knom's developer corner : Work

Slides and Demos from BigDays 2009 are online!

knom — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:22:00 GMT

These days I'm travelling around austria with our biggest developer & IT Pro event Big>Days 2009!

This year's theme was "packen wir's an" - translated "let's get to work"!

Accompanying the theme we built a multi-tier application with .NET 3.5 and Silverlight called "Rent-A-Worker"!

You can download the sources at http://www.codeplex.com/BigDays09/!

If you're interested in the slides of my four sessoins, feel free to get them here

WPF Webcast - New Year's resolutions

knom — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 13:34:39 GMT

I’ve a lot of New Year’s resolutions for 2009 :-) One of them is to blog more often (we’ll see how this works..) another is to do a series of webcasts around WPF.
We’re starting with our first WPF webcast on Friday, January 9th at 10am with an overview over WPF and XAML.

Topics we’ll cover:
*) Why a new UI framework
*) What tools, frameworks, .. do we need for WPF?
*) What is XAML, what is it’s syntax.

>> Register now at the Webcast Website

.NET Roadshow - Demo Solution

knom — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 17:07:00 GMT

The demo solution from our .NET Beginners Roadshow is no ready for download for attendees and all others.

The scenario is event management.

The solution consists of 4 parts:

*) Data Access layer using ADO.NET Entity Framework

*) Business Logic Service hosted as a WCF service.

*) Web Site, written in ASP.NET, which allows attendees to register and view their events, including a

*) Silverlight Web Control

*) Desktop Client using WPF, for managing the events.

Here some screen shots:

Feel free to have a look at the source code here.

On the road - The .NET Beginners Road Show

knom — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:41:31 GMT

From September 16th to 25th I'll be on the road with the .NET Beginners Road Show together with my colleague Mario.

Our goal is to target newcomers to .NET and show them, how to implement a simple solution over the three tiers.

Target audience are VB6 guys, as well as Java, C++ or Delphi people.

As the schedule is pretty tight, we expect the attendees to know the principles of object oriented programming.

Andreas has produced a series of webcasts, called "Get the basics", which introduce OOP in .NET for those who don't know (so they can also attend).

The videos are 15 minutes each (at a maximum) and are going to be published before the event (obviously :-)).

The roadshow stops in Dornbirn, Innsbruck, Salzburg, Linz, Graz and Wien.

So pretty much everywhere over Austria.

It's going to be a tough week travelling around for us two - as we have events every day and have to move on to the next stop in the evening ;-)

The attendee fee is 85 € for a one day power event full of demos (and food as well *ggg*).

Visit http://www.microsoft.com/austria/msdn/netstartups/ for more informations - and don't forget to register soon, as the venues have only restricted seats available.

Advanced Workflow Foundation - MSDN Briefing

knom — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 21:04:59 GMT

This week I had a session about advanced topics of Windows Workflow Foundation.

Some features I covered were

Workflow Execution Internals
External Services & Communication
Activity Execution Context
Persistence
Workflow States
Fault Handling
Transactions
Tracking
Advanced Authoring
Dynamic Updates

Feel free to download the slides and play around with the demos!

Slides
Demos

Silverlight-Showcase "CollectIT" Video

knom — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 17:17:00 GMT

Recently I've been recording a Demo-Video of our sticker-collection application. It's built on a soccer brand (for EM 2008) and is called "CollectIT".

It was built using Silverlight 1.0. Another cool thing is the LiveID integration.

And the most important thing - YOU can win a lot of prizes! Just visit http://www.microsoft.com/austria/collectIT/

Here's the video:

MSDN Subscription - Restrict DVD delivery language

knom — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 17:10:26 GMT

If you have an MSDN subscription, I suppose you get a lot of DVDs in different languages like Italian, German, Swedish, etc... every month.

Je ne parle pas français? - Non parlo italiano? - No hablo español?

Good news for all Europeans: You can restrict the languages of DVDs delivered to you!

1.) Go to https://microsoft.eu.subservices.com/msdn/default.aspx

2.) Login with your Firstname / Lastname, Email & Subscriber-ID as printed on your MSDN card.

3.) Select "Subscription Information"

4.) Select "Change your Media/Language Type".

5.) Select the language of your choice:

And no more hours of throwing away useless DVD - PLUS: you've helped reducing the wastage.

If you surprisingly need a language later on: No need to be confused - you can download it from the MSDN site anyway.

