Fingerprint identification and its security implications

Today I decided to talk about security, just because it's one of the subjects I really enjoy. I hope you'll find this informative. In recent days, there's a lot of noise on the interwebs about fingerprint security and how it can be easily compromised. Recent examples can be found here, here and here. It all started when Apple made fingerprint authentication a commodity with the introduction of Touch ID on iPhone 5. Subsequently, other phone manufacturers followed and today there are many high-end devices with a fingerprint scanner. Security researchers expect that by 2019 over 50% of smartphones will have …[read more]

Visual Studio Code: getting insider builds

I use lots of IDEs (VS, Code, Sublime, Atom) when it comes to doing development work. As they say, you should always choose the right tools for the job. Visual Studio Code is one of these tools for me. It's even replace my Notepad++ for simple text editing tasks. Since I choose to live my life on the edge (subject to personal interpretation), I also want to run the latest beta released. VS Code, as with many other Microsoft tools these days, offers an insiders fast track that allows you to get the latest code before it goes to the …[read more]

Delete Git branch locally and remotely

I stumble across this one every so often. And since I have to look it up every time, I may as well document it. Today's post is small and easy. To delete a Git branch after the completion of a feature or bug fix, you can use the following commands. Cause the CLI rules, right, RIGHT? Anyway, back to the task at hand. As you realize, there are 3 different branches that need to be deleted in Git: The local <branch> The remote origin/<branch>. The local remote-tracking branch origin/<branch> that tracks the …[read more]

How to update your Git credentials on Windows

Git is awesome and I love it. Plain and simple. It works. Yet, there are occasions when things within Git break. And then you have to go googlebing for the solution. I'm just back from a 2-week holiday and, as expected, my Windows credentials had expired so I changed them. Then I tried to do a git pull and I got this nice error message: $ git pull fatal: Authentication failed for `repo url/` Apparently, updating my domain credentials also broke my Git credentials. At first, I thought there was an issue with my credential.helper. So I unset it and …[read more]

My summer holiday reading list

In two days, I'm off on holiday to the beautiful island of Zante, Greece. With 2 weeks of relaxation ahead of me, I wanted to make the best of it and read as much as possible. With 2 young kids this is a bigger challenge than it sounds, but I plan on using my time wisely. In addition, since I do a lot of technical reading throughout the year, want to go for something more lightweight and easy to read. Thus, I decided to avoid technical-heavy books. Amazon is great at suggesting books, but this time I chose to turn …[read more]

Unable to login to Azure Mobile Apps - API Service (formerly know as Azure Mobile Service)

TL;DR Jump to the end of the post for the quick solution I'm currently working on a new mobile application which has a lot of integration with Azure Mobile Apps service which is part of the Apps service offering on Microsoft's cloud platform. I have been creating a few API endpoints that will be used by the application to store user data and it's been great fun writing all the code and unit tests around it. Azure Mobile Apps use ASP.NET WebAPI at the core with a few nice wrappers to make the integration as simple as possible. …[read more]

TechMeetup Edinburgh - Getting Started with Microsoft Azure Development

Yesterday I had a great time talking to the TechMeetup user group in Edinburgh. The event was hosted by SkyScanner in their fanky and cool-looking offices and we had a very interesting and enthusiastic audience. The format was slightly different to what I'm used to when speaking to user groups and I will explain now. Firstly, the meetup opened with introductions, something that you don't usually see in larger user groups. Everyone in the room got a chance to introduce themselves and speak briefly about what they do and what they're looking to get out of the session. For me, …[read more]

The specified type member 'Date' is not supported in LINQ to Entities Exception - Entity Framework

EntityFramework is great when it works. You almost don't know it's there, doing its magic in the background while you focus on building your application around your models. However, when it breaks or doesn't work in the way you expect it, you're in for a ride. This morning I spent a bit of time trying to figure out why I was getting the following error on a seemingly straightforward query: The specified type member 'Date' is not supported in LINQ to Entities Exception So, why is this failing? The answer to the question is simple: "LINQ to Entities cannot …[read more]