Did you know that .NET provides an easy way to interact and control console programs?  In this article I will walk you through this process by creating a wrapper class for Google’s Tesseract OCR application.  At the end of this post, I will provide a complete WinForms-based frontend for Google’s Tesseract OCR Engine.   Initial ...

In my last post in this series I walked through the basics of launching and managing an external process.  In this post I’ll be discussing simple process interactions via ShellExecute API Verbs.  Using Verbs will allow you to perform simple tasks on specific file types without having to worry about building a complex communication layer ...

VSLab has just been updated with full support for Visual Studio 2008 Shell and the F# CTP release. It has been a rough couple of weeks for the VSLab team as F# CTP changed a number of things and they have been working hard to put together a compatible release. In this article I talk about a bit about what exactly VSLab is and walk you through ...

Visual Studio Shell was released in January of 2007 without much fanfare.  Even though it's free to download, at the time it was not very useful for most developers as few packages had yet been written for it.  Now eight months have gone by and quite a few projects are sporting free Visual Studio interfaces.  In this article I ...

It has come to my attention via a recent DZone article that .NET 3.5 and 2.0 SP1 jointly included a new feature which lets you manipulate the way your garbage collector acts programmatically.  This can be done through changing the value of a new property of the System.Runtime.GCSettings class named LatencyMode. In this article I will walk you ...

Because .NET Streams have state, they are difficult to use in multithreaded environments. In this post I discuss ways to manage or work around problems arising from the statefulness of .NET Streams. I explain how this is possible both through traditional inheritance and also through some indulgence in hacking of object protection levels by ...

Tuning the garbage collector to the specific context of the particular application can significantly improve the performance of both non-threaded and multi-threaded applications. In this post I discuss the gcConcurrent and gcServer settings which allow you to exercise some control how the Garbage Collector operates.   Articles in This ...

I have a new CodeProject article up which details how to make a Debugger Visualizer in the case where you need to custom serialize the object. The actual classes I build in the tutorial are only useful with our DotImage project line. However, the process of creating a Custom Serializer should be useful to any .NET ...

In the previous article I discussed a few of the benefits of stack allocation as well as a couple of C# keywords which help you to leverage those benefits. However, the one megabyte default stack size is too small for stack allocation to be used with a large dataset. Alternatively, in some threading situations one megabyte per thread/fiber can ...

Articles in This Series Part 1 – Basic Housekeeping Part 2 – Improving Performance Through Stack Allocation Part 3 – Increasing the Size of your Stack Part 4 – Choosing the Right Garbage Collector Settings Part 5 – Changing Your Garbage Collector Settings on the Fly Introduction In C#, when you create managed objects or arrays of value ...