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…
Keeping Zcash sync fast while supporting IVKs
Background into IVKs and internal addresses ZIP-32 describes how to derive accounts and keys for Sapling and Orchard pools. Among these are “internal keys” and “internal addresses”. Internal addresses are…
Get rid of your .designer.cs code-behind for .resx
Committing generated files into source control is a shame. Besides bloating your source control database, it creates more opportunity for merge conflicts. And if the computer generated the file in…
New NuGet packages for Zcash and other cryptocurrencies
I recently applied for a grant from the Zcash Foundation to fund a .NET library that would be able to parse and construct Zcash Unified Addresses. You can learn more…