Thoughts on .Net & Coding

Uploading files from the client machine onto the server is a fairly common task in web applications. Recently I came across such an application where the end users are required to upload XML files from their machine onto the server. These XML files were produced as a result of some export operation of a desktop application installed on their machines. These XML files then used to get imported in some central database for further processing.  Uploading the file is a quite straightforward thing but in this case it was also required to validate these uploaded files against an XML schema (XSD). This was a safeguard against manual or accidental tampering of the files that might take place at the end user's side. If a file is found to be invalid the it shouldn't be accepted in the system for obvious reason. This article discusses a simple solution to accomplish this task.

If you are running any website that makes use of Google's reCAPTCHA for keeping bots and automated scripts away, you are probably aware that version 1.0 is being phased out. That means you need to integrate version 2.0 into your websites. To that end this article explains how to do just that. I use ASP.NET MVC project to illustrate the integration process but the same applies even for ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET Core applications.

Invoking Web API is a quite common task in modern ASP.NET web applications. Usually, developers resort to jQuery Ajax to call the Web API. If you are using a client side framework such as Angular, you may also use the inbuilt ways to make the Ajax calls. However, what if you aren't using these approaches? This article discusses an alternative.

As as ASP.NET developer working with latest trends you might want to use Angular 4 in your projects. Unlike libraries such as jQuery, Angular 4 is a framework and there are quite a few steps involved before you actually start utilizing its powerful features. To that end this article explains the steps necessary to prepare your ASP.NET projects to use Angular 4. We will discuss the process for all the three flavors of ASP.NET available today - ASP.NET Web Forms, ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Core.

Modern web application use JSON as the preferred data format for the sake of transferring data between a Web API and its client. However, at times you may want to use XML data format instead of JSON. Although the overall process to accomplish this task is same, there are certain subtle but important differences. To that end this article shows how XML data exchange can be done between an ASP.NET Web API and a jQuery driven client.

When a web page accepts an input from the end user it can also include malicious data consisting of special characters, HTML tags, JavaScript code and the things like that. As a safety measure you should encode such data before displaying it back on to a page or while passing through URL query strings. To that end ASP.NET Core providers three encoder classes that help you accomplish just that. This article discuses how these classes can be used to encode HTML markup, JavaScript code and URL query strings.

If you worked with ASP.NET MVC applications before, you are probably aware of Cross-site request forgery (CSRF / XSRF) attacks. You might have also used anti-forgery token based approach to prevent them. ASP.NET Core uses a similar approach but there are a few differences that you should be aware of. To that end this article briefly discusses the CSRF attack and ASP.NET Core way to prevent them.

It is quite common for ASP.NET Core applications to rely on the tag helpers to render forms and form fields. So, a view typically contains many tag helpers as well as standard HTML markup. You can improve your development time experience with the tag helpers in variety of ways. This article discusses a few of them.