One of my least favourite things about the .NET Framework is that there are plenty of places where it expects you use magic strings . These make maintaining your application harder as refactoring through Visual Studio will not pick up these references, which then get left behind with their original value. This blog post is …
Failing to handle null reference’s is one of the most common bugs in an application, this happens when a developer assumes that the a value will always contain an object even though it could be null. One of the nasty things about checking for nulls is that if you’re looking to retrieve a value from …
Get deep nested values without worrying about null Read More »
I’m currently working on an XML File Explorer application, which I intend on highlighting XML files which do not conform to an XSD schema, as part of this I have created a class for containing the details of performing XSD validation against an XML document, which I thought I would share with you (although the …
It’s becoming more and more common for websites to provide the capability of having two factor authentication as part of you login process. Google, GitHub, Hotmail and Dropbox just to name a few of the organisations that have embraced two factor authentication and provided it as an optional security measure. In this article I will …
The Internet is full of bots. There’s no denying it, bots have been created to perform tasks on the Internet for many purposes, a good example is Ticketmaster, who have calculated that approximately 60% of all bookings are made by bots (src nyt). One of the most common practices for fighting back against bots is …
If you’re developing a website where there should only be a couple of publicly accessible pages in ASP.NET MVC, then at first you may try to go through all your controllers decorating them with the AuthorizeAttribute. Although you will still want to allow anonymous users access to the login page otherwise anonymous users can never …
What is Google Now Google Now is an app that Google has had available for a couple months now, while there have been a lot of reviews out quickly about the list of features that are available I’ve left it for a bit to be able to try it out and use it properly for …
Recently my old laptop started making some rather worrying noises like a chainsaw, now admittedly it was just the fan needing replacing but due to age I decided to retire the old gal. Before a recent trip abroad I spent some time in the terminal waiting for my flight during which I decided to have …
When this is posted I shall be travelling around Europe (I’ve set up delayed publish), while I’m away I will be getting my fix of the Internet through public wireless networks and networks in hostels. As any security conscious person will know public wireless networks are dangerous territory where unless your connections are secured it …
I admit it I go to Starbucks for coffee occasionally, I know I am a terrible person and I’m going to hell but it’s in my building and just so convenient when I am getting into work at 07:30 or something. On a more serious note, one of the things that I like about Starbucks …
