Fiddler Extension Development Tips

I recently created a custom Fiddler extension called PowerBIFiddler. Here are a few tricks that I learned along the way. Re-use Default Fiddler Inspectors For PowerBI-Fiddler, I wanted to re-use the J

How to make authenticated calls to the LinkedIn API using the Spring.net Social Extension for LinkedIn

I just spent way too much time trying to figure out how to call the LinkedIn People Search API. I needed to simply use the LinkedIn API to find people in my network by their full name. The last thing

Do I always have to call Dispose() on my DbContext objects? Nope

Like I mentioned in my post “Microsoftie Perk #9 – Access to product team devs”, it is awesome to be able to ping the people who build the tools we use every day. This post is a great example of that

Problem Microsoft ASP.NET Web API (RTM) references Newtonsoft.Json (>= 4.5.6) (AKA Json.net) Twitterizer 2 references Newtonsoft.Json (=4.5.5) You can’t have both Newtonsoft.Json (>= 4.5.6) AND

How to OutputCache an object based on the current date with VaryByCustom and GetVaryByCustomString

I have a long running script that needs to run once a day and I’d like to store the results of that script in cache for the rest of the day so only one user (or any automated http request) will incur

Solution to MVC app listing contents of directory instead of executing routes

I just deployed a new MVC web app and instead of executing the routes it just listed the contents of the directory like so: There could be many reasons for this, but I figured out the reason it was h

How to manually update your Entity Framework model classes when they get out of sync with your database

The ADO.NET Entity Framework is an awesome way to quickly pull data into an app. I’ve been building apps for a really long time and have used all the frameworks that have come out over the years. IMO

Solution to "This file is in use. Enter a new name or close the file that's open in another program" when trying to add new MDF connection in Visual Studio

I needed to refresh the code generated by the EDMX model, but it wasn’t working for some reason. So I deleted the EDMX file and deleted the connection string from web.config to start from scratch. I g

Solution to "Entry point was not found." in Visual Studio

I got this “System.EntryPointNotFoundException” exception today: “Entry point was not found.” There could be many reasons for this exception. In my case it was because my main app and library app we

[object Object]

Could not find an implementation of the query pattern for source type ‘[type]’. ‘Where’ not found. Consider explicitly specifying the type of the range variable ‘[variableName]’ You get this error if

How to set HtmlAgilityPack Timeout

HtmlAgilityPack is a great HTML parser library that I often use for scraping. It does web requests on your behalf via the HtmlWeb().Load methods, but doesn’t expose the HttpWebRequest.Timeout property

How to get a UIHint attribute value from an MVC Razor view

The UIHint Attribute is a great way to pass metadata from a model to a view. I was looking around for a simple way to get the value of the attribute from my razor view. I could be missing something ob

How to create an MVC Razor view for a generic List property

You have a model that has a property of type List. You write a view and your first inclination is to create a cshtml file called List.cshtml, but that doesn’t work. There’s a trick and it has to do wi

Solution to "Unable to cast object of type '[type1]' to type '[type2]'." when trying to cast a List to List

Okay, it’s not really a “solution” per se, but more of a workaround to a limitation with generic List objects that has to do with covariance and contravariance. I struggled with this for way too long,

[object Object]

There are many reasons why this error will appear. One of the less obvious reasons has to do with the “Target framework” project level setting. In my referenced project the “Target framework” was set

MSN is hiring MVC, Razor, C#, jQuery, HTML, CSS web devs

I lead the Tools dev team for Bedrock, the CMS system that runs MSN.com. We are rebuilding the entire app one piece at a time in jQuery and MVC4 and need your help. We ship every other week. We do gat

How to call the new Azure Marketplace Bing Search API using C#

It took me more than 2 minutes (too long!) to figure out how to call the new Bing search API. The Bing API to Azure Marketplace migration doc is a great resource for learning how to call the new Azure

How to modify read only TFS fields with WorkItemServer.Update

Sometimes you want to update a read only system field in TFS, such as System.CreatedDate or System.ResolvedDate. There is no way to do that with TFS 2010 by using the UI or the object model because bo

How to load a remote assembly using Assembly.Load

If you try to load a remote assembly using it’s path you’ll likely get a permission or operation exception. When using LoadFrom: Assembly a1 = Assembly.LoadFrom(file); I got this error. Could not loa

How to programmatically generate C# files from a DLL or EXE

I’m working on a project that involves researching and comparing many versions of the same DLL. I don’t have the source for every version of this DLL so I needed a way to convert it to C# files and di