Court of Lord Zoltan v2

One of the reasons I often say to people that the Microsoft stack is the best to work on is the quality of the documentation.  For most APIs you get decent documentation as to what the method/class does, what kind of parameters to pass and, most crucially, why the operation will throw an exception (and what to do about it).  Across most of the BCL, too, you get lots of helpful exceptions when things go wrong - so you can address any issues and try again. For this post I'm going to be working primarily with a random pair of examples (and it's by no means the best, especially throughout the Windows Store MSDN you'll see stuff like I'm about to show all over the place): From the BCL MSDN: The AesManaged class (from the core BCL) and the documentation for it's CreateEncryptor(byte[], byte[]) method . With those two opened in tabs, let's now open the Windows Store MSDN topics DataProtectionProvider and the DataProtectionProvider.ProtectStreamAsync(IInputStream, ...

As my signature states - I work for JobServe in the UK.  Over the past few months I have been working on a new REST API (using the ASP.Net Web API from pre-beta to RTM) and it is now in official public beta. Now of course, this isn't just so your good selves can start running your own job searches using whatever web-enabled client takes your fancy, but that is one of the cool benefits that has come out of it - and that's why we're calling it a public beta. At the time of writing, you can use the API to run almost any job search that you can on the website.  As you would expect, you can get the results in XML or JSON (also GET requests with search parameters in the query-string are supported as well).  Note that JSONP is not currently supported - but it's slated for a future release. Sounds great, how do I get in? In order to get cracking with this - you need to request an API token .  This is not an automated process but we should be able to get you set up i...

For the web service project I’m working on at the moment I need to be able to treat authorization differently based on the hostname of the URL that requests are made through. To state more clearly – these web services will have a ‘sandbox’ mode in addition to the real mode, and the mode a request will operate under is determined as part of the controller-selection phase early in the Web API request lifecycle.  So, say that my web services will be hosted on services.acme.com; the sandbox will simply be sandbox.services.acme.com. Please note – a discussion of how this is implemented is entirely outside the scope of this article; but I’ll just say that I’ve developed an in-house multi-tenancy layer for both MVC 4 and Web API that allows us to define ‘brands’ and, under those, you can then redefine content, controllers, and even the DI container that is used. These services are going to require caller-level authentication for most operations via SCRAM Authentication (RFC 5802) , and...