ExtRSAuth for Custom SSRS Authentication (works w/newest SSRS version 16.0.8)

Fortunately, ExtRSAuth code doesn't require any updates to work with MSSQL SSRS 2022

ExtRSAuth for custom SSRS security 

This assembly, forked from the Microsoft Custom Security Sample extends and improves custom authentication to allow for mechanisms other than user/pwd credential check and to offer a seamless pass-thru of the Login page if something present in the HttpRequest verifies that user is already authenticated. For instance, the user already has an app token from an app that communicates with the report server, and you require the communications with the report server to not involve any intermediate screen or login UI. The user just wants to auth as fast as possible and get to their report, right?

What does ExtRSAuth do to authenticate SSRS user connections?

For direct URL report server access, the default here is to allow local connections, which grants Admin rights for any local requests. If the SSRS request is external, a fallback option accepts an AES 128-bit encrypted querystring from the calling app, and the application, if decryption works, is authenticated and allowed to communicate using a read-only SSRS user; any exception thrown indicates the request is neither from a local connection nor a secure request from the external app.

ExtRSAuth gives SSRS environments the freedom from MS Active Directory that they deserve

To secure the built-in SSRS REST API v2.0 access, you can simply customize the LogonUser() and VerifyPassword() methods in AutneticationExtension.cs and AuthenticationUtilities.cs, respectively:

If you don't perform a security check here, the SSRS REST API will be open to anyone who knows the SSRS admin username

As you can see, this is but one of many approaches we can take with ExtRSAuth in an SSRS-connected application or business environment. Any type and granularity of custom authentication and level of authorization is possible. The only ingredient needed is a .NET developer or developers willing to customize a pretty basic .NET security model.

Real-world applications

This Custom Auth assembly has been tested with (1) several .NET Framework 4.8 and .NET 5, 6, 7 and 8 web and mobile applications, (2) with the SSRS API and all its operations, (3) with the SSRS /ReportServer and the /Reports management web interface as well as (4) Visual Studio 2022 Reporting Services projects (report designers can seamlessly deploy Report Server projects from VS to the Report Server with ExtRSAuth).

After running InitalizeExtRSAuth.ps1, a successful installation will output the above

Demonstration

This YouTube explainer video describes the SSRS external user authentication problem that ExtRSAuth addresses.

Requirements

This plug-in relies on SSRS (2016 or later), and a report server configuration as described in Microsoft's Reporting Services Custom Security Sample

-Replace [your_sym_encr_key] with your symmetric encryption key. Clients can encrypt SSRS URL access querystring with Sonrai.ExtRSAuth.Excryption.Encrypt() or a similar 128-bit AES encryption implementation, or modify Encrypt() with any encryption algorithm and key and block sizes.

Clone it, customize it further (or not) and get started today: https://github.com/sonrai-LLC/ExtRSAuth

Inflation 2022

Funny comic that is less funny in the midst of our high inflation

Inflation is defined as the rate of increase in prices over a given period of time.

To understand inflation we need to understand how money supply is controlled. The best way to understand fiat* currency and the necessary independant role of the Federal Reserve bank and their actions to influence overall money supply is to picture a small town with X amount of money circulating in the town.

The people in the town work hard to create goods and services that did not exist before their work. This new work is how money or value- temporary (services) or permanent (goods)- can literally be "created" without any tangible (silver, gold, etc.) backing. The town can create its own paper to represent the incremental value they create each year.

When an economy's overall value expands (like postive GDP growth rate for nations), the money supply needs to be increased to reflect the increased value available for purchase or lease.

This "town money" is backed by the stuff produced by the townspeople each year, which, aside from a rare bad (crops, etc.) year every few decades, only ever increases. The townspeople have large, growing families** so the annual productivity gains and corresponding increases in the town's money supply can be counted on for generations*** and become part of the town's normal economy.

If all of the sudden, the town had to completely stop producing goods and services, the town's money (which is tied directly to the productivity of the town) will lose its purchasing power as each of the precious few remaining (already-produced) goods and services in the town become more and more scarce and expensive.

Recent inflation readings have been "not good" to put it mildly

The role of the Fed is to print money when positive GDP growth warrants it, to set base interest rates which banks use as the rate to lend money to each other, and to perform what are called "open market operations" where the Fed buys or sells bonds to influence the U.S. economy.

In normal times the Fed can cool an overheating economy by selling bonds and raising the base lending rates (which makes it more expensive to get money and slows spending), and can stimulate a flagging economy by buying bonds with cash which injects money into circulation (as was the case in the 2008 Recession and COVID stimulus grants, checks and other stimulus programs of the past 14 or so years).

In the national and world economies during a so-called "credit event" (ie. overvalued, "funny money" being found out, underlying assets being devalued, causing debts to default), the government can quite literally 'create' money by printing physical dollars and updating corresponding central digital banking ledgers in order to make up for the loss of liquidity in markets- this is the scenario when the Fed needs to add money to the money supply to stimulate the depressed labor market and demand that follows a credit event.

The problem lies in the lack of added value when the Fed prints money or buys debt securities far in excess of the actual value available in the economy. If there is nothing backing the new money, the new money represents a devaluing of currency because the overall money supply has changed, but the value available in the marketplace has not changed. This is why large loans typically need to be "secured" via a physical asset backing the loan- like a dwelling place, valuable land or an expensive vehicle.

A government's central bank can provide unbacked stimulus temporarily, but only temporarily. Eventually, any mismatch between value available and capital available will rebalance.

