Peter Shaw

One of the great things about writing software that runs under the .NET platform is the ability to play videos, music files, and to display images. With such a rich platform for multimedia, it’s quite easy to just get consumed in media players and MP3s. It’s possible, however, to actually make some very, very custom […]

With the advances we’ve made in computing power today, we now have more choices than ever before on how we input data into our PCs. One area of input that’s moving faster than most is the area of “Artificial Intelligence.” Much of this drive is coming about as a result of the ever growing maker […]

As far as toolkits to handle images go, the .NET eco-sphere has more than an abundance. From toolkits that are specifically designed to complement .NET right through to kits ported from other platforms such as GD, there’s no shortage of tools and APIs to do pretty much anything you might desire. There’s one toolkit, however, […]

Whenever the subject of creating images from scratch comes up in .NET, people automatically start thinking “Windows Forms” and “Picturebox” or “Bitmap” manipulation. Although this is all good, there are more than a handful of ways to create interesting images in .NET Let’s take an interesting example. Let’s suppose you wanted to do something like […]

In this day and age of powerful graphic-orientated computing devices, it’s always useful to know exactly what you’re dealing with when you have to analyze an image file. With an ever increasing global online photo album, containing millions of images across millions of websites, we as a society put millions, maybe even billions, of new […]

One of the questions a see most often regarding the WinForms-to-MVC transform is “How do I add my drag-and-drop components” or “Where’s my webforms tool box gone?” The answer to this is not a simple one. ASP.NET MVC does things very differently to ASP.NET Webforms when it comes to creating your page markup, and as […]

How often do you use the DateTime object in .NET? I’m willing to bet quite often, but here’s the thing. I reckon, like most .NET developers, most of the time you use it to do the following: var currentDate = DateTime.Now; or var currentDate = DateTime.UtcNow; What many developers don’t stop to look at, however, […]

In a previous post, we took a closer look at the static methods available in .NET’s file class. In this post, we’re going to continue with the I/O theme and take a look at the functionality available in the “Directory” class. Like the file classes, everything in “Directory” is static and contains a large amount […]

When someone mentions file handling in an application, what kind of things go through your mind as a developer? To many folks, file handling is nothing more than opening a file, reading its contents, and then closing it. .NET, however, has a very rich static class with lots of useful stuff in for doing all […]

How many of you still use RSS? I’m willing to bet the answer is “Not Many”, but the reality is, you use it without realizing. Take your blog. Does it run on WordPress? Well, take a close look at it, then, because it’ll be using RSS. Your browser, too, has an RSS Feed reader built […]

One thing that many applications need to do is to send email. .NET has quite a robust set of classes available that allow you to do this very easily. The best part about it is that not only can it be used to send email by using a standard email/smtp server, but you also can […]

Do you know what a DNS is? Some of you might, and some may not, but it’s most likely something you use every single day without realizing. A DNS Lookup is the process of taking a domain name and getting its IP address, or taking an IP address and getting its domain name. Whose Address? […]