a great book title

Just Rambling

I love this book title and description!

***Hardware Hacking: Have Fun While Voiding Your Warranty

Publisher: Syngress

ISBN: 1932266836

“Hardware Hacking” is for people who dream of running Linux on an Xbox and opening a garage door with a PDA. To successfully hack consumer and SOHO ….

VB.NET Whidbey – Debugger wants your class constructor!

dotNET

This is probably old news to many who have been playing with VB.NET Whidbey for a while…

I noticed that when debugging, if I didn’t have have NEW in a custom class, the debugger stops on code that instantiates that class, givint a little popup message “There is no source code for the current location.” You can hit okay and then just continue and all  is fine. This is not affected by Option Explicit or Option Strict settings.

Probably something that has been duly noted by now. I wish I had time to do this stuff this summer when it would have been useful for the VB team.

More on ASP.NET paths

dotNET

a few days ago I posted a some code  that (if you trust me, if you really really trust me…) you can drop into your asp.net application folders to get a quick look at the various paths returned by server.mappath or directory class and stop the nonsense with the guesswork!

Rick Strahl just posted a nice examination of ASP.NET paths, so I wanted to put them both together in one post. (ummm – that’s the one you are reading at the moment…)

Can we take the VB syntax for generics one step further??

dotNET

Duncan Mackenzie posted a little code sample that shows the sweet syntax of

For Each cust as Customer in Customers
 …
Next

which I so very much prefer over

Dim cust as Customer
for each cust in Customers
…
next

Simple, minor, but just a nice difference. I always hated that extraneous line of code. And hated it more when we moved to vb.net and could just declare a variable and give it a value all in one line.

However! …she said with a grin.

Why stop there?

Why do I even have to (re-)define what the objects in Customers are?

Why can’t I just write

for each whateverthehecktheobjectsareinmycollection in Customers
 …
next

and have .net look at that and say “well d’uh, I know what whateverthehecktheobjectsareinmycollection is going to be because Customers is filled with Customer objects, so I will just implicitly cast the whateverthehecktheobjectsareinmycollection to a Customer.

?

Just an idea… maybe it’s already there and I haven’t discovered it yet…

Or how about if I have a generic collection of generic objects?? Oh dear, it looks like I won’t be going to bed early tonight after all… Damn!

Think Security is boring?

dotNET

Do you, Mr/Ms Developer, think Security is boring? Well after seeing most of the content for the DevDays web track – my answer to that is : TOUGH SHIT!

DevDays is doing a big job of trying to make this stuff accessible and palatable because it is THAT important that the secure development practices message and the HOW-TO get pushed out there.

I recognize a lot of my own mistakes in what they are trying to teach you not to do, even though I have really made an effort to do things securely.

I love my track because the first few tracks teach you about all the REASONS you need to write secure code. I get to be the knight in shining armor. Hmmmm – are there female Knights – cause I don’t know if “lady“ works for me! Anyway, I get to save the day with all of the solutions! Thanks Thom for assigning me this session!

Check the cities. See if one is near you and go!

(Darn, if only I was getting a commission! :-))