Starting Development of FillLPG v3.x

Overview

With the most recent update to the FillLPG application (v2.0.28.2) rolling out I will be ceasing all development of this version (unless some horrible bug raises it’s ugly head). But fear not loyal LPG users – that doesn’t mean the the app will be going away – far from it.

Technology moves on at pace and over time new skills are acquired and lessons are learned. The ‘problem’ is that to implement all of this it is easier to start over again – taking advantage of the new framework features, applying the new skills and remembering those sometimes painful lessons.

Online Tools of the Month – ASafaWeb.com & SecurityHeaders.io

It has come to my attention that ‘ASafaWeb’ has now reached ‘End of Life’ and is no longer accessible. The site developer, Troy Hunt, has posted on his blog the reasoning behind his decision.

We all know that we should be developing with security in mind right from the point of File > New, ensuring that our ASP.NET web applications are configured correctly. The problem is that there are so many configuration settings that can be tweaked and this can become overwhelming.

I heard Troy Hunt speaking on a podcast a while ago talking about a site he had created which would probe a target URL and report back with anything it found, i.e. information that a hacker could potentially use to hack your site. The site is called, ASafaWeb (it makes sense if you read it out loud) and is essentially a service which can determine ‘remotely detectable’ configuration issues with your website, i.e. what it maybe leaking to the world.

Online Tool(s) of the Month: Bacon Ipsum

I’m sure that many of us have used the Lorem Ipsum site to generate some dummy text to use as a placeholder in a webpage or similar. Just something that looks like real text but with no meaning whatsoever. This is ideal if you want to show something to a client when you don’t have the actual copy text yet or you want to play around with some CSS during development.

The thing is, that standard Lorem Ipsum is a little …. well dry to say the least. Yes it is supposed to be meaningless so why should it matter right? Well, just because that’s the way it’s always been doesn’t mean it can’t change.

Windows 10 (and 7) Built-In MD5 Checksum Calculator

I recently paved my main development workstation after it started misbehaving (slow start up, some applications not opening consistently etc) and am trying to be careful about what I install on it going forward.

Previously I had all manner of applications, games (including Steam) and utilities installed and the chances of finding what was causing the problems was pretty remote. There could of course be multiple culprits.

Today I needed to install MySQL Workbench so I headed off to download it and noticed the MD5 checksum beneath the link. Now, I don’t always check these and maybe this is why my workstation ended up in a bit of a mess. But with a view to keeping this system as clean as I can I decided to make a point going forward of checking these checksums when they are available.

Online Tool of the Month: .NET Fiddle

I frequently find myself spinning up Visual Studio to create a simple Console Application just to hack out a small piece of functionality. In an attempt to not adversely affect the code I’m actually working on or having to step through the application to the required point, I create a simple project to quickly try things out.