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After reading Jon Skeet’s excellent C# in Depth - again (3rd edition - to be published soon) I’ve decide to try and actually read the C# language specification… Being a sensible kind of guy I’ve decided to purchase the annotated version which only cover topics up to .NET 4 – but has priceless comments from several C# gurus. After I’ve read a few pages I was amazed to learn that a few things I knew to be true were completely wrong and so I’ve decided to write a list of new things I’ve learnt while reading this book. What other "secrets" of C# have you learned?
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Learning C/C++ (with some assembly enough for debugging) before jumping on to the managed language bandwagon should have helped with the heap/stack confusion.
Readonly field is also a no brainer; the message of NullReferenceException says "Object reference is not set to an instance of an object.", thus a readonly reference is similar to:
Noob* const p
*doublefacepalm*
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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. For the most part, you never want to accept YAML from the outside world.
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Unfortunately, this anti-pattern is too common. It doesn't hurt until it hurts and when it does hurt, it hurts a lot. If you are developing frameworks do not provide superclasses that framework users must inherit to use your framework. Inheritance is the one of the tightest forms of coupling you can use in OO. As a framework designer, you have many other choices: eventing, listeners, and object composition.
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: If you are developing frameworks do not provide superclasses that framework users must inherit to use your framework
And they wonder why some people find programming difficult.
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Oh, you mean like System.Windows.Forms.Form? Yeah, that's bad.
But what's worse is not being able to derive properly due to broken polymorphism. 
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Researchers have created software that predicts when and where disease outbreaks might occur based on two decades of New York Times articles and other online data. The research comes from Microsoft and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. The system could someday help aid organizations and others be more proactive in tackling disease outbreaks or other problems, says Eric Horvitz, distinguished scientist and codirector at Microsoft Research. “I truly view this as a foreshadowing of what’s to come,” he says. “Eventually this kind of work will start to have an influence on how things go for people.” No doubt the precogs have already seen this.
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There’s a fine line between inducing conversation and creating havoc. In the field of web accessibility (which is very complex and fragile already), it seems that this line has been crossed at least a couple times lately.... Web celebs have created confusion when the answer was already agreed upon by most web accessibility professionals. So, I won’t write about NodeJS and Spring if you other experts stick with your area of expertise. Many times, we should leave accessibility to the experts. Agreed? I guess we still need to ask: who are the experts, and what do they suggest?
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On January 31st, 1997, Final Fantasy VII was released to the Japanese public. This single game both revolutionized and raised the bar of Japanese style console role playing games. It success was so staggering, it placed Squaresoft firmly on top the the the genre, displacing the Dragon Quest series created by the rival Enix company. The story of how this game came to be has a story more expansive than the game itself. An AVALANCHE of information.
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Mozilla is excited to announce that we’ve achieved a major milestone in WebRTC development: WebRTC RTCPeerConnection interoperability between Firefox and Chrome. This effort was made possible because of the close collaboration between the open Web community and engineers from both Mozilla and Google. RTCPeerConnection (also known simply as PeerConnection or PC) interoperability means that developers can now create Firefox WebRTC applications that make direct audio/video calls to Chrome WebRTC applications without having to install a third-party plugin. For those eager to give interop a try, here are instructions and information about “trying this at home”.
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When someone shares their code, the respectful and honorable thing to do is to carefully critique that code. No one's code is above criticism. Criticism is, after all, how we learn. Respectfully criticizing someone's code is one of the highest honors you can pay to the author. Just remember, you respect the person, not the code. The code is fair game. Acknowledge our shared stupidity. Commiserate just how difficult writing good clean code is...
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On the other hand, this would be much less stupid:
public MyClass() {}
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GNU has been producing free software for almost 30 years now, and there's no reason why it should stop.... So, here are some proposals to fellow hackers. Some of them may work out, some of them may not. It is even possible some of them are inapplicable because of U.S. law for non-profits. But I'm sure that they are welcome by the FSF, and that's already a good motivation to write them. Paolo Bonzini shares some thoughts on improving GNU guidelines, project management and more.
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Writing code, which is easy to change is the Holy Grail of programming. Welcome to programming nirvana! But things are much more difficult in reality: source code is difficult to understand, dependencies point in countless directions, coupling is annoying, and you soon feel the heat of programming hell. In this tutorial, we will discuss a few principles, techniques and ideas that will help you write code that is easy to change. SOLID advice for programmers.
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Over the past few years a semi-conscious unease has been steadily growing in my mind: OS X is not getting more reliable and more stable, it is instead developing more and nastier problems that range from interference with getting work done to potential data loss.... The goal here is for Apple to step up to the plate and engage in responsible OS X development; some of these issues are absolutely unacceptable even in a single minor release, but to see them persist for months or years is unforgiveable. No mystical reality distortion field controls my destiny. It's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.
