Background Recently, I wanted to setup a new blog. I have purchased the domain and started looking for the hosting. My main goal was to build a clean and a simple site that loads fast. Instead of working with the traditional WordPress platform and trying to configure dozens of plugins to increase the performance, I …

Background Sometimes we still need to maintain some legacy code that was written ages ago. A long time ago, MFC library was the default choice for many programmers wanted to develop a Windows Desktop Application in C++. Today, there are much better alternatives for the Desktop Applications developments that include: …

Background In one of my previous posts, I created a very basic VSTO example that adds a button to the PowerPoint ribbon. Recently, I had a task I needed to enumerate all the pictures in the Power Point presentation and extract them into a zip file. Power Point presentation might contain many different shapes, such as …

Background In one of my previous posts, I wrote about deserializing XML with namespace using XmlSerializer that requires creating custom model classes in order to perform the serialization. Today, I am going to cover another powerful method for parsing - LINQ to XML. My Stack Xml element tag Visual Studio 2019 …

Background In one of my previous posts, I demonstrated how to create a simple VSTO Addin for Excel that adds a button on the ribbon. In this post, I am going to show how to add a user defined functions using Excel-DNA as well as use the ribbon functionality. My Stack Visual Studio 2019 Community. .NET Framework 4.7.2 …

Background Starting Windows 7, Microsoft added a capability for displaying recently used files. This usually includes documents, pictures, and movies we've recently accessed. These files can be seen in various Windows components, including: Recent files Recent items Start menu or application's Jump List The …

Introduction In my previous article, I covered serializing/deserializing JSON in C++ to a simple object using RapidJSON. When working with JSON, my goal is to work always with object models and keep the actual JSON parsing behind the scenes. This keeps the readability and maintainability of the code as JSON …

Background Usually when creating forms with different controls, we would like the form be opened with a specific control in focus. This is usually true for Textboxes, but could be also very relevant for other controls such as ComboBox, Radio control, Listbox, and more. There are several ways to achieve this …

Background MySql installer hangs Recently I tried to install MySQL server on my Windows 10 development machine. First, I tried the MSI installer which is available from MySql Community Downloads as both 32-bit and 64-bit editions. Unfortunately, after running the installer, it kept hanging in the middle of the setup …

Introduction In one of my projects in C++, I had to work with an input in JSON format as we were using Django Web API that produces a JSON response for REST API calls. Parsing the JSON format in C++ should be easy with the open source libraries such as RapidJSON, nlohmann/jsonm, Boost.JSON. My goal was to work with …