All About Interop : on WSRP

All About Interop : on WSRP

A friend of mine was saying the other day that they are working on WSRP. I was surprised to hear the word. Reason being that its the first time I am hearing the word. when I queried, I was being told what WSRP is.

I did a quick search on Web Services Remote Portlets (WSRP) and its support in .NET led me to an intresting discussion on the msdn blogs.

something that is really intresting

Life, Being a Techie

Sometimes, sucks, sometimes wonderful.

Just cannot escape, nor love to escape

its part and parcel

something we go with it

hate it and love it

Help required on FLash

I am trying to call functions in flash from javascript or php or xml. I cannot change any files, I can just call the api functions. and am not sure on how to do that. I tried to look into different options as listed on the google search, but, found that none could be implemented.

Can anyone help me out on this, on how to acheive it?

I am new to this type of work. I had worked on different projects, but flash is something new. I am aware of action script alone, but not this combination.

Please help or mail me at kiranvnv at gmail with details

Security Developer Center: Regulatory Compliance Demystified

Security Developer Center: Regulatory Compliance Demystified:

I came across the above url while going through MSDN. Understanding the requirements for meeting the regulatory compliance while executing projects from US is a major task and this is something that would help everyone in understanding them clearly.

Many times, I was asked about the effect of NDA, Non-NDA, etc. Infact, I was also not aware till a few weeks earlier when a friend explained me the legal issues that could arise out of not meeting the terms and conditions laid out in NDA.

An article like this would certainly help many an individual.

Thanks for publishing one on MSDN...

CLR Inside Out: Using Strong Name Signatures -- MSDN Magazine, July 2006

CLR Inside Out: Using Strong Name Signatures -- MSDN Magazine, July 2006: "Strong name signatures (and signing in general) are a key facet of Microsoft� .NET Framework security. But regardless of how well designed .NET signatures may be, they won�t offer the maximum benefit if you don�t know how to use them properly. This installment of CLR Inside Out talks about strong names, strong name signatures, and how to use them.

A Short Refresher

Digital signatures are used to verify the integrity of data being passed from the originator (the signer) to a recipient (the verifier). The signatures are generated and verified using public key cryptography. The signer of a message has a pair of cryptographic keys: a public key, which everyone in the world knows, and a private key, which is kept secret by the signer. The verifier knows only the public key, which is used to verify that the signer knew the private key and the message.
In some cases, when some additional infrastructure is in place, digital signatures can also be used to reliably learn the name of the signer, and to ensure some chunk of data (a message, some code, or so on) has not been modified after the signer created the signature for the data.
Various mechanisms are used to implement digital signatures. The current implementation of strong names in the .NET Framework relies on the RSA public key algorithm and the SHA-1 hash algorithm."

If u forget VSS Admin Password

hmm, thinking of sharing a tip I learnt
Other day, I changed the VSS Admin password and later forgot it. I normally choose words that I can identify easily. I tried to log in using the same.
However, inspite for my umpteen attempts to log in, I could not. Its then that I decided to check Internet for ways to enter the VSS as an admin.
There were different hacks given, out of which, I found the below as simplest:
Create a new VSS database, with the same list of users you have in the original Database.
Go to the data folder of the new database and copy the file "UM.DAT"
go to the data folder of the original database and replace the file "UM.DAT" with the copied file.
You can now log in as the administrator
Side effects:
1. You have to give the password for each user and inform them again
2. You may have to give the permissions to Users for individual folders, if they were in existence.
After some research, I found a way out for #2 also. While creating the users for the new database, if you create them in the same order as you have done for the original database, the permissions would be retained as given.
I hope that this would help some one who forget the VSS Admin password.

Security Developer Center: Using Application Verifier Within Your Software Development Lifecycle

Security Developer Center: Using Application Verifier Within Your Software Development Lifecycle: "The Microsoft� Application Verifier (AppVerifier) is a runtime verification tool for unmanaged code that assists in finding subtle programming errors, security issues and limited user account privilege problems that can be difficult to identify with normal application testing techniques.
Introduction
One of the biggest challenges faced by programmers, software architects, testers, and security consultants is to understand the consequences of their applications when deployed into production. Even with access to source code, it is difficult to grasp everything that will occur during execution due to a variety of dependencies (for example. multiple groups contributing to code or leveraging external components). The Microsoft AppVerifier can play a critical role in helping to manage this complexity and the potential side effects of bugs. The AppVerifierassists in finding subtle programming errors, security issues, and user account privilege problems that can be difficult to identify during a typical test pass."

