Tech Blog

Parse CVS Data with LINQ

By: Chris Dunn on Tue Jul 10, 2018 (4 min read)

In the world of BIG DATA we're dealing with more than just JSON, XML and SQL.  A lot of data comes in raw Comma Separated Values (CSV) format.  A number of times in the past I've imported CSV data into SQL server and queried the data that way.  With LINQ, we now possess that same concise query power (somewhat) in our code. It gives us some more options especially if we don't want the weight of a database (or server) for a client application. Also, if you're starting to get involved in machine le ...

Web Scraper Data Tool

By: Chris Dunn on Tue Mar 13, 2018 (3 min read)

A number of years ago I was migrating and merging a series of websites into a Content Management System.  We were attempting to organize a number of mixed technology sites, some hard-coded html, others ASP or PHP, under a single CMS.  Rather than manually translate each page into the new system, I decided to try parsing sites that followed a template pattern and import sections into the properties of the new system pages.  I developed a web scraping tool to extract that data based on a data map ...