December 2010 Blog Posts
I was trying to get a web application we’re building using a commercial CMS system up and running on my localhost today. I checked the ASP.NET source code out of our source control repository, and configured my local IIS instance to host the site. The site started up successfully, but I noticed it wasn’t loading any of the CSS files. After viewing the page source, the URL’s to the CSS files looked correct, but when I attempted to browse them I received the dreaded 401.3: I poured over the file system security of that local...
I’m not a security expert. I’m not a hacker. I’m just a guy that spends a crazy amount of time online . Maybe the story I’m about to tell is a well known thing… maybe it’s not. All I know is I’m convinced it happened to me last year, and I see it frequently happening to people I know. This is good general advice for everyone. So I’m going to lay it out here for everyone I know to read. If you were sent a link to this post by me, then you’re one of the people I’m worried about…...
Over the last several months, there’s been a lot of rumblings in the community about HTML5 and the future of browser plugin technologies like Silverlight and Flash. I follow Silverlight pretty closely, so I hear most of this talk in terms of the future of Silverlight. As the HTML5 spec has been maturing and browser vendor implementations arrive, you’ve heard a lot of people start to sing it’s praises. There is no doubt that HTML5 is going to be huge. What we’ve been able to accomplish with HTML + CSS + JavaScript in the last 10 years is jaw dropping...
I’ve found the Path.Combine() function cannot be fully trusted and can cause some sneaky bugs in your systems. I’ll use SnippetCompiler to demo the scenario I’m talking about. If the right term is prefixed with a slash, the right term is dropped. I’m sure it behaves this way for some good reason, but I don’t know what it is. I always write a utility method to wrap and check the strings prior to calling Combine.
I spent a great deal of time last week wrestling with the .NET System.IO.Path API. I frequently struggle to remember what some of these methods do. Here’s a cryptic cheatsheet for future reference. public void Test()
{
string[] strings = new string[] { @"\", @".", @"C:\Temp", @"C:\Temp\foo\bar.txt", @"C:\Temp\foo.txt", @"\foo\bar.txt", @"\foo\bar\baz.txt", @"\foo\bar\", @"foo\bar\", @"\\\\\\" };
DoGetDirectory(strings);
...