The problem right now is that we have to remove money from circulation to get inflation under control. And nobody ever wants the pain that is necessary for valuations and corresponding debts to "slow down" and reflect more realistic, tangible, clearly derived and described values. Fed actions to remove money from the money supply and hike basis interest rates means that money will become much more expensive to obtain and prices will remain bid up by the wealthiest spenders, until the world economy has been drained of all this excess money in circulation.

Americans would need an average annual pay raise of around 7-8% at this point simply to keep up with current inflation

Banks and large companies have been overdosing on easy (near-0 percent interest rate) money since 2008. Long-term high inflation is often the result of this kind of "cheap/easy money" monetary policy. When money can be had for the absurdly low rates as it was until very recently, an economy like that of the aforementioned ficticious small town, becomes awash in "too much money, chasing after too few goods and services".

In other words, people on average have a lot of money right now- but they cannot find enough things to spend it on. And because money has been raining on our economy for so long without an equal increase in the corresponding value backing the money, there simply aren't enough goods and services to go around for everyone (ie. meet the demand).

So what happens when once-affordable products and services become scarce like this? Naturally, people who possess the most money in the economy bid prices up as high as they are willing to afford, much like like an auction or eBay, and this raises prices for everyone.

Inflation was responsible for the rout of Reagan vs. Carter; no incumbent will win with 10% inflation (*cough*)

This excess supply of money- the principal cause of our current inflation and coming Recession- is accompanied by the inflationary pressures of China COVID lockdowns and Russia's invasion of Ukraine maligning global supply chains. 

So not only are there less things and services available to purchase, but higher energy prices (sanctions on Russian oil) and slower delivery of supplies and goods to/from China are raising the prices of goods and services even higher than would happen in a "normal/historical" high inflationary period.

There are many takes on our current elevated inflation, but they all boil down to the same conculsion: when a normal balance of money in circulation and the goods and services available for purchase returns, inflation will return to the normal/expected ~2% year over year.

Naked captialism can be ugly and often reduces virtually all human value to metrics. We can do better, be more prudent about assesing risk, while also being more sensible (and equitable) in the distribution of new capital, and must.

This system is all we've got. And nobody wants to keep going on this terrifying plane ride every 8-10 years.

*dollars backed not by tangible precious metals like gold, silver or another scarce commodity resource but rather, backed by the "full faith and credit of the U.S. government". This "full faith and credit", is defined as "trust and reputation". But in regards to dollars and dollar-derived assets, the full faith and credit of the U.S. government includes its ability to collect massive amounts of revenue through taxes, as well as law enforcement and the military who protect assets from theft or seizure. Though this malleable "faith" backing is ambigous (it is a bit like "Goodwill" in business accounting), it's not for nothing.

**this is why a mid-to-high-growth U.S. economy is dependant on increases in nominal birthrates (workforce increases) and immigration (workforce increases). Otherwise there won't be enough people to provide for the demand of the older, retiring workforce and increasing wealth. That currently we've produced a series of American generations who are not as well off as their parents were is clear evidence of this already happening. There is simply demand outstripping supply at every turn.

***if this all seems like a gigantic institutionalized Ponzi scheme, that's because in a way, it is. 😐

                        MORE

                             moremore

                     moremoremoremore

              moremoremoremomoremore

        moremoremoremoremoremoremore

    moremoremoremoremoremoremoremore

  absolutelynothingabsolutelynothingabsolute...

       [uh-oh-we-can't-pay-the-ppl-above-us]

References:

https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/basics/30-inflation.htm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIbNJCSCEjk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4stI2TVPIc

https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Job-Looting-Americas-Savings/dp/0070502307

FP Lite

Less filling?

The Imperative/Object vs. Functional/Declarative paradigm has confused many a beginning developer; even the seasoned developer writing this article. Here I attempt to shed some light.

Why FP? For starters, controlling object hierarchies and keeping track of object state is one of the most difficult challenges of OO design. Additionally, we live in a world of interactions, not models in a fixed state. FP aims to simplify those interactions by reducing the scope of what could possibly go wrong. FP aims to create fixed, 100%-predictable-at-runtime operations vs. the polymorphism and dynamic composition so often seen in OO.

Huh? 😕

Many an FP project was begun as a pure NodeJS project, only to fall back on TypeScript when the need for type-checking and compilation became too obvious to ignore. Why is this?

There seems to be a push and pull between the flexibility that JS offers (the kind of "super dynamism" inherent in the JS prototyping model) vs. the adherence to SOLID principals that typed modeling with pre-compilation provides. When implemented reasonably and practically, FP can greatly simplify a project or at least simplify some of its lambda-izeable code.

The Virtues of FP

• FP's versatility lies in its ability to abbreviate logical statements with lambda calculus, thereby shrinking the solution space and reducing cognitive load for the developer (for enthusiastic students of Calculus theorems, at least 😃)

• Also => x = > x.Happiness

The Virtues of OOP

• Since the release of Smalltalk, has seen widely successful iterations in Java and C#

• Its footprint is vast and its legacy rich (C# 12, .NET 6, Java 18)

• OO development is still the best way humans have to model entities and complex hierarchies; FP does not magically solve or remove the OO state-tracking problem (and actually makes debugging less transparent in many cases), it merely pushes it to another corner of the development space (the function implementations).

When Alan Kay coined the term “Object Oriented Programming” in the 1960s he had a background in biology and was attempting to make computer programs communicate the same way living cells do. Kay’s big idea was to have independent programs (cells) communicate by sending messages to each other. The state of the independent programs would never be shared with the outside world (encapsulation). Said Kay years later after OO had achieved market dominance, "I’m sorry that I long ago coined the term “objects” for this topic because it gets many people to focus on the lesser idea. The big idea is messaging.".

