jacobslusser.com

One of my more recent hobbies is reversing. I’ve been brushing up on some reversing books I have and my knowledge of x86 assembler. However, since .NET is my platform of choice my interest in reversing has given me the desire to know Common Intermediate Language (CIL; sometimes called MSIL, or just IL). I’ve never had to really worry about what goes on down there before, but if you’re going to learn to reverse .NET apps, you’re going to need to know IL. Sure we’ve all used Reflector (I personally can’t live without it) but to really reverse a .NET application requires a working knowledge of IL.

(more…)

I can’t describe how excited I was when I learned of a new theme/skin for Windows XP. In the several years that I’ve been running XP (I haven’t upgraded to Vista yet), Microsoft has released virtually no additional XP themes. Sure there are other programs like StyleXP and WindowBlinds but I’ve not had very good experiences with these programs. Both rely on hacks to change the appearance of the UI. In addition, I’ve found that most of the user-created themes are not very good, have bugs in them, or worse, make it too difficult to do everyday tasks. What I really wanted was an “official”, digitally signed, and professionally created theme with Microsoft’s stamp of approval.

(more…)

I’m not one to post information about my personal life, but I guess if there ever was an exception to the rule, new babies might be it. Creation of life still counts for something. So here he is, my son Clark. He was born May 12th, 2007 (the day before Mother’s Day) and was 8 pounds, 6 ounces, and 20 inches long. Don’t be shocked about the size, that’s quite normal in my family.

Mother and baby are doing great.

I primarily consider myself a User Interface guy. I certainly know my way around the other established tiers of a well architected program (i.e. - data access, logic, etc…), but I most enjoy working on the UI. I think I enjoy working on the UI because I feel that is where the tire hits the road, so to speak. It’s where my user interacts with the software I’ve written. Without a good interface, the user will not be able to take full advantage of the potential of the software (or garner all the compliments ).

Over the years this has made me keenly aware of flaws in interfaces that I come across. It’s much easier to look at an interface and recognize when it’s bad, because, ideally one will never take notice of a good UI. A good UI will allow you to accomplish the task at hand with little thought of how it needs to be accomplished.

(more…)

With the rollout of VS2005 and .NET 2.0 we got a couple new options for getting values out of config files. The most prominent of these is the strongly-typed Settings class generated when you use the VS2005 Settings designer. However, this option is not always available if you have lots of legacy code that uses keys/values in the appSettings section of the config or you’re using a .NET 2.0 Web Site which doesn’t support the VS2005 Settings designer out-of-the box. BTW, how did Microsoft overlook that?

As an ASP.NET developer I’ve seen many different approaches to getting appSettings out of the config file and have yet to find a better technique than this static method:

(more…)

I think this blog is more for me than anyone else. In fact, in my opinion, the majority of blogs are pretty lame. I don’t think I really expect anyone to read or care about the items I chronicle here. Why should you? Rather, I have thoughts that bounce around in my head and need to get them out before they are lost forever. If anything, this will hopefully help me remember things that I would ordinarily forget.

(more…)