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When working with JSON in Go, it’s common to encounter numeric values represented both as numbers and as strings. This inconsistency can lead to issues during unmarshaling, as Go’s encoding/json package expects a consistent type. Fortunately, Go provides the json.Number type to handle such scenarios gracefully. The Challenge Consider the following JSON snippets: {"value": 123} {"value": "123"} In the first example, value is a number, while in the second, it’s a string....

When developing with Go on a team, it is useful to have a good branching strategy so you can work together as a team and not tromp on each others changes. But how do you use Go modules with a branching strategy? It’s easy to refer to another project (even at a certain version) – but branches seem to offer a bit of a challenge. The official guidance involves using the specific commit hash for the module you want, like this:...

Let’s talk about your development workflow. If you’re still including all of your scripts in your pages using a <script> tag, you’re doing it wrong. A modern front-end workflow includes some kind of dependency management solution, and some kind of bundling / minification process. Prereqs: Package management and Git console npm Even if you don’t use Node.js for your server use npm for managing your client-side dependencies. It really makes adding and removing compenents a breeze!...

Created in 2010, NuGet is a free and open source package manager for the Microsoft development platform. NuGet has become the defacto way of distributing tools and libraries in the Microsoft developer community. If you’re interested in working with NuGet, here are some tips and tricks that will be helpful to you. Creating NuGet packages Creating NuGet packages from scratch can be daunting for a first-timer. nuspec != nupkg First, you need to understand that there is a difference between the types of files that NuGet uses:...

Interested in using a password manager for all your passwords? You should be. Services like OpenId are catching on, but aren’t as widespread as originally hoped. You might visit hundreds of different sites a year that use a login and password. Using the same password for every website and service is a terrible idea: A hacker just needs to compromise one of the services you visit and they’ve got the username/password for all the sites you visit....

I do a lot of development with websites in Visual Studio 2013 nowadays. I’ve discovered that in order to use IISExpress with Windows Authentication, I had to jump through some hoops. You may find yourself banging your head on the wall trying to get IISExpress to work with Windows auth – so here are few tips for you. Update your web.config Make sure your web.config file both enables windows authentication and also denies anonymous authentication....

I’ve had cause to work with NLog a lot lately. In working with it, I have discovered some surprises and tricks that I thought I would share. Log levels matter You should think carefully about your log levels as you start adding logging to your app. Trace should probably be used sparingly, because when you turn on log level ‘Trace’ that means you’re pretty much logging EVERYTHING. Log level Debug or Info might be a better level to start with....

In a previous article, I talked about working with HttpListener. Remember: HttpListener uses http.sys. It’s necessary to tell http.sys that a process & user should be allowed to listen to a certain port before that process starts listening. This is called ‘url reservation’. In Windows Vista and Windows server 2008, the way to do url reservation is with netsh.exe. My development workstation is Windows 7, so I used netsh.exe to get things working locally....

Dear Reader, I learned some important things the hard way this week, so I thought I’d share the fruits of my agony. You must reserve ports when working with HttpListener I’m used to letting IIS handle the details of hosting a web service for me, so I wasn’t familiar with the ins and outs of netsh. If you self host with OWIN, this apparently gets taken care of for you – so you don’t need to worry about it....

Today I discovered an interesting ‘gotchya’ when using HTML5 data attributes with jQuery. jQuery supports getting these data attributes with the jQuery.data() syntax … but beware: it will automatically strip hyphens and camel-case hyphenated attributes. In other words, if you try to use the following HTML: <div data-role="page" data-last-value="43" data-hidden="true" data-options='{"name":"John"}'></div> … the data-last-value attribute automatically becomes lastValue when accessing it in jQuery. This also introduces another behavior you should be aware of....