FP simplified: function interaction for behavior vs. object interaction for behavior.

Indeed.

In my experience with it, FP yielded successful programs, but never did I feel that I had intimate knowledge of how things were working outside of the modules I implemented or modified because the code was not inherently readable- to me, that is. When things go wrong, that can be a problem no matter how predictable the (wrong) results are. Certainly, with time and exposure, an OO developer can learn to reason about FP code equally if not more effectively than OO code; a lot of this debate is, at its core, a preference of style and mental model and has no right/wrong answer.

Oftentimes, the best decision is to use a little bit of both OO and FP. With the introduction of lambda statements in C#, .NET became a veritable proving ground for any software developers who knew they could greatly simplify .NET code by flattening all those convoluted and bug-prone foreach and for loops into simple lambda maps. Making certain properties readonly in an OO project will shine a (useful) bright light on just how much your code has spiraled out of control... Know?

For those who claim that FP will magically prevent all bugs, don't even try obfuscating the truth:

You cannot run away from or completely shield yourself from complexity.

Not by declaring, "we are an FP team now, as such all behavior must be function interactions, no mutable state anywhere!". That isn't what FP promises. Implemented practically however, FP is a far superior solution for certain use cases and certain development teams (think- very math-oriented software engineers).

In this instance, the case for FP is clear; in .NET we can use FP within OO via Lamba fn()'s which achieves the simpler code on the right

FP Drawbacks and warnings

• Sometimes not feasible when trying to model application entities and their behaviors
• The same brevity that some developers love in FP can cause readability issues for others
• Often the tests for FP become so large that any gain in brevity is kind of negated

OO Drawbacks and warnings

• Type modeling can lead to an excessive number of types, increasing program size and complexity
• Bugs related to state mutations as a result of function/object side-effects
• More problem space for things to go wrong

More than any of the three issues above, the biggest problem I have with functional programming (in the Node ecosystem at least) is that the entire supply chain is open source and that can lead to neglected, abandoned, sabotaged or broken projects without warning. Love or Hate MS, they make sure (some) bugs are fixed and libraries are maintained.

When a NodeJS package/module that you depend on becomes obsolete or is compromised it forces teams to find an alternative and in the worst cases- entirely rebuild functionality with completely new dependencies.

And related to this, there is a bit too much over-distribution/splintering of source code going on with many (most?) FP Node projects. 20 dependencies in a project, sure. But I've worked on Node projects, that only involved a few functions, which relied on hundreds of NPM package dependencies, many of which were several versions out of date (and couldn't be updated to current, because, well y'know, it's a breaking Node package update! Weeeeee... 😃 (Ç'est la vie nous vivons))

😆

On the flipside, there is something immensely liberating about having not only a completely commercial-free OS like Linux, but also, free IDEs and a worldwide bazaar of NPM packages that fulfill virtually any development requirement that one might ever encounter.

FP style emphasizes ensuring your code has "high signal-to-noise ratio"; when things break, we want to know where it hurts and why, immediately. To paraphrase Kent Beck in his book on unit testing, stack traces of poorly written integration tests and production failures often tell us there is a problem in our application, "but, where oh where?".

If we keep our abstractions tightly wound and limited (and oh boy does FP do that in spades), we will immediately become aware of any issue in our program and know exactly what line or lines of code are responsible.

The "core" of FP is in its ability to do several things at once (parallelism- prime domain for large list processing)

Summary

FP is only going to gain a greater and greater share of the software development world as more and more mathematically inclined developers join the ranks of the IT industry. To be sure: Java and .NET have a lot of great stuff on Maven and Nuget, respectively.

More than anything else, FP is a mindset, or a "mental model" of how program messaging is defined.

You can even collaborate on open-source project in .NET and Java and even C++ in in this day and age of 2022. In fact, MS Documentation and a large portion of the MS code library is now open source.

However, no open-source communities are as active as the ones you will find for FP (Lisp, Go, NodeJS, Haskell, Clojure, F#). Whatever Lisp or Haskell may lack in worldwide development footprint they make up for in developer enthusiasm and evangelizing the FP mindset and how it can lead to more concise and more "easier to test and reason about" software application code.

More than anything else, FP is a mindset, or a "mental model" of how program messaging is defined.

More specifically, it is the mindset of passing around functions-as-arguments-to-other-functions (like recursion, but for everything in the program) instead of object composition, state tracking and function arguments. This not only eliminates the need for state tracking and therefore much of the problem space, but it also opens up the application code to mathematical proof modeling of the application behavior requirements- a huge productivity gain if your development team is a heavily math-oriented bunch.

OO vs. FP

Lisp is short for "list processor". Naturally, programs involving list manipulation and uniform message processing are a very good candidate for FP code which is excellent at doing very specific tasks that involve inputs and outputs and not much else- at huge scale.

Like most software development trends, FP is not new (Lisp was developed at MIT in the late 1950s), but it is experiencing a renaissance thanks to developers rediscovering and extolling its virtues with the larger (and largely OO since 1990s) software development community.

A little bit of FP can go a long way and can clear away complexity in code like so much brushfire. But don't go using it to look for problems in existing OO code that don't exist.

