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On this page...

Two Weeks, Two Conferences
Important Security Fix for ScrewTurn
The Week in Review - TechEd Developers 2007 Sessions
Support? Not If You Evaluate the Product!
Sony Ericsson Must be Kidding Me
Me on .NET Rocks
Two IIS7 Sessions @ ASP Konferenz 2007
R.I.P. Eudora (1995 - 2007)
Stunnel / OpenSSL Notes
Memory Drawer
TFS Code Comment Checking Policy v2.0 Preview
Code Conversion and Code Formatting News
From the Useful Tools Department: Fiddler
What is Vista Trying to Tell Me?
Searching for "xml notepad"
RSS Reader Switch
MVP Visual Developer - ASP/ASP.NET Again 2007
CCCP - Sneak Peek at vNext
The Soul of a New Machine
Three Talks at Next Year's VSone Conference
The Week in Review: IT Forum Sessions
Stiffware
Books @ Tech·Ed: Developers
Next Week Tech·Ed: IT Forum, Barcelona
The Week in Review - TechEd Developers Sessions
Another Beta of SharpDevelop 2.1 Has Arrived
Advanced Code Access Security
ADC06 (Advanced Developers Conference)
SharpDevelop2 2.1 Beta 1
SharpDevelop2 2.0 Final Hits the (Virtual) Streets
Talk Resources: ASP.NET Build Provider
Talk Resources: WF & ASP.NET
Speaker @ ASP Konferenz 2006
SharpDevelop2 Release Candidate 2 Available
Vista On My Machine
UAC Prompts & Security
Ready, Set, Go! Office 2007 Beta 2
Reporting Vulnerabilities is for the Brave
Novatel Wireless Merlin U630 on Windows Vista
Security Technical Briefings
Ridiculous Item of the Day
UMTS For Me
Ready to Rock the Launch
Most Creative "Won't Install on Your x64 Box" Setup Message to Date
PayPal Driving Me Crazy
Why You Don't Need Vista
Hitting the Roof
Spam Statistics
Where Did My Application Data Go...
MVP 2006
Windows 64bit Compatibility Guide
You Can Have Too Much RAM
No Intelli* For You
Community Wintercamp 2006
Article: Building Applications with the SharpDevelop Core
Delayed Write Failed
Virtual Server 2005 R2
Remote Desktop Disconnected
Pimp My RAID
When you thought you had seen it all...
New x64 Workstation
Regional Settings - I don't get it
Google PageRank as a .NET Assembly
Next Week: ADC 2005 - Advanced Developers Conference
Issue Identified: Crashing Visual Studio 2005 for Fun
Avalon
Why I won't use OpenOffice.org 2.0 (for serious work)
Community Server v1.2 will support setting the SMTP port number
SvnPostCommitHook 1.8
Web applications and SMTP proxies don't mix well (it seems)
This blog is a suspicious website
Fun notes from the AspInsiders meeting
Misleading error message of the day
Built to scale
Warning: Low-Flying Golf Balls
MVP Summit 2005
SharpReader not working on Longhorn
Application Data Folder on Longhorn
Windows Server Codename Longhorn, Visual Studio 2005 Team System Beta 2, LINQ & Atlas
Errors you don't expect
Latest Member of the PC Family
New Cell Phone - W800i
PDC05: Mono "BOF" in the Rearview Mirror
PDC05: The Books
PDC05: Last Men Standing
PDC05: Complimentary Copy of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition
PDC05: Day Three, WE-SYP
liveplasma
PDC05: Day Two, Wednesday
PDC's I have attended so far
PDC05: Day One in Review
PDC05: Attack and Defense: The Art of Secure Coding
PDC05: Arrived
