How to search for users in Active Directory with C#

Last time I wrote about how you can reach the Active Directory search dialog in Windows 7. Today I’ll show you how to search comfortable for users in the Active Directory by using C#. The emphasis is on comfort, because there are quite a few articles on the subject in general, on the internet.
However, most of the shown methods/solutions are build exclusively around System.DirectoryServices.ActiveDirectory and the DirectorySearcher. But ever since .NET 3.5 it is also possible to search in the Active Directory much easier.
But let us come to the point. In the following example, I mostly use methods from the System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement namespace. And here’s how:

//Create a shortcut to the appropriate Windows domain
PrincipalContext domainContext = new PrincipalContext(ContextType.Domain,
[…]

The best free .NET decompilers – the .NET Reflector alternatives

netreflectorToday I want to briefly highlight a few alternatives to Redgates .NET Reflector. Former I frequently used this tool, but since it costs money and there are good and useful free alternatives, this is no longer between my fingers.
The following parenthesis is for those who don’t know what’s meant by the term .NET Reflector/decompiler. All the other can read on below the following paragraphs.
What is a (. NET) decompiler?
.NET Reflector was the first CLI assembly browser. It can be used to inspect, navigate, search, analyze, and browse the contents of a CLI component such as an assembly and translates the binary information to a human-readable form. By default Reflector allows decompilation of CLI assemblies into C#, Visual Basic .NET, Common Intermediate Language and F# (alpha version). Reflector also includes a “Call Tree” that can be used to drill down into […]

TagKeywordFinder – a free WordPress SEO plugin

Last while browsing I came across a WordPress plugin called wpSuggest. This links Google’s autocomplete function (the thing called “Google Suggest”, which ensures that you get suggestions while typing your question) with the title field in the WordPress editor. So if you write an article in the WordPress backend and type the title wpSuggest will make suggestions for the perfect title.
I liked the way the Google Suggest feature was used here. However, I found that the combination of Google Suggest and the input field for the keywords/tags would make much more sense.  So in short I have developed a small WordPress plugin named “TagKeywordFinder”. This plugin works similar to the above mentioned wpSuggest, with the small difference that it is used when tagging the article. And this is how it looks like:

(If you’re not intrested in the setup process, skip it to 1:00.)
When you begin to assign tags for your […]

PHP workaround – how to use file_get_contents() without allow_url_fopen

php_artikel_logoI admit, the title of this article is somewhat misleading. The PHP function file_get_contents(), which can be used to read files from the internet into a string, just does not work with allow_url_fopen disabled. On that not even this article will change anything.
However, if you want to develop an application or a script, that should work on as many server environments as possible, such as a wordpress plugin, so there is a good workaround for all the environments where allow_url_fopen is disabled. And just this little snippet/workaround is what I want to show and explain to you today.

$file = "http://www.example.com/my_page.php";
if (function_exists(‘curl_version’))
{
$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $file);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$content = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);
}
else if (file_get_contents(__FILE__) && ini_get(‘allow_url_fopen’))
{
$content = file_get_contents($file);
}
else
{
echo ‘You have neither cUrl installed nor allow_url_fopen activated. Please setup one of those!’;
}

First, it is checked whether the cURL extension is available on the server. […]

MD5 hashes in C# – benchmark and speed ​​optimization

For a current project I must generate a large number of MD5 hashes. I explicitly don’t want to discuss the meaning and security of MD5 hashes in this article, but rather concern myself with the question on how to generate MD5 hashes as fast as possible using C#.
The. NET Framework itself provides a class for creating MD5 hashes, which after the first attempts seemed a little slow to me. So I began to search for alternative classes and/or functions and came across a class of Syed Faraz Mahmood. His class is a manual implementation of the RFC 1321 (“The MD5 Message-Digest Algorithm”). The class can be downloaded for free on his blog.
The test environment
For the test I created six lists (List<int>) with many different numbers. Each with 1,000, 10,000, 50,000, 100,000, 1,000,000 and 10,000,000 elements.
All lists were run complete for both methods (MD5 .NET framework implementation & manual MD5 implementation) and […]