String.Format - how do you escape curly braces

Took me a little bit of googling to find this out...

Basically if you want your output to be "{like INPUT_HERE this}" then you need to use:
string.Format("{{like {0} this}}", input);

i.e. you escape the curly braces by doubling them up.

With all this talk about charts...

I've posted lots about charts recently.

After all the talk, I thought I really should add a few examples....

The data in these isn't a real example, but it's representative of the type of things I've been working on








Well I like them anyway :)

If your encryption/decryption works in your test harness but it goes wrong in real life....

Had a bug in one of my (semi)secure data stores today.

Basically I was using the .Net cryptographic patter to encode and decode some strings that I didn't want to be in plain text in this website's database.

I had a unit test in place and the encryption/decryption was fine.

However, in 'real life' testing I saw my text get scrambled - the first few bytes of this text were often corrupted - and it didn't matter whether I used DESCryptoServiceProvider, RC2CryptoServiceProvider, etc

I spent some time looking at my byte to text converters to make sure that it wasn't them... and then I spotted the problem:

I wasn't always correctly initialising the Initialisation Vector (IV) for the encryption/decryption.

This worked fine in the test harnesses - as they always used the same IV and Key for every encrypt/decrypt (because they were in the same process) - but messed up in real use.

Moral of the story - if you are going to use the symmetric cryptographic services then always set both the Key and the IV.