Category: .NET

I was thinking about creating a web service that would spew out the current terrorist threat level.  When it got to the implementation phase, I decided that it was probably not wise to poll a web site at whitehouse.gov in order to parse out the current threat level.  I thought about it, did it a few times, got it right, and decided not to deploy it.

Secret Service Agent: “Can you explain why a machine on your network has polled the whitehouse.gov exactly every hour for the past two weeks?”
Matt: “Uhh…”

Needless to say, I was quite happy to find out at xmethods that RBailey at Tinetics has recently released a security level service.  Here’s my quick (less than 2 minute) app utilizing this service:

The code behind this in C# is a joke (after importing the web reference using the WSDL for the service:

homeland.securitylevelService s = new homeland.securitylevelService();
string alert = s.getsecuritylevel();
lblAlert.Text = "Current homeland security level is: " + alert;


There’s a switch statement after that to color code the label’s background color based on the result.  Nifty.

Yes, I was bored in class.

Cool!  Russ points to a post by David Watson in which he posts a bit of software that runs on Mono 0.19 and works a bit like Amphetadesk.  I’m definately going to check this out.

I agree wholeheartedly with what David thinks about Mono:

I’ve been exploring mono to see what’s possible with current builds of the compiler and runtime and have been blown away by how much progress has been made by this team while maintaining a very high quality level.

Ingo:

Early next week, I’ll send out the first issue of my free “Distributed .NET Newsletter”.

This bi-weekly newsletter contains real world tips and tricks about .NET Remoting, Web Services and EnterpriseServices, and design guidance for distributed applications. You’ll also find the occasional pointers to other free resources like white papers, patterns&practices documents or other great samples on the web.

You can subscribe to the newsletter in HTML or plaintext format at http://www.ingorammer.com/contact/Newsletter.aspx.

*signed up*

Scott Hanselman:

Disturbing, not for the faint of heart, possibly evil on at least 3 levels…but potentially useful…
How to share sessions between ASP and ASP.NET

O’Reillynet:

The .NET Framework offers basic support for cryptographic operations inside of the System.Security.Cryptography namespace in the mscorlib assembly. Out of the box, you are provided with implementations of many common symmetric key and public key-based algorithms. In addition, the cryptography framework was designed to be extensible, so that your implementation of any algorithm can be plugged in quite easily.

Richard Caetano:

It sure it odd to use +=, -=, &= and Return with VB.NET

Phil Windley:

Bruce Schneier, well known security expert and CTO of Counterpane Security, has a letter in the New York Times about the dilemma faced by CIO who run large numbers of Microsoft machines: there are too many patches and they can’t be installed automatically because they often break, and yet if you don’t, you’re vulnerable to worms like Slammer.

It’s the server side equivalent to Critical Update Hell.

I was looking at ASP.NET books over the weekend, and I found that the majority of books that cover ASP.NET choose to do so using VB.NET rather than the relatively easy and extremely powerful C#.  I wonder why this is?  Oldskool VB was definately easier than C++.  Today VB.NET is almost as (if not just as) complex as C# (IMHO), while C# seems to be more simple and elegant.

I picked up ASP.NET: Tips, Tutorials and Code at MicroCenter over the weekend (for $4.99!) and it tries to cover both VB and C#, though it is extremely biased towards VB.  I’m really not going to complain for what I paid, but if it had been any more than five bucks, I probably couldn’t justify it.

Doing ASP.NET in VB seems like buying a Bentley with a four-banger.

On a related note, I also picked up Building Web Services with Java: Making Sense of XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI for half off at a computer show.

I’ve been doing some skimming of both books, but I’d really like to dive in.

Sam Gentile:

Ron Jefferies, one of the inventors of Extreme Programming, and a man I admire very much, is working on an online book, Adventures in C#, of which the latest installment is Adventures in C#: Using NUnit, Be sure to check this out.

I’m reading the tutorial while at work, it looks like an excellent resource.  The tutorial made sense to me, having some experience with JUnit on the Java side of things.

Adventures in C# also has some great info for applying eXtreme Programming to .NET.

Rob Fahrni:

Charles Cook: “After writing a lot of C#, returning to C++ make me realize how unproductive C++ is.” – This has been my experience as well. I’m looking forward to the day when I can spend most of my time implementing code in C#.

This is so true.  It’s painful to go back to C++ after coding for awhile in C#.  It’s just so easy to do so many things.  I’ll be spending a good bit of time in C# this semester, and for that, I am quite happy.

This is too cool.  Sam Gentile gets the scoop from John Lam:

using Channels = System.Runtime.Remoting.Channels;

This is really nice if you have namespace conflicts and need to disambiguate your type references, or if you’re from the school of thought that says that you must always use fully qualified type names, but don’t want to obscure your code with giant namespace references.

This is a great little tip.  I am in the process of committing this to memory.

Tomas Restrepo has been diving into the rotor source, starting with CLIX.EXE.  I can’t wait to hear more.

So here is another reason that Sam Gentile has been a little quiet lately:

I suppose that this is as good a time as any to let you all know that I am working on a .NET book for O’Reilly along with co-author Tomas Restapo for later this year.

Sam Gentile unleashed his Introduction to Managed C++ for O’Reillynet this afternoon.  Congrats, Sam!

Thanks to Steve “Furrygoat” Makofsky for a pointer to Microsoft’s press release on expensive smart watches with SPOT (Smart Personal Object Technology).  I’d love an RSS aggregator on my wrist, that would be geeky-cool.  It’s interesting that Fossil, one of the initial manufacturers, is hedging its bets: it released a palm-based wrist PDA just a few months ago.

If you go to their Tech page, you can see Microsoft technology on the left and Palm technology on the right.  Freaky.

Gordon Weakliem:

In the space of a week, Ingo and Greg have transformed MS Exchange and Outlook into a competitor for Radio. Who would’ve guessed?

Sean & Scott:

We’ve just posted a new article that walks you through the new features in the VS 2003 IDE.

Mike Roberts has fallen in love with Cygwin+SSHd and TightVNC for administering Windows (and .NET) server farms.

Via Ben Houston at Sellsbrothers, (this is awesome): Exocortex Cg – An Wrapper for using NVIDIA’s Cg shaders in OpenGL

This is awesome.  I’ll have to take a look at this later.

Sean and Scott have some great tidbits:

• Easy access to MyMusic and MyPictures folders from 1.1 Framework
• Updates about their .NET Server install, and DirectX 9 doesn’t seem to break anything.
• XP Themes framework 1.1 and Themes support in .NET Server.
• MSDN: Patterns and Best Practices.
• Hyperthreading chips are faster.
• “Don’t Outlook Me“