.NET / C#

This blog will explain how to use C# (.Net) and Nuget to get keywords from the Google Cloud Vision API project. I will show you how to upload your images through the API and getting the keywords using the LABEL_DETECTION feature.

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.

HTML is often easier to generate than SVG. Can it be converted to SVG? I’ve found a cloud service with an API that does a nice job converting various formats: CloudConvert. I ended up implementing a small part of their API to do the conversion.

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.

Yesterday I was working on a bit of code that had to read the XMP meta data from a file. It is not located at a certain position, so I had to scan the file. XMP, being plain XML, can be found by simple string matching. After some searching I’ve found many solutions that read the entire file into memory and perform a regular expression search or a string comparison. That’s not going to work for me, because I have files that are +100MB! So I wrote some code that does a search that performs.

PowerShell is very similar to .NET, so it is no surprise that it is very popular with .NET developers. It is a language for writing scripts, so you might encounter some unexpected situations. I had this experience when I tried to parse some HTML with PowerShell: I could not get the replacement with regular expression groups to work! It turned out that my .NET knowledge was working against me…