Slides, Demos, Links for Yesterday's UG Talk
TechTalk "Repeat" @ .NET UG Styria
German MSDN Developer Center - Security Revamped
MSN Messenger Password Decrypter for Windows XP and 2003
Webcast on MSBuild for Visual Studio 2005 Team Systems Beta Experience
Webcast on Profiling for Visual Studio 2005 Team Systems Beta Experience
SVN Post-Commit Hook v1.7
The Best Software Writing I
Microsoft Office System Webcast: OneNote Tips and Tricks
Community-driven Security Conference in Vienna, Austria
Virtual PC and Windows Vista
#d^3 coming to a close
Hasta La Vista RINDVIECH1!
NCC 2005 A
Callbacks in ASP.NET 2.0
Copying files off / onto a Virtual PC / Virtual Server hard disk w/out starting the virtual machine
Upcoming book: ROOTKITS, Subverting the Windows Kernel
Got my Phobile
WEB428 @ TechEd Europe 2005
Community Bootcamp 2005 Fully Booked
TechTalk Downloads
Registered for PDC05
Beta 2 Code Updates for "Introduction to ASP.NET 2.0"
Next week: Whidbey Training in Redmond
Impressum
What a Rip-Off
THE Ultimate T-Shirt for PMs
Favorite Waste of Time Season Starting
Silence Expectations From a Different Angle... so to speak
#develop 1.1 Beta
Regional MVP Get-Together, Vienna
Finally
Highly recommended - Etymotic mobile phone headset
TechTalk Locations Announced
#develop 1.1 Preview Release
Screen Recording with Windows Media Encoder
How to manually blue screen your computer
TechTalk Announced
Blue Screen in the Sky - Out of Motivation Error
Two more
Building Seven
Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2004 Standard Edition Service Pack 1 (SP1)
And Now for Something Completely Different: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language
Speeding up Windows XP - done right
The right tool for the job
BLfH Shop
Back from ASP / vs2005 conference
Community Wintercamp 2005 is over
Webcast now downloadable
X1 Desktop Search
InCD 4.3.11.1 solves memory issue
Next Monday: MSDN Webcast by His Chrisness
:: SiteBar :: The Bookmark Server for Personal and Team Use
MVP Award Awarded Again
Joel on Software: Advice for Computer Science College Students
Portable Firefox | Thunderbird | Sunbird
Sources of Spam
Generics – Misconceptions Abound
Free Ebook: Dissecting a C# Application - Inside SharpDevelop
Note to self: PDC 2005
#usblib - a library for low-level USB access in .NET
Top 10 Things to Be Thankful for in .NET
VirtualPC + 2GB RAM
Winning entries of the 17th IOCCC
Development Process Best Practice Train the Trainer Event
Connect Event, Barcelona, 20. - 21. October
My Channel 9 Guy
New toy, oh joy!
Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 Service Pack 1
Joel on Software: one down, n to go
#develop team blog
2GB of memory on my workstation
The Bad Old Times of IIS
#develop 1.0 released
Tour of Building 20 with Scott Guthrie
Book: Introducing Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0
Note to self: Command-line Options for XPsp2.exe and Update.exe
Flashback to 1996
It's the documentation, stupid!
Not so random OSS notes
Disagreements gone too far
this.Pose() as Expert
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 Thursday, February 21, 2008

