YAML’s security risks are in no way limited to Rails or Ruby. YAML documents should be treated as executable code and firewalled accordingly. Deserializing arbitrary types is user-controlled, arbitrary code execution. It’s Not Just Ruby A few weeks ago, I had a need to parse Jasmine’s jasmine.yml in some C# code. I spent some time looking at [...]

The last post contains the description of a sqlMonad. It also happens to contain a silly and obvious (aren’t they all in hindsight) bug. The bug is in implementing the containing CmdSqlBuilder with the IDisposable. While the intent was good (the class wraps resources that should be promptly disposed of – SqlCommand and SqlConnection): there […]

HTML input elements have a placeholder attribute which you can use to show a bit of text to prompt the end user. Although you can make an editable div by using the contenteditable attribute, it will not support the placeholder attribute. I needed to do both, so I ended up reinventing the placeholder attribute for [...]

Phil Trelford recently released Foq, a small F# mocking library (with a very daring name). If most of your code is in F#, this is probably not a big deal for you, because the technique of mocking isn’t very useful in F# (at least in my experience). On the other hand, if your goal is to unit test some C# code in F#, then Foq comes in very handy. So why would you want to write your unit tests in F# in the first place? Let’s start with some plain old C# code, like this:namespace CodeBase { using System; [...]

So this tweet got a lot of attention: potch @potch alias yolo=’git commit -am "DEAL WITH IT" && git push -f origin master’ I laughed at this, not because it implies some kind of reckless disregard for process and community, but because, in 1999,  at a former employer, when our VCS was Microsoft SourceSafe, this was just the way [...]