Archives for .net
Cross-Site Request Forgery
In this post I’d like to explain one of the most common ways the bad guys can steal your information on the Internet today. I’ll use the literary technique of schizophrenial-paragraphs to help explain the hacker’s technique.
Using NLog To Track Events
Instrumenting your application, or at a more basic level, simply logging specific events, is one of the most important things you can do for a system that going to have a productive and cost effective lifespan. It’s right up there with data backups. As with most things in .Net, its usually best accomplished by starting with [...]
Importing Data From Excel with C#
Behind the scenes, I see a lot of companies run on Excel and duct tape. So it’s common for clients to hand me a slab of data organized into neat little rows and columns. Excel is just a handy way to throw some data over the wall and get things done. This might be a [...]
What’s Your Pet’s Name?
Such a casual question at party could have terrible consequences when you use weak passwords on the Internet. The best advice is to use a unique password for each account. If you spend all day online like me, plus a little more at home, you’ve probably garnered somewhere north of 50 or more accounts. The question [...]
Understanding LINQ
LINQ is an acronym for Language-Integrated Query and a new feature in v3.5 of the .Net Framework from Microsoft. This new version of Microsoft .Net reached RTM status a couple of weeks ago — this framework is chock full of brilliant things I can use to improve my efficiency and effectiveness on daily tasks here [...]
Flash ExternalInterface in ASP.NET Applications
Update 11/27/2007 We do quite a bit of Flash video integrated into ASP.NET web applications. For video library application, the best solution from a usability perspective is to use JavaScript to control the flash player. There are some issues that keep popping up with the Flash Player, SwfObject, ExternalInterface, and ASP.NET that we needed to document [...]
How I Married Into Mathematics
I’m working on a solution that requires a special type of chart to visualize results from some elaborate number crunching algorithms. Dundas Chart for .Net has an implementation of the standard polar chart. That’s the closest “buy” option I could find and it might very well do the job. I’m a big fan of using existing [...]
June Accomplishments
SelecTrucks We launched four new sites this month: Grand Rapids, Little Rock, Miami, and Nashville. Miami is a particularly striking design, heavily inspired by old cigar and fruit boxes. We were playing a bit of catch-up this month, but we managed to get back on our feet with a new production process that's resulting in these [...]
Few CSS Reboot Sites Validate
Sean Fraser from The Elementary Group Standards reveals that more than 70% of the sites participating in the most recent CSS Reboot don’t validate. He provides lots of interesting details, such as the breakdown between XHTML and HTML doctypes, and whether or not the CSS validates. After installing the HTML Validator extention for Firefox, I managed [...]
That’s Why You Hire Professionals
“If I employed a professional architect, I would expect them to design a house that complied with current legislation and industry best practices. I wouldn’t be expected to learn all this information up front, to make sure they did a good job. That’s why you hire professionals.” – Andy Budd, from an interview in .NET magazine I [...]
May Accomplishments
SelecTrucks In the last month, we launched three more SelecTrucks sites (Chicago, Massachusetts, and Los Angeles), and got one more to Alpha, but at that point we were two-three weeks behind on the project, depending on which estimate you were looking at, and with a major redesign on my desk for Detroit Diesel, it was clear [...]
April Accomplishments
Training I continued my ASP.NET 2.0 training, and have gotten through five chapters in my book, the most recent about theming. Based on this, I gave a presentation to the office titled .NET 101, which just gave a brief overview of what .NET is and isn’t, and an really short demo of how to use Visual [...]
Link Day
View Rendered Source plugin for Firefox will give you a nice view of your nested HTML elements. In explaining to me yesterday about the CIL yesterday, Andrew linked me to this screencast illustrating that CIL is truly independant of anything else. To prove it, Scott Hanselman compiles the same code in both Mono and Microsoft environments, [...]
ASP.net Training Exercises – Chapter Five
1. You have an ASP.NET Label control on a page. The label has a font-italic="true" attribute, and a CssClass="maintext" attribute. The page has an associated CSS style sheet (not associated with a theme) that defines a .main-text style class. This style class has the following attributes: <asp:label id="myLabel" CssClass="maintext" font-italic="true" text="This is a label"></asp:label> .maintext { [...]
ASP.net Training Exercises – Chapter Four
Chapter is about Membership and Security, and due to some complications in-house, I can’t post the sample website I built for the chapter, so I’m just going to post the questions here, and then talk about what I did… 1. Change the configuration of your test site to allow anonymous access, but to deny access to [...]
ASP.net Training Exercises – Chapter Three
(No questions in this chapter, just exercises, so I’ve uploaded the HTML pages of the final results). 1. Practice using the drag-and-drop functionality of VWD to put together a simple web page that displays the following information: The WroxUnited Logo (or an image of your choice). The names of the players and some information about them, arranged in a [...]
ASP.net Training Exercises – Chapter Two
Describe the functional differences between the Web.config file and Global.asax. Web.config is used to store settings for the site, such as database connection strings and default error pages. Global.asax is used to hold code for the entire site that is executed under certain circumstances, called “events” – when the application starts or stops, when the users starts [...]
ASP.net Training Exercises – Chapter One
Explain the differences among the .NET 2.0 Framework, ASP.NET 2.0, VWD, and IIS. The .NET Framework is the overall framework that allows programmers to write in various .NET-compatable languages to create ASP web pages. ASP.NET is the .NET framework implimentation of Active Server Pages. Visual Web Developer is the free version of Visual Studio, which is a [...]
CSS Overrides In ASP.net 2.0
My coworker, Kelly, linked to this awesome bit of news that there will soon be a way to override the default XHTML output from ASP.NET classes with your own, standards-compliant markup. Hooray! Oh, also, it’s CSS Naked Day, an idea that Dustin Diaz came up with to promote Web Standards.
March Accomplishments
For the bulk of last month, I have been working on SelecTrucks sites. After launching Memphis, I started work on Louisville, and then proceeded on to Chicago and then Massachusetts (which I now know how to spell). Louisville has already gone "live" on their domain, and Chicago and Massachusetts are both production-complete, but awaiting final [...]
February Accomplishments
My coworkers have both posted their accomplishments for the month of Febtober, so I'll join the cool kids and try to impress the boss. I got hired at the beginning of the month, and spent my first few weeks getting settled in and finishing up work on Carrier and Bryant, both of which have now gone [...]
Ugly and Inelegant
As the first step in learning more about .NET and presentation-level programming, my boss asked me to watch a training video about ASP.NET development. I was expecting some sort of 101-level intro to ASP.NET thing, but was extremely disappointed with the video. I honestly feel that I learned next to nothing from this, though it [...]
Developing .NET COM Callable Wrappers (CCW)
There is quite a bit of information posted on developing COM Callable Wrappers in .NET. Below is some information that I’ve compiled after developing quite a few. < ?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /> Developing COM Callable Wrappers, all types exposed to COM should follow the guidelines presented in the following checklist: - Ensure AssembyVersionAttribute is [...]
