Jon Paul Davies

Developer Highway Code - Microsoft Security Best Practice eBook

  Microsoft have put together a nice little manual that sets out best practice for developer driven security. It’s choc full of techniques you can integrate into your development pursuits to build better, more secure applications.

From the official Microsoft blurb: To build software that meets your security objectives, you must integrate security activities into your software development lifecycle. This handbook captures and summarises the key security engineering activities that should be an integral part of your software development processes.
Download full book as a .pdf by clicking here

Get up to speed with Visual Studio 2008

The Visual Studio 2008 sessions at Mix 07 UK were really exciting events. There is lots of great new functionality built in, and it’s useful too! Unfortunately, ‘new’ and ‘useful’ don’t always go hand in hand when it comes to software, but elements like spilt view editing, enhanced CSS support, LINQ, the new ListView control etc. are things that I know I will be using on a a daily basis.

Here is the link to the Microsoft training videos that are already up - there are plenty more to come too.

LINQ - First Impressions

LINQ is pretty good! I’ve used plenty of ORM tools in the past, and LINQ offers a nice user experience. I spent an hour hooking up Northwind and dragging tables onto the design surface in order to generate some code and the created objects offer some cool features.
The LINQ syntax does feel a bit like writing inline SQL though, and doesn’t feel as ‘objecty’ as the entities thrown up by Subsonic. The use of the DataContext classes *seem* to offer transactions out the bag, and the hierarchy of methods and properties feel well thought out and usable.

I’m going to do a little ‘Learn LINQ’ series of posts later in the week, so stay tuned.

Microsoft WCF Webcasts on the way

A 15 part Webcast series is in the pipeline from the nice people as MS Events. Most of the basic stuff you need to know about the latest MS communication framework is going to be covered, so it’s one for the diary if you have not spent much time exploring this new technology. I’m a big fan of WCF ( even though some of the configuration can be a little cryptic ) and I’ll be sure to watch this series in order to pick up any tips and best practices.

Overview Monday July 02
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032344312&Culture=en-US

Contracts Monday July 09
 http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032344314&Culture=en-US

Contract Versioning Wednesday July 11
 http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032344318&Culture=en-US

Exceptions and Faults Friday July 13
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032344322&Culture=en-US

Bindings Monday July 23
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032344330&Culture=en-US

Hosting Wednesday July 25
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032344338&Culture=en-US

Messaging Patterns Friday August 10
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032344342&Culture=en-US

Instancing Modes Monday August 13
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032344344&Culture=en-US

Concurrency, Throughput, and Throttling Wednesday August 15
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032344346&Culture=en-US

Security Fundamentals Friday August 24
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032344348&Culture=en-US

Federated Security Monday August 27
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032344351&Culture=en-US

Reliable Messaging Wednesday August 29
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032344353&Culture=en-US

Transactions Monday September 03
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032344355&Culture=en-US

Message Queuing Wednesday September 05
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032344357&Culture=en-US

Extensibility Friday September 07
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032344359&Culture=en-US

I heart System.Activator!

If I had to pick a single class from the wide range that the .Net framework makes available, it would have to be System.Activator. This bit of code has served me well over the years to pull off all kinds of flashy stunts that never fails to impress co-workers and clients.

Well what is it? Briefly, System.Activator can take a couple of strings as input ( along with a whole host of other invaluable overloads ) that specify an assembly name and a class, and re-constitute a fully working instantiated object from them. Impressive huh?! I’ve used it to create extendible plug-in frameworks and super configurable class libraries. Just drop a new DLL in your bin folder, and existing code that has no reference to it can instantiate and use the objects within it.

If you want a crash course on using Activator to create a plug-in architecture for your application, check out Roy Osherove’s article on the subject here.

Here’s a link to the MSDN docs. So why not make today the day that you make acquaintance of System.Activator too?