Articles Tagged “Technical Consulting”
28 articles tagged “Technical Consulting”, newest first.
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System Tray Icons and Toast Notifications in Windows Apps — NotifyIcon Pitfalls and Choosing the Right AppNotification API
A practical guide to keeping a business Windows app resident in the system tray and notifying users with toast notifications. Covers the correct use of Notif...
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How Long Will VB6 Apps Keep Running? — Runtime Support Status and a Practical Path to .NET Migration
How long will VB6 applications keep running? This practical guide clarifies the asymmetry between the VB6 runtime support policy (still supported on Windows ...
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Japanese Era Dates, Public Holidays, and Closing-Date Processing in Business Apps — Era-Resilient Design, JapaneseCalendar, and Business-Day Calculations in Practice
A report that must show '令和8年' in the Japanese era, business-day calculations that exclude public holidays, payment due on the last business day of the month...
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A Practical Guide to Process Monitor (ProcMon) — Pinpointing "Settings Not Applied" and "ACCESS DENIED" in 10 Minutes
"I fixed the config file, but nothing changed." "It worked yesterday, but won't start today." Before touching the source code, Process Monitor (ProcMon) lets...
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When Not to Move a Windows App to the Web: A Decision Table and the Practical Answer of Splitting
Requests to move in-house Windows apps to the web are increasing, but for apps built around device integration, local file processing, offline operation, or ...
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Localizing WinForms/WPF Apps — resx, Satellite Assemblies, and Culture Switching in Practice
A practical guide to localizing Windows desktop apps, covering the difference between CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture, how resx and satellite assemblies ...
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CSV Is Not "Just Text": A Practical Guide to CSV Handling in C# Business Apps (Encoding, Excel Compatibility, Injection Defense)
A practical rundown of the classic failure patterns in business-app CSV I/O - hand-rolled Split(',') parsing, mojibake from BOM-less UTF-8 in Excel, lost lea...
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Don't Wrap HttpClient in a using Block — Practical HTTP Communication in C# Business Apps (Creation Patterns, Timeouts, Retries)
Creating a new C# HttpClient with using on every request exhausts sockets, but making it static means it stops following DNS changes. This article walks thro...
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Pinpointing "Slow" with PerfView and dotnet-trace — A Practical Introduction to .NET Performance Investigation
When a business app is "slow," "pegs the CPU," or "occasionally freezes," which tool should you reach for, and what should you look at? This article walks th...
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More Than appsettings.json — A Practical Guide to Configuration Management in Windows Business Apps (Per-Environment Settings, Secrets, and Where to Write)
A practical look at configuration management for Windows business apps: layering appsettings.json, choosing between IConfiguration and the IOptions/IOptionsS...
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Printing and PDF Output in Windows Business Apps — Choosing Between System.Drawing.Printing, WPF, and Report Libraries
Organizes WinForms printing with PrintDocument, WPF FlowDocument/FixedDocument printing, and PDF output options into a requirement-based decision table. Cove...
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Getting a Real Feel for the OSI Model — Dissecting a Single HTTP Request Into Its Seven Layers
Understand the OSI model through the real thing instead of rote memorization. We assemble and dissect, in C#, the Ethernet frame carrying a single HTTP GET r...
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How to Think About Windows Session Isolation — Session 0, RDP, and Running Multiple Users Concurrently
This article untangles the concept of a Windows "session," a topic that consistently confuses Windows app developers. It covers why Session 0 isolation exist...
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Extending the Life of and Migrating VB6 / Access Business Apps — A Decision Table for Keep, Wrap, or Replace
How do you decide whether to leave a VB6 application or Microsoft Access business app as-is, extend its life by wrapping only part of it, or replace it outri...
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Reading Crash Dumps with WinDbg + SOS — A Practical Guide to Analysis After Collection
Explains how to actually read a collected Windows crash dump using WinDbg and the SOS extension. Covers symbol path configuration, tracking exceptions and me...
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Preventing Multiple Instances of a Windows App — Named Mutexes and Activating the Existing Window on a Second Launch
This article organizes the classic requirement for business Windows apps — 'don't let the same app launch twice' — around a named Mutex. We cover the pitfall...
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Safely Calling Win32 APIs from C# — A Practical P/Invoke Guide (DllImport / LibraryImport / CsWin32)
A practical rundown of what to watch for when calling Win32 APIs and native DLLs from C# via P/Invoke. Covers the differences between DllImport and LibraryIm...
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Integrating Entra ID Authentication into WinForms/WPF Apps — A Practical Architecture with MSAL.NET and the WAM Broker
A practical, hands-on look at integrating Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) authentication into WinForms/WPF desktop apps: the public client mindset, where ROPC s...
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Date, Time, and Timezones in Business Apps — From DateTime Pitfalls to the UTC-Storage Principle and Test Design
Timestamps drift by nine hours after a server migration; only the overseas office's dates roll back to the previous day — we trace date/time incidents back t...
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WPF High-DPI Support — Why It Still Blurs and Bleeds Despite Being 'Supposedly DPI-Aware,' and How to Fix It
WPF lays out UI in DIPs (1/96 inch) and is System DPI Aware from the start, but moving a window to a monitor with a different DPI blurs the whole screen, and...
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Why EXCEL.EXE Processes Remain After C# Excel COM Automation — Reference Release Patterns and the Replacement Decision
A practical look at why EXCEL.EXE processes remain running after automating Excel from C# via Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel, explained through COM reference...
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High-DPI Support in WinForms — Why the UI Blurs or Breaks on 4K Monitors, and Practical Fixes
This article organizes the reasons WinForms apps blur or have broken layouts on 4K monitors and 150% scaling, starting from DPI virtualization and DPI awaren...
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Choosing Windows Inter-Process Communication ── A Decision Table for Named Pipes / TCP / gRPC / Shared Memory / COM
How do you choose the right way for Windows applications to talk to each other? This article organizes named pipes, local TCP, gRPC, shared memory, file-base...
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Using SQLite from C# in Business Apps — WAL Mode, Exclusive Locking, Corruption Countermeasures, and When to Reach for EF Core
A practical rundown of embedding SQLite into a business Windows app with Microsoft.Data.Sqlite: connection strings and pooling, how WAL mode works, SQLITE_BU...
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How to Build and Operate Windows Services ── From Choosing Between Task Scheduler and Services to Turning a BackgroundService into a Windows Service
Should a background process become a Windows service, or is Task Scheduler enough? This guide organizes the practical design work for putting a service into ...
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Is WebView2 the Right Successor to IE Mode? — The ActiveX Constraint and a Realistic Migration Design
A rundown of WebView2's basic architecture, the Evergreen vs. Fixed Version distribution strategies, the user data folder trap, how native code talks to web ...
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How to Choose Where a Windows App Stores Local Data — A Decision Table for SQLite / JSON / Registry / Access
Where — and in what format — should a Windows desktop app store its data? This article organizes the choice between AppData and ProgramData, and the strength...
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When Task Scheduler Tasks Don't Run or Exit with 0x1 — Isolating the Cause and Designing for Reliable Operation
A design guide to putting Windows Task Scheduler into reliable production use: execution accounts and logon types, what 'Run whether user is logged on or not...