Skip to main content

Daily Dilbert Service - the most important service I've ever written...

NuGet package available here...

First off a big shout to @hamish & @leeoades on this one - I'm just blogging about it. At work we have a test harness for launching the application in different environments, the test harness like the app is written in WPF. We got very bored of looking at the test harness UI and decided to make it a bit more interesting - we added the Daily Dilbert comic strip to the button to launch the app - a full on VB style button taking up most of the UI :)

This was originally done using code provided by Brian Ritchie, but since the image was removed from the daily Dilbert RSS a couple of months ago this no longer worked, fortunately a couple of weeks later a Yahoo pipes URL implementation appeared with the daily image.

We took this and used it inside a service to abstract away to complexity, here it is:
Loading ....
As you can see you can either get the image as either a file (*.jpg) or a .Net Stream. Also it makes use of Task and since the service is designed to support .Net v4.0 it means you will need to have this Hotfix KB2468871 installed on Windows XP machines.

I've pushed the code to Git here & published a NuGet package here.

So you'r only a couple of clicks away from getting it working, a quick example WPF app is shown below:
The test app is available for download.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Implementing a busy indicator using a visual overlay in MVVM

This is a technique we use at work to lock the UI whilst some long running process is happening - preventing the user clicking on stuff whilst it's retrieving or rendering data. Now we could have done this by launching a child dialog window but that feels rather out of date and clumsy, we wanted a more modern pattern similar to the way <div> overlays are done on the web. Imagine we have the following simple WPF app and when 'Click' is pressed a busy waiting overlay is shown for the duration entered into the text box. What I'm interested in here is not the actual UI element of the busy indicator but how I go about getting this to show & hide from when using MVVM. The actual UI elements are the standard Busy Indicator coming from the WPF Toolkit : The XAML behind this window is very simple, the important part is the ViewHost. As you can see the ViewHost uses a ContentPresenter element which is bound to the view model, IMainViewModel, it contains 3 child v

Showing a message box from a ViewModel in MVVM

I was doing a code review with a client last week for a WPF app using MVVM and they asked ' How can I show a message from the ViewModel? '. What follows is how I would (and have) solved the problem in the past. When I hear the words ' show a message... ' I instantly think you mean show a transient modal message box that requires the user input before continuing ' with something else ' - once the user has interacted with the message box it will disappear. The following solution only applies to this scenario. The first solution is the easiest but is very wrong from a separation perspective. It violates the ideas behind the Model-View-Controller pattern because it places View concerns inside the ViewModel - the ViewModel now knows about the type of the View and specifically it knows how to show a message box window: The second approach addresses this concern by introducing the idea of messaging\events between the ViewModel and the View. In the example below

Custom AuthorizationHandler for SignalR Hubs

How to implement IAuthorizationRequirement for SignalR in Asp.Net Core v5.0 Been battling this for a couple of days, and eventually ended up raising an issue on Asp.Net Core gitHub  to find the answer. Wanting to do some custom authorization on a SignalR Hub when the client makes a connection (Hub is created) and when an endpoint (Hub method) is called:  I was assuming I could use the same Policy for both class & method attributes, but it ain't so - not because you can't, because you need the signatures to be different. Method implementation has a resource type of HubInnovationContext: I assumed class implementation would have a resource type of HubConnectionContext - client connects etc... This isn't the case, it's infact of type DefaultHttpContext . For me I don't even need that, it can be removed completely  from the inheritence signature and override implementation. Only other thing to note, and this could be a biggy, is the ordering of the statements in th