Visual Studio Magazine - Guest Opinion - Software is Too Darn Hard

Visual Studio Magazine - Guest Opinion - Software is Too Darn Hard: "Software development is too darn hard. As an industry, we spend more time discussing 'plumbing' issues like Java versus .NET, or .NET remoting versus Web services, than we do discussing the design of the actual business functionality itself.
Even when we get to the business functionality, we spend most of our time fighting with the object-oriented design tools, the form-designer tools that 'help' create the UI, the holes in databinding, the data-access code (transactions, concurrency, field/column mapping), and the database design tools"

How I Work: Bill Gates - Apr. 4, 2006

How I Work: Bill Gates - Apr. 4, 2006: "NEW YORK (FORTUNE) - It's pretty incredible to look back 30 years to when Microsoft (Research) was starting and realize how work has been transformed. We're finally getting close to what I call the digital workstyle.
If you look at this office, there isn't much paper in it. On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. I can drag items from one screen to the next. Once you have that large display area, you'll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity." ---Thanks to a colleague who forwarded this :-)

Sharing Lego blocks: Modular software reshapes the computing landscape - Technology - International Herald Tribune

Sharing Lego blocks: Modular software reshapes the computing landscape - Technology - International Herald Tribune: "The Internet is entering its Lego era.

Blocks of interchangeable software components are proliferating on the Web, and developers are joining them together to create a potentially infinite array of useful new programs. This new software represents a marked departure from the inflexible, at times unwieldy, programs of the past, which were designed to run on individual computers.

As a result, computer industry innovation is rapidly becoming decentralized. In the place of large, intricate and self-contained programs like Microsoft Word, written and maintained by armies of programmers, smaller companies, with just a handful of developers, are now producing pioneering software and Web-based services. These new services can be delivered directly to PCs or even to cellphones. Bigger companies are taking note.

For example, Google last month bought Writely, a Web-based word-processing program created by three Silicon Valley programmers. The Google chief executive, Eric Schmidt, said that Google did not buy the program to compete against Microsoft Word. Rather, he said, it viewed Writely as a key component in hundreds of products it is now developing.

These days, there are inexpensive or free software components speeding the program-writing process. Amazon recently introduced an online storage service called S3, which offers data storage for a monthly fee of 15 cents a gigabyte. That frees a programmer building a new application or service on the Internet from having to create a potentially costly data storage system.

Google now offers eight programmable components - elements that other programmers can turn into new Web services - including Web search, maps, chat and advertising. Yahoo o"

Download details: UIP Application Block

Download details: UIP Application Block: "The User Interface Process Application Block provides a simple yet extensible framework for developing user interface processes. It is designed to abstract the control flow and state management out of the user interface layer into a user interface process layer. This helps you write generic code for the control flow and state management for different applications types (for example, Web and Windows) and helps manage user's tasks in complex scenarios (for example, suspending and resuming tasks)."

Download details: Updater Application Block version 2.0

Download details: Updater Application Block version 2.0: "The Updater Application Block is a .NET Framework component that you can use to detect, download, and apply client application updates deployed in a central location. By using the Updater Application Block, you can keep smart client applications up to date with little or no user intervention. You can also extend the Updater Application Block to use custom classes for downloading files and for performing post-deployment configuration tasks."

Web Service Security

Web Service Security: "To design, develop, and deploy secure Web services, architects and developers must learn new technologies, and consider new threats associated with exposing functionality on potentially hostile networks. To prepare you to meet these challenges (both now on Web Service Enhancements 3.0 and in the future with Windows Communication Foundation), patterns & practices has created the Web Service Security guide. This guide provides a scenario-driven approach to demonstrate where different security patterns are successful, combined with a series of decision matrices to assist you in applying your own criteria for using Web service security patterns in your environment."

