Case insensitive XPath query

I wanted to do a case insensitive xpath lookup in my C# .Net application. There was no direct way that i could find to get the job done, but fortunately the workaround ain’t that difficult. Lets consider the following example:
<xml><books><book id=”1″ name=”Book1″ type=”fiction” /><book id=”2″ name=”Book2″ type=”nonfiction” /><book id=”1″ name=”Book1″ type=”FICTION” /></books>

To request for all [...]

‘Sys’ is undefined – ASP.Net Ajax error

I was using ASP.NET 2.0 along with Ajax Extensions 1.0. I received this error ‘Sys’ is undefined error message every time I used an Ajax control. I was pulling my hair out on it and decided to give the Control Toolkit’s web.config a glance. The following lines were not available in my web.config, so i [...]

Hide a window instead of closing it in WPF

I wanted to give WPF a try and was creating a timer application which will pop up a window once a while. But what I wanted was for the application to keep running in the tray even when its closed. The following code does NOT work in WPF for some reason:
private void Window_Closing(object sender, System.ComponentModel.CancelEventArgs [...]

Using StreamReader without locking the file in C#

I was using the StreamReader class to read the contents of a text file. I was under the assumption (well I know its a bad
thing)  that because I am only reading the contents of the file, the file would be available for other applications to read or write. Guess what, i was wrong. The StreamReader [...]

.Net CLR Windows Service and the ConfigurationManager class

I created a new windows service and attached a App.Config file to it. Then I went back to the code and tried this:
System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.GetSection(“Extras”);

For some reason the compiler was not able to figure out the class and kept throwing an error. This does not happen with your standard EXE projects as well as ASP.NET projects. I [...]

Strip Illegal XML Characters based on W3C standard

W3C has defined a set of illegal characters for use in XML . You can find info about the same here:
XML 1.0 | XML 1.1
Here is a function to remove these characters from a specified XML file:
using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Text;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

namespace XMLUtils
{
class Standards
{
[...]

Quickly calculate and compare MD5 or SHA2 values

There might be situations when you might want to quickly calculate the MD5 or SHA2  values of any file or a set of files. The solution depends on what is your requirement: 1) Its a one time work and you would just want the results in a text / html file 2) You want the [...]