FP Quotes

"You can use OO and FP at different granularity. Use OO modeling to find the right places in your application to put boundaries. Use FP techniques within those boundaries" -OOP vs FP

"OOP is not natural for the human brain, our thought process is centered around “doing” things — go for a walk, talk to a friend, eat pizza. Our brains have evolved to do things, not to organize the world into complex hierarchies of abstract objects." -FP essay

OOP does not have enough constraints in place that would prevent bad programmers from doing too much damage. " -Ilya Suzdalnitzski 

"Encapsulation is the trojan horse of OOP. It is actually a glorified global mutable state" -OO, the trillion dollar disaster

References:

https://betterprogramming.pub/object-oriented-programming-the-trillion-dollar-disaster-92a4b666c7c7

https://dev.to/bhaveshdaswani93/oop-vs-fp-with-javascript-39jf

https://betterprogramming.pub/object-oriented-programming-the-trillion-dollar-disaster-92a4b666c7c7

https://www.lihaoyi.com/post/WhatsFunctionalProgrammingAllAbout.html#the-core-of-functional-programming

What is the Fed?

The Fed

The Federal Reserve, also known as the "Fed", "lender of last resort" and a "bank to other banks" is the central bank of the United States that determines U.S. monetary policy. This means that it controls the national money supply which enables it to control national interest rates. This is used to keep two major indicators in check- unemployment and inflation. The Fed also provides short term loans (a kind of "stimulus") to banks in times of stress.

History

For a long time, people feared central banks had too much power in too few hands. However, in 1907, the Knickerbocker Trust Co. went bankrupt which led to a run on the banks and the banks didn't have sufficient cash reserves to give customers their requested withdrawals. To quell the panic, J.P. Morgan and other private wealthy American individuals made loans to the banks to get past the crisis. It was at this point the need for a central banking authority was made clear to America.

What the Federal Reserve does

The United States developed the Fed as a way to keep the economy healthy and provide reserves when necessary to prevent panic. It is a tool, most notably in its control of the federal funds rate.

The Fed controls this "root" lending rate (or the rate which the Fed lends to banks) and this directly influences the rate at which banks lend to each other and ultimately, the rate trickles down to companies and individuals. This is what is referred to as "the Fed changing the interest rate".

• Higher rates to cool a hot economy lead to more saving, less spending- a contraction of the money supply. Prices fall, lowered inflation.

• Lower rates to stimulate a flagging economy lead to more spending, borrowing and investing- an expansion of the money supply. Prices rise, heightened inflation.

The Fed raises interest rates to check inflation and lowers rates to check stagflation. The Fed is essentially designed to keep money flowing and prevent any major disruptions in our economy. The goal is to keep the U.S. economy healthy.

To match its target, the Fed performs "open market operations" which traditionally is the buying and selling of short-term U.S. government securities. To fight more recent financial straights however, the Fed has resorted to buying and selling more long-term, non-governmental securities.

The Fed essentially performs a balancing act to ensure that there is always enough buyers and sellers or put another way, they ensure that too many dollars in circulation for too few people (specifically people spending cash/money) doesn't lead to runaway inflation and that too few dollars in too many hands doesn't lead to Recession or a tightening of overall lending that causes the economy stagnate or crash.

The Federal Reserve building in Washington D.C.

Fed criticism

The Infamous Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke line during the 2008 Financial Crisis "using a computer to mark up the size of the account" 👀 is not a typo or misquote. It is however, very misinterpreted by many. In normal times the Fed doesn't need to literally expand the money supply very often by printing dollars- it merely purchases securities with dollars to put those dollars back into circulation.

But when it is determined that the Fed doesn't have enough dollars to buy the securities required to stabilize the banking system it has to (heaven forbid) create dollars to match the need for lending during a lending freeze as was seen in the Financial Crisis of 2008, 2009 and Spring of 2020 when COVID-19 first ravaged the American economy. If you think about it rationally, the United States usually increases overall productivity year-over-year. With this increase in productivity, and increase in securities valuations, you need the physical dollars (or other tangible liquid assets like precious metals) behind the increased productivity and valuations otherwise when there is an adverse event and people go running to withdrawal money and liquidate their securities, there will not be enough money.

Printing dollars is necessary because our economic systems, and specifically the "cash paper/note" is man-made. And it cannot expand without human action (unless we put the economic into some kind of smart contract, but I'd advise against that).

If you expand the overall wealth in the U.S. by 3% or 5%, should the money supply not also expand to reflect this expansion?

If it doesn't, then $1 in current USD value would probably be worth about $3,378 dollars. It makes small transactions impractical. And I suppose we could instead print more "coins" but coins are more expensive to make and they are heavier.

The need for the Fed

There will never be enough money to autopilot the U.S. economy or obviate the need for the Fed and its independency. There will always be a need to do the balancing act of adjusting interest rates, the printing of money to match productivity and lending needs and the extreme rescue measure of printing money to create extremely large loans in order to keep key so-called "too big too fail" institutions solvent.

And that is to be expected. All of this is due to human nature and the fear instinct. When things go really bad (usually due to lack of regulatory oversight and/or financial fraud), people are going to run to the bank for cash and attempt to liquidate securities. And when peoples' and companies' bank and IRA balances are tied to institutions that evaporate overnight, the FDIC can't help beyond $100,000 per account. For companies and individuals with very high balances, you cannot expect the bank to have all the cash on hand to match everyone's balance (to say nothing of the ability to liquidate any of the myriad securities banks now offer to customers).

Banks are in the lending business, not the saving business. And there is a general expectation that there won't be a run on the bank and that all customers will not run to liquidate long-term assets all at once. So when these kinds of things happen (or when things start to tip in that direction)- the Fed steps in to provide everyone their "tomorrow money", today.

