Vidar's musings

In my video course PowerShell 5 Recipes, I used the Dnsimple API as an example of writing PowerShell modules. In the course, I uploaded and…

For the last months, I have been working on my PowerShell 5 recipes video course. It is now finally published! Why? Why make a video course…

During the last few months, I have written several blog posts in my company’s blog about how to secure a site with HTTPS. I started off…

Å bruke kommandolinjen er kjapt. Hvis du ønsker å slå opp i Bokmålsordboka eller Nynorskordboka på nett, kan du nå gjøre det fra Powershell…

I just made Logstash available for installation on Windows through the brilliant command-line installer Scoop. This makes it very easy to…

I just made RabbitMQ available for installation on Windows through the brilliant command-line installer Scoop. This makes it very easy to…

A while back, I wrote about how to somewhat improve flow control in case of null checks. I finally decided to make a tiny library out of…

The Azure compute and storage emulators enable testing and debugging of Azure cloud services on the developer’s local computer. On my…

I am trying to be silly: Posh1337.

This blog has ran on a dedicated WordPress installation hosted by domeneshop.no. A couple of weeks ago, I decided to move my blog to Azure…

The Scheduler is one of the new kids on the block in Azure Land. With Scheduler you can set up triggers for some sort of event in your…

I earlier wrote about Handling null checks efficiently by using extension methods to make our code more terse, not cluttered by null check…

At the QCon Conference in London in 2009, Sir C.A.R. Hoare apologized for inventing the null reference back in 1965 for the Algol W…

On the Norwegian Developer’s Conference 2013 I gave a talk on PowerShell for developers. The video is now freely available: Vidar Kongsli…

Consider the following code: Not too complicated, right. Let’s see what happens when we run it: What’s going on? Well, trying to change the…

(This post is in Norwegian. For a short English summary, scroll to the bottom of the post) Når du installerer Windows 8, er det viktig at du…

Consider the following code: The gotcha here is not to fall into the trap to use a C#-like or Java(Script)-like syntax where parameters are…

If given a relative path, xml.Save will do nothing, giving no error messages or anything.

When Powershell writes to standard out, and there is now redirection in the Powershell script itself, it will assume that it writes to a…

I long grappled with a problem installing applications using chocolatey. Specifically, all installations that required downloading an MSI…

The gotcha here is that the opening token or has to be at the end of the line, and the closing token, or , has to be a the beginning of a…

The other day, I wrote a Powershell script that would manipulate a Windows command prompt file. After some troubleshooting (note to self…

In C# (as well as in Java and C++), you can use the ternary operator (?:) for a shorthand notation for conditionally assigning a value: In…

Note to self: Where Extended ASCII differs from ISO-8859-*, according to Wikipedia: One notable way in which ISO character sets differ from…

Web Transformations is a great feature. When a web application is packaged or published, the file is transformed dependent on which Visual…

In August last year, I blogged about how to get Log4Net log entries written to Azure Table Storage. In this article, I will show how the…

You can use the Windows Identity Foundation SDK to replace the authentication scheme of your ASP.NET web application. Most notably, this is…

Earlier, I blogged about how one can leverage Azure Diagnostics to easily set up Log4Net for your application running in Azure, and how to…

I have earlier blogged about how to use Log4Net on Azure compute. With this solution the log files from the various running instances gets…

Log4Net is a popular logging framework, and if you have an existing application that you wish to move to Azure compute, you probably want to…

During development of an Azure application, I noticed that my disk kept running full. First time it happended, I thought nothing of it and…

If you want to create a new WCF services application with REST support, the WCF REST Templates are brilliant. However, if you have an…

There are quite a lot of examples on the Internet on how to create a shared access signature for Azure storage. However, the examples are…

Just checked in my Azure WebRole solution in to TFS. I immediately encountered two problems. Luckily, it turned out that both where solvable…

My unbridled enthusiasm was suddenly constrained when I during the Azure tutorial suddenly tripped over my first Azure hurdle. When trying…

I artikkelen “Vil ha helsetjenester på nett” hos Teknologirådet heter det i ingressen: Ni av ti nordmenn ønsker å kommunisere med fastlegen…

Yesterday I got an email from Atlassian, the makers of applications such as Confluence and JIRA, that said that their own hosted customer…

My application on Google App Engine recently hit a mail quota limit. Specifically, there is a quota limit on how many recipients the…

