Notes From My Basement

Via Jeff Attwood's post, in summary (because his posts tend to be very, hmm, thorough):

The primary improvement here is that we're only accepting a whitelist of known good URL characters. Allowing arbitrary random characters in URLs is setting yourself up for XSS exploits, and I can tell you that from personal experience. Don't do it!

We only allow certain characters to "end" the URL. Ending a URL in common punctuation marks like period, exclamation point, semicolon, etc means those characters will be considered end-of-hyperlink characters and not included in the URL.

Parens, if present, are allowed in the URL -- and we absorb the leading paren, if it is there, too.

The regular expression is:

\(?\bhttp://[-A-Za-z0-9+&@#/%?=~_()|!:,.;]*[-A-Za-z0-9+&@#/%=~_()|]

Tags: regex, coding

Via a dear friend of mine, this gem was made available for my enjoyment in all coincidence written the day of my birthday, and since being selfish is not in my nature I decided to share it with the five of you (literally).

Tags: funny, coding

I love these as a quick, hands on way (my favorite) to get up to speed with skills and technology you may otherwise miss or take longer to catch up to.

Here is the training kit from the horse’s mouth:

The .NET Framework 3.5 Enhancements Training Kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, demos, and event materials. This content is designed to help you learn how to utilize the .NET 3.5 Enhancement features including: ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, ASP.NET AJAX History, ASP.NET Routing, ADO.NET Data Services, ADO.NET Entity Framework, WCF 3.5 SP1, and the .NET Framework Client Profile.

Download the kit from here.

Tags: .net, c#, training, wcf, wpf, asp.net, free

for my age… and it will be officially the Hexadecimal base to define my age. 

So today, I am 0x26!, yes 26 (hex).

Tags: guillermo

The September 15th issue of InformationWeek (perpetually mistakenly delivered to me for 3 years), features their 20th annual ranking of companies they deem “The Top Innovators In Business Technology”. 

The listing has a regional breakout, and so I thought It would be easy to just go through it and identify & extract all of those companies with headquarters in our state of Wisconsin.  It is in a way a means to show my regional pride.

Here’s the list of companies in alphabetical order, containing the company name, city and the company’s highest ranking IT executive & title:

• Actuant (Butler, WI), Dennis B. Biederman/IT Director
• Acuity, A Mutual Company (Sheboygan, WI), Neal Ruffalo/VP of Enterprise Technology & CIO
• Assurant Health (Milwaukee, WI), Lance Wilson/Sr. VP & CIO
• Fiserv, Inc (Brookfield, WI), Richard K Jones/Executive VP & CIO
• Foley & Lardner LLP (Milwaukee, WI), Douglas D. Caddell/CIO
• KI (Green Bay, WI), Vicki Petit/VP of IS
• Kohl's Corp (Menomonee Falls, WI), Tom Kingsbury/Sr. Executive VP Markerting, Business Development & IT
• Marshfield Clinic (Marshfield, WI), Carl Christensen/CIO
• Metavante Technologies (Milwaukee, WI), Gary A Refinski/Executive VP of Integration and Implementation Services
• Schneider National (Green Bay, WI), Judith Lemke/Executive VP & CIO

Tags: lists, noteworthy

I recently came across Microsoft StyleCop, that analyzes the code, within the IDE for style.  This includes things like naming conventions, formatting and other matters of visual appeal.  It differs from FxCop in that it doesn’t check for use patterns, it simply checks style. 

I’ve been looking at this tool in order to implement it at work, where we have a pretty consistent and adhered to coding standard, who’s style enforcement could be done by a tool and save some people some time.

In any case, I am sure most of you are familiar with it but I deemed it worth noting, writing about and referencing.

The team’s blog is a great resource for help, release announcements, and general information about the tool.

The tool itself is available here in its latest 4.3 release. 

Tags: c#, visual studio, .net, coding, free

Me and my addiction to books, especially FREE books.  Sorry.

Go to the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Learning Portal, click on Special offers (or scroll down a bit), and follow the link.

Via the author's blog post.

Tags: free, books

Tags: funny, videos

I am not one to get into any political discussions, I reserve my opinions and understand it when others passionately get into it and make it their main content.  This however is not the latter, but a very interesting and unbiased way to present content in a visual way.

Below is a wordie of both candidates acceptance speeches at their respective national conventions.  McCain’s on top, Obama’s  the bottom one.

work by Thomas Hawk

Tags: politics

Draft version, PDF delivered, Free.  I don't need to "sell it" to you do I?

DSA Book

Tags: free, books