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Apple has always touted it's OS lines as faster, more reliable, and mostly: more secure than an equivalent windows PC (remember the Mac and PC adds with the 'cool' mac and 'Nerdy' PC)
In most cases, they were right.
The problem I see is that they believe that they had these advantages because they were better, quicker, smarter and more good looking than Windows and Microsoft.
My theory is that the Apple OS line had advantages due to:
A far smaller and more industry focused user-base (meaning less targets for viruses, less reason to develop a virus for a Mac)
a Much higher price point for Hardware and Software (when I last looked at buying a mid-range Mac, the same money would buy a bleeding-edge ultra high spec PC bundled with any software you could think of)
Finally they have only a limited range of hardware to support (Apple Macs aren't built out of components by their owner, nor can almost every part of the hardware be changed at any point - Apple didn't need to develop Plug-N-Play, there wasn't anything to plug in and play with)
However, now that Apple is producing Windows 7/8 compatible machines, they are going to inherit all the problems that the rest of the PC industry has been dealing with for years.
They might just find out that PCs aren't better just for looking pretty and being incompatible with most malicious software. 
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Many people don’t realize how many web pages offer access to try out C++ compilers, including many of the latest compilers with burgeoning C++11 language support. So we thought we’d publish a list. Clang, EDG, GCC and even VS2012 in the cloud.
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My “Windows Secrets” co-author Rafael Rivera has spent much of the past week investigating Play To, the streaming media technology available in Windows 7 and Windows 8. And perhaps not surprisingly, this is another example of Microsoft doing the right thing—supporting a standards-based interoperability solution—and then going absolutely nowhere with it. Plays for Sure, except when it doesn't.
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People ask what the next web will be like, but there won’t be a next web. The space-based web we currently have will gradually be replaced by a time-based worldstream. It’s already happening, and it all began with the lifestream.... This lifestream — a heterogeneous, content-searchable, real-time messaging stream — arrived in the form of blog posts and RSS feeds, Twitter and other chatstreams, and Facebook walls and timelines. Its structure represented a shift beyond the “flatland known as the desktop” (where our interfaces ignored the temporal dimension) towards streams, which flow and can therefore serve as a concrete representation of time. David Gelernter says the future of the web is “Bring me what I want.”
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With Office 2013 now officially available, is there anything in it actually worth upgrading for? As was the case with its predecessors, the latest Office upgrade is driven less by actual appetite from consumers for new features as by compatibility factors. Will anything but the latest or at least a recent version run properly on Windows 7 or 8? Will it play nicely with SharePoint? Will users be able to read emailed documents, and create documents that are intelligible to others? The most radical change in Office 2013 is its new developer model.
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As our industry is dragged into yet another round of scapegoating, I am discovering that the conversation about violent video games is rigged against us from the start, and that we collectively need to change the terms of the conversation before we sit down to talk with anyone. Shoot the messenger: target game opponents more accurately, then go for the (rhetorical) kill.
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Actual, real psychology says that violent Video games actually reduce our violent tendencies through the vicarious experience.
Civilised humans are now less violent than we have ever been. Most of us would go into shock simply witnessing real violence happening in front of us.
But we are still living in the same bodies our caveman barbarian ancestors occupied, our bodies and brains are programmed to relieve anger and solve immediate dangers by hitting things.
However this is not the way we do things any more in the civilised world - besides which most of the sources of stress we live with don't have any physical part we can hit.
Thus we release this built up aggression by playing sports, and watching TV, and playing video games.
Take away violent video games and violence in our society will increase.
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Some say we're living in a "post-PC" world, but malware on PCs is still a major problem for home computer users and businesses. The examples are everywhere: In November, we reported that malware was used to steal information about one of Japan's newest rockets and upload it to computers controlled by hackers. Critical systems at two US power plants were recently found infected with malware spread by USB drives. Malware known as "Dexter" stole credit card data from point-of-sale terminals at businesses. And espionage-motivated computer threats are getting more sophisticated and versatile all the time. Think before you click, and never run as root.
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This attack underscores the security problem posed by third party code. In this case, the vulnerable application was probably not coded by Yahoo! team, and not even hosted on Yahoo’s server farm, leaving Yahoo! with the full responsibility for securing the application on one hand, and a very limited capability to actually control the code, on the other hand.
Apart from the SQL injection bit, this reminds me of the way David gained access to the WOPR in WarGames[^] 30 years ago - There was an open line at our division in Sunnyvale. The phone company screwed up.[^].
Soren Madsen
"When you don't know what you're doing it's best to do it quickly" - Jase #DuckDynasty
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