Visual ActiveKent Sharkey .NET SE 3.11 : Useful info

Browser Security Test

ksharkey — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 03:41:00 GMT

Run 37 tests to make certain your browser isn't letting anything in you don't want. [via ACMEbinary]

Tracing in 2.0, soon.... soon....

ksharkey — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 18:03:00 GMT

I try not to push 2.0 information too much, as there are many others out there with far more knowledge on it than me.

Having said that, I saw this new setting this morning.

<trace enabled="true|false" localOnly="true|false" pageOutput="true|false" requestLimit="integer" mostRecent="true|false" writeToDiagnosticsTrace="true|false" traceMode="SortByTime|SortByCategory"/>

I'll be the first to admit, I go crazy with _context.Trace.Write and _context.Trace.Warn in my code. However, then you either get into the situation of having to look at your trace.axd file a lot, or even worse, leave the trace info in the page, and show people your underwear (or worse, server names and IPs). Now, with writeToDiagnosticsTrace, it goes to System.Diagnostics.Trace, so any listener you have for that (such as the VS debug window, or the excellent SysInternal's DebugView will pick it up.

February CTP now available

ksharkey — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 16:59:00 GMT

In honour of March 2, we now present {insert ta da here} The February Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Visual Studio 2005. This month, we have new versions of Visual Studio 2005 Professional (for MSDN Subscribers) and the fabulous Express products:

Get them while the bits are still hot -- overwhelm our download servers. Taste, build, enjoy (note: these are still not *quite* Beta 2).
Finer print:
The new Community Technology Preview releases of the Express products now require registration and activation within 30 days of first use. This process is simple, free, and it allows us to personalize your experience on MSDN. If the products are not registered and activated within 30 days of first use, they will cease operating.
UPDATE: fixed the links

Second Edition, now with more brain-thumping goodness

ksharkey — Thu, 24 Feb 2005 18:37:00 GMT

Just got a copy of the second edition of Advanced .NET Remoting by Ingo (and now also Mario Szpuszta). I had the good fortune of squeezing my brain through it a while back (and lived!). While the talk continues, you really need to read as much of this book as you can. It's not only THE best book on Remoting (even better than the first edition), it's also a great reference on how to build scalable, loosely coupled distributed applications; information that is useful if you're building Remoting, Web Services, Indigo or even COM/COM+ apps.

Trust everyone, but always cut the cards

ksharkey — Mon, 17 Jan 2005 23:29:00 GMT

There are a lot of ASP.NET Hosters out there. So, logically you want to build ASP.NET applications and put them on the hosters. Simple, dimple? Well, for you. You can fire up Visual Notepad, Web Matrix or Visual Studio .NET and hammer one out of silicon pretty fast.

However, let's now look at it from the Hosters' point of view. Here is a chunk of code that someone is trying to post on their servers. They have no clue (short of walking through it themselves) just what it may do. It could walk up and down their entire customer-base, grabbing information and mailing it to www.hackersRus.com. It could reformat drives by accident. There are many, many things that poorly written code may do. Yes, I know you never write poor quality code, but other people do. How can they protect themselves? Well, one method that many hosters implement as a first step in protection is to run ASP.NET in medium trust. This means that such things as ActiveX, file access (other than isolated access) and whatnot are completely out of the question. Here is a brief table from one of my favourite reference works:

Table 9.1 Restrictions Imposed by the ASP.NET Trust Levels

ASP.NET Trust Level	Main Restrictions
Full	Unrestricted permissions. Applications can access any resource that is subject to operating system security. All privileged operations are supported.
High	Not able to call unmanaged code Not able to call serviced components Not able to write to the event log Not able to access Microsoft Message Queuing queues Not able to access OLE DB data sources
Medium	In addition to the above, file access is restricted to the current application directory and registry access is not permitted.
Low	In addition to the above, the application is not able to connect to SQL Server and code cannot call CodeAccessPermission.Assert (no assertion security permission).
Minimal	Only the execute permission is available.

We're working on getting you some content to help you design and build apps for Medium Trust, but in the meantime, you should try changing the web.config (or machine.config) to run as medium trust whenever possible. Certainly for apps that will be deployed to a hoster. It could prevent problems later when you try to deploy.

