Fail tests instead of crash on Debug.Assert failures
The Debug.Assert(bool) method is a very old API that allows your program to test your assumptions at runtime, but in a way that only impacts performance of debug builds. The…
The case for strong naming .NET assemblies
I’ve observed many .NET open-source projects whose authors either don’t know about strong name signing or are actively opposed to it. In this post, I’ll explain what strong name signing…
Can We Trust LLMs to Write Secure Code? The Hidden Risks Developers Need to Know
DeepSeek is the newest and hottest large language model (LLM) on the block. Many claim it is open source. But what does that really mean, and can we trust it?…
A fresh MessagePack library
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…
How to quickly delete old branches in git
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…
How to safely exfiltrate secrets from Azure Pipelines
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…
How to set up custom Azure Pipelines agents
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…
When string literals are better than nameof(id)
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…
.NET library for Zcash
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…
Rust: A C# developer’s perspective
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…