TOP not only for SELECT

I actually never considered the case that the TOP clause in SQL can be used for other tings than SELECT. But is it really a realistic use-case?

The social circuit breaker

The same way I have applied ideas from agile development to other random situations like moving from one country to another I have come to realize that there is a pattern that I should apply. I call it the social circuit breaker.

Timetravel in C# done right

Testing things where you need to fake time is not hard given the right abstractions. That is why when I read this article I felt really sad. Because while the article describes one way to fake time it does so by breaking three fundamentals which is pretty hard in three lines of relevant code...

Asynchronous enumerations - again

Almost 2 years ago I wrote about this problem with accessing data from Azure and returning it in a LINQ friendly way. Well not long ago the discussion came up again only this time it was in regard to access data in a Cassandra cluster.

Returning 403 or 404 - that is the question

I think it is safe to say that anybody who is serious about security will tell you that security through obscurity is no security. Yet a lot of people think obscuring is a great way to increase security like for example return 404 rather than 403 on REST APIs when the caller does not have rights to retrieve an existing resource.

Enumerating dictionaries

When people work with the Dictionary class in .Net there are two common assumptions that I see used a lot. Worst part is that these assumptions are both wrong.

The ultimate programming language

One of my favorite bloggers had an article last month that resulted in a rather interesting conclusion; that the ultimate programming language is a language without a lot of features most developers take for granted.

Email as password manager?

A lot of people these days rely on some (software) password manager to keep track of all different passwords you need. Obviously there are two risks with this approach.

To await or not to await - that is the question

One question that comes up quite often is if you should always use async/await or not. Sadly enough the answer is not simple because there is a trade-off between performance and ease of understanding exceptions.

Yet another estimation rant

Lately I've been discussing estimation a lot with both colleagues and friends so I guess it is time to go at it again. As I've mentioned several times before; I'm not a believer in estimates. The process of estimating is good in order to understand and break down complex problems but the estimate itself as limited (if any) value in my opinion.