Team System prezzies

ksharkey — Thu, 23 Dec 2004 21:19:00 GMT

In the spirit of the holidays (either late in the case of Hanukkah, Ramadan or Solstice — or early in the case of Christmas or Kwanzaa — and I have no clue what holiday Jedis celebrate around now) the Team System team have brought unto you a gift. A new Community Technology Preview. So, now you will have something to do while *everyone* else drinks egg nog, shreds wrapping paper and watches their new plasma TV.

Enjoy

TTFN - Kent
PS: If you're at all confused about all the builds we're throwing at you, we've also updated the "Get VS2005" page with details on which builds are stable, and what's in each. I'll add some details about the SQL 2005 specific builds in the new year.

Internet Explorer Developer Center

ksharkey — Wed, 15 Dec 2004 23:20:00 GMT

And then there were 50...

OK, maybe there aren't 50 Developer Centers (yet — it just feels that way some days), but there is now an Internet Explorer Dev Center. With new content, even! Learn what SP2 and future advances have in store for you. It's worth saving the link, even if all you need to do is find the DHTML reference, as I seem to have to do a lot.

ASP.NET Member Management Component Prototype now available

ksharkey — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 18:38:00 GMT

The Microsoft ASP.NET v1.1 Membership Management Component Prototype contains classes that allow a developer to more easily authenticate users, authorize users, and store per-user property data in a user profile. The authentication feature validates and stores user credentials which a developer can use to manage user authentication on a web site. The authorization feature lets you treat groups of users as a unit by assigning users to roles such as manager, sales, member, and so on. Combined with ASP.NET's built-in authorization functionality, Windows Shared Hosting developers have end-to-end support for maintaining user-to-role mappings and authorizing users based on this information. The profile feature enables you to provide users of your Web site with a custom experience. By defining and using profile properties, you can track any custom information your application requires, including user information and user preferences.

Download
Discuss

UPDATE: I was reminded by the Spider King that "There are already two applications in beta using this component; DotNetNuke by Perpetual Motion and Community Server by Telligent Systems.

NOAA Way -- the Web Service

ksharkey — Sat, 04 Dec 2004 21:15:00 GMT

Looking at my news items this morning, and what do I see? NOAA (the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, aka, the Weather Guys) now has a Web Service available (sadly RPC/Encoded) to get the weather. Details here. WSDL here. Party on your desktop.

We have many questions...

ksharkey — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 01:04:00 GMT

Scott Mitchell's latest playpen is something I've been looking to find for a while -- a FAQ system built on ASP.NET. Multicategory, pumps out RSS feeds, what else could you want (besides a download) So far, it looks pretty r0xx0r (sorry, I've been spending too much time around l33t forums lately). Looking forward to see how it progresses.

Use Cache, Save Cash

ksharkey — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 21:40:00 GMT

Where's Rob been? Busy starting a company and building a Community Server. However, he still cares about all of you enough to keep writing his column - read his latest, "Use Cache, Save Cash" about SQL cache invalidation in ASP.NET 1.1 and 2.0.

How bread (and ASP.NET 2.0) is made

ksharkey — Mon, 25 Oct 2004 02:03:00 GMT

Scott Guthrie has an amazing look into the 'end game' of how software gets released from Microsoft. It also has the cleanest explanation of "tell" and "ask" mode I've ever read (never had the guts to ask anyone).

Something new, something blue

ksharkey — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 23:33:00 GMT

Two articles for you today:

Still making money off of ASP.NET 1.1? Take a look at Callum Shillan's Dynamic Creation of Validation Controls for those times when you just don't know what you'll need to do to validate
Looking forward to making more money off of ASP.NET 2.0? Michele Leroux Bustamante returns with a great look at the localization features in ASP.NET 2.0.

Go Google yourself!

ksharkey — Thu, 14 Oct 2004 16:42:00 GMT

Google Desktop launched (OK, Beta).

"Use Google Desktop Search to find:

Web pages you've previously seen in Internet Explorer
Email you've sent or received via Outlook or Outlook Express
IM chats you've had using AOL Instant Messenger (AIM)
Files in Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint as well as plain text. "

Why wait for DetailsView?

ksharkey — Tue, 12 Oct 2004 22:20:00 GMT

Dino is back, and he brought presents. The DetailsView control is one of the most intriguing ones (for me) in ASP.NET 2.0. However, why wait until ASP.NET 2.0 ships? In this article, Dino creates a DetailsView control that works with ASP.NET 1.1 code.