Casual Ideas for Software Development

I noticed that sometimes, having a free evening and wishing to spend it watching a movie, I spent a lot of time selecting this movie, checking online movie databases for ratings, reviews, etc. As it was rather unproductive wasting of the time I created a simple Chrome extension helping to do the search easier and faster. The extension adds context menu items executing search for a selected text (movie name). There are also lots of sites which web masters overcomplicated them with scripts and CSS and made a simple selection of text quite a tricky thing. For these particular cases it is also possible to search without selection; for a focused text at cursor. The extension is configurable: you can select preferable online movies databases. Link:  https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/movies-tv-series-search/miploifkaagebhdlcdaaomgnenchiocf?hl=en&gl=PL Preview:

There comes a time in an ASP.Net developer's life when he must write own HTTP handler. Quite often the handler has to return a static or a rarely changable content and the developer should implement caching of it. Step 1. Specify how long data should retain cached. Someone does it this way: context.Response.Cache.SetExpires(DateTime.Now.AddDay(1)); Someone likes this approach: context.Response.Cache.SetMaxAge(86400); //1 day in seconds The most careful developers use both: context.Response.Cache.SetExpires(DateTime.Now.AddDay(1)); context.Response.Cache.SetMaxAge(86400); All the above are correct in their own way. The first example sets an absolute expiration date. In the list of headers it looks like this: Expires: Mon, 25 Jul 2016 19:50:09 GMT This header was introduced in the HTTP/1.0 specification but it is supported by HTTP/1.1 too. A small pitfall related to this header is that the expiration date and time are set explicitly and it may cause issues ...

Three authentication methods are proposed by the JIRA REST API documentation: Basic Authentication is a simple but not very safe approach. Credentials are sent in the header on every request and encoding to Base64 is not a proper protection in this case; HTTPS connection is required. OAuth authentication - looks a bit complex and requires additional configuration at the JIRA server that is not always possible. Cookie-based Authentication - this approach seems to be the most convinient one: credentials are checked once, then the authentication cookie only is sent on subsequent requests. However, trying to use the cookie-based authentication I encountered an issue. The approach described in the documentation worked partially: I was able to create a new session and get the response containing the session cookie but all subsequent requests using this session cookie were rejected as unauthorized. Spending some time investigating this I found the cause of the issue: JSESSIO...

JSON Viewer extension has now a few new features: ability to print formatted data ability to format input data keeping JSON markup ability to compare 2 JSON data Source code and binaries to download are here: https://github.com/marss19/json-viewer-visual-studio-extension After installation the viewer appears in the main menu: Tools -> JSON Viewer. Applicable to VS 2012 and 2013. UPDATE The source code has been migrated to GitHub: https://github.com/marss19/json-viewer-visual-studio-extension The latest release is available for download in Visual Studio Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MykolaTarasyuk.JSONViewer

Made a simple extension to Visual Studio to view JSON data in a more user-friendly format. Source code and binaries to download are here: https://github.com/marss19/json-viewer-visual-studio-extension . After installation the viewer is available in the main menu: Tools -> JSON Viewer. Applicable to VS 2012 and 2013. Please note that custom VS extensions cannot be installed into Express editions of Visual Studio due to a Microsoft policy. UPDATE The source code has been migrated to GitHub: https://github.com/marss19/json-viewer-visual-studio-extension The latest release is available for download in Visual Studio Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MykolaTarasyuk.JSONViewer

A few nuances about the primitive types in .Net which are not so obvious: If you add two short s you will get int . The same with byte s. Arithmetic operators for these types are not implemented in .Net therefore the values are implicitly converted to int before calculation. short x = 2, y = 2; var z = x + y; Console.WriteLine(z.GetType()); //output: System.Int32 Chuck Norris is not the only person who can divide by zero. Every .Net developer can do this. Just use floating point numbers. var z = 1.0 / 0; Console.WriteLine(z); //output: Infinity

It usually took me hours to add all tasks for my team for the next sprint in TFS. Existing UIs for this purpose were too sl-o-o-o-w, both built-in Team Explorer and Web Access (I mean Web Access for TFS 2010; 2012 is better in this context). The most annoying thing is that I usually need to specify just title and estimate for tasks but have to wait until the whole complex task entry form is loaded and then closed. I also found bulk work items generation by means of Excel is not that convenient for addition of hierarchical (parent-child) data. So I made a small utility for this purpose. Details and source code are here:   https://github.com/marss19/bulk-task-generation-in-tfs How to use The main form is divided in 3 parts: main menu: you can select a TFS project here, specify an area and/or an iteration to filter displayed work items and select a template for tasks creation. The default template containing all required fields is created automatically for each p...