Unicode, circa 1994

Public announcement of the day: on the Objective C++ compiler than ships with Xcode 26.6 (and maybe before, who knows), the option -fshort-wchar is broken, unless you also specify -fno-builtin-wcslen, and it only manifests in release builds. The evidence is overwhelming.

...and naming things

 As the joke goes, naming things is the other hard problem in IT. I think there is one overlooked naming pattern that deserves more love.

VBA.NET, no such thing

 Another day, another lovely point of friction on the managed/native border. I was trying to instantiate and call the .NET class System.Security.Cryptography.HMACSHA256 from an Excel macro.

Polyglote troubles

Being fluent with multiple languages plays a trick on one where a construct exists in many of them, but is worded differently.

Now with pattern

 Looks like SQL Server grew a RegExp engine. Time to revisit the JSON schema validator.

OAuth scopes in Azure DevOps 2025H2

In a continuation of a long running series, here is a scope dump from TFS Azure DevOps 2025H2, the latest as of the time of writing. Again, some endpoints might be cloud only.

Xdebug disconnects over a Watch expression evaluation fail

This is one of those entries where I've spent several frustrating days fighting with a problem, solved it finally, and want this solution to be googleable for future generations. Let me set the scene: a PHP website,