var self = justin();

Masking Console Password in .NET

I pieced this together to mask some console input when a user needed to enter a password. Simple, but not meant to be secure as it still uses string. Based on this stackoverflow answer. private static string GetPassword() { var password = new StringBuilder(16); while (true) { var keyInfo = Console.ReadKey(intercept:

Extensibility In Message Based Systems With NServiceBus

One of my favorite things about message based systems is the natural points of extensibility you can gain. Though, you don't get it for free if you aren't setting yourself up for it. Let's say you work for a company that sells dog shoes online. Thinking about it, that's a

NHDNUG May 2016

This is for the talk I gave at the North Houston .NET User Group in May titled "Going Distributed with NServiceBus". Here are the slides for the NSB Talk. Here's the github repo for the code. Link for github

Software won't be my legacy

I use to think the most important thing I could do as a developer was write code that made a difference; that somehow my code would impact the lives of people in some amazing way. While that's a possibility, it hasn't happened yet and it most likely won't happen in

mdd

Mistake Driven Development - Estimations

Mistake Driven Development, or MDD (because we need another TLA in our lives), is my thought process on how I grow as a human both personally and professionally. The basic idea is that I, as I'm sure others do, learn best after making mistakes. I can be told the right

softskills

Starting a Major Refactoring By Refactoring Myself

A few months ago, I started with Clear Measure and joined a project as the team lead. The project had been started about 2 years earlier, so it was not the elusive greenfield project. This project had changed hands a few times and, for a while, there wasn't anyone who

Click Jacking

TL;DR### Scroll down to the bottom for a github repo and a list of links to see the code in action. It's pretty slick### I get a little too excited, and paranoid, when I think about different types of attacks hackers can utilize against web sites. One of the

Multiple NSB Hosts with RavenDB

At my current client, we've been using a bus in our app since day one. For the most part, the bus was a simple in process, synchronous bus that was developed in house. It served the needs of the application and was easy to use with pratically no setup. We've

Learning to be a Mentor

Before I was a titled developer, I would spend my off hours working on small applications to help me and other departments in my office work more effectively. After year or so of self taught development and running through one C# tutorial, I knew what I was doing. I knew

Dell Technical Debt Presentation

Here's the slide deck I used for the Technical Debt presentation at Dell's "Agile City Limits" conference.

Dell TDD Presentation

Here's the deck I used for the TDD presentation at the Dell Agile Conference. Here's a link to the repo for the code that was used.

Prevent MVC From Serving Mobile Pages

My client brought in a mobile site developer to "mobilize" our project. So to start, he used the built-in features of MVC to switch between mobile ndain desktop. This means he went through and added .mobile. to the files he was making mobile friendly. For example, Index.cshtml

Creating MVC Themes

During my last sprint, one of the stories we committed to was the ability to create "themes" in our site. As a team, we estimated this a relatively high point value. We thought the complexity behind trying to manage this was going to be difficult. Custom Razor View

Houston Techfest Presentations

So, I'm a little late in uploading these, but here are the PDF's of my presentations. CSS Positioning CSS3 JavaScript Libraries

Capturing Parameters with Rhino Mock

The Setup When writing tests, using a mock framework helps with isolating the exact code or functionality you want to test. I've been using RhinoMocks at my current client and like it. However, recently I had a situation where my class under test accepted input, made some modifications to it,

CSS Architecture

I recently watched a great talk by Anthony van der Horn over what he calls bringing SOLID into CSS and JavaScript. In the video, Anthony talks about a great method for creating maintainble CSS. Over the past year, I've been doing a lot more work on the front end and,

Flushing Chrome DNS Cache

TL;DR? Go straight to the bottom for the meat. After moving my blog over to Ghost, I decided to signup for a free CloudFlare account and put the blog behind it. I also moved my domain from the namecheap over to CloudFlare. The propagation took about 20 or so

Using Ghost

I've moved my blog over to the Ghost platform so images and formatting may not be right as I migrate them over. I'm also missing posts, but I'll get that fixed soon.

Creating Storage fast with Azure Blob Storage

Picture this: it's Friday night. The wife has gone back to East Texas to visit some friends and I am all alone in the house with a couple of beers and a lot of free time. This opportunity doesn't present itself very often. So I did any other red blooded

Registering the same implementation twice

Ran into an issue today with Castle Windsor. For my current project, we use Castle Windsor to manage and inject our dependencies. It's a very powerful library that makes dependency injection a freaking breeze. My problem was that I had a specific adapter I wanted to use during testing that

Add Jira Issue ID With PowerShell Git

At my current client, we use Scrum to help us manage our development process. One of my favorite tenants of Scrum is self organizing teams. During our sprint retrospective last week, our team decided to append our git commits with the Jira issue Id so that way Jira can track

Simple Fluent API Example

The Goal - A Fluent API Example Skip to the goods - here's the code on github.com A few weeks ago, a buddy at work and I decided to try writing a fluent API to wrap an open source project. Since neither of us had written one before, we

Content Security Policy Header 101

Let's say you are developing a website. As a security minded individual, you take care in protecting against malicious scripts being injected into your site by evil-doers. You implement security code reviews to find and seal up and content that isn't being html-encoded when rendered. You scrub the input and

Web security headers you should be thinking about - HSTS

Your website really isn't 'secure', though you probably know this. As a developer or product owner, you know the real idea behind web security is to only make it hard enough for an exploitation artist to give up and try another target less secure. It's kinda like running from a