How to deserialize a part of JSON as a string keeping everything inside as is including the formatting? Or how to merge JSONs together into one having them provided as strings? The article shows an implement of a custom converter for the System.Text.Json that does described things, and provides additional cases when such converter might be useful.

One of the form how MongoDB represents UUID is BinData of type 3 or 4. The post covers how to convert the Legacy UUID (LUUID) to the .NET GUID representation.

Recently I've developed a simple processing application that generates some data in the database. For business logic it was important to understand what entity was created the last on some steps. Since there was no concern about scaling or running several instances simultaneously, it was decided to use the primary key itself, the auto-incremental integer value. I didn't want to rely somehow on date-time or invent something sophisticated.

Sometimes, the incoming data in JSON has some custom form that is not supported by the built-in Json.NET converters. In this article, as an educational example, we will implement a custom converter from the UNIX time format in milliseconds to the native .NET class DateTime.

Once, I was needed to have a simple endpoint in which I can send any request for test purposes. Just a simple web service that eats a request, no matter what HTTP method and route are used.

Fortunately, Microsoft did a great job making ASP.NET Core as flexible as possible, so the solution turned up quite short and simple.

My new article about product versions was published. Feel free to read. It explains different kinds of versions, and approaches how to use and implement them. Additionally, my own experience of implementing versioning in my current project.

A simple implementation of the shared Logger based on NLog that can be easily included into any solution with a minimum configuration.

I'd like to introduce a library for accessing app settings in the App.config and Web.config. Unlike standard ConfigurationManager, ConfigEx additionally allows reading configs of other assemblies used in the project. Moreover, it is strongly typed, has a mechanism of settings overriding, and allows applying automatic conversion of values.

Have you ever had a task to read and deserialize a large XML file? Like 500 MB or 2 GB, that is impossible just to read to the end into memory and parse it.

An interesting note that I've found while updating the ConfigEx library: the assembly DLL file in the ASP.NET application might be located in a place different from what we expect. During runtime, it is actually not in the place where the application is hosted.

WPF Async Pack is a small library for creating asynchronous WPF applications. It's not a framework, it was created mainly for the small applications where installing heavy frameworks is just overkill. It doesn't have any dependencies and contains such the most used classes as AsyncCommand and BaseViewModel.

Read more in Binary-Studio's blog.

In C# in order to control what code should be executed we can use compilation directives #if, #else, #elif and #endif. For instance, we can compile certain code only in Debug mode and exclude one in Release.

The question is how to achieve the same in XAML.

For localization or some other reason you might want to access the static resources in ResX file from the XAML using Static extension.

Imagine a quite common client-server application where the server exposes REST methods and the client communicates using HTTP requests. Requests and responses are serialized in JSON format. There might be a problem if you try to send and receive a DTO that contains a collection of interfaces or abstract classes. I will talk about the usage of Web API and Newtonsoft Json.NET as its underlying serialization library.

In this post I'm going to show how to fill object properties using reflection no matter what types they are.

You can see examples of global system-wide hotkeys almost in every application: media players, chats, different tray tools. The application can be minimized or even hidden, but you can control it by pressing hotkeys no matter what is in focus right now.

Unfortunately, .NET Framework doesn't contain convenient classes or methods for setting up global system-wide hotkeys. The only way to achieve this is to use the Windows API functions.

Sometimes we need to disallow starting multiple instances of our application (for example, it make sense for music players, applications for Windows Tray, etc.). The easiest and, probably, the most proper way is to use Mutex - a synchronization primitive.

In our project we faced the problem of how to make running some calculations concurrently. We can simply start each calculation in a separate thread but the problem is how to limit the number of threads.

The Skype Auto Recorder version 1.2 was released. It contains important bug fixes and finally can be treated as stable.

The source code is available on GitHub.