Like most side projects that devour hours of time and end up being entirely useless, this one started with a simple question:

Can recessions be predicted by increased interest in news stories about recessions?

The background behind this question -- and you'll have to forgive my complete ignorance of basically the entire field of economics -- is that recessions are a feature of capitalist economies. From what little I've read (and understood); during a boom, businesses scale up their operations to produce more and more "stuff". At a certain point the amount of "stuff" exceeds the demand for "stuff" and businesses and sectors are left holding a load of plant/equipment/employees they no longer need.

One of the challenges for generating accurate character sizes in a PDF document I encountered while building PdfPig was working out the bounding box for a cubic Bezier curve.

A cubic Bezier curve is defined by 4 points; the start, end and 2 control points.

We can number the points for use in the formulae in this post:

• Start: P0
• Control 1: P1
• Control 2: P2
• End: P3

This gives the formula for the Bezier curve:

I wanted a platform independent way to open and create PNG images in C#. BigGustave is a new library which provides a .NET Standard 2.0 compatible way of opening and creating PNG images.

To open a png image you can pass either the bytes or the stream of the image to Png.Open and then retrieve the values for pixels at any location in the image:

Png png = Png.Open(File.ReadAllBytes(@"C:\pictures\example.png"));
Pixel first = png.GetPixel(0, 0);
Console.WriteLine($"R: {first.R}, G: {first.G}, B: {first.B}");

To create a .png image in C# use the PngBuilder to define pixel values before saving to an output stream:

var builder = PngBuilder.Create(2, 2, false);

var red = new Pixel(255, 0, 0);

builder.SetPixel(red, 0, 0);
builder.SetPixel(red, 1, 1);

using (var memory = new MemoryStream())
{
    builder.Save(memory);

    return memory.ToArray();
}

BigGustave is completely open source and is available on NuGet now so if you need very basic PNG manipulation tools for platform independent .NET code why not check it out?