Tragedy on the information super highway!

seattlepi.com Microsoft Blog

seattlepi.com Microsoft Blog: "New IE, free anti-spyware
Two of the pieces of news emerging from Bill Gates' keynote address at the RSA Conference this morning:
Microsoft plans to offer a new version of Internet Explorer, IE 7.0, on its own, with a widespread beta version coming this summer. The company had been planning to wait until the next version of Windows, due in 2006, to come out with the new Web browser.
The company will make the finished version of its anti-spyware product available to Windows users at no charge. That could complicate matters for existing vendors of anti-spyware software.
During his keynote address later in the morning, Symantec CEO John Thompson addressed Microsoft's broader security initiatives:
'We applaud Microsoft's security initiatives. They are very necessary -- but in my opinion, not sufficient for large enterprises. They don't offer a cross-enterprise, heterogeneous solution and genetically they may be incapable of doing so.' As a result, he said, Symantec and other companies specializing in security software 'will always be a better alternative. We provide common tools across the many disparate environments present in every large enterprise, and we aren't distracted by computer games and a host of unrelated security stuff going on.' "

A Girls's Guide to Geek Guys

Something interesting that I came across. I hope you will like it ;)

So, your crush on the bass player from Vibrating Sandbox has finally died a whimpering death and you're wondering where to go from here. All the sinister dudes are either dating a series of interchangeable high-school riot girls in baby doll dresses and an overdose of manic panic, or permanently shacked up with some bitter old lady who pays all the bills. Which will it be, a wifely prison or a humiliating one night stand? Into this void of potential mates comes a man you may not have considered before, a man of substance, quietude and stability, a cerebral creature with a culture all his own. In short, a geek.

read full article by Mikki Halpin and Victoria Maat
is available here

Writing Secure Code

.NET Security or Writing Secure Code in .NET is my one of new found interests as far technical stuff is concerned. I had already delivered a couple of presentations on this as well.
A lot of people are usually un-aware of secure coding or lack skills in this domain. Another thing worth mentioning here is that we usually dont get to see a lot of text available on this either. I have came across a couple of very good books on secure coding on Microsoft Platform. One is "Writing Secure Code" (2nd Ed) , I got this book from INETA quarterly kit and this is an awesome resource on secure coding. This book doesnt target .NET rather its a general guidance for Windows Developers, it has a chapter dedicated to .NET. This book also contains an excellent work on "Buffer Overflow" problems and rates Buffer Overflows as Number One Enemy!.

The second book that i have on security is specifically for .NET people and i tell you that its a must read for any serious developer, this book is titled as "Security for Visual Basic .NET" .Although the name might suggest that this book specifically targets Visual Basic .NET but i always read it as language independent source for secure coding apis and concepts.

Another good book that I have come across is "The .NET Developers Guide to Windows Security" ( but i dont own this book) , this book is available as a wiki by Kieth Brown at http://pluralsight.com/wiki/default.aspx/Keith.GuideBook.HomePage. I havent read too much of it though, but i still find this book well written and comprehensive resource for .NET Security.

Locking for Synchronization

If you have a scenario where a piece of code/resource is called/accessed by more than one execution sequences (threads for example) asynchronously, and you want the target piece of code/resource to be exclusively available to one caller/accessor at a time then lock statement in C# is the right tool for you.

Recently we were facing a similar issue in our Replication/Warehousing service where the timeout event of timer control was spawning new calls to code while the previous call has not finished executing. This was a problem because we were loosing the maintained states and transactions were not being processed, since connections were already listed in transactions (in previous call i.e.). What we did to resolve this issue is that we enclosed our critical code in lock and synchronization was guaranteed !

Here is the code snippet we used:


lock(this)
{
if ( System.DateTime.Now.Hour >= 0 && System.DateTime.Now.Hour < 9)
{
if ( System.DateTime.Now.Day.ToString() != "Monday" )
{
RepSer.ControlProcessor.ServiceMain();
}
}
}

Rainbow portal rocks!

I recently completed developing/configuring funcitonal prototype for my banks intranet portal. I based my portal on Rainbow Portal, which is one of the most powerful open source portal available on .Net Platform. It has around 70 plug in modules (out of which 45 modules are available as part of standard release), support for 17 langugaes and even more larger developer community. This all ensures a quality product full of useful features. Its easy to configure it and get it running in a shortest possible time. It also provided hosting of multiple portals on a single code base. If you want to learn more about rainbows powerful features then read the anatomy of Rainbow Portal here :