Category: programming

The basics of javascript were designed in 10 days.  No wonder it’s so crazy.  Truthy, falsey, optional semicolons that start wars, etc.

 

Microsoft just announced the free Visual Studio Dev Essentials program:
Things that caught my eye:
• Pluralsight training video site  (6-month subscription)—(Available through December 31, 2015 or while supplies last)
• Azure credit  ($25/month for 12 months—coming soon)

Html.Encode in .NET 3.5 (used to encode special characters to help stop SQL injection attacks) worked on all the special characters except a single quote.  So if you called Html.Encode (“O’Connor”), it would not encode the single quote.  They fixed this in .NET 4.0 when it started properly encoding to '

Today Microsoft announced Visual Studio Community edition.  It’s basically Visual Studio Professional free for teams of 5 or less.  Good opportunity to learn the Microsoft stack if you were ever interested…but it’s also a great javascript/html editor.

I like how in all of these modern APIs, they’re finally realizing that the first thing a developer looks for is an example.  It’s often right there on the front page.  They don’t want to read through a page of crufty descriptions of all possible uses when an example explains it clearly.

For a corporate web application, I was looking into using an open source DLL that was under the Affero General Public License.  Initially, I thought it’d be free because it was open source.  In this case, it turned out it’s only free for commercial use if you publish your own source code.  Otherwise, you have to pay for a commercial license.  This might be ok in the right situation, but I learned from this not to just assume that open source libraries are free in all cases.  Check those licenses carefully before you do anything!

I recently used a Tuple, which is a newish .NET compound key structure. Need to look up something in a data set using 4 keys? You can use a Dictionary with a Tuple key. What if you want to be able to return more than one row for each key? Use a Lookup with a Tuple key.