidia drivers on my Windows notebook computer are not really sufficient to fix the issue when Visual Studio 2017 launches to a black or invisible screen, as...
View ArticleC# .NET simple Async Await example from console application Main
I did a couple of posts a few years back about doing async/await in VB.NET, and now I had need of doing something similar with a C# .NET console application. Here is what I put together to get it...
View ArticleMac Visual Studio Error: Address already in use
I have started to use the Mac version of Visual Studio more and more, and I must say I like it very much. But that does not mean it is not without its sharper edges. Once in a while, when I am working...
View ArticleUse ExecuteScalar to insert a database row and return the primary key
I suspect that just about every developer who has had to work with SQL Server has faced this issue. You need to insert a bunch of related records, some of which depend on other records being in the...
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