It's been quiet on this blog recently, one reason being that it is conference season again. Last week, I was in Munich for VSone, where I did three talks:

  • LINQ to SQL
  • ADO.NET Entity Framework
  • ADO.NET Data Services

At this very moment, I am at the airport in Frankfurt waiting for my flight back from the ready.for.take.off Visual Studio 2008 / Windows Server 2008 / SQL Server 2008 launch event here in Germany. It was the biggest developer event in Germany so far (7000+ conference participants), and Microsoft gave away quite a nice package of software: VS Standard, TFS with one CAL, Windows Server 2008 Enterprise with 5 CALs plus a voucher for SQL Server 2008 that will be available later this year.

I was staffing ATE (Ask the Experts) at this event, initially for IIS7. However, we were very pleasantly surprised that the attendees showed great interest in TFS / VSTS, so I switched duties to that area (VSTS / TFS is a growing business for me as I do training and consulting for those products). Hopefully this free license will trigger more adoption because Team System is such a great tool!

Thursday, February 21, 2008 9:09:30 PM (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)  #    Comments [0]

 



 Friday, February 08, 2008

Yesterday, we found ourselves at the receiving end of an attack against one of our German Wikis that are running the ScrewTurn Wiki software. Turns out that it was a security issue even with the then latest version 2.0.23. Dario Solera - the maintainer of ScrewTurn - acted real fast when I informed him about the root cause of the attack and released v2.0.24 yesterday night.

Please download and upgrade immediately! The issue is being actively exploited (zero day if you so will).

Categories: ASP.NET | Security | this | Use the source Luke
Friday, February 08, 2008 7:54:08 AM (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)  #    Comments [0]

 



 Friday, November 09, 2007

TechEd Developers 2007 is over, and before moving on (and flying back to snow in Austria), here is the list of sessions I attended this year:

  • TLA201 - A Tour of Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5
  • OFF401 - .NET Developers Advanced Introduction to SharePoint 2007
  • TLA324 - What's New in Team System for Software Testers
  • SEC301 - CLR Security in .NET Framework 3.5
  • DAT201 - Entity Framework Introduction
  • WEB401 - Building Highly Scalable ASP.NET Web Sites by Exploiting Async Programming Models
  • TLA304 - Building Services with the Service Factory: Modeling Edition
  • DAT303 - Entity Framework: Application Patterns
  • TLA305 - Continuous Integration With and Without Team System
  • TLA307 - Improving Code Performance with VSTS 2008 Team Edition for Software Developers
  • DAT304 - Managing Unstructured Data in SQL Server 2008: Introducing the FileStream Datatype
  • TLA403 - Loose Coupling in Practice: CAB in the Real World
  • ARC401 - Designing High Performance, Persistent Domain Models
  • TLA407 - Dealing with Concurrency and Multi-Core CPUs with Today's Development Technologies
  • SBP307 - Modeling and Composition of Applications
  • TLA319 - The Joins Concurrency Library
  • TLA405 - Parallel and Async Functional Programming on .NET with F#
  • WEB403 - Securing your High-Risk ASP.NET Web Applications - A Case Study

Compared to last year, I managed to attend more sessions, however, there were also more duds. The last session (WEB403) turned out to be the one that earned the raspberry this year (a close runner-up: TLA403). Coming out on top I decided to nominate three: OFF401, TLA307 and DAT303.

Categories: .NET | this | Training and Conferences
Friday, November 09, 2007 7:15:43 PM (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)  #    Comments [0]

 



 Monday, July 23, 2007

I got myself an eval kit for RSA SecurID tokens to see how easy / hard this would be to deploy via AD. Well, I didn't get very far, that is, installation failed spectacularly in the early stages:

After this "helpful" message box setup decided to be more specific:

Ohh-Kay. Let's go to RSA and their support center (it takes roughly five clicks to get to online support, but that's another usability story) - sign in required. Hmmm. How about creating an account?

The eligibility is a real joke: "RSA customers who have a trial product (This does not include two user demos)". Excuse moi? On the Web site you told me that I was ordering a trial and in actuality it turned out to be a "2-User Promo Kit" (the moment I needed support I looked more closely on the package...) without support.

Maybe it's the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition VHD I am using?

Categories: Administration | Security | this
Monday, July 23, 2007 7:54:49 PM (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)  #    Comments [0]

 



 Thursday, June 28, 2007

"The Sony Ericsson Update Service for Windows Vista™ will be available for download on www.sonyericsson.com/updateservice in September." You ain't serious, right? This is more than annoying simply because I don't have a single computer with XP any more - not that SE software ever worked on XP either.

Categories: this | Vista
Thursday, June 28, 2007 9:34:29 AM (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)  #    Comments [0]

 



 Wednesday, June 13, 2007

On May 10th, we recorded the interview on SharpDevelop that is now live on .NET Rocks. The interview starts around minute ten in this show. I tried to give some background on project history (if you really, really want all the details: look here), some of its features, where we stand today in comparison to VS Express, what's up next (hint: version 2.2 end of this month), and what the near future holds for SharpDevelop.

