Massoud Mazar

I was very much into flight simulator during late 90s and early 2000s. I remember spending hours in the flight sim, and even flying cross country (with faster simulation speed of course!). Astonishing improvements in hardware and software since then has made a huge difference in performance and image quality of the Flight Simulator. More...

Encountering memory leaks in a .net application is not very common, but when dealing with one which is not common and you cannot find any mention of it online, it is even harder to resolve. I had one of these encounters this week and took me a couple of days to find a solution for it.

A product I'm working on, makes extensive use of SQL server DbGeometry types to store and manipulate GIS data. DbGeometry type is provided in the System.Data.Entity.Spatial library, which can be added to your .net code using the Microsoft.SqlServer.Types NuGet package. After a trivial change in the code I realized it is failing on the QA server where it was deployed to. Strangely there was no failure on the development machine. Failure on the server was surfacing as processing taking so ling it would timeout. Observing the server health revealed unprecedented memory use when this new part of code was being executed. More...

I needed to access my restricted Google App Engine API from an Android App using a Service account. Let's say, I don't want to ask my users to authenticate with their Google accounts to my Android App, and I also don't want any third party access my App Engine API. All the documentation I found online was about how to authenticate with backend using users, but nothing about using service accounts. Even on many StackOverFlow articles people say it is not possible.

So, here is summary of steps: More...

I was experimenting different themes with my BlogEngine blog and noticed not all of them show the correct color coding of my source code examples. There is a simple fix for that which is to copy the section of style.css file related to "Syntax Highlighter" from a working theme to the style.css of the theme you like. That should do the trick.

Suppose you want to start your SysTray application at installation time and remove it when your application is uninstalled. Here is one way to do this:

Add an Installer Class to your project, and overwrite the Install and Uninstall methods. For Example, assuming your SysTray program is named "My SysTray": More...

If you have setup more than one email account in your Outlook (Work and Home) you may have realized a need for some type of pop-up dialog which will ask you which account you want to use when creating a new email. Outlook lets you define a default account, but obviously that's not good enough. I decided to write a small and simple add-in which will ask me to select the sending account every time I compose a new email. (Even if Outlook already has such a tool, I couldn't find it! and I wanted to gain some Office programming knowledge anyways.)

I used Visual Studio 2008 and created a new Office project of type Outlook Add-in. This will give you the basics you need. Just fill the methods with your code and you are done. More...

iTextSharp is a rich code library to create PDF and RTF output. Recently I decided to use it for a client and realized there are not much good code examples available on the internet. Even some of the code samples from its online tutorial wont run.

By doing a lot of try and error and with some help from other posts, I could get the desired output. It took me too much time to gather all this information and thought it may come handy to others. So I put together a sample web application which creates a PDF document and renders it to the client browser. Here is the code behind for the page: More...

I thought this may save someone a little time:

WHen using BlogEngine.net as your blogging tool, you can format your code using one of the extensions which comes with the tool.

some of the things to remember: More...

While working on a Windows Service project in .net (Visual Studio 2008), a minor problem related to defining custom event logs kept bugging me.

As you already know, to debug your Windows Service you should use InstallUtil tool to install the service in your Windows. For InstallUtil to be able to install your Service, you add an Installer to your project which contains a ServiceProcessInstaller and a ServiceInstaller. So far everything is cool. You set the properties on these components and BAM! you can now easily install your Service. If you look closely at the IinstallUtil messages on your screen you will see that it creates an EventLog source with the same name you specify for the Service Name property of the ServiceInstaller component and assigns that source to a standard Windows event log called Application. More...

I know it's way past due, but i finally decided to spend the time and get this blog software setup on my site.

When I started the MazSoft.com web site (early 1999), my idea was to have a web site to share my thoughts and knowledge. At that time the concept of blogging was not as popular as it is now, and obviously there was no pre-existing software for it, so I started with some simple static HTML files. After I got more involved with creating web application using classic ASP, I converted my site to an ASP web site so I could re-use parts of the UI, and that was it. So, MazSoft.com is still a Classic ASP site for now, until I find the time to move all my previous articles to this new blog.

But before I move old contents to this new system, I may start with some new articles.

In case you need to find those old pages use this link