One of the hard tasks in the daily live of an IT administrator is to ensure that the network and the server are secure. The perfect security is not possible. There will always be some small leaks either provoked through the behavior of the user in version 1.0 or the administrator of the system. Not to mention design leaks in the software itself. Most environments are too large and too complex for a manual checkup of all security patches and service packs. One other factor is most users need some higher rights on their machine to do their work. This often results in disabling the windows firewall. These two scenarios are big the root of all evil.

Administration, Security MSBA, Security, server, Windows

Have you ever needed to implement configuration sections for the application configuration file with C#? If you want to implement such a section for the application configuration file you need to dive deep into the System.Configuration namespace which offers quite powerful collections and attribute based configuration methods to implement configuration sections. But there is actually an easier way to implement such a section without divining deep into System.Configuration. The solution is serialization!

.NET configuration section, DataContract, DataContractSerializer, IConfigurationSectionHandler, section

The first release candidate of version 2.0 of NMock2 – a .net dynamic mocking framework – is published.

Check it out at: sourceforge.net

You can provide feedback at: NMock2 forum

Release Notes:

• virtual/abstract classes can now be mocked (with default or transparent mock style)
• Stack traces of exceptions thrown in event handlers of events fired on mocks are preserved
• Source is now on Visual Studio 2008 (target framework is still .net 2.0)
• Events of inherited interfaces can now be fired on mocks
• internal interfaces of signed assemblies can now be mocked (contribution of Matthias Weibel)
• Swallowed exceptions are rethrown in VerifyAllExpectationsHaveBeenMet

.NET, Announcement, Software .NET, mocking framework, NMock2, unit testing

Not long ago I posted the first part of this article under:

Part I: Mimic SynchronizationContext behaviour on .NET CF

The article was intended to give the reader a better feeling of the purpose of the SynchronizationContext and the importance of the class on behalf of synchronization between different apartment threads. Unfortunately the SynchronizationContext is not available on the .NET compact framework which is especially annoying when you want to port existing code which uses the SynchronizationContext onto the compact framework platform. So how can we obtain similar functionality on the compact framework?

Mobile .NET CF, Compact Framework, Delegate, SendOrPostCallback, SynchronizationContext

I’m owner of an ASUS eeePC with 4 GB and 16 GB SSD hard drive. After changing the OS from ubuntu to Windows XP, everything works very well except the speed is a bit slow but I can live with it. The 4 GB SSD is my primary boot partition with the “%systemroot%” (“C:\” drive), so space is a little short. After all Windows updates and some program installations there are 150 MB left. This is ok for my purpose but windows starts to bother me with balloon tips.

Administration balloon, low Disk Space, tip, windows XP

As we all know the major issue with security is the user itself, because current security systems don’t consider the human factor. Most of the security measures neglect the human limitation in the real world with the result that the users are annoyed by the system. Annoyed users stop paying attention or even worse they stop considering the whole security aspect of the system they are using. OpenSSH 5.1 implements a new (experimental) feature based on an innovative visualization technology, which care about the human being.

Security hash visualization, Linux, Security, ssh

I must admit that I’m not an owner of the LaCie LaCinema Black Max but I’m a proud owner of the popcorn hour A110. The popcorn hour A110 is a small media box which plays almost every video and audio format on the market. The media box includes portal services for youtube, google video, shoutcast and many more platforms. Although I’m very pleased with this box I want to present to you the latest news about LaCie LaCinema Black Max.

Hardware A110, Black Max, codecs, Lacie, LaCinema, media, Media Box, Popcorn Hour

These are my personal top ten of software design evilness. That means ten designs that make your software either complex, untestable, monolithic, unchangeable or hard to understand:

1. Singletons
2. Enums (or other c# enumeration equivalents)
3. Swallow exceptions
4. God classes
5. Missing interface segregation
6. Monster classes
7. Too configurable, too flexible
8. Abstraction layers not providing additional abstraction
9. Try catch for program flow control
10. Missing logging

Architecture, Software Architecture, Design, Patterns, principles

Source Control like CVS or Subversion is used almost in every software project. As a developer, it’s your responsibility to be up to date with the current version from the source control system. In Eclipse there is a nice feature to schedule such synchronizations. This means, you get regularly informed about all updates and you have less merging problems!

Software eclipse, Java

Before I got into the details of the problem I want to briefly describe what the SynchronizationContext class really does and what it’s main purpose really is in the first part of the article. From that perspective I’m going to show how the basic functionality of the SynchronizationContext class can be implemented for the .NET compact framework in the second part of the article..

Mobile .NET CF, Compact Framework, Delegate, SendOrPostCallback, SynchronizationContext