After the interview I realized that I mentioned most devs only by their first name, which happens if you are part of the team for nearly seven years! Therefore, I'd like to formally apologize for any confusion this might create and point to the development team page on our Wiki. There, you will find Daniel Grunwald (current technical lead), Mike Krüger (project founder now working for Novell on MonoDevelop, read an interview with Mike), Matt Ward, David Srbecky and the many others who make and made SharpDevelop the #1 open source IDE for .NET. Thanks guys!

A couple of links in closing: Download Wiki Forum

Categories: this | Use the source Luke
Wednesday, June 13, 2007 11:35:15 AM (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)  #    Comments [0]

 



 Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Tuesday June 19th I will be doing two sessions on IIS7 - administration and programmability.

Categories: IIS | this | Training and Conferences
Tuesday, June 05, 2007 10:02:11 AM (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)  #    Comments [0]

 



 Saturday, June 02, 2007

Today marks the offical day of me switching from Eudora to Outlook 2007. I have been a long-time fan of Eudora, and it served me well over the years (oh glory days when my mail program plus mailboxes did fit on a single diskette).

With Eudora being end of life, I had to make a decision which mail client I will be using in the future - and I have to say that every single one had its moments (ever enjoyed the fun of querying multiple mailboxes on the same mail server in Thunderbird?).

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Categories: this
Saturday, June 02, 2007 5:00:24 PM (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)  #    Comments [0]

 

A couple of notes to self:

The latter is especially important if one fails to grasp how to turn the private key plus the certificate into the .pem for Stunnel. By the way, I was using CAcert. That works just fine for internal email servers.

Categories: Administration | Security | this
Saturday, June 02, 2007 4:22:41 PM (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)  #    Comments [0]

 

I have one drawer of CD / DVDs that I haven't GCed in years - and possibly won't ever. That stuff is really a trip down memory lane. For example:

In addition to the agenda for Web TechEd 1998 (the only one ever) I also still have the post conference CDs plus it's accompanying system requirements correction letter: 486 or higher and 8mb of RAM.

Speaking of hardware requirements, here is another goldie:

Chicago SDK Kit, May 1994.

There's a lot more old stuff in this drawer, and I am not going to clean it out!

Categories: this
Saturday, June 02, 2007 1:28:22 PM (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)  #    Comments [0]

 



 Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Today, I uploaded a preview of version 2.0 to CodePlex. There are two big ticket new items in comparison to version 1.3:

  • Plugin support The TFS checkin policy only tests for existence of code comments. For many applications, this is just fine. However, sometimes you also want to test for completeness of comments (i.e. a refactoring "broke" the documented parameter list). In this case you can use the new extensibility API, which comes with two sample plugins in the cccplibcontrib project. The API allows you to select which checking you want to override or complement, and you get full access to the parsed source file just like the stock implementation ("abuse" for non-code commment checking purposes obviously possible too). If you come up with a cool plugin, be sure to contact me for inclusion into the contrib project!
  • MSBuild task This build task lives in cccplib, which is entirely independent of TFS or VSTS (it was written by Matt Ward). Therefore, you can use it eg with CruiseControl.NET or simply as part of the local .*proj files. What's the purpose of this build task anyways? Simple: as part of the build, you get information on "code comment coverage", just like you do with let's say code coverage and unit tests. Currently, you only get an XML file with the report - if you are XSLT-savvy and want to contribute a HTML report transform, let me know!

To get an overview what v2 looks like, how to configure it, etc you might be interested in this demo screen recording.

Tuesday, May 29, 2007 3:19:28 PM (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)  #    Comments [0]

 



 Thursday, May 24, 2007

I have been doing some sprucing up of SharpDevelop's Web offerings today - namely the code converter. Up until today, you only could convert syntactically valid classes. Recently, Daniel implemented the SnippetParser class, which is now in use for the snippet converter (C# to VB.NET, VB.NET to C#). Note: the Web service for code conversion does support both class and snippet conversion, a Windows client sample is available for the former.

