Sasha Sydoruk

Get out your party balloons and funny hats because we’re there, baby. Yes, sire, Rails 1.2 is finally available in all it’s glory. It took a little longer than we initially anticipated to get everything lined up (and even then we had a tiny snag that bumped us straight from 1.2.0 to 1.2.1 before this announcement even had time to be written).

Rails 1.2: REST admiration, HTTP lovefest, and UTF-8 celebrations

For designers who find web standards as easy to grasp as a buttered eel, Craig Cook shows how to stop the hurting and turn on the understanding. Learn how web standards work, and why they are more than simply an alternative means of producing a visual design.

How to Grok Web Standards

SapphireSteel Software today formally announced Ruby In Steel Developer – the only professional Ruby programming environment for Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2005.

Ruby In Steel Developer provides a full suite of editing and debugging tools for Ruby and Ruby On Rails (‘Rails’) developers. Product highlights include:

Editing
 Ruby and Rails (RHTML) code coloring
 Ruby and Rails code folding/collapsing
 Smart Indenting and code formatting
 Ruby auto-expand snippets

Debugging
 Ultra-fast integrated debugger
 Step-Into/Step-Over/Step-Out tracing
 ‘Drill-down’ watch variables
 Interactive ‘run and debug’ console

IntelliSense
 Accurate (by class and scope) member completion
 Parameter completion tooltips
 Class and method documentation in tooltips
 Code navigation drop-down combos over the editor

Ruby On Rails
 Import Existing Ruby On Rails Projects
 Rails Toolbar and script-runner dialogs
 RHTML / HTML switchable editor
 One-click Rails Debugger

A complete feature list can be found on the SapphireSteel web site:
Feature List

So, just as I was about to complain about how Scott Hanselman got me hooked on his I-can-stop-listening-to-this-podcast-any-time-I-want-I-just-don’t-want-to-right-now aka Hanselminutes and then left for his vacation and left me high and dry, desperately craving the sweet embrace of the new Hanselminutes, I noticed the new entry on my RSS reader in uTorrent.

There is no way – I thought to myself. He just came back from Africa. He did have enough time to come up with a new podcast. Must be something not very good…

But good it was. In fact, it was awesome. In his new podcast “Language Extensibility”, Scott talks about the future of IronPython and ASP.NET. This subject interested for quite a long time now. My interest was initially sparked by this white paper and this blog post. I tried to look for more information but came up with nothing.

Before you start with the “Language Extensibility”, I would strongly recommend listening to “Dynamic vs Compiled Languages” first, because it provides a lot of useful information that feeds nicely into the following podcast.

Once again, Scott proved that he knows his stuff and if you want to know what is happening in .Net world, his podcast is the podcast to listen to.

Thank you Scott!

This is just great. You can now hack websites with XSS in PDF files. Adobe Reader will executed any JavaScript passed to it through a query string. Here is a working example:

http://www.example.com/document.pdf#whatever_name_you_want=javascript:alert(document.cookie);

If you replace www.example.com and document.pdf with valid samples and click on the link, the browser will pop up, load the specified file from the specified site and show you your cookies for that site.

Adobe Reader v8.0 is not affected. Also, this does not work on some Win XP SP2 + IE 7.0 systems.

Found via Alek Levin.

Just to vent some of my frustration. Infragistics is a real piece of crap. If you even think about using it for your web project please stop right now. Get yourself Telerik controls and meet your deadlines, go home happy and proud of your work, kiss your wife and hug your kids.

But, if you enjoy debugging weird errors in somebody else’s code, horrible documentation, emailing to a non-existent support and reading support forums devoid of any helpful answers, go ahead and get Infragistics. And you know, while you are at it, sign up for an AOL account as well.

Just to make sure my message is clear – I hate Infragistics with passion. Infragistics is the Visual Source Safe of web controls for asp.net.

UPDATE:

Downgraded the ranting level to YELLOW.