Posts

This is a short note on how we can develop scripts for use in the game Space Engineers. Background A friend suggested Space Engineers to me, so I bought it and after some scavenging, mining and dying—I tried out the Programmable Block. To my surprise, it used C#! There was one caveat though: the documentation was outdated and often unusable. I managed to piece together scripts using various posts on the official wiki, its Action List, and API List, plus some Reddit threads. ...

Sometimes we’re presented objects in JSON that do not directly map to a strongly typed object. Here’s a simple example: [ { "type": "Car", "wheels": 4, "trunk": true }, { "type": "Bicycle", "wheels": 2, "persons": 1 } ] The goal is to deserialize these into their respective types, Car and Bicycle, both inheriting from a shared base class Vehicle. JsonConverter JsonConverter allows you to customize how JSON is deserialized. Here’s an implementation that checks the type property and instantiates the appropriate object: ...

A common issue in API client libraries is mismatches between the JSON response and the expected strongly typed objects. I encountered this with TMDbLib and created a validator to catch these mismatches during unit testing. The Settings We can set up a JsonSerializerSettings object to: Treat missing properties as errors. Use a custom ContractResolver to enforce that all expected properties must exist in the JSON. Handle and log deserialization errors without throwing immediately. private static readonly List<ErrorEventArgs> Errors = new List<ErrorEventArgs>(); public static void Main() { JsonSerializerSettings settings = new JsonSerializerSettings { MissingMemberHandling = MissingMemberHandling.Error, ContractResolver = new FailingContractResolver(), Error = Error }; JsonSerializer serializer = JsonSerializer.Create(settings); } private static void Error(object sender, ErrorEventArgs errorEventArgs) { Errors.Add(errorEventArgs); errorEventArgs.ErrorContext.Handled = true; } This configuration makes sure that: ...

This is a short post on using Let’s Encrypt to get TLS certificates for NGINX virtual hosts. The setup assumes: Ubuntu NGINX hosting multiple domains A scheduler (e.g., cron or Rundeck) Let’s Encrypt Let’s Encrypt offers free domain-validated (DV) certificates for HTTPS and other secure services. letsencrypt.org GitHub Initial Setup I run multiple web services on VMs behind a single public IP. My NGINX proxy manages SSL termination and routing using virtual host configs. ...

Previously, I described a Bencoding Library I made to simplify working with the Bencoding structure in .NET. I also published it on Codeplex. However, I discovered a flaw—if a string contains a null-byte (as most .torrent files do), it will fail. So I made a fix, which has been uploaded to Codeplex as changeset 1102. As can be seen in the changeset, a few files have been changed. Ignoring all the test files, the changes were made to: ...