This act and the act of controlling the interest rates lever may not look very fair but it is necessary to rescue the economy in times of a major adverse event and to counter economic booms and busts and limit inflation.

When the next financial crash occurs, I'm not counting on Elon Musk and Bill Gates to be as generous as J.P. Morgan.

References:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7nj2X-yl_U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoUmSer2IxA

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/21/opinion/-coronavirus-stimulus-trillion.html

Using Azure Key Vault Secrets in ASP.NET Core

This is, in my opinion, one of the coolest features of Azure. Azure Key Vault is a space in Azure where you can add certificates and keys for strings and cryptographic keys that you want to keep safe and don't want inside source control, etc.

Azure Key Vault is like LastPass for your ASP.NET apps- set it and forget it

I've worked with the process for managing keys in AWS and in my experience (each usage/implementaiton is different), AWS Secrets is a slightly less simple process. (meaning it is pretty simple too, but I'm partial to Azure).

To enable storing Secrets in Azure, you first create an Azure Key Vault in your Azure account. Then you add keys (for instance the clientID and secretKey for an API your apps use or an artifact repository URI or database connection strings, etc.).

Both SSL certs and your own custom secret keys can be stored in Azure Key Vault

Once the keys are created, you configure Azure KeyVault for your application in appSettings as such:

 .ConfigureAppConfiguration((context, config) =>  
       {  
         var azureServiceTokenProvider = new AzureServiceTokenProvider();  
         var keyVaultURI = "https://myvault.vault.azure.net/";  
         var keyVaultClient = new KeyVaultClient(new KeyVaultClient.AuthenticationCallback(azureServiceTokenProvider.KeyVaultTokenCallback));  
         cfg.AddAzureKeyVault(keyVaultURI, new DefaultKeyVaultSecretManager());  
       });  

his is where you configure you Azure Key Vault in an ASP.NET Core app

And once wired up, you can refer to your keys from that app- both on-prem and in the cloud (it uses SSL for the transfer) just as you would reference an appettings value through an IConfiguration object a la:

 val keyVal = _configuration["mySuperSecretKeyInAzureKeyVault"];                                  

Reference: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/key-vault/

Localization in ASP.NET Core using Resource (.resx) files

Localization in ASP.NET Core works much the same way as it did in legacy ASP.NET

You need only create .resx files with your translations reference them with an instance of IStringLocalizer<YourControllerName> that you can add to your controller method that contains the model that will use and present the translations to the UI.

First, add the below to ConfigureServices() or similiar method in Startup.cs or Program.cs:

       services.Configure<RequestLocalizationOptions>(options =>  
       {  
         options.SetDefaultCulture("en-US");  
         options.AddSupportedCultures("en-US", "es-CO", "fr-CA");  
         options.AddSupportedUICultures("en-US", "es-CO", "fr-CA");  
       });  

Next add resource (.resx) files (in this example for default American English, Spanish (Colombia), and French (Canada))

Your default .resx will look like this (same language for keys and values); make translations for the Values of es-CO and fr-CA

Now, the results - the translations, the latter two after changing browser default language to es-CO and fr-CA

Reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/fundamentals/localization?view=aspnetcore-6.0

How does ACH work?

ACH is a very common American intrabank account payment system

ACH is an acronym for Automated Clearinghouse. ACH is essentially an electronic way of performing increments (credits) and decrements (debits) to financial accounts. 

ACH can process any transaction so long as the bank or financial institutions in the transaction are ACH compliant. There exists a nationwide ACH network for the settlement of transactions betwen financial institutions. Beginning in the early 70's ACH emerged as the preffered payment method for transfering money- especially routine, scheduled payments- between banks without the need to be physically present,

During the 1970's in America, ACH organizations were created such as the long-standing NACHA, or National Clearinghouse Association. ACH files have standard "entry class codes" and "transaction codes" with standarized formatting for ACH transaction messaging. ACH files contain information to describe the ACH transaction such as:

• Debit or credit type of transaction type (+/-)

• Whether transaction is posting to deposit account, loan account or a corporate GL

• Customer Name

• Account

• Routing

• Customer ID

• Next day or same day settlement

• Settlement date

The details of an ACH file.

"Prenotifications" are test ACH transactions using zero dollar transactions to validate source or destination account numbers.

ACH operators are a centralized clearninghouses that settle the transaactions for paritipating financial institutions. The two ACH operators are the federal reserve bank and the electronic payment system.

Transaction types that do NOT use ACH and why:

Wire transfer - due to differing regulations, higher dollar amounts

Debit card - requires proprietary rules and a network

Credit card - because they are a line of credit only

ATM - card based with pin (differing rules)

ACH's relationship with cryptocurrency transfers is interesting (apparently wire transfers of monies in/out is far more expensive than ACH). See this recent NACHA article: https://www.nacha.org/news/crypto-and-ach-and-coming-pair

ACH is a vital component in the payments ecosystem, and though it is uniquely American, other countries have similiar clearinghouses with different transaction file/message formats. Knowing the ACH background and basic file structure is useful as you may need to understand how it works some day at some job.

Regardless of what happens with cryptocurrencies and the inevitable USD coin which will be backed by the full faith and credit of the US government, ACH technology- and technology built on top of it- is here to stay for a long, long time.

Code Readability vs. Code Golf

All developers aim to achieve expressiveness in their code. Which is to say we strive to ensure our code is readable and that we make efficient use of our code so that things are not repeated and the behaviors of interacting objects or functions are clear and easy to understand even for a new developer who has never previously seen the code base.