MSDN Solution Architecture Center: Management at the Edge in Industry Verticals

MSDN Solution Architecture Center: Management at the Edge in Industry Verticals: "Enterprises today need to be agile and flexible enough to rapidly adapt to changing business conditions by bringing new products and services to market, adjusting internally to support business changes, and tightly controlling risks. Management is critical in achieving these goals. The IT department must be able to monitor systems and discover problems and resolve them before they affect the operations; however, the legacy infrastructure used for management is consuming the majority of the enterprise's IT budget in costly maintenance activities, leaving few resources to make the IT advances required. This paper provides the importance of management at the edge in the industry verticals and how Microsoft products can help in this area. "

MSDN Solution Architecture Center: Extending Enterprise Applications with Microsoft Outlook: Architectural Design Guide

MSDN Solution Architecture Center: Extending Enterprise Applications with Microsoft Outlook: Architectural Design Guide: "Many organizations have made multi-million dollar investments in customer relationship management (CRM) systems and other line of business (LOB) applications over the last decade. Although many of these applications have delivered significant business benefits, some organizations have found that these bespoke systems have not provided the expected returns on investment. One of the argued reasons for this is that specialized enterprise systems, databases, and applications do not integrate well with information worker workflows."

MSDN Solution Architecture Center: Stored Procedure Object Interface Layer

MSDN Solution Architecture Center: Stored Procedure Object Interface Layer: "A stored procedure is a T-SQL program that executes on SQL Server and returns parameter values and/or a ResultSet. Business rules are often encoded in stored procedures, so many applications involve calling stored procedures and processing the data they return. Invoking Stored Procedures in ADO.NET requires a lot of code for each instance. It also causes the developer to switch from an OO paradigm into a functional paradigm with relational data. This is time-consuming and error-prone. Instead, SPOIL creates an OO layer of abstraction between the application and the database. At the highest level, SPOIL creates an object abstraction exposing a stored procedure as methods on managed classes."

MSDN Solution Architecture Center: A Business-Oriented Foundation for Service Orientation

MSDN Solution Architecture Center: A Business-Oriented Foundation for Service Orientation: "Service-orientation, with the advent of Web services, is the latest technology solution put forward to automate business activities. (For a good overview of SOA and related concepts in Microsoft's connected systems strategy, please refer to Service Orientation and Its Role in Your Connected Systems Strategy.) The concepts embodied by service-orientation evolved out of long-standing efforts to modularize and distribute complex computer systems that reflect and support the reality of the distributed business world."

Representing Datacenters with Logical Datacenter Designer

Representing Datacenters with Logical Datacenter Designer: "Logical Datacenter Designer (LDD) is used to create diagrams of interconnected logical servers that represent the logical structure of a datacenter. These logical datacenter diagrams communicate important information to the developer about the target deployment environment. Using this designer, infrastructure architects can specify and configure the types of servers in the datacenter, the types of communications allowed, specific communication pathways, and types of services enabled. Logical datacenter diagrams will typically be created and owned by infrastructure architects, but will be used by developers. "

: Modeling and Tools: Introduction to Logical Datacenter Designer, Part 2

: Modeling and Tools: Introduction to Logical Datacenter Designer, Part 2: "Logical Datacenter Designer is used to create models that describe the policies and logical structure of a datacenter, including servers, firewalls, communication paths, security constraints, and other configuration requirements that affect the deployment of application systems into a datacenter. Here, we'll look at how to build a simple model using the Designer."

: Modeling and Tools: Introduction to Logical Datacenter Designer, Part 1

: Modeling and Tools: Introduction to Logical Datacenter Designer, Part 1: "Logical Datacenter Designer is used to create models that describe the policies and logical structure of a datacenter, including servers, firewalls, communication paths, security constraints, and other configuration requirements that affect the deployment of application systems into a datacenter. Logical Datacenter Designer is integrated with other Distributed System Designers, included in Visual Studio Team System. All of the designers leverage a common XML-based metafile format known as the System Definition Model (SDM). Logical Datacenter Designer is an effective tool for communicating between IT professionals and system architects."