Them’s fight’n woyds!

Expensify‘s CEO on “Why we don’t hire .NET programmers”:

Programming with .NET is like cooking in a McDonalds kitchen.  It is full of amazing tools that automate absolutely everything.  Just press the right button and follow the beeping lights, and you can churn out flawless 1.6 oz burgers faster than anybody else on the planet.

So what’s the moral of this whole story?  Two things:

  1. If you ever want to work in a startup, avoid .NET.  It does you no favors.
  2. If you are a startup looking to hire really excellent people, take notice of .NET on a resume, and ask why it’s there.

I recently knew of Expensify by reading this blog entry by Phil Windley. I can only guess from Mr. Barrett‘s conclusion that Expensify gets alot of resumes from .NET developers. From the employer’s perspective, following the law of averaging, it makes perfect sense. If your software platform is Linux, PHP and Bash, why would you hire a .NET developer? Rather, underlying the above two points is an implicit advice to startup employers—don’t use .NET technologies—which, I daresay, is ill-conceived. But hey, I’m not a CEO of a company. Not yet anyway. ;-)

In the end, probably nothing more than simply a publicity stunt.

What to do when CryptAcquireContext() fails

I’m using CryptoAPI to do encryption and encountering an error on Win2008 Terminal Server which enforces Mandatory Profiles. CryptAcquireContext() fails with a message of either “keyset not found” or “The profile for the user is a temporary profile”.

I’ve tried the same test on WinXP using a guest account and got the same thing.

So, what gives?

Well, this blog post (RSACryptoServiceProvider fails when used with mandatory profiles) way back in 2007 by @alejacma explains:

CryptAcquireContext will fail with NTE_TEMPORARY_PROFILE error when called from a mandatory profile.

Mandatory profiles are read-only user profiles. Since changes to the mandatory profile cannot be saved, PKI design doesn't allow this operation, and CryptAcquireContext prevents this scenario by failing.

The moral of this story is: RSA sucks, and I am now Rijndael’s new biggest fan.

By the way, troubleshooting this problem had given me the chance to learn a few more WinDbg commands:

.sympath srv*http://msdl.microsoft.com/downloads/symbols
.sympath+ c:\localsymbols
.reload –f
bm /a advapi32!CryptAcquireContext*