In my previous post, I talked about how we could use System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer and System.Runtime.Serialization…

If you want to parse XML in .NET, you have a lot of options to choose from. You can use XmlDocument to parse the XML into a DOM tree, you…

As a follow-up to my previous post ASP.NET 3.5: improving testability with System.Web.Abstractions, I would like to show how the same…

WTF? I am quite sure that replacing ToLower() with ToUpperInvariant() will make my test fail…

The testability of ASP.NET code has long been a challenge; creating unit tests for your ASP.NET code has been difficult. One of the main…

Found this nice page that summarizes how to set cache-related information in ASP.NET: ASP.NET Cache Examples and Overview

I just came across Ken Schaefer’s blog, and I found that he has posted a series of excellent posts concerning various aspects of getting…

It seems to me that collaboration is a hot topic in IT nowadays. With the emergence of social networking, a new breed of online…

According to this New York Times article, researchers at Stanford University vote in favor of starting all over, redesigning the Internet. I…

Found this nice article entitled RFID’s security problem. US authorities have started to use RFID tags in passports and driver’s licenses…

One popular way to dismiss or select a product is by referring to the word ‘enterprise’. ‘No, we cannot use Ruby on Rails because it is not…

Five years ago there was a lot of hype around portal technologies. (You know of which I speak; portlets, JSR-168, WSRP, etc.). In 200…

Hva gjør en teknolog som forvalter SOA-laget? Hvor kommer dette SOA-laget fra? Er de i førstedivisjon? Programvareselgere har klart å få…

21apps.com has written an article about how to use Typemock Isolator in order to unit test SharePoint applications. According to the article…

Reading up on theory about mashups I found an article on Wikipedia that states the following about “oldfashioned” portals’ aggregation style…

No measurement beats WTFs/min!

When trying to introduce unit tests into an existing project, code dependencies is often a problem. During a teeth-grinding session…

One of the things that seem very simple on a Powerpoint presentation, but are not that simple in practice, is having a web user’s identity…

My experience is that Spring.NET configuration files tend to grow very large. As far as I can figure, there are two principal problems that…

One question have troubled me for some time when automating Internet Explorer (actually, I am doing web testing with Watin): how to test for…

When doing web testing using Watin, it is not trivial to be able to do a POST request to the server. However, with the help this article on…

Encapsulation is one of the most important features of object orientation, but often easy to break in practice. One common mistake to make…

When developing an ASP.NET solution for a customer, I run the application locally on my laptop (IIS 5.1, Win XP). For a realistic test…

Jakub, one of the project members on my current project pointed me to this blog entry explaining a threading issue with in .NET: Hashtable…

I was at a presentation about Windows CardSpace a couple of days ago. Beautiful technology it might be, but I cannot help questioning the…

On NDC a couple of days ago, I went to a session where David Chappell talked about Microsoft’s forthcoming “Oslo”. He went to great lengths…

I attended a session with Mary Poppendieck at NDC today where the topic was trashing in projects. I was a very interesting talk. One of the…

Today, I attended Scott Hanselman‘s opening keynote at Norwegian Developers Conference. He went through some of the emerging .NET related…

Not being sexist at all, I found this blog entry to be quite good: How I explained REST to my wife.

I found this very interesting blog entry: 13 reasons for UML’s decent into darkness.

Just moved my blog to a new blog engine, which introduces new functionalities such as comments. A new design is also part of the package.

The DSAPI is a very powerful feature of the Domino server where you can create filters that modifies the Domino web server’s behaviour when…

Earlier, I blogged about running JavaScript tests from Visual Studio 2005 where I automate Internet Explorer to load the HTML tests files…

In my current project, we see an increasing use of JavaScript in our web application. Web 2.0, ya know. Hence, we have a growing need for…

I have started to surf the web 2.0 wave trying to figure out what all the fuzz is about. And after all, I have the Knack, so I wanted to…

Yet another panel at OOPSLA discussed SOA, this one entitled “The Future of SOA: What worked, what didn’t and where is it going from here…

At OOPSLA, SOA was the subject of many panels, one of them being entitled “The Role of Objects in a Service-Obsessed World”. The panel…

I ran my demo at OOPSLA today entitled ‘Security Testing with Selenium’. You may find the presentation slides here.

