UnknownReference

Windows : File download issues.

Nothing specific as such but i was just curious on something that happened recently while downloading a huge file from a site. Here goes ...

Basically, i was downloading a video file of size 80MB when my system had something about 100MB left in the hard disk. I felt it was fair enough to store the file for now, view the video and then delete it to reclaim the disk space.

But here comes the catch. When i finished downloading the huge file, the system had actually downloaded it to a temporary internet directory and then tried to copy it to the destination directory which was specified. Now why would it want to do that ??

Doing something like that would require 2 times the size of the file downloaded to be present in the hard disk. Why impart such a constraint ??? All it needs to do is to download it directly onto the destination directory. Or what could have been done is to download the file to the temporary directory and then move it, not copy to the destination directory. We know that copying a file takes much longer a time when compared to moving a file, if the destination is in the same disk. So why copy ?? But the actual implementation does neither ! Why so ?

Are there any specific security or any other implications for doing the implementation the way it has been done now ?? Any ideas ?

Link Interface 32.

Ok. Sorry about the recent lack of posts but will write about that in detail later ... For now, enjoy these links on security.

Probably most of it here is well known already but i just wanted to consolidate all the links i found out recently about security while reading on the topic ! This one is a security special :)

Improving Web Application Security: Threats and Countermeasures - This download contains guidelines for architecting, designing, building, reviewing, and configuring secure to build hack resilient ASP.NET Web applications across the application tiers, technology, and servers.
Building Secure ASP .NET Applications - A guide which focuses on the key elements of authentication, authorization, and secure communication within and across the tiers of distributed .NET Web applications.
Saying Goodbye to an Old Friend - by Michael Howard where he talks about the work going on to make the C runtime libraries more robust in the face of malicious data. A very nice read :)
Michael Howard also points out to another eBook which talks about Secure Programming for Linux and Unix HOWTO by David A. Wheeler. And he's got a blog too ... Subscribed. Have a look at all his articles here. Not everything is applicable to Linux only. Have a look.
Defend Your Code with Top Ten Security Tips Every Developer Must Know - by Michael Howard again !
Threat modeling - A nice review on thread modeling tools by Jon Udell with some good links too.
Security Policy Best Practices from GotDotNet. Read more basics at “About .NET Security”.
A site dedicated to providing security related links to SysAdmins and Hackers. Read on ...
FoundStone, Inc has a superb site with lots of resources on securing data from many of the common threats. They also have a rich Resources section where there are several webcasts and whitepapers too ...

Link Interface 31.

Some more bunch of interesting links that i found while browsing...

Microsoft Research announces Cw (C-omega) via TSS.NET. The combination of C# and Xen is what they are calling now as Cw. Check out the site for more information.
Another Object Oriented language - Scala is a modern multi-paradigm programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. It smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages. Read more about the Scala Programming Language.
A nice primitive, generic DataLayer using Generics article by Darren.
Phil Haack writes about the difficulties of language design via EricGu.
Check out the Industrial XP site. This is where the XP community shares its stories about Industrial XP. Must see.
XML Schema patterns. hmm they do look quite weird. Anyone has any clue ??

Code Humor Challenge at Kuro5hin.

There is a new article up on Kuro5hin called Code Humor Challenge.

Overall, it talks about some of the weirdo code that people do write and those which do end up in production systems ...

The author starts of with a few examples and one of them which stood out was an IntWrapper method that wraps the Integer type. Oh yeah ... This is how it goes ...

public class IntWrapper
{
  private final String value;

  public IntWrapper(int p_iValue)
  {
    this.value = p_iValue.ToString() ;
  }

  public String GetValue()
  {
    return value;
  }
}

You can't wrap the primitive Int better than that .. Can you ?!

And the best one yet is this particular post in one of the comments .. I loved the comment in the code ! Wow !

From a threaded tftp server written for class, I created a 'pocket' datatype that consisted of a tftp packet and a socket:

From a threaded tftp server written for class, I created a 'pocket' datatype that consisted of a tftp packet and a socket

struct pocket {
struct packet * p;
struct sockaddr * s;
};

(note: this was so I could pass it as one argument on the stack, using thr_create)
Hence, this comment (shamelessly stolen, apologies to Dr. Seuss and the original author(s)):
/*********************************************************
If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
And the bus is interrupted as a very last resort,
And the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort,
Then the socket packet pocket has an error to report!
*********************************************************/

WTF ?! I kept laughing my guts out on this one ... Sheer poetry and still conveys the meaning ... I wish i could write comments like that !

Read on ...

