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Translating text with Azure cognitive services

Some time ago, I used the Bing Translator API to help create localization for some of our products. As Microsoft recently retired the Data Market used to provide this service it was high time to migrate to the replacement Cognitive Services API hosted on Azure. This article covers using the basics of Azure cognitive services to translate text using simple HTTP requests.

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Richard Moss
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Using custom type converters with C# and YamlDotNet, part 2

Recently I discussed using type converters to perform custom serialization of types in YamlDotNet. In this post I'll concentrate on expanding the type converter to support deserialization as well.

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Richard Moss
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Using custom type converters with C# and YamlDotNet, part 1

One of our internal tools eschews XML or JSON configuration files in favour of something more human readable - YAML using YamlDotNet. For the most part the serialisation and deserialisation of YAML documents in .NET objects is as straight forward as using libraries such as JSON.net but when I was working on some basic serialisation there were a few issues. This article describes how to use the `IYamlTypeConverter` interface to handle custom YAML serialisation functionality.

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Richard Moss
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Writing Microsoft RIFF Palette (pal) files with C#

A short follow up which demonstrates how to write a RIFF palette with ease.

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Richard Moss
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Loading Microsoft RIFF Palette (pal) files with C#

At the start of 2014, I published an article describing how to read colour palettes from BBM/LBM files. At the end of that article I noted that Microsoft palette files used a similar format, but I didn't investigate that at the time. Since then I followed up with articles on reading and writing Adobe's Color Swatch and Color Exchange format files and I posted code for working with JASC, Gimp and other palette formats. Now, finally, I decided to complete the collection and present an article on reading Microsoft's palette files.

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Richard Moss
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Integrating NDepend with Jenkins Freestyle Jobs

Previously, I've described on this blog how to do a basic integration of NDepend with Jenkins pipeline jobs. The disadvantages of the previous post was it was essentially part of a series tailored to our build process and so not easy to view as a stand-alone article and it only covered pipelines. This complementary post covers how to perform the same level of integration with a freestyle project.

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Richard Moss
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Adjusting the Jenkins Content Security Policy

One of the security features of Jenkins is to send Content Security Policy (CSP) headers which describes how certain resources can behave. The default policy is extremely restrictive which can cause problems with content added to Jenkins via build processes. This post describes how to either temporarily or permanently change the CSP to be less restrictive.

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Richard Moss
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Integrating NDepend with Jenkins

After two posts regarding building and publishing Nuget packages with Jenkins pipelines, I now follow up with details on integrating NDepend with the pipeline job.

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Richard Moss
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Using parameters with Jenkins pipeline builds

A follow up to my first post on Jenkins pipelines, by upgrading the script to work with parametrised builds, allowing one script to handle multiple pipeline jobs.

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Richard Moss
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Using a Jenkins Pipeline to build and publish Nuget packages

A fairly lengthy post which describes how to setup a Jenkins Pipeline to build, test and publish Nuget packages, along with some tips and caveats learned from working with pipelines.

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Richard Moss
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Finding nearest colors using Euclidean distance

I've recently been updating our series on dithering to include ordered dithering. However, in order to fully demonstrate this I also updated the sample to include basic color quantizing with a fixed palette. While color reduction and dithering are related, I didn't want to cover both topics in a single blog post, therefore this post covers finding the nearest color via Euclidean distance.

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Richard Moss
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StartSSL code signing certificates are crippled

StartSSL code signing certificates are crippled and your binaries no longer trusted once they have expired, even if they have been counter signed. Not to mention the other trust issues that StartSSL are experiencing.

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Richard Moss