C#

Excel with its file formats is not the only spreadsheet application that is widely used. There are also users on Linux and Macs and often they are using OpenOffice and other open-source office packages that use ODF instead of OpenXML. In this post I will show you how to read Open Document spreadsheet in C#.

I’m building web application for customer and there is requirement that users must be able to import data in different formats. Today we will support XLSX and ODF as import formats and some other formats are waiting. I wanted to be able to add new importers on the fly so I don’t have to deploy web application again when I add new importer or change some existing one. In this posting I will show you how to build generic importers support to your web application.

It is often good idea to isolate our domain model from consuming applications by using service layer and data transfer objects (DTO) or application specific models. Using DTO-s means that we need two-way mapping between domain classes and DTO-s. In this posting I will show you how to use AutoMapper to build generic base class for your mappers.

In this posting I will show you how to use Task Parallel Library (TPL) and PLINQ features to boost performance of simple RSS-feed aggregator. I will use here only very basic .NET classes that almost every developer starts from when learning parallel programming. Of course, we will also measure how every optimization affects performance of feed aggregator.

I solved a little problem last night when playing with named pipes. I created named pipe that writes all output to file. Named pipe is opened for all users in machine. In this posting I will show you simple class that works as pipe server.

.NET Framework 4.0 introduced new class called Lazy and I wrote blog post about it: .Net Framework 4.0: Using System.Lazy. One thing is annoying for me – we have to keep lazy loaded value and its value loader as separate things. In this posting I will introduce you my Lazy wrapper for complex to get system parameters that uses template method to keep lazy value loader in parameter class.

I am evaluating hosted Jira Studio and it likes me more and more when I’m using it. As hosted service is not in our premises and contains important information about our work I was asked to find out if there’s a way how to read data from Jira Studio and save it to our local data store. In this posting I will show you a simple way how to read issues from Jira Studio and save them to database.

Here’s one little method I use to write out debug information when investigating some new (legacy but new to me) system. Usually I remove this method later when I know how code works. It’s maybe not the best way to debug things but it works like charm in many situations.

In one of my applications I needed In one of my applications I needed copy data from one stream to another. After playing with streams a little bit I wrote CopyTo() extension method to Stream class you can use to copy the contents of current stream to target stream. Here is my extension method.

Pex and Moles is new testing and code analysis technology that is created by Microsoft Research. Pex is powerful tool that helps you analyze your code, detect error situations and generate parameterized unit tests. In this posting I will give you quick and illustrated overview of Pex. (more…)