How to make Windows less suck for developers

As part of my objective to up my skills, I decided to check out all the hypes with Ruby on Rails. But... I'm running Windows and if you're not writing anything other than .Net languages, running Windows seems fine. For other thing it sucks a bit…

Playing nicely with PagodaBox

Recently, I get a chance working with Pagodabox while helping a friend with a client project. If you do not know about Pagodabox, you can go to their website to checkout. In short it is a cloud solution to deployment of web application. One of the nice feature of Pagodabox…

AES 256-bit encryption/decryption

This time around, I had a little project with a friend which involved cryptography. So we decided to implement an AES-256 encryption/decryption. That is way above top secret (lol). I googled around looking for information and reading more on cryptography and found this http://www.chapleau.info/blog/2011/…

Understanding async against callback

While learning the new asynchrony feature in C# 5.0, I was experimenting the difference between the previous method of achieving asynchrony using callback against the latest feature provided by C# by utilizing the async and await keyword. So what's the difference? This question raised againt when I…

Google Code Jam Practice

I was playing around with Google Code Jam practice question and was thinking of a smarter way to solve this question. The particular challenge I'm doing is Hedgemony [https://code.google.com/codejam/contest/2334486/dashboard#s=p0] problem. I ended up solving it with two solutions and…

Deserializing Json list of objects

I am currently working to finish up Pocket Api [http://getpocket.com/developer] wrapper for C#/.Net. In turned out that the Api returned list of articles/items in Json and the list is not in array form. It is actually a list of object. We will see how we…

WP8 Uri association with Caliburn.Micro

Windows Phone 8 has this new feature of opening an app (in this case my own app) by assigning Uri. It is useful when you are doing Oauth and need to supply the redirection uri. If you are using this new feature, then your app can be automatically opened after…

ETag in HTTP Headers

One of the thing that I learned while making my app is how to optimize call to the webservice returning XML (RSS feed and the like). There is one cool feature called ETag [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_ETag]. Sometimes you need to know whether the RSS feed has…