Stefano Tommesani

1. Web page scraping, the easy way

There are many ways to extract data elements from web pages, almost all of them prettier and cooler than the method proposed here, but as we are in an hurry, let's get that data quickly, ok? Suppose we have to extract the profile names from a...

Sunday, 07 January 2018 | Print | PDF |  E-mail | Report | More...

2. Scraping dynamic page content

One of the most common roadblocks when scraping the content of web sites is getting the full contents of the page, including JS-generated data elements (probably, the ones you are looking for). So, when using CEFSharp to scrape a site, reading the...

Sunday, 07 January 2018 | Print | PDF |  E-mail | Report | More...

3. Unit-testing file I/O

Two good news: file I/O is unit-testable, and it is surprisingly easy to do. Let's see how it works! A software no-one asked for First, we need a piece of software that deals with files and that has to be unit-tested. The TestableIO project does...

Sunday, 26 November 2017 | Print | PDF |  E-mail | Report | More...

4. Fixing Git pull errors in SourceTree

If you encounter the following error when pulling a repository in SourceTree: VirtualAlloc pointer is null, Win32 error 487 it is due to to the Cygwin system failing to allocate a 5 MB large chunk of memory for its heap at the fixed address...

Friday, 28 April 2017 | Print | PDF |  E-mail | Report | More...

5. Necessary evil: testing private methods

Some might say that testing private methods should be avoided because it means not testing the contract, that is the interface implemented by the class, but the internal implementation of the class itself. Still, not all classes were designed with...

Sunday, 29 January 2017 | Print | PDF |  E-mail | Report | More...

6. Windows Forms smells funny, but...

In the "2016 .NET Community Report" just released by Telerik, the answers to the question "What technology would you choose if building for Windows Desktop?" were as follows: So roughly half of new desktop developments would be based on Windows...

Thursday, 07 April 2016 | Print | PDF |  E-mail | Report | More...

7. Say goodbye to "it does not happen on my PC!" with Azure

It is not easy to monitor how our code behaves on a vast array of different machines. A myriad of different configurations can lead to errors that are difficult to reproduce and even more difficult to anticipate. And when the customer calls...

Saturday, 12 March 2016 | Print | PDF |  E-mail | Report | More...

8. Parallel loops in the AltaLux kernel

The AltaLux plugin for IrfanView is now open-source (here is the GitHub link) and it is worth analyzing the different methods used for parallelizing the computational kernel. The filter factory, contained in the CAltaLuxFilterFactory files, can...

Monday, 01 February 2016 | Print | PDF |  E-mail | Report | More...

9. Transient objects with IoC containers like Castle Windsor

Dependency Injection (DI) and Inversion of Control (IoC) are popular patterns in modern software development that reduce coupling among modules and so improve the testability of the sames. As this article is not meant to be an introduction to DI /...

Monday, 01 February 2016 | Print | PDF |  E-mail | Report | More...

10. Opening password-protected PowerPoint presentations

PowerPoint presentations can arrive in different file formats: PPT is the default file extension for saving presentations in PowerPoint 2003 and earlier versions. PPTX is the default file extension for saving presentations in PowerPoint 2007...

Sunday, 23 November 2014 | Print | PDF |  E-mail | Report | More...

11. Visual Studio installer getting stuck

When installing or uninstalling Visual Studio 2012/2013, the installer might get stuck right at the beginning:

Saturday, 22 November 2014 | Print | PDF |  E-mail | Report | More...

12. Fixing Here Maps in Windows Phone 8

After the map updates on mid-May, both the HERE Maps and Drive apps for Windows Phone 8 stopped working, even worse, launching them made the phone reboot. The obvious fix would be an hard reset of the phone, but that would mean a lot of work,...

Wednesday, 25 June 2014 | Print | PDF |  E-mail | Report | More...

13. Friend Watchdog software livre para Facebook e Skype

Agora eu sei o que você fez na segunda-feira passada Friend Watchdog controla os status dos seus amigos do Facebook e Skype, salva todas as mudanças de entradas e saídas dentro de um servidor remoto e te dá permissão de controlar...

Saturday, 07 December 2013 | Print | PDF |  E-mail | Report | More...

14. Friend Watchdog software gratis per Facebook e Skype

Ora so cosa hai fatto lunedì scorso Friend Watchdog controlla lo stato dei tuoi amici su Facebook e Skype, salva i cambiamenti di stato su server remoti, e ti permette di controllare quando i tuoi amici sono stati online nella settimana...

Saturday, 07 December 2013 | Print | PDF |  E-mail | Report | More...

15. Friend Watchdog free software for Facebook and Skype

Friend Watchdog is now offline. There are several technical reasons for this choice, the first one being Microsoft dropping support for the chat API in Skype, the second one being Facebook changing the behaviour of their chat servers. But the most...

Saturday, 07 December 2013 | Print | PDF |  E-mail | Report | More...

16. Building Installshield LE 2012 setups from the command line for CI

In Visual Studio 2012, after installing Installshield LE 2012, you can include setup projects into your solution, as shown below: Adding the Setup project to the solution, and including it into the Release configuration, makes for...

Thursday, 31 October 2013 | Print | PDF |  E-mail | Report | More...

17. Background subtraction: ViBe

The ViBe algorithm In the paper "ViBe: A universal background subtraction algorithm for video sequences", Olivier Barnich and Marc Van Droogenbroeck introduce several innovative mechanisms for motion detection: Pixel model and classification...

Tuesday, 15 October 2013 | Print | PDF |  E-mail | Report | More...

18. AskWatch: track your kids on Ask.fm

AskWatch is a free software application for Microsoft Windows 7/8 that helps you: find your sons in Ask.fm keep track of the questions they receive and how they answer see who they are talking to highlight the Q&As that contain alarm...

Sunday, 13 October 2013 | Print | PDF |  E-mail | Report | More...

19. AskWatch: technical requirements

You need the following to run AskWatch: a PC running Microsoft Windows 7 or 8 .NET framework 4.5 (already installed in MS Windows 8, requires installation in MS Windows 7) the AskWatch installer includes the .NET framework 4.5 web installer,...

Sunday, 13 October 2013 | Print | PDF |  E-mail | Report | More...

20. Integrating Visual Studio unit testing with release management software

In a previous post, Unit testing with Visual C++ 2012, the unit testing features of Visual Studio 2012 were shown to be an effective way to improve software quality by introducing various tests. Still, instead of having to run these tests inside the...

Sunday, 13 October 2013 | Print | PDF |  E-mail | Report | More...