First 64-bit Windows virus sighted

Anti-virus researchers at Symantec yesterday spotted the first virus capable of infecting 64-bit Windows systems.

Rugrat was created to prove a point rather than to be released into the wild. The proof-of-concept virus poses no immediate risk to Itanic users, but as the population of IA64 systems grows that risk of 64-bit worms will also increase. The virus is also capable of infecting 32-bit computers running 64-bit emulation software.

via The Register

SharpReader, my Love, my Hate ...

This post is a tribute to my favorite blog reader's creator Luke Hutteman ! I've tried FeedDemon, FeedReader, Abilon, Syndirella, SauceReader, RSSBandit and Bloglines but nothing has yet been able to convince me other wise from using #Reader. This product is just plainly fantastic ... Now thinking about the comparison of all these readers and things i've seen in GMail also have influenced some of the way i work regularly and so i cooked up couple of points of improvement that can be applied to #Reader to make it a Ultra-Cool product. Luke, you are under no hurry to do any of this or to even try it. Its just one frustrated man's plea to his favorite reader's creator to improve the product. Read on.

Some things that can be improved and cleaned ...

Please please please ... I beg you. Reduce the memory consumed by #Reader for Gods sake ... It literally hogs the memory and in effect leaves other apps to beg for the resources on a 512MB RAM machine ... I understand that it is necessary to have all the feeds in-memory to generate the backlinks and all that, but probably you could choose an optimised lazy load pattern or use a change in the algorithm order. For eg., you could derive the backlinks for a particular post as and when the particular feed is refreshed and updated. And from further on, you could just show the data as such from the XML ! Well all this is based on my assumption after some research with reflector on #Reader ... If it doesn't work this way, then Luke, i would be glad to hear how it works ..
If i read a particular author, then all the same instances written by same author ( something like mainfeed and author feed ) should update and reflect the same status .. Now why do i have to go to the backlinks and then update the status or delete the duplicate feed ? I know that doing it this way is trivial but you know, hmm i'm lazy. Also more importantly, the whole list of duplicates shows up in the Unread post when all i have is essentially much lesser than that ! And just in case, if i delete a particular entry or a post, then if it is repeated in many places, then you could remove all instances of it too ... Eg., Say if i am subscribed to Brad Adams directly and i subscribe to MSDN blogs mainfeed and Weblogs.asp.net mainfeed directly, then for every post by Brad, i ineffect have 3 unread items in my #Reader ! What the ....
There is a bug in the subscription front. If i enter a particular feed url and keep hitting enter, then eventhough i could be subscribed once, every one of those requests ( the number of times i pressed enter) comes back with a vengeance and shows up as one of the trackback thingies for each post. Now why is that ?

I've got a couple of feature requests too. See if something is feasible.

Need a facility to sort according to the lock value for posts in a particular feed. Also if the label functionality is included, then a sort or a filter based on particular label value will be cool too !
For the subscribing part, don't allow the user to hit enter more than once for a particular feed. Even if he hits, you could check it from a queue and if it already is in the async request queue or something then don't process further. Also a messagebox or someother kind of notification to inform the user that the feed has been fetched when subscribing for hte first time would be nice too. Right now, the user has no clue when #reader is going to get the feed and has to wait till it fetches. Now that is frustrating if the site i'm subscribing is under heavy load already or very slow. It takes quite a while and all i can do is stare !
If not for a feature to copy a blog entry, let us atleast have something similar to how GMail works. Give us labels !!! Now let me explain this to the uninitiated. Labels are like flags that you can attach to a certain post or an entry and accordingly it can be searched too. These labels could be dynamically created and can be associated with any of the entries. If you delete the label, then that does not delete the entries associated with the label but instead removes the association :) Straightforward huh !
Deleting something from the Referrers list ( the backlinks ) which is shown as an entry's child node in the top view, does not really seem to delete the actual item physically. hmm may be a option to choose this feature would be great because i love and use a lot of the threaded post feature that sharpreader provides and so it would be great to mark other entries related as Read, Unread, Locked, Deleted or mark labels over it too right at the threaded juncture :)
It would be mondo cool and classical from a Cool Factor perspective if the local search can support boolean operators to perform the search. So someone can essentially query the local cache with a string like "Bill | Microsoft & Sun & !Scoble" which means search for entries containing Bill or Microsoft and Sun but not Scoble. Now ain't that cool ?! And of course that would also mean the inclusion of parenthesis to categorize the && and || together ... I can't explain in words how i'll freeze with the cool factor so high if this thing does make it into #Reader ... Whoa !
A feature to mark a post as that which was commented previously would be mega cool too ! One of the main things about blogs is that, we don't know exactly which post we comment on amongst the plethora of blogs that we read in a day. So if there is some kind of label that can be applied ( my #2 point ) then probably you could retrieve all the new comments after the comment was typed in by the user. This shouldn't be that hard if i can understand this right ...

