Over the last week a few stories have moved through the Ruby On Rails and wider development community as one of their shining stars, GitHub was hacked to draw attention to some of the weaknesses that can come about from ROR’s convention-based model binding. The interesting thing about the security hole found at GitHub is that it is not necessarily limited to Ruby On Rails, but often comes from using a framework that supports model binding out of the box without understanding the security limitations up front. It also brings a question to the fore: Is it the role of framework developers to force any security configuration to be the default instead of being explicitly applied?

Over the years I have had the luck to work alongside many really smart, switched on people in the development community. I’ve learnt from them many intermediate and experienced programming skills. Generally when it comes understanding the very basis of how the internet functions using DNS, most of these very same experienced developers haven’t got a clue. I wrote this post to hopefully help pay back some of the awesome karma they  have earned helping me over the years, by teaching them something in return. Lets learn about DNS.

Today marks the release of InTheKnow Google Analytics version 1.8 for Windows Phone 7 – there is a lot of little tweaks that have come about during the creation of this next version, and I'm excited that it is out there and getting great feedback. I spent a large chunk of the downtime in my Christmas break working on InTheKnow, so it is great to finally release the next version. If you haven’t tried the app, and are looking for and easy way to check your website’s Google Analytics on your Windows Phone 7 device, check it out – the trial is free.

After developing Windows Phone 7 applications in my spare time over the last year, I've collected an assortment of tools that make developing apps so much easier than when I first jumped in to Silverlight/Windows Phone 7 development. I only wish I'd know about them all when I first started down the Windows Phone 7 path. Whether you are just starting out or have been developing Windows Phone 7 apps for a while now, there’s something here for everyone.

While working on soon-to-be-released projects there has often been a need to make a staging/testing website publicly accessible for client testing. This is a slippery slope if search engine spiders get in and index your site before the rest of the world is meant to see it (it happens more than you’d like to think) – If it happens to be a website you are building for something that the rest of the world shouldn’t see yet such as a product/service launch, having it leak too early can often make or break you. They have a word that describes this very fear of spiders  – it’s called Arachnophobia.

I’ve been lucky enough to have access to a brand new Surface 2.0 (Samsung SUR40) recently, and wanted to try my hand at developing for the platform. As with most things, the easiest way to learn something is to set yourself up with a little project – I’m going to build a very simple Image “Attractor” to start. This will allow you to move, resize and rotate images and videos on the screen of the device. The Surface development community appears to be a little cloak and dagger, with very little information being shared; something hopefully I can positively contribute towards changing by documenting my journey.

Recently I studied and sat a Microsoft Certification for ASP.Net 4.0 and MVC. As much as some people on the web cause grief to anyone who’s interested in certifications I must state that I actually did learn a lot about other parts of the framework that day-to-day I never touch. The great thing about this experience was that while yes I did learnt about some parts of the ASP.Net framework that I’ll never touch because in the real world you wouldn’t use them, I also found I learnt about a number of other parts of the framework that I didn’t know were there and these new bits of knowledge will help me daily.

My old design lasted a long time. In fact it was the design that I launched this blog with in 2009. I loved it when I launched the site as although it wasn’t the easiest design on your reading eyes it had a certain shock/wow factor. Times change though, so i wanted a fresh look – and i wanted to claim some of that wow factor back – So if you’ve been reading for a while you’ll notice that the change has been quite dramatic. As always though, the Ninjas had to stay.

Jetbrains’ build server software TeamCity is an awesome product to get up and running with continuous integration and deployment, however with its ease of operation it leaves a few nice to have business features aside. One of these is Scheduled backup – and if there is anything that your career has probably taught you to date, it’s that when things break, having a backup is priceless.

So you’ve started sending email from your site/application, your application is doing well and you are now sending more e-mail daily. With this comes the fun of finding out that most of the email you now send ends up stuck in your customers spam filters – how did this happen? You aren’t a Nigerian scammer, and people opted-in to hear from you! At this point signing your mail may be the next step.