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January 2004 - Posts

Saturday, January 31, 2004 9:31 PM

Where VSTO creates the project folder

Julie wrote to me with a problem about where VSTO creates its DLLs and how they get trusted. Hopefully this will help ;-) The other day I blogged about how referenced assemblies are copied around, but there's another piece to the puzzle. If you use the
Posted by ptorr | 4 Comments
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Saturday, January 31, 2004 9:03 PM

MyDoom and VSTO

I've blogged a lot about the VSTO security model , and many customers have been frustrated / confused by the tight security policy we use. Why on earth would we not trust code just because it's on the local machine? Well, one of our main scenarios for
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Saturday, January 31, 2004 8:12 PM

Gandalf is Dracula!

Many of you probably know that Sir Ian McKellen played both Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings and Magneto in X-Men . But did you also know he plays Dracula in the Pet Shop Boys ' 1988 music video Heart ? I didn't, at least until I listened to the commentary
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Thursday, January 29, 2004 2:35 AM

Hacking IE Security Zones

Warning : This entry contains information about editing the registry. Editing the registry could mess up your machine. Also , the changes described here will cause some web sites (and possibly even some local applications) to stop working correctly. That's
Posted by ptorr | 10 Comments
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Wednesday, January 28, 2004 6:52 AM

Using referenced assemblies in VSTO

OK, a quick one to finish up. When you add a reference to a "private" (non-GACed) assembly to a VSTO project, you'll need to grant it trust if it needs more than basic Execution permission. But where to grant trust? Some background information for folks
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Wednesday, January 28, 2004 6:05 AM

Francis Francis! X5 and ESE pods

Warning: this entry has nothing to do with code. As I blogged earlier (I think!) I have a rather nice espresso machine at home. You can pick one up for yourself at Whole Latte Love (that pun makes my dear friend wince :-) ) but it's a bit big (and expensive)
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Wednesday, January 28, 2004 5:12 AM

Not calling your parent constructor

Earlier today, JArnold wrote a blog entry that looked at an instance-based constructor hack that is similar (in an opposite kind of way) to my earlier post on class constructors . Whilst JArnold's blog is 100% correct, there's an important distinction
Posted by ptorr | 4 Comments
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Wednesday, January 28, 2004 4:41 AM

Beware of AutoSave and DocumentBeforeSave

One of the cool things about Word is that it auto-saves your work so that if the machine dies or the app crashes you can get most of it back again. One of the other cool things about Word is that you can customise the built-in dialogs -- such as the Save
Posted by ptorr | 9 Comments
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Tuesday, January 27, 2004 5:59 AM

Calling class constructors twice

Yesterday I blogged about a bug that you could exploit in JScript .NET, and the other day I made a comment on Eric's blog about compiler-enforced rules versus runtime-enforced rules. Here's a quick story about one such rule that we fixed before the CLR
Posted by ptorr | 5 Comments
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Monday, January 26, 2004 5:25 AM

GetObject and Security

Eric has recently done a series on script security, and one of the things he very briefly mentions is how you can use GetObject with a moniker to get an instance of an object. This reminds me of one of the "cool" bugs we found before the first version
Posted by ptorr | 4 Comments
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Tuesday, January 20, 2004 9:05 PM

Clinick's Clinic is back!

My "old" boss (he hates it when I say that <g>) Andrew Clinick has started blogging . He'll be talking about VSTO 2, scripting, and other stuff. Hopefully he'll adopt dotWord and update it to VSTO 2.0 :-)
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Monday, January 19, 2004 8:38 PM

Now I've seen it all

The new Bagel Virus takes the cake. ( Update : Also known as Beagle, Bagle, etc.) It comes as an EXE attachment (which would be blocked by all current versions of Outlook and Outlook Express) with the subject "Test" and the message body "Test, yep." It
Posted by ptorr | 11 Comments
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Sunday, January 18, 2004 10:34 PM

SD Times mentions VSTO security

There's an article about VSTO at SD Times . One of the things they point out is that VSTO is the first Microsoft developer product that really enforces a strong security policy , and that this is the way of the future (think Longhorn). The author also
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Thursday, January 15, 2004 7:54 PM

You know you're a PM when...

...you see a drive-through espresso stand and ask yourself "I wonder if they support the 'walk-in' scenario." Seriously! Last autumn (err, "last fall") I also commented to a friend on how pretty all the different "versions" of trees looked with their
Posted by ptorr | 6 Comments
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Thursday, January 15, 2004 8:24 AM

Security and Inheritance

I received an e-mail from a customer referencing this newsgroup post and asking two questions about virtual methods and inheritance: 1. Why does it work like this? 2. What's the 'security' implication? Funnily enough, I just read Eric's post on a very
Posted by ptorr | 10 Comments
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Monday, January 12, 2004 4:20 AM

8 Rules of Security

An interesting post by Dana Epp via Robert Scoble via Owen Allen . Apologies if this is a dupe for you!
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Sunday, January 11, 2004 9:44 PM

Word Shortcuts

Ever wanted to move some text around in a Word document, but didn't want to go through the hassles of copy and paste? Just select the text, hit F2 , move the cursor to where you want the text to be, and hit Enter . Using Shift+F2 will copy the text instead
Posted by ptorr | 8 Comments
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Sunday, January 11, 2004 9:36 PM

Five phases of security

This will hopefully start a mini-series on some thoughts around security. I don't know if they'll be daily, weekly, or neverly, but we'll see. These days, everyone seems focused on preventing attacks on software -- predominantly through the use of firewalls
Posted by ptorr | 7 Comments
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Sunday, January 11, 2004 8:38 PM

Always making the wrong decision

Paul Stubbs and I both work on the Visual Studio Tools for Office team at Microsoft. Other bloggers from VSTO include Eric Lippert and the User Education team, but Paul and I work closely together on the same sub-team, doing stuff I can't really talk
Posted by ptorr | 7 Comments
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Tuesday, January 06, 2004 9:52 PM

Positive customer feedback

I just received some (unsolicited) feedback from a customer who wanted me to pass on their great experience with the Microsoft Office Document Scanning tools to the right team. Although it wasn't feedback for the product I work on, it was nice that somebody
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Monday, January 05, 2004 4:24 AM

You can use Excel templates with VSTO 1.0

If you've tried out VSTO (and you should :-) ) then you may have noticed that Word has both Document and Template projects whilst Excel has only a Workbook project. If you were thinking that the reason was because Excel was naughty but Word was nice,
Posted by ptorr | 4 Comments
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Monday, January 05, 2004 3:34 AM

Regex perf bug

While trying to get a WordML -> HTML conversion that would work reasonably well with .TEXT, I came across an interesting performance bug in the Regex class of .NET. Run the following code and see what happens. It doesn't produce any output; just step
Posted by ptorr | 18 Comments
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