How to save / receive jpg image or any binary data in C# Web Api 2

Searched all through the web for a simple way to save / receive binary data or image file using Web Api 2. Solutions range from very complex to complex:

  • using JSON (30% overhead?)
  • BSON (looks nice, but not widely supported – bsonspec.org)
  • Multipart MIME (why multi-part, if we have only one file?)
  • Complex Web Api / MVC controllers encapsulated by enterprise classess, etc.

They all are missing the simplest form — POST binary data, receive binary data… all in one line of code

HttpContext.Current.Request.SaveAs(filename, false);

Yes! That’s it! One line and data from Binary HTTP POST response is saved.

In case you are looking for the simple way to send binary data using the same Web Api, here is a code we are using.

HttpResponseMessage response = new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.OK);
byte[] binaryData = File.ReadAllBytes(@"C:\full\path\to\image\photo.jpg");

if (binaryData == null) throw new FileNotFoundException("something bad happened!");
response.Content = new ByteArrayContent(binaryData);
response.Content.Headers.ContentType = new MediaTypeHeaderValue("image/jpeg");
return response;

//if your are using IHttpActionResult, use return ResponseMessage(response);

And as always, your comments are welcome! Registration is not required.

No more sense to keep all these MSDN disks

I have several active Microsoft MSDN licenses / subscriptions, and the oldest one comes with the biggest MSDN disc collection (more than 1500 CDs and DVDs). The 2015 is the year when the Cloud has won. Disks are going to recycling plant, and I am left with a small virtual .iso collection, and big collection at the MSDN download site. Internet is so fast here in Latvia, that full DVD disk is downloaded faster, than I can make a cup of coffee.

R.I.P. my MSDN collection.

Real men do not test backups, remember?

I always said, real men don’t make backups for their important data :)
I do not want to lose data. I am in IT industry for some time, and I know, that it is not “IF hard drive will fail”** … but “when will it fail”. Here is the story we all can learn from:

About 20 years ago, I worked for a company which I shall not name, which used CVS as its source repository. All of the developers’ home directories were NFS mounted from a central Network Appliance shared storage (Network Appliance was the manufacturer of the NAS device), so everyone worked in and built on that one central storage pool. The CVS repository also lived in that same pool. Surprisingly, this actually worked pretty well, performance-wise.

One of the big advantages touted for this approach was that it meant that there was a single storage system to back up. Backing up the NA device automatically got all of the devs’ machines and a bunch more. Cool… as long as it gets done.

One day, the NA disk crashed. I don’t know if it was a RAID or what, but whatever the case, it was gone. CVS repo gone. Every single one of 50+ developers’ home directories, including their current checkouts of the codebase, gone. Probably 500 person-years of work, gone.

Backups to the rescue! Oops. It turns out that the sysadmin had never tested the backups. His backup script hadn’t had permission to recurse into all of the developers’ home directories, or into the CVS repo, and had simply skipped everything it couldn’t read. 500 person-years of work, really gone.

Almost.

Luckily, we had a major client running an installation of our hardware and software that was an order of magnitude bigger and more complex than any other client. To support this big client, we constantly kept one or two developers on site at their facility on the other side of the country. So those developers could work and debug problems, they had one of our workstations on-site, and of course *that* workstation used local disk. The code on that machine was about a week old, and it was only the tip of the tree, since CVS doesn’t keep a local copy of the history, only a single checked-out working tree.

But although we lost the entire history, including all previous tagged releases (there were snapshots of the releases of course… but they were all on the NA box), at least we had an only slightly outdated version of the current source code. The code was imported into a new CVS repo, and we got back to work.

In case you’re wondering about the hapless sysadmin, no he wasn’t fired. That week. He was given a couple of weeks to get the system back up and running, with good backups. He was called on the carpet and swore on his mother’s grave to the CEO that the backups were working. The next day, my boss deleted a file from his home directory and then asked the sysadmin to recover it from backup. The sysadmin was escorted from the building two minutes after he reported that he was unable to recover the file.

from Slashdot by swillden.

** I am talking not only about HDD, but about media in general. And this also applies to humans, because we humans are making mistakes too, and we lose data every day.