Also new (just completed a few minutes ago) is the code formatter: it uses the highlighting engine from SharpDevelop's text editor to HTML-ize a bunch of formats: ASP/XHTML, BAT, Boo, Coco, C++.NET, C#, HTML, Java, JavaScript, Patch, PHP, TeX, VBNET, XML. Again, there is a Web service available, as well as a sample using the service. This offering is built upon the HtmlSyntaxColorizer sample that can be found in SharpDevelop revisions > 2522 (currently only on the build server)

I am sure that both the snippet converter as well as the code formatter are welcome additions. Spread the word! After all, it's free.

Thursday, May 24, 2007 9:06:07 PM (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)  #    Comments [0]

 



 Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Fiddler is a HTTP debugging proxy. Although it is easy to use (a very good thing!), it is also very powerful. Point in case and why I am writing about it today is that I stumbled across a drive-by-download site (stumble is the wrong word, the URL came with what seemed like a phishing mail and that piqued my interest):

That site is actually quite clever though: when you go there the second time, it detects that it tried to infect you before and tells you that your IP is blocked. And it doesn't send a peep to a browser other than IE. Plus - and that takes the biscuit - it also verifies the referer.

But I still wanted the code, so I reset my router and started Fiddler:

Although Fiddler has tons more features, this did the trick for me in this case (if you want to learn what Fiddler can do, look here).

So what's the obfuscated script about? The short version: it is a variant of the ASUS download server drive-by download incident. The actual code can be found in a discussion on our German .NET community site here.

Categories: Cool Download | Security | this
Wednesday, February 28, 2007 3:26:38 PM (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)  #    Comments [0]

 



 Friday, February 16, 2007

Categories: this | Vista
Friday, February 16, 2007 7:51:04 PM (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)  #    Comments [0]

 



 Monday, January 15, 2007

...doesn't necessarily yield what you are looking for as the first result:

Especially #1 I would rate as misleading and advertising that leaves a very bad taste in the mouth.

Categories: this
Monday, January 15, 2007 2:31:51 PM (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)  #    Comments [0]

 



 Wednesday, January 03, 2007

For the past couple of years, I had been using SharpReader - today, finally, I switched over to FeedDemon. It simply is faster, especially at the number of feeds I have subscribed.

Categories: this
Wednesday, January 03, 2007 7:30:14 PM (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)  #    Comments [2]

 

I have been re-awarded MVP for Visual Developer ASP/ASP.NET.

Categories: ASP.NET | Community | this
Wednesday, January 03, 2007 10:37:47 AM (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)  #    Comments [2]

 



 Sunday, December 31, 2006

You will have to wait till next year to get this (and more) new functionality for the Code Comment Checking Policy. For example, a WiX-based setup:

Also in the box now: version information to easily see which assemblies are currently in use when you are adding the policy:

Also, there are a few changes to the configuration of the policy. Note that this will require you to remove & add the policy back to the team project's source control settings. The new defaults are the same values as the previously hard-coded configuration:

So check back next year!

Categories: Team System | this | Visual Studio
Sunday, December 31, 2006 3:39:10 PM (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)  #    Comments [0]

 



 Monday, December 18, 2006

Two weeks ago, during this year's AspInsiders summit, I got ahold of a 1982 (!) copy of "The Soul of a New Machine" at Half Price Books. I still have to decide whether the equally ancient Continental boarding pass DEN-SEA used as a bookmark will be kept too (I guess so), but the book is definitely worth your time - be it for a computer history lesson, or on the "signing up" concept and all other project management topics being touched on (without it being a pm book). The story in itself is more than fascinating, so although old by now, it does come highly recommended.

Categories: Books | this
Monday, December 18, 2006 5:40:42 PM (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)  #    Comments [0]

 



 Tuesday, November 21, 2006

At next year's VSone in Munich (a German developer conference taking place in February), I will be doing three talks:

  • Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals
  • User Account Control (UAC) in Your Applications
  • Advanced Code Access Security (CAS)

Two security topics, one team-development focused. See you in Munich!

Tuesday, November 21, 2006 4:21:21 PM (W. Euro