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, ...

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...

I was going to post this as a question over at SO , but as I got to the end I realised a blog would probably be better (apart from the fact that only five people will read it!). The project I'm working uses runtime objects that are produced with configuration-driven delegates built using Expression trees. I'm doing a big functionality merge at the moment and have reached a class that, because of another that has grown, is now obsolete. So I want to make it 'properly' obsolete (generate compiler errors), go through the static codebase and change all the references. The problem is that the class library is used, through Expressions, by a few other apps so I can't yet get rid of the class completely - I'll perhaps look at farming that job off to somebody else. So I thought I'd just check whether the expression compiler honours the ObsoleteAttribute when marked as an error, and it doesn't: [ TestClass ] public class UnitTest1 {      [ Obsolete ( ...

I’m working on a new RESTful service (I’m using Asp.Net MVC for this) and I’m keen to make it as easy to integrate with as across as many client platforms as possible. I’m going to be using XML exclusively, as I it enables me to produce schemas that our service clients will be able to download and then see the shape of each object that the service operations will expect. I also want to employ XML schema validation on the data coming in from the request.  Doing this will trap most data errors it gets further down the request pipeline, thus protecting my code; but will also ensure that the caller gets nice verbose error messages – XML Schema Validation is pretty explicit on what’s gone wrong! Thus, I’ve wired up an MVC action to produce a schema for the relevant objects using the XsdDataContractExporter class.  I will simply point users at this, alongside documentation for each of the operations; which will include schema type names from that ‘live’ schema. While testing o...