Twenty-one years have passed since Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.‘ seminal article “No Silver Bullet – essence and accidents of software…

What are the influences of Simula 67 on today’s programming languages? Is Simula 67 the most important language in the history of…

My second day at OOPSLA consisted of two security related workshops. The first one as entitled “Security Patterns and Secure Software…

After arriving in Montreal Saturday evening, on my first day at OOPSLA, I attended the Fifth International Workshop on SOA & Web Services…

For reasons previously unclear to me, I have not really felt comfortable with ADO.NET DataSets. With regards to topics like testability…

Norwegian tabloid Dagbladet revealed yesterday that several commercial and non-commercial sites can be exploited to perform identity theft…

I sometimes wonder how software certification test questions are created. In many occations, the questions seem like they are first and…

Nice video explaining the Wiki concept in plain English. No techie gibberish. 🙂

I just read Scott Granneman’s article on Security Analogies on SecurityFocus.com. He argues that the use of analogies is essential when…

I just finished a first version of the new graphical design on my blog. I tried to make it a little more “web 2.0”-like. Another reason was…

When automating tests, avoiding creating brittle tests are very important. In my experience, this something that can easily happen when…

I found the slides from Josh Bloch’s brilliant OOPSLA’06 keynote “How to Design a Good API and Why it Matters“, which I attended.

Came as a surprise to me. I came to suspect this as I was unsuccessful in connecting with ADSI EDit, while successful using LDP. I got a…

I get my monthly patches from Microsoft via Windows Update. I have configured it to download updates automatically and prompt me before…

I came across this very good article discussing web services security: Security Concepts, Challenges, and Design Considerations for Web…

On my current project (running .NET 2.0), I have been using Selenium to test various security related aspects of the application. (Could…

Creating a versioning scheme for web services is a challenge that I have faced on a few occasions before. My experience is that creating…

Sun is working on a new interesting language to replace Fortran, dubbed Fortress. Now, Sun has decided to open source an interpreter for the…

Yes, it’s a fact that people are not good at coming up with good passwords. Some administrators, security people, and such try to improve…

In his OOPSLA keynote, Martin Rinard, associate professor at MIT, talked about how we should make systems more resistant to errors, rather…

I attended a panel debate at OOPSLA on agile methodologies. A lot of insightful information was given by the panelists (including Alistair…

Today at OOPSLA, I sat in on a panel discussion on aspect-oriented programming. It was about whether aspects are a good thing, when to use…

The most useful talk I have been to thus far at OOPSLA, was Joshua Bloch’s talk about designing APIs. I believe that many of the examples of…

My third day at OOPSLA started off with Dr. Guy Steele‘s (Sun Fellow) keynote entitled “A Growable Language”. It was a very interesting talk…

Today at OOPSLA, I attended a panel discussion on databases and objects, which basically were about object databases vs. relational…

I attended the 4th International Workshop on SOA & Web Services Best Practices workshop at OOPSLA today. The workshop brings together people…

I blogged earlier about using Selenium for security testing. One of the shortcomings that I pointed out, was that session handling (i.e…

The Java keystore is powerful, yet not very user-friendly. While the Java documentation provides an OK reference on keystore commands, there…

I read an interesting article called The non-denial of the non-self on the web today. An interesting article about how to secure databases…

Pragmatic programmer Dave Thomas talks about what he calls Code Kata in his blog. He argues that a programmer needs to practice on a regular…

A project that I worked on some time ago got into some trouble. As the project progressed, some parts of the code “owned” by some of the…

When testing for security, it is important to test that the application under test (AUT) handles unexpected input properly, i.e. does not…

My current project uses an agile project methodology. As such, we use Selenium to create automated acceptance tests for the project…

In my experience, working with XML Schemas involves a number of uncertainties. One of the things that I have wondered about a few times is…

I am currently grappling with the challenge of transferring large binary documents in Web Services in an efficient manner. Finally, some of…

Dynamic languages are gaining popularity these days, Ruby is particularly hot. JavaScript is also a dynamic language, however somewhat more…

JavaScript, as many other popular programming languages, uses a lot of sugar to sweeten the syntax. This causes the code to be quite verbose…

The other day, a colleague of mine and I discussed our test environment. We concluded that neither of us had used it for a while and were…

I am currently working on deploying eTrust SAML Affiliate Agent (Computer Associates) for a customer , and found myself totally baffled by…

Once upon a time there was this platform renowned for its security features. But as the platform became of age, the security features was…

Last few weeks I’ve been back on the horse doing Notes/Domino programming after been working on various J2EE-projects for a couple of years…