Visual Studio 2008 ("Orcas") problems with .NET Configuration MMC Snap-In

knom — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 13:55:00 GMT

I've heard of problems with Visual Studio "Orcas" - now Visual Studio 2008 Beta 1 and March CTP installed together with VS 2005.

After running the setup of Visual Studio 2008 users had problems opening the .NET Framework configuration MMC snap-in out of administrative tools ("snap-in failed to initialize", ".NET Framework 2.0 Configuration").

When searching for the CLSID in registry I found a hive, where Visual Studio 2008 setup changed something... ;-)

The hive is HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{A22B5BA1-D8CF-4db6-BC91-CFC1A04E2469}

This is how the normal registry-key should look like:

This is what VS 2008 does to it:

To fix this, delete the hive and import the original VS 2005 version of it (which I appended as .REG file to this post).

Vista API Demos with C#

knom — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 19:10:00 GMT

Last week I was "On-Tour" at local Usergroups in Vorarlberg (Dornbirn) and Tyrol (Innsbruck).

I did one of my last presentations of Windows Vista Development! (Meaning NOT .NET 3.0, but unmanaged APIs, like those already posted on my blog).

Thanks for everyone, who joined me!
For everyone else - the Topics included:

User Account Control
Windows Error Reporting, Restart & Recovery API
Vista UI Look & Feel
Search
Network List Manager

Here is the presentation as well as the demos!

Presentation (4,55 MB)
Demos (3,82 MB)

Workflow Foundation Basics Slides

knom — Wed, 02 May 2007 00:29:00 GMT

Last month I did a basic session on Windows Workflow Foundation at the Global Knowledge .NET Takeoff event!

Here are the slides, for everyone, who is interested!

[Update] Big>Days 2007

knom — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 22:56:00 GMT

Hi!

Last week we tested our session in a 5pm - 11pm rehearsal.. Unfortunately we've found out: it is far too long. Unless you don't care spending > 2 hours we should shorten it up a little. So here's the plan: I threw out the UI and UAC stuff (I will post an entry on the UI stuff details tomorrow, so it's not lost) and Andreas will cut down the gadget demos to the really gadget specific parts!

So finally we will show: Gadgets, Vista Search Integration, Windows Error Reporting - also giving an overview of Vista Development in general and Web 2.0 / UX (and how gadgets can help to establish this).

This should fit into 70 minutes (although there will be little extra time left..)

My first contact with the Windows Vista Package

knom — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 13:45:50 GMT

Although I've installed the Vista Beta on my first day at Microsoft and upgraded it continuously up to RTM, it took me until today (the official start of Vista sale) to get a real package into my hands! (the bad news.. it doesn't belong to me..)

Here it is...

Today I was sitting in our local cafeteria, when the local Vista BG-lead passed by heading to ITnT exhibition with some "real-world" Vista packages.

I just had the time to play around a little bit with the package and make some fotos. I think it looks really cool, but it's not that easy to open it, if you don't know how.. maybe some kind of theft protection :-)

Then the packages was gone again.. leaving me with the unspectacular green MSDN subscription version of Vista I have.. :-(

MVP Day at Microsoft Austria

knom — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 18:19:00 GMT

Last Wednesday we had the local "MVP Day" in our subsidiary.
A lot of MVPs came to Vienna to meet each other, exchange their experiences and discuss future activities.

As main contact for MVPs in the Developer & Plattform Group I also joined the meeting.´
I had the chance to introduce myself as well as to point out some activities I'm planning for the next few months.

I didn't only present the planned topics for up-coming MSDN Briefings but also unveiled our ideas for Big Days 2007. In March and April 2007 we'll be touring through 4 Austrian Cities (Bregenz, Linz, Graz, Vienna). If you're interested in the date of your local BigDays-Event or would like to see a review of the last ones see our MSDN.AT-Team-Blog.

It was nice to get to know most of our MVPs at one time :-) and to have talks with them about technologies, life as an MVP, user groups, ...

Thanks again to all MVPs for coming!

tune in!.. Podcasts @ MSDN AT

knom — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 22:59:00 GMT

Some time ago we've started producing cool PODCASTS with technical background.
As introduction "footprints" of all members of the Development and Platform Group Austria will be published there. 2 days ago it was my turn to be interviewed. Now my podcast-footprint is "on-air/on-line".

You can tune in to our "Microsoft Podcast Network Austria" on http://blogs.msdn.com/talk/ !