Well guess these are some of the things that i wanted to put through for quite some time but never got enough of it at hand to write such a lengthy rant ! Luke ! You rock dude ... And #Reader definitely rocks. No matter what anyone says, i've found it the most simple interface with no gizmo graphics or anything and is straightforward in doing it's job efficiently ! And Luke, in case you need some help in doing any of the above said stuff, feel free to contact me. I'd be more than glad to help you out !!!

Interesting Programming contest ...

WARNING : This post has nothing related to .NET or any of the current technologies. I got this as a forwarded mail from a friend. It details about a programming contest once held in CMU and the results of it. Not sure whether it is true, but sure is a very interesting read. If you are still interested, then read on !...(read more)

Free .NET IDEs

There has been a lot of talk about how expensive our favorite IDE, VS.NET is right now. Charles assured in one of the replies to the post that the issue is being discussed internally and will be addressed soon. Cool ! Actually, i don't know what stand to take on this issue. Is your productivity important or the one time benefit of buying VS.NET professional edition ? It really is very confusing ...

Anyway, as our quest for a free .NET IDE continues, here's one to quench that ! Check out Eclipse for .NET ! Infact, i think i picked up this link from one of the replies, but not sure though... Eclipse as most of you would have heard is an awesome product which was developed by IBM and then later opensourced. I have heard quite a lot from fellow Java devs that the IDE is powerful compared to IntelliJ's IDE. Well i'm not the judge in either case but i definitely think that the plugin will help all those cribbing for a good IDE with C# support.

Again, #develop as many of you already know, is a very flexible IDE completely written in C# which is opensource and freely available. There is rarely something extra needed apart from #develop and ASP.NET Webmatrix for developing WinForm and WebForm code in .NET. What more do you want ?

And apart from all that, for the most hardcore developer who doesn't care for IDE features, there is one really cool app to write code in C#. Ofcourse it will not work at all for enterprise level apps but for smaller projects, definitely useful. Check out Textpad. FYI, its got syntax highlighting functionality for C# too .. Download the file here.

Code on ...

I guess, this is a pretty decent list of free IDEs to work on .NET right now. I might have missed a lot of other ones here but these are the ones that stand out quite prominently, i should say :)

Update : Just found out that the Notepad2 free utility provided at Flo's freeware site also supports syntax highlighting for C# ! And the best part is that the whole thing is customizable, just like Textpad's syntax highlight feature :) Cool.

GMail Gems

Gmail Gems - Yeah you guessed it right. It is related to Google's new email service. What better way to teach people about GMail than to open up a weblog and evangelize it !

Link Interface 30.

The news of the day : My favourite book, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is going to be made into a movie ! And they have a blog too ... Too bad they don't have an RSS subscription yet ... Ok, back to business.

A KB Article that provides a fix for a very common error in ASP.NET. Fix for "Server Application Unavailable" error message if a DLL is loaded in the 0x33A20000 address space and you request an ASP.NET page.
A very detailed article on Code Access Security (CAS) and Design Patterns.
Latest Channel 9 Video with Ward Cunningham - How did you come up with the idea for the Wiki ?
Read about the review of the new book : Hackers & Painters by Paul Graham.
There is a free online course on security at the microsoft E-learning center. Check out Clinic 2806: Microsoft® Security Guidance Training for Developers. This online clinic provides students with knowledge and skills essential for the creation of applications with enhanced security. Students will learn about the need for implementing security at every stage of the development process and best practices for applying security principles. Students will also learn how to use established threat modeling methodologies and tools with other best practices to minimize vulnerabilities and limit damage from attacks. Finally, students will learn how to implement security features to enhance security for Web applications and Web services that are built by using Microsoft ASP.NET. via Sudhakar Sadasivuni
IronPython: A fast Python implementation for .NET and Mono. A pretty neat article with lots of benchmarks and some real advice on how to improve the performance in the managed world.
Design Guidelines Update: Enum Design via BradA
A nice article on Document-Centric .NET which stresses on the principle "program to an interface, not an implementation".
Clemens gives an acronym to SOA. Guess it before you click ;)
Betting on Managed Code - An exclusive interview with Somasegar who is the corporate vice president of Microsoft's Developer Division, talks about Microsoft's new Partner program; the future of the .NET platform, in both the short and long term; and how Microsoft has learned from the open source community.
Read more about the Rules engine in Biztalk 2004.
Check out HTML-Kit - A full-featured, highly customizable development environment that can be used to create, edit, validate, preview and publish web pages and scripts.

