Brandon: Boise Code Camp!

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I'm at the Boise Code Camp right now.

Its been fairly interesting already. Not too bad.

I'm such a geek ;)

Battery: on my laptop needs charged.


Tags (beta): code, camp, boise, geek

Comments (1)

Brandon: Obfuscation

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I hate obfusaction.

What I am speaking of, of course, is having to obfuscate compiled .NET code so that someone cannot simply reverse engineer it using reflection or some such nonsense.

At work we use a package called Xenocode Postbuild 2007. It is quite improved from the 2006 version, but it still has some annoying issues.

For example:
.NET 2.0 has a XMLSerializer class built in. What this does is take data out of an object and represents it as XML. It makes saving the contents and state of an object quite easy. However, to do this, it (the .NET runtime) creates a new assembly (basically a .NET dll) on the fly. Now, when you obfuscate a program, it takes the variable names and makes them full of random characters, so something like "Name" would end up being "x9038242ndo3412f". Thats all fine and good, but it ends up confusing the generated XMLSerializer assembly sometimes.

And don't get me started on the mess it makes of trying to use reflection. You might as well not even try to protect your code if you are going to use reflection on it.
(Reflection is a way of dynamically loading .NET assemblies at runtime. Think of plugins, thats sort of the idea, but its much more complex than that).

Anyway, code that works fine in a development environment may not work at all if it is obfuscated.

But, how else can you protect your code.



Code: monkey need caffene
Post: is far too nerdy for most.


Tags (beta): code, .net, obfuscation, rant, xml

Comments (1)

Brandon: Site News and such

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Ok, so I *think* I have fixed all the issues with the ajax comments system. I've learned a lot about how you dynamically add and remove objects from a page without reloading it.

You should be able to make new comments and edit them in place without any issues.

Also, I think that I have fixed the problems with using BBCode and punctuation. so things like I'm and you're and stuff should look right now as well as

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Please let me know of any outstanding issues, or new features you would like me to add.

Tired: I need more sleep


Tags (beta): bugs, code, ajax

Comments (3)

Brandon: WTF is with the Windows Installer

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So, why does the Setup project creator in Visual Studio 2005 basically suck, and nobody can seem to write a decent tutorial on WiX so it doesn't seem incredibly complicated. Not to mention that writing custom actions in managed code is apparently a no-no. That makes doing custom actions rather difficult when the built in ones are rather lacking, IMO.

Sure I can use managed code to write custom actions when creating a Setup project in Visual Studio 2005, but the UI is quite limited, plus the progress bar is just random in how it goes, and I can't put more detailed information on the UI.

Anyways, I'm just ranting.





Tags (beta): code, wix, windows installer

Comments (2)