But sometimes, "expressiveness" can come at a cost. Having readable code means different things to different development teams. But a clear sign of unreadable code (no matter how much IDE screen real estate is saved) is something like this oddly nested structure of if statements.

This code is pretty objectively horrible no matter how you slice it..

If no other developers can understand your code, it won't matter how elegant your code is; it will become difficult to find people who can quickly read it, understand it, and change it. Lacking such ability to transfer the codebase knowledge can turn a great piece of software into millstone for an organization once all of the original developers have left the building.

So in comes my (*biased) opinion of code golf and how it impedes code readability. It's neat and a fun way to enhance your programming skills and knowledge of a language or framework; but it serves as a terrible template for producing readable code that your colleagues can fairly easily look at and understand, or at least debug and determine how the abstractions interact and what pieces of functionality are contained in (or spread across) which files.

Code Golf: https://code-golf.io, https://codegolf.stackexchange.com  (have fun, you can learn lots)


ASM, clear for some developers; not most:

             global    _start

             section   .text

_start:   mov       rax, 1                    ; system call for write

             mov       rdi, 1                    ; file handle 1 is stdout

             mov       rsi, message         ; address of string to output

             mov       rdx, 13                 ; number of bytes

             syscall                               ; invoke operating system to do the write

             mov       rax, 60                 ; system call for exit

             xor       rdi, rdi                ; exit code 0

             syscall                           ; invoke operating system to exit

             section   .data

message:  db        "Hello, World", 10      ; note the newline at the end

-vs-

Java, unclear 1-liner:

public class StringStatsArray { private final String[] stats; public StringStatsArray(String[] a) { stats =

  a; } public String toString() { String ret = "{"; for (String check: stats) { ret += "\"" + check + "\", "

  ; } ret = ret.substring(0, ret.length() - 2) + "}"; return ret; } public double averageLength() { double

  sum = 0; for (String check: stats) { sum += check.length(); } return sum / (double) stats.length; } public

  int search(String target) { for (int i = 0; i < stats.length; i++) { if (stats[i].equals(target)) { return

  i; } } return -1; } public int sortStatus() { if (stats.length <= 1) { return 1; } if ((int) stats[0]

  .charAt(0) < (int) stats[1].charAt(0)) { for (int i = 0; i < stats.length - 1; i++) { if ((int) stats[i]

  .charAt(0) > (int) stats[i + 1].charAt(0)) { return 0; } } return 1; } else if ((int) stats[0].charAt(0) >

  (int) stats[1].charAt(0)) { for (int i = 0; i < stats.length - 1; i++) { if ((int) stats[i].charAt(0) <

  (int) stats[i + 1].charAt(0)) { return 0; } } return -1; } else { for (int i = 0; i < stats.length - 1; i

  ++) { if ((int) stats[i].charAt(0) < (int) stats[i + 1].charAt(0)) { for (int j = i; j < stats.length - 1;

  j++) { if ((int) stats[j].charAt(0) > (int) stats[j + 1].charAt(0)) { return 0; } } return 1; } if ((int)

  stats[i].charAt(0) > (int) stats[i + 1].charAt(0)) { for (int j = i; j < stats.length - 1; j++) { if ((int

  ) stats[j].charAt(0) < (int) stats[j + 1].charAt(0)) { return 0; } } return -1; } } return 1; } } }

-vs-

C# Minecraft client, clear code:

using (var world = JavaWorld.Connect())

{

    world.PostToChat("Hello from C# and .NET Core!");

    var originBlock = world.GetBlockType(0, 0, 0);

    world.PostToChat($"Origin block is {originBlock}.");

}

"Code formatting is about communication, and communication is the professional developer’s first order of business." -Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob)

Even complex languages can be simplified somewhat by using logical naming conventions to identify what the entities are and what operations are doing.

Clear and consistent naming conventions of all members within the code of an application go a long way for making your code open to collaboration and/or extension by others. In much the same way people prefer different kinds of poetry, we developers prefer certain programming languages or styles (.NET vs. Java vs. NodeJS vs Python vs. C and C++; Message Queues vs. RDBMS; OO vs. FP) more or less than others. We should however, as far as possible, attempt to make our code clearly formatted and named for anyone to easily interpret. We should be as clear and consistent as possible and only comment when explaining the behavior in variable or function names alone won't suffice.

And this is all not to be confused with just good old fashioned best practices encompassed in the excellent book Clean Code by Robert Martin. Write clean code. Write understandable code with well-named members etc. And for the love of software development (esp. open-source) having a fighting chance to reach its potential in this early part of the 21st century, please do not write code in such a way that serves only to prove how clever you are or obsfuscate what is really going on for reasons unknown. "Security through obsfucation" is a real thing, but it's not a good way to manage a team code base.

Assume that the developers who inherit your code are going to need a little guidance

*true story, I was once interviewed first on the phone, and then on-site for an interesting .NET/SQL Server Dev opening with a major league baseball team. I did relatively well in the 3+ hour interview which included live coding exercises and meeting with all of my potential future colleagues. I went home that day pretty confident that I'd get the job, which in my experience is usually a sure sign that I won't get the job.

The last step for me before the hiring decision was made, arrived in the form of an email which let me know that the other final candidate had submitted a better solution than mine to the final and most difficult coding challenge but only by a couple bytes (16 or 24 bits or something) and that I was going to be given a chance to resubmit my code if I could make it smaller.

The final challenge was to demonstrate some extreme DRY by writing a program that would output the lyrics to "Old McDonald had a farm" in the smallest possible source code file. So, logically I abracted away all the individual characters and repeating character sequences and did my best to make the program as small as possible.

