The HTTP protocol supports data compression of network traffic via the Content-Encoding header . Compressing network traffic is beneficial because it reduces the amount of data that needs to be transmitted over the network - and sending fewer bytes obviously takes less time! The tradeoff is that it takes...

Over the holidays, a relative emailed me the following rant: Most of my conversation with technical support was to find out how to turn off the "Show desktop" icon in the lower right corner of the screen. This icon can be engaged by clicking on it or hovering over it (if you select Peek). On a desktop...

Windows Installer is the installation and configuration service used by Windows to add and remove applications. (For more information, Wikipedia has a great overview of Windows Installer , covering products, components, setup phases, permissions, etc..) In addition to exposing a rich, native API , Windows...

Recently, I was working with a program that needs to cache the content of a network file on the local disk for faster, easier access. The network file is expected to change periodically according to an unpredictable schedule; the objective is to keep the local file in "close" sync with the online copy...

When I wrote about WebMatrix's new extensibility features a couple of posts back , I said I'd share the complete source code to Snippets, one of the sample extensions in the gallery. In this post, I'll be doing that along with explaining the overall extension model in a bit more detail. To begin with...

I wrote TextAnalysisTool.NET a number of years ago to streamline the task of analyzing large log files by creating an interactive experience that combines searching, filtering, and tagging and allow the user to quickly identify interesting portions of a large log file. Although .NET 2.0 was out at the...

If you use .NET's Debug.Assert method, you probably write code to validate assumptions like so: Debug .Assert(args == null ); If the expression above evaluates to false at run-time, .NET immediately halts the program and informs you of the problem: The stack trace can be really helpful (and...

Previous posts introduced the Delay.FxCop custom code analysis assembly and demonstrated the benefits of automated code analysis for easily identifying problem areas in an assembly. The Delay.FxCop project included two rules, DF1000: Check spelling of all string literals and DF1001: Resources should...

My previous post outlined the benefits of automated code analysis and introduced the Delay.FxCop custom code analysis assembly . The initial release of Delay.FxCop included only one rule, DF1000: Check spelling of all string literals , which didn't seem like enough to me, so today's update doubles the...

No matter how polished the appearance of an application, web site, or advertisement is, the presence of even a single spelling error can make it look sloppy and unprofessional. The bad news is that spelling errors are incredibly easy to make - either due to mistyping or because one forgot which of the...

XLINQ (aka LINQ-to-XML) is a set of classes that make it simple to work with XML by exposing the element tree in a way that's easy to manipulate using standard LINQ queries. So, for example, it's trivial to write code to select specific nodes for reading, create well-formed XML fragments, or transform...

The topic of "data URIs" came up on a discussion list I follow last week in the context of "I'm in the process of creating a page and have the bytes of an image from my database. Can I deliver them directly or must I go through a separate URL with WebImage ?" And the response was that using a data URI...

I used .NET 3.5 to write the first version of Insomnia about a year and a half ago. Its purpose in life is to make it easy for anyone to temporarily prevent their computer from going to sleep without having to futz with system-wide power options every time. Insomnia did its job well and people used it...

In the previous post, I showed how to combine .NET 4's "type embedding" capability with the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) to create an application that can be upgraded without breaking existing extensions . In that post, I described the notion of a MEF "contract assembly" thusly: The contract...

One of the neat new features in version 4 of the .NET Framework is something called "type equivalence" or "type embedding". The basic idea is to embed at compile time all the type information about a particular reference assembly into a dependent assembly. Once this is done, the resulting assembly no...

NuGet is all the rage right now, and it seemed like a good time to familiarize myself with it. Conveniently, it just so happened that I had something perfectly suited: my Delay.Web.Helpers assembly which offers ASP.NET web helper-style access to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) blobs and buckets. ...

Two posts ago, I explained the benefits of pseudo-localization and showed an easy way to implement it for WPF - then said I'd outline how to do the same for Silverlight and Windows Phone 7. In my previous post, I went off on the seeming diversion of implementing a PNG encoder for Silverlight . With this...

At the end of my previous post about easily pseudo-localizing WPF applications , I said this post would show how to apply those concepts to a Silverlight application. Unfortunately, I seem to have made an off-by-one error : while this post is related to that topic, it is not the post I advertised. But...

I've previously written about the benefits of localization and shown how to localize Windows Phone 7 applications . The techniques I describe in that post constitute a good workflow that's just as suitable for WPF and Silverlight desktop applications! But even with good processes in place, the way localization...

As part of my previous post announcing the Delay.Web.Helpers assembly for ASP.NET and introducing the AmazonS3Storage class to enable easy Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) blob access from MVC/Razor/WebMatrix web pages , I made some changes to the BlobStoreApi.cs file it built on top of. BlobStoreApi...

Microsoft released a bunch of new functionality for its web platform earlier today - and all of them are free ! The goodies include new tools like WebMatrix , ASP.NET MVC3 and the Razor syntax , and IIS Express - as well updates to existing tools like the Web Platform Installer and Web Deploy . These...

Over the holiday break, I was asked to create a program to "speak" (via text-to-speech ) simple sentences that were provided on the command-line. None of the available offerings were "just right" for the customer's scenario, so I was asked if I knew of any other options... Although I hadn't used it before...

It was over a year ago that I wrote and shared the first version of my Insomnia utility . A few months later, I published a new version of Insomnia to satisfy the two most popular feature requests . Here's how I explained Insomnia's motivation at the time: The default power settings for Windows...

It feels like a long time since I last wrote about hash functions (though certain curmudgeonly coworkers would say not long enough!), and there were a few loose ends I've been meaning to deal with... Aside : If my hashing efforts are new to you, more information can be found in my introduction to...

If you've used the Windows Phone 7 emulator to access the network, you might have noticed that in some environments it takes an absurdly long time for network activity to complete. For example, a single HTTP request with Internet Explorer or an HttpWebRequest from a custom Silverlight application can...