Cool HTML META tag trick !

I was recently browsing through some links and in the end reached this page. Maybe you've looked into such pages before but this was the first one for me !

The page looks very normal but the animation effects that happened when it loads in the screen was really way too cool ! I was wondering first that it might be some scripting trick and so dived into the source to have a closer look. But i didn't find any such scripts in any of the pages. It was really scary because i knew that it will take pages of script to get that kind of thing working but this page didn't have any such reference. And then, in the top, there was this magic META tag which did the trick silently ! Check this out.

Awesome !!! The page really has a very creative effect eventhough the author of the page didn't have to spend more than probably 2 mins to whip it up and include it in the page. If you were to do this in ASP.NET 2.0, we could probably include this in a Master page for the site and be done with it !

Speaking of META tags, check out this site which has a complete list of all the valid META tags.

Also check out Shital Shah's NotepadX. It does really look cool, not to mention the source is also included ! Very cool.

Impressions on Devdays India 2004

'DevDays' - my first MS event in my short software career till now. I definitely was excited about it and after reading through the agenda covering Whidbey and Yukon, I had expectated quite a bit of mental workout. I got a pass for Devdays Bangalore after a lot of nail-biting suspenses and finally on May 5, i hoped all that was expected was about to happen.

The opening keynote was very normal, not something i had expected after reading through some of the opening notes that have been delivered recently in many conferences. hmm.. Well after that, another developer who spoke, promised us to show the nitty-gritties of programming because this is 'DevDays' ! Ha, there's something assuring, i thought.

Then we moved on to the technical sessions ... the interesting bits eh !!

The first one was about ASP.NET 2.0. They spoke about Master pages, personalisation, Role based authentication as all inbuilt features in the upcoming ASP.NET versions. Thats cool. But haven't i already read all that online. Show me something else interesting, something thought provoking, some complex application where it could be used, saving valuable developer time. But ahem, to my dissapointment, the session ended very soon without any surprises. Even the question and answer session at the end of it was very short :(

Then was the session on Winforms and CLR 2.0. The speaker detailed about Generics, partial types and Iterators. Wow cool ! Again, can't anyone read the online entries from innumerable people talking about these basics. This is not what i want or expected. What happened to the anonymous delegates, and details on all that was mentioned and all the other really neat stuff that the MS devs have spent hours to include in the upcoming release ?! Not a word. Very dissapointing really ... About Winforms, there was something new, some new controls but not anything other than that they have shown in the Winforms site.

Ok. Now comes the hands on session. How cool ! Am gonna do some cool code in Whidbey finally. I do not have to toil anymore with collections that are loosely typed with Objects. We can create strongly typed Generic classes over which we could apply constraints and manage to create a robust collection !!! With all that hope we entered the hall, only to find that there weren't enough seats left. Ugh. Share the computer with a fellow programmer. Ok. Not bad. We could do something like XP here, aha. Or so i thought. The instructor got onto the podium and started dictating exactly what to do. Hello ! These are not kids here for God's sake. Do give us the requirements, and we will code it out. If we need help, we will look into Google, MSDN or ask help from someone who knows this stuff. Don't and Never dictate. After 10 mins, i lost all the vigor with which i entered into the place. So much for hands-on sessions ...

After the lunch there was the Yukon session. There were quite a bit of surprisingly new things. But probably IMHO there was quite a bit of focus of the Reporting services, which could have been dealt with in later sessions. But anyway this one was good ! Ah at last. Then came the hands-on for Yukon. Oh God will these people never change their ways ... More dictation again ...

It was in the back of my mind that we have the 'Ask the experts' session anyway to clear all our doubts. No problem. Since this was scheduled for more than an hour, we were expecting to see some interesting questions and some thought provoking answers here. But, it was dissapointing again ! Not on the part of the experts, but on the developer's side.

Certain things dawned upon me then. Ofcourse I was not the only guy who was bugged by this contentless showcase but then we have all been following blogs and all the discussion that has been happening in the past year. May be that is the reason why these sessions weren't interesting at all. As someone said in the Keynote, I was expecting to see some hardcore nitty-gritties of programming in Whidbey and Yukon but instead it just turned out to be an overview of the basics. There could have also been an indepth session on the CLR 2.0 which covers behind the scenes on the exact kind of things that the CLR does for each of the new constructs and how it is being handled. That would have been very interesting. Also, I would have certainly liked it a lot if the speakers didn't treat the developers like kids and start popularising the absolute 'drag-drop-build an application' philosophy.