I declined to attempt any improvements. I honestly didn't know how to make it smaller, but more to the heart of the matter, this code golf barrier for entry made me wonder if there were other development practices within the IT department of this organization which I would not be a fit for; so it was probably mutually beneficial that I dropped the ball.

Due to a few .exe filesize bytes... I came in 2nd place and lost out on my dream contract/job. All of this because of my failure to hit a hole-in-one in that darn code golfing test.

My (C#) solution looked somewhat similiar to this:

void x(string c, string d){var a="Old MacDonald had a farm";var b=", E-I-E-I-O";var f=" a ";var g=" there";Debug.WriteLine(a+b+",");Debug.WriteLine("And on that farm he had"+f+c+b+",");Debug.WriteLine("With"+f+d+" "+d+" here and"+f+d+" "+d+g+",");Debug.WriteLine("Here"+f+d+","+g+f+d+", everywhere"+f+d+" "+d+",");Debug.WriteLine(a+b+"!");

I think the actual (C?) solution with the smallest filesize was something like this: 

o(char* x, char* y)
{
    char* f=
        "Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O,\n"
        "And on that farm he had a %s%.13s"
        "With a %s %s here and a %s %s there,\n"
        "Here a %s, there a %s, everywhere a %s %s,\n"
        "%.35s!\n";

    printf(f,x,f+24,y,y,y,y,y,y,y,y,f);
}

Ah well, we live and learn. Development is not a series of 1-upping and out-dueling one another with battles of cleverness. It's an ongoing communication, elaboration and collaboration experiment wherein the ultimate goal is for everyone to understand the domain problems and solutions, domain modeling for the problem abstractions and a standard domain language which removes ambiguity and enables "1000ft" knowledge for even the most tertiery of interested stakeholders.

Some areas of code (for instance the data layers or the UI or the file I/O, etc.) will invaribly be understood by some team members more or less than others. And a team architect will understand everything, though not at the low, "weeds" level of the dev who is implementing a particuliar story or piece of functionality.

Code like you might die tomorrow and someone will have to pick up everything from scratch. Enable frictionless configuration for setting up the local IDE and environment for the first time. Create a useful, concise README.md that includes everything needed to get up and debugging and an explanation of anything that is completely or somewhat non-standard. Include unit and e2e integration tests that 2x-check runtime interactions and clearly demonstrate all behaviors and interactions. 

Above all else: make your application instructions so readable and elegant that perusing the source code is not unlike reading a book and immidiately understanding and visualizing each entity and operation and what typical usage and operation looks like. It's really hard, but it is important for the future that we all get it right and continuously improve our code's understandability.

Happy developing, all.

Reference: https://github.com/bleroy/minecraft.client

Reference in defense of code golf (good read): https://itnext.io/standing-up-for-codegolf-abusing-the-language-you-love-to-learn-more-about-it-43c3c0ea5f12 

"All the quirks and buggy behaviours we can exploit in a code-golf challenge allow us to identify with less effort code that will otherwise behave unexpectedly or cause trouble."

...

I’d argue that code-golf can be greatly beneficial as long as we keep our mind in the game and not try using it where it doesn’t belong." -Juan Cortés

Very, very true points in favor of code golfing for fun and deep exploration (even if not the default for real world implementations).

A Timeless Book (by Jerry Fitzpatrick)

TL; DR;

This book gets right to the point of the common aspects required for building great software and is too valuable for any software development professional not to read; and it contains just 172 pages! 😃

Read this book.

Plan Before Implementing

Proper and properly named abstractions to match problem domain and purpose. Thoroughly documented and well-understood behavioral interactions among all accessible components and at minimum a solid high level understanding of all dependencies; know when not to re-invent the wheel and instead utilize a proven 3rd party or open source tool.

Keep it Small

YAGNI ("You ain't gonna need it") is a very real thing. Development teams should focus on working prototypes that can be ironed out for production vs. forever "ideal" implementations that never make it to an actual user's screen.

Write Clearly

Treat a rough draft as a rough draft by encouraging code reviews and frequent minor refactoring to achieve code clarity for the next developers who will inevitably read (and need to understand in order to change or extend) your logic in the future.

Prevent Bugs

Meticulously control scope and member access and understand all ramifications of behavioral code points within the application. Every area of variation/mutation/state change should be covered by tests that are both named and implemented to clearly demonstrate the function/class/behavior being tested.

All tests are important for confidence/assurance in ongoing development but TDD (writing tests before the implementation a la Kent Beck) is not a replacement for good, cohesive design. That being said, I think the TDD backwards approach can help start great design discussion among developers when the design is somewhat unclear (tests, particularly broken tests will expose the innards that most warrant discussing).

Make the Program Robust

Utilize agreed-upon code formatting and pattern implementation standards and non-antagonistic code reviews to ensure these standards are being followed.

Utilize information hiding and useful categorization and encapsulation that extends but does not lend itself to potential client issues.

Do not try/catch everything and log everything unless necessary for compliance or a particuliar initiative being monitored. Make Exceptions very visible (but exit the program gracefully if the exception is not "handleable") and integrate tests to prevent the same (preventable) issues from recurring. Instead use try/finally and let exceptions bubble up to the surface application code.

Exceptions that are allowed to be handled and logged hide problems in the code that need immediate attention.

Use solid CI/CD and automated testing that tests for easily definable application behaviors.

Prevent Excess Coupling

Favor atomic initialization: Initialize everything all at once versus incremental composition.

