KeesTalksTech Utility Pack

In a previous article I wrote how to parse Roman Numerals in C#. This article will focus on how to calculate with the class in an intuitive way. It will show how to implement implicit casting and the add and subtraction operator overloads. Fun stuff that’s probably useful in other projects.

Lately I’ve become fascinated with the Latin language. I’m working on a project that converts photographs of Latin inscriptions on medieval statues into translated text. One of the challenges is parsing years, usually expressed in the form of Roman Numerals.

After building a parser class I noticed that it had a lot of nice characteristics: parsing, operator overloading, implicit conversions. A nice way to play around with C#.

I can almost hear you think: “Why on earth would anyone use EMF?” Well… I don’t… but MS Office does! Thumbnails that are saved in MS Word documents are in the EMF format. As I struggled to do something with one, I realized that I had to convert it first to a more “easy to handle” format: PNG. Easier said than done.

There are a few instances in which you’ll need to hash a combination of data. You might resort to creating one big string and hashing that. It has a clear disadvantage from a memory and processing point of few. It might even be impractical when files or streams are involved. That’s why I created a BlockHasher utility class that helps to generate these types of hashes.

In a previous blog I explored how to create a dynamic compiler. In this blog I’ll explore how to create an evaluator that aids in the compilation of classes. It will take care of the ceremony needed to wrap the code into a class, compile it and retrieve the result.

Dynamic compilation is an awesome feature to add to your projects. Especially frameworks will benefit from the compilation of dynamic expressions and scripts. There are two main ways of doing it: the Code DOM Compiler or the Roslyn project. In this blog I will show how to implement them both.

Lately I’ve been playing around with some API’s. Most of them need a bunch of settings that I’m storing them in my config files. I found myself doing the same work over and over again: creating a settings class, filling the class with information and using it. So I came up with a way to leverage reflection to fill my setting classes with .config values.

Sometimes you’ll need a (slightly) better C# WebClient that’s able to store/retrieve cookies, prevent redirects or retrieve the HttpStatusCode of a request. I’ve created a small class that facilitates these features.