February 2005 Entries

MSDN Event

Today myself along with other members of the .NET User Group atteneded the MSDN Event presentation by Mike Benkovich, our Developer Community Champion. The presentation material like usual, gave a pretty good starting point for developers to follow with their wondering minds. To me the highlight of this event was the showing of Visual Studio Team Systems. All I have to say this is something all developers (yes, architects are developers too) will find extremely useful for managing enterprise projects. All of course, is built on Whitehorse which from the start seemed pretty kick-a**, now after a several...

posted @ Tuesday, February 22, 2005 10:53 PM | Feedback (617)

Windows Development Webcasts in C#

While look through microsoft.com's webcast events, I ran into their Modern Software Development Using C# series. It's a series of 15 webcasts that will cover a range of topics dealing with Windows development. So if you are just starting on .NET or are interested on the subject feel free to check them out. This is the compliment to the previously released VB.NET sessions.

posted @ Friday, February 18, 2005 5:48 PM | Feedback (615)

Yet Another Indigo Post

This material from Don Box is a little dated, but it covers our soon-to-be-friend [ServiceContract] pretty well. Also, Nick and I were scetching some ideas on the board of how to come up with a pseudo-Indigo for dnfx 1.1...our ideas are some what rough, but I think there's something brewing.

posted @ Thursday, February 17, 2005 9:10 AM | Feedback (614)

Valentine's Day, TiVo and AsyncHttpHandlers

I received a special Valentine's Day present yesterday that came in an orange box ... that's right, a TiVo (as if the title of this post didn't give it away)! Honestly, I feel that my wife got cheated out of a gift this valentine's day; I got her roses, she got me a TiVo...granted what's mine is her's. So why AsyncHttpHandlers in the title, you ask? Well, while waiting for my wife to get ready I read through this really good article on AsyncHttpHandlers from Fritz Onion on MSDN. If your web application does a lot...

posted @ Tuesday, February 15, 2005 11:00 AM | Feedback (613)

Indigo, The Unifier

I just finished reading, Dave Chappell's article on Indigo. Man, I can't wait until we have access to the CTP! If I were to pull three main points from the article, I will say the following: Indigo surely emcompases all 'distributed' computing technologies under an easy to use bundle (see Nick's post). Indigo pushes developers to think of services as components of their applications rather than something mystical and external to their application. Indigo makes you wonder if your current (serviced|distributed)-architecture can withstand a smooth migration. The most interesting section of the article was titled Coexistence and Migration. Dave outlines how...

posted @ Thursday, February 10, 2005 8:22 PM | Feedback (618)

IL Nerver Lies

Currently, I'm doing a lot of work in VB.NET...yeah, I know...so if you take a look at my VB code, it has a a bit of a C-hint to it. I guess, I just miss some of the nice language constructs C# has to offer. In particular, the terniary operator (? operator). After making writing several pseudo-terniary statements in VB, I decided to look at the IL that makes up the C# and VB.NET statements. So, let's take a look at the C# statement first: namespace Lozanotek.Examples {     using System;     public class TerniaryTest     {         public TerniaryTest()...

posted @ Wednesday, February 9, 2005 11:18 AM | Feedback (615)

ASP.NET Quick Read

Dino posted a great little article about common web attacks and methods of preventing them with the help of ASP.NET. I specifically like the Session Hijacking section cause that's a topic that sometimes is overlooked by many developers.

posted @ Monday, February 7, 2005 2:08 PM | Feedback (613)

Two Down, Three To Go

Well, I just finished my second MCAD/MCSD exam, 70-320 XML Web Services. I'm glad it's all over cause I've been postponing this exam for quite some time now...I figure, why wait? Just get it over with! I find myself questioning the way my self-paced book approached the different topics (Windows Services, Component Services, Web Services). I specially liked the fact the way the book implemented some ws examples that used DataSets. Why do I say this? Well, after reading Rocky's posts on passing DataSet objects through Web Services, I just have to chuckle at the...

posted @ Monday, February 7, 2005 1:50 PM | Feedback (613)

I'm just too geeky

Ok, some of you out there will agree with the title of this post. But that's not its point! While browing the Daily WTF, I bumped into these images and just couldn't stop laughing!     The past part about it is that you can get t-shirts and mugs!

posted @ Friday, February 4, 2005 10:13 AM | Feedback (612)

Thanks Jeff!

I would like to extend a big thank you to Jeff for taking the time to come down and give a presentation to our group! Also, thank you to all that attended! Eric, Nick and I were talking after the meeting and we all decided if we keep getting more people at our meetings that we will need to find a bigger room! (A problem that we will love to have, so help us out!) Also, a huge, huge thank you to Grandview College for allowing us to use their facilities and supporting since our beginning! For more information about our...

posted @ Thursday, February 3, 2005 12:34 PM | Feedback (615)

Java and .NET Open Source Projects

On Monday, Nick had a great post about how some popular Java open source projects, "frameworks", are now creaping into the .NET "Open Source Scene". Jeff also, had a good input about the "get it out the door" .NET mindset. Then Kent posted about how MS got developers hooked into the "just glue it attitude." Here are my two cents on the issue...Having been heavily exposed to both .NET and Java (J2EE), I say that yes if you want a shot time-to-market development, then .NET is the answer for your solution. However, if you want a robust framework that will ship...

posted @ Wednesday, February 2, 2005 11:54 AM | Feedback (613)

Iowa dotNET User Group Meeting

Tonite we have our monthly dotNET User Group Meeting at Grandview College. Our speaker this evening is good ol' Jeff Brand and the topic at hand is an overview of ASP.NET 2.0. Here's more information about the meeting: Wednesday Feb 2nd, 6:00pm 5:45 - 6:15 : Pizza & Pop 6:15 - 7:30 : ASP.NET 2.0 Overview This session will provide an overview of the new features and capabilities in ASP.NET 2.0. It will include demonstrations of key new technologies including personalization, membership and themes/skins. Speaker: Jeff Brand is a .NET Architect for Microsoft. Jeff assists customers in evaluating, developing and deploying...

posted @ Wednesday, February 2, 2005 10:33 AM | Feedback (615)

Windows Authentication: Creating Your Own Windows Principal

The System.Security.Principal.WindowsPrincipal class was intended, according to MSDN, to allow code to check the Windows group membership of a Windows user. For example, ADO.NET uses this class to access a SQL Server resource when the connection string specifies the usage of Integrated Security by accessing it via the Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentPrincipal property. Of course, if you are going to have a WindowsPrincipal, you need a System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity, a representation of a Windows user, class to interact with it. Unfortunately, you cannot create an identity from a constructor or managed method. Instead, you are restricted to use the Win32 API function LogonUser that's under...

posted @ Tuesday, February 1, 2005 10:01 PM | Feedback (621)