Well, at the end of the day, for all the money's worth, we got a bunch of 4 CDs containing Whidbey, ASP.NET Resource Kit and an Infopath SDK ! Cool ! But wait, where's my Yukon ??! Hey, please give me a copy ... Why did you forget that ?!

There goes my perfect sessions. What a start :(

Scoble, is there any reason or background why the DevDays sessions were like this in India ?! I'm sure i am not the only one with this opinion. Mahesh, Babu shared my opinion about the event and so did many others who had come over. Any thoughts or comments anyone ?

Link Interface 29.

Quote :

Sometimes when I reflect back on all the beer I drink I feel ashamed. Then I look into the glass and think about the workers in the brewery and all of their hopes and dreams. If I didn't drink this beer, they might be out of work and their dreams would be shattered. Then I say to myself, "It is better that I drink this beer and let their dreams come true than be selfish and worry about my own damned liver. - Jack Handy

Definitely a very cool perspective huh ;-) Will work for beer !! Ok. Time to check out these bunch of interesting links now...

There are a series of support webcasts from Microsoft that have been posted recently. Most of them talk about the internal workings of the ASP.NET infrastructure and the general nitty gritties of programming in ASP.NET. Check out the bunch of links that i found below ...

Microsoft ASP.NET Server Controls : Learn about the internal workings of custom ASP.NET server controls such as ViewState, PostBack, Events, and Rendering.
Microsoft ASP.NET Threading : An in-depth look at the Microsoft ASP.NET threading architecture, and what it means to your Web applications. You will learn how to monitor the ASP.NET ThreadPool in real time, use the real-time ThreadPool information to tweak the machine.config to yield the best performance for your application, and avoid threading trouble when using COM components from ASP.NET (especially when you are upgrading from ASP).
Microsoft ASP.NET: An Overview of Caching : Hear about the features of the different types of caching that are available in Microsoft ASP.NET, and where to use them. This also includes information that will help you gain a general understanding of how caching can improve performance in Web applications.
Data Binding in ASP.NET Web Forms : Learn how to retrieve data from different data sources and populate it in data bound controls. You will hear about various ASP.NET Web controls and the binding techniques related to them. You will learn about simple data binding, but the WebCast will focus on complex data binding.
Microsoft ASP.NET: Side-by-Side Execution with ASP.NET : A brief introduction to the side-by-side concept, which involves running multiple versions of programs and .NET Framework on the same computer. It will then discuss how those concepts apply to ASP.NET applications, both at run time and during their development, including using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET to create Web applications.

A very useful KB article that details “How to create keys by using Visual C# .NET for use in Forms authentication”. Learn and improve your encryption of form data...
Inheritance versus composition: Which one should you choose? - by Bill Venners of Artima fame. In his own words, its a comparative look at two fundamental ways to relate classes. A must read.
The list of presentations done at the EMEA Architects tour 2004 in Helsinki. Very very nice :) Don't miss this one.

Link Interface 28.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

This is a new site where there are architecture related articles, links and news. Just seen it. Nothing to comment yet. Check it out.
Building a Defensive Perimeter Against Malicious User Input - Simple and true.
The SOA Implementation Framework White Paper. See here.
A cool article on creating SQL Based RSS Feed !
A bit old article but found the idea very interesting. Yet to try out the code. Read about Circular Buffer here ...
And Google's stats show that Win XP, 2K and 98 comprise almost 87% of the OS that are used to access Google worldwide !!! Wow ! But i still can't beleive that 22% of those people are still using Windows 98 ! hmm ..

Link Interface 27.

Nothing new and you might have already noticed it, but i wanted this link here to stay for future reference.

MS presents the online SQL Server 2000 System Table Map.

Included in this document:

Log Shipping Tables in the msdb Database map
SQL Server Agent Tables in the msdb Database map
Database Maintenance Plan Tables in the msdb Database map
Replication Tables in the msdb Database map
Backup Tables in the msdb Database map
Systems Tables in the Master Database Only map
Systems Tables in Every Database map
Replication Tables in Each User Database map
Replication Tables in Each Distribution Database map

Pretty cool.

On a sidenote, a friend of mine pointed me to a post on a small performance test wrt sorting and filtering of custom collections on 1 million custom objects... Not bad. Not bad at all !