Discourage unnecessary extensibility points and instead expose what needs to be exposed with as little information sharing as possible.

Strive for immutable members wherever possible.

Cohesive, self-evident abstractions are of utmost importance.

SUMMARY

The concepts so succinctly covered in Timeless Laws of Software Development apply to all types of code (imperative or declarative) and all languages.

While I've read many great software books and all have helped me become a better developer, no text has struck me as so plainly obvious and concise at explaining good software design concepts in such an easy-to-grok manner.

For a worthwhile read, check out Timeless Laws of Software Development by Jerry Fitzpatrick

.NET 5+: the Future of .NET

Microsoft doesn't want to restrict the growth of their highly popular .NET development framework by requiring that it only run on Windows OS and that its components rely on Windows-based components like ASP.NET which relies on IIS.

Enter .NET Core 1, 1.1, 2, 5 (6)+: the Future of .NET.

One .NET Framework to rule them all? No. But a new, unified, cross-platform .NET Runtime? Yes.

With .NET 5 (and coming in hot down the pike, .NET 6), developers can use the languages (C#, F#, VB and C++/CLI) and framework (.NET) they are familiar with, to build applications that can run on a Windows, Linux or Mac OS. While .NET Core 1 and 2 lacked several expected features and felt fairly unsupportable, .NET 5 feels more familiar and addresses most issues (this is just the networking improvements made).

Formerly known as .NET Core 1, .NET Core 1.1 and then .NET Core 2, the future for the .NET Framework and associated runtime libraries will fall under the umbrella of what is simply called ".NET" (5 (current release), 6 (preview), with intermediate minor versions one would expect) as of the time of this writing. ASP.NET Core will continue to be labeled with the "Core" designation for now with the .NET version tagging the runtime (ASP.NET Core Runtime 5, ASP.NET Core Runtime 6, etc.).

There do exist more-than-slightly-subtle differences. For instance ASP.NET Core Runtime 5 projects are structured differently and Global.asax.cs has been replaced with Program.cs and the accompanying Startup.cs which contain the Main entry point and provide spaces for application configuration methods that execute only when your program is initially run (this includes functions to respond to certain events like a unhandled/last chance exception handling, etc.).

    public class Startup

    {

        public Startup(IConfiguration configuration)

        {

            Configuration = configuration;

        }

        public IConfiguration Configuration { get; }

        // This method gets called by the runtime. Use this method to add services to the container.

        public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)

        {

            services.AddDbContext<ApplicationDbContext>(options => options.UseSqlServer(Configuration.GetConnectionString("DefaultConnection")));

            services.AddDefaultIdentity<IdentityUser>(options => options.SignIn.RequireConfirmedAccount = true).AddEntityFrameworkStores<ApplicationDbContext>();

            services.AddControllersWithViews();

            services.AddRazorPages();

            services.AddMvc().AddViewLocalization(LanguageViewLocationExpanderFormat.Suffix);

            services.AddLocalization(options => options.ResourcesPath = "Resources");

            services.Configure<RequestLocalizationOptions>(options =>

            {

                options.SetDefaultCulture("en-US");

                options.AddSupportedCultures("en-US", "es-CO", "fr-FR");........

An example of .NET 5 ASP.NET Startup.cs which replaces most Global.asax.cs functionality; Program.cs handles all else

 

In sum total, .NET 5 is basically a framework with the same functionalities that the .NET Framework had, with new namespaces and methods and a few slightly different design paradigms for ASP.NET and other project templates that use .NET 5 code. But it compiles to binary code that can run crossplatform- to a Linux distro or OSX27 or regular old Windows 10, 11, 12, etc.).

.NET 5 seems to favor better encapsulation/information hiding (less extensibility but fewer things to keep track of that can go wrong!) but ASP.NET Core still tends to have the magic string architecture that is its double-edged sword. Everything is a balance; never can be 100% fast, cheap and customizable.

Expect lots more to come now that .NET has it's versioning, cross-platform integration and road map in order

Virtually everything is customizable if you want to use your own implementation of a SqlClient RDBMS provider or Authentication provider. Setting up social media authentication is relatively simple. For relational database access, Dapper is a nice balance between ADO.NET with pure SQL statements and an ORM for object population/deserialization, etc. and compiles to .NET Standard which can be referenced and compiled by a .NET 5 project.

With SQL Server moving to Linux world I imagine many other useful services that used to rely solely on Windows-OS will follow: native MS Office, MS Dynamics and related dependencies, IIS, etc.

Where .NET really shines is in its ability to compile/integrate .NET code libraries (with the notable exception of server-side WCF)  built with .NET Framework 4.5-4.8 as well as Xamarin, Mono, Unity and other previous .NET-related runtime libraries. It uses what is called .NET Standard (a collection of commonly used and .NET 5-compatible .NET Framework  members) to achieve this bridging between .NET and all .NET Framework versions preceding it.

Perhaps not all of that old .NET 4.5-4.8 legacy code will need to go to waste.

All SDKs under one roof; what is not to like? Almost as great as "Write Once.. Run Anywhere" 

Long-term support for .NET 5's predecessor, .NET Framework will continue for versions 4.6.2 and above for the foreseeable future while prior versions have either already ended LTS or will be ending LTS soon, per Microsoft:

Support for .NET Framework 4, 4.5, and 4.5.1 ended on January 12, 2016.

Support for .NET Framework 4.5.2, 4.6, and 4.6.1 will end on April 26, 2022. Customers and developers must have completed the in-place update to .NET Framework 4.6.2 or later by April 26, 2022 to continue receiving technical support and security updates.