DotNetOpenAuth

I’ve been honored to work on the MessagePack-CSharp library since at least 2019. I’ve learned a lot from its founder in the process. We shared a lot of values, and his library is hugely successful, with over 150 million downloads from nuget.org. But the library has a lot of history in it now, and runtimes […]

I was sold a lie. Dvorak isn’t superior. Sure, it relies on the same reasoning that keeps the U.S. on the old British measuring system instead of switching to the International System of Units (aka ‘metric’), but that’s a dang good reason. Even if it is unsatisfying. I was a fast qwerty typist. 100 WPM […]

I had a computer with a 1TB NVMe storage device. It wasn’t enough, so I bought a 4TB NVMe device on Amazon Prime Day. I already had an NVMe enclosure and a USB C to USB A converter so I could plug it into my desktop. My goal was to replace the 1TB device with […]

As you work in your local clone of a git repo, you tend to create lots of topic branches. These will often get merged online via pull requests, leaving the topic branches in your local clone to languish forever. This clutters up lists of your local branches everywhere, yet deleting them can be tedious and […]

Azure Pipelines does what it can to prevent accidental logging of secrets. As long as you tell it a particular value is a secret (through marking a variable as a secret, or using a logging command), any time the secret may appear in the logs Azure Pipelines will automatically redact it. But when you actually […]

Azure Pipelines and GitHub Actions offer generous compute time for OSS repos PR and CI builds. But when your repo is private, the economics change dramatically. For Azure Pipelines as of the time of this writing, the prices are $40 USD/month per parallel job, with the first 1800 minutes free. GitHub Actions prices are far […]

In C# programming, magic strings often get a bad reputation. They are seen as a code smell, something to be avoided. The advent of nameof(x) in C# gave us a great alternative to magic strings in many cases, perhaps most famously for argument exceptions, like this: This is a great use for nameof because if […]

Most folks will just buy and hold a cryptocurrency (often referred to as HODLing), waiting for someone else to drive the price up so they can make money. When the price doesn’t go up, they whine and moan that the coin’s creators are crooked cheats. I find it ironic that so many of these same […]

My recently released Nerdbank.Zcash library is available on nuget.org and makes the Zcash cryptocurrency accessible to .NET apps. This library exposes all the APIs necessary to generate seed phrases and derive Zcash accounts from them that support ... [More] the transparent pool and the shielded sapling and orchard pools. You can interact with the blockchain with common […] [Less]

I’ve programmed primarily in C# for over 20 years. Before that, I did a mix of C++ and VB, and a bit of ruby. While I’m a long-time fan of C#, the more I learn about rust, the more it appeals to me. Despite its being a “systems programming” language, I find it has many […]