Beside other footprints there is also an interview with Dave Green (chief architect of Windows Workflow Foundation) and *newly* added a video-podcast with my colleagues Robert John and Martin Fenyö about VS 2005 & MSDN licensing models.

In the near future we're planning to record all our "offline" events, like the MSDN-briefings and also to do interviews with different experts on various topics.

I personally think it's nice to hear such podcasts while going by car or bike, because they distract me of those annoying traffic-jams :-)

[Edit] I forgot.. You actually don't know which one of the guys interviewed there is me..
So here is the direkt URL to my podcast footprint!
greetz, knom.

My first demo session... - aka. "Spot the error"

knom — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 15:49:00 GMT

Today I had my first session as DE!

I was doing a demo session on Cryptography and Security with .Net 2.0 together with my colleague Mario (who was DE previously) for a customer (actually for 3 of their developers).

Whereas he was explaining the theories of symmetric- and asymmetric algorithms and XML signing and encryption I did three live codings.

The first one was a simple demo creating a hash value with MD5- or SHA1CryptoServiceProvider:

Console.Write( "Enter Cleartext: ");
string clearText = Console.ReadLine();

SHA1CryptoServiceProvider sha1 = new SHA1CryptoServiceProvider();
Byte[] hashBytes = sha1.ComputeHash(Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes(clearText));

Console.WriteLine( String.Format( "Hash Value: {0}" ,
Convert.ToBase64String(hashBytes)));

As this demo always produces equal hashes for equal cleartexts, it is easier to attack the hashed values. E.g. If a user's password hash was the same as his own he would know the cleartext of the other one (as he knows his own).

To make password hacking more difficult you could spice up the demo by including a random salt value.
Instead of hashing just the cleartext secret you would also include a random number, generated by the RNGCryptoServiceProvider object. This random value can be stored in a public way, but should be different for each user.
Although attackers know the different salts as well as the hash-values, they need to attack each user password on it's own, as the hash is dependent on the user specific salt.

In my third demo I showed how to encrypt/decrypt data using symmetric algorithms and CryptoStream objects.
Unfortunately I made a small mistake (but only a small one..) That's why my code didn't work at first...

    string key = "584Af81Jasdaf(4125908";
    string clearText = "Hello World!";
    TripleDESCryptoServiceProvider tripledes =
              new TripleDESCryptoServiceProvider();
    Rfc2898DeriveBytes deriveBytes =
              new Rfc2898DeriveBytes(key, 32);

    // Generate random Initialization Vector
    tripledes.GenerateIV();
    // Derive a 16 Byte (128 Bit) Key out of the key string.
    tripledes.Key = deriveBytes.GetBytes(16);

    // Encryption
    MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream();
    // Create CryptoStream object and pass Encryptor-ICryptoTransform object of     // tripledes
    CryptoStream cryptoStream = new CryptoStream (
              stream, tripledes.CreateEncryptor(), CryptoStreamMode.Write
    );

     // Write the cleartext - unicode encoded to the stream
    Byte[] dataBytes =
              Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes(clearText);
    cryptoStream.Write(dataBytes, 0, dataBytes.Length);

    cryptoStream.Close();
    stream.Close();
    Byte[] cipheredBytes = stream.ToArray();

    Console.WriteLine(String.Format("Ciphered Bytes: {0}",
              Convert.ToBase64String(cipheredBytes)));

     // Decryption
    stream = new MemoryStream(cipheredBytes);
    cryptoStream = new CryptoStream(
              stream,tripledes.CreateDecryptor(), CryptoStreamMode.Read
    );
    Byte[] decryptedBytes = new byte[cipheredBytes.Length];

    cryptoStream.Read(decryptedBytes, 0, decryptedBytes.Length);
    cryptoStream.Close();
    stream.Close();
    Console.WriteLine(String.Format( "Original Value ?",
              Encoding.Unicode.GetString(decryptedBytes)));

Did you spot the error? I'm sure you have.. First I was anxious that my demo would lead into a disaster :-) but unfortunately it was only a small typo!

What this demo does is using a overlayed CryptoStream to write and read data to and from an underlying stream (in this demo a MemoryStream). You can use CryptoStreams on top of any other stream, to do encryption before writing data to the stream or decrypt it after reading it from the stream.
Thereby you need to pass an ICryptoTransform object to the CryptoStream, which is created by calling the methods CreateEncryptor() and CreateDecryptor of the corresponding algorithm.

So.. I'm glad that everything went right and I'm looking forward to doing my next session..