Parsing the ridiculously large DNC file – .NET Edition

So previously I posted about a problem one of our customers had parsing the DNC. The solution was done in perl and you can read about it in the Perl Edition of this. And it worked rather well and very quickly. However it presented a support issue: They didn’t have a linux box nor the inclination to install perl on a windows box just for that meaning each month we needed to parse it for them.

So I rewrote it in Window using .NET…
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Automatically starting and broadcasting in Wirecast

Recently, one of the local radio stations here in town wanted to stream their stuff live over the internet. Being their ISP, we helped them quite a bit. You can read about that and how it was done here: Multiple parallel audio streams from multiple audio sources on one Wirecast license.. Recently, however, we have uncovered a huge flaw in Wirecast: it’s inability to recover from pretty much any error automatically, start automatically, or automatically broadcast. If you don’t have a 24/7 technician who can sit in front of the server and watch Wirecast around the clock, this presents a problem.

A HUGE problem. And Wirecast’s official answer is “it’s on the wish list”.

Nice. I’m done wishing. So here’s what I did…
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Windows .NET in C# Major – Web Interaction With Self Signed SSL Certs. Part 2

Last week, we started making the web interaction class and did the self-signed compatibility functions as well as some setup ones. You can see all that here. Today we get into the meat and potatoes and get started on the functions that will actually send and receive the data we care about. So here we go!
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Windows .NET in C# Major – Web Interaction With Self Signed SSL Certs. Part 1

I am going to shift gears a bit, actually change cars entirely, and do a windows programming tutorial in Microsoft’s .NET environment using C#. Why? Because the world runs windows and in the World of Windows, the fastest method of development is through the .NET framework and the best language on that framework is, without a doubt, C#. I know. I took a poll. Stats never lie.

In this tutorial we are going to create a class to handle website interactions, giving us a simple way to post or get information from a web server, with or without an SSL cert and even a self signed one. Usually self signed certs present a problem since the cryptographic side tries to validate the authenticity of the cert, presenting problems. We will get around that.
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