Scott Mitchell presents the first 3 tutorials in a series that will explore techniques for authenticating visitors through a web form, authorizing access to particular pages and functionality, and managing user accounts in an ASP.NET application. Tutorials are available in both VB.NET and C# versions.

When using WCF, you may want to integrate your security model into your application using claim based security. At this point, you will come across ServiceAuthorizationManager, which is responsible for evaluating policy statements to determine if the user is authorized to perform the requested operation. There is an interface, IAuthorizationPolicy, which you can implement to add your own claims to be evaluated by your ServiceAuthorizationManager implementation... there is one problem with this approach: the documentation you will find will most likely tell you to override CheckAccess in ServiceAuthorizationManager. However, if you merely override CheckAccess as in most of the provided samples, you will never see the output of your IAuthorizationPolicy implementation. As it turns out, the default implementation of CheckAccess sets up your security context as expected, but overriding CheckAccess will prevent this setup code from happening. Instead, override CheckAccessCore and your Security Context will be set up properly (the default implementation of CheckAccess sets up the context and then calls CheckAccessCore), or call base.CheckAccess as the first line in your handler to ensure that the basic setup of the security context happens before your code executes. This will save you hours of frustration.

 Why in the world Microsoft didn't just split this up into two distinct methods such as InitializeSecurityContext and CheckAccess is beyond me. Generally Microsoft does a great job of Framework design, but this case seems to be an exception.

This article discusses how to create an HTML Editor server control for use within an ASP.NET AJAX environment.

This article explains how to obtain automated reports on the unhandled exceptions thrown by your methods, by integrating Exception Hunter – a new analysis tool from Red Gate Software – with CruiseControl.NET.

AFP - A group of university students posed tough questions about Cuban society to Parliament chief Ricardo Alarcon, in a video made public through the Internet and distributed in Havana that is causing a stir in the communist-ruled country.

A few days ago I was asked to do a version of my XMLSerializer post in C#. 

Well it was more like a week or two ago but either way here it is.  For explanation on what I'm doing in the code please refer back to my original post.

http://weblogs.asp.net/davidyancey/archive/2008/01/23/writing-xml-with-xmlserializer.aspx

Download

 

We’ve published over 3 dozen new controls contributed by community members across many categories. Find new controls for media, ecommerce, encryption, forms, AJAX extenders, data providers, communication, email, and more in our Control Gallery!

Use the Presentation Model pattern in ASP.NET web site, Windows Forms and WPF

A simple VB.NET SQL Helper that can help you make your web/windows application like never before

Upon checking rumors that SP1 for Vista was released today, I stumbled upon something else.

That's right. Windows Server 2008 is available for download from the MSDN website! Check the date.

 

Writing asynchronous code requires repetative programming if you have synchronous method stubs aswell.This code generator creates them for you.

I posted this on my GeeksWithBlogs blog a while ago (3 years)...  I've gotten a few questions about it recently, so I figured I'd post it here and see if it's helpful.

Ever wondered how to reset IIS on a remote (local network) machine?

Pop open the command prompt, and type:

iisreset <machine_name>

That's all.

You must be an administrator of the remote machine (on the same domain) or have the same credentials as an administrator on the machine (not on the same domain) for this to work.

(HT)

Expandable/Collapsable rows in grid using Javascript to show and hide.

An article providing JavaScript code which allows you to parse the DOM of your website easily in a cross-browser fashion

Reader Georges asked the other day via the Contact link:

Do you have a list of the national standards supported by the various collations that Windows and SQL Server and .NET support?

And similarly, regular reader Ivan Petrov asked in the Suggestion Box:

Hi Michael,

Do you have a list with the supported Keyboard layouts by Windows and the corresponding standard documents in which they are defined with their full document numbers and titles ?

I mean national standards like ANSI (US), DIN (DE), GOST (RU) and etc. or any other Standards like ISO, EN and etc. or Norm documents .

I will be very grateful to you if you post such a list as attachment to a post.

Regards,
Ivan.

Funny having two such similar questions in two areas so completely different from each other, no? :-)

The answer is really the same for both questions (fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view)....

And that is no such list really exists.

Both keyboards and collations are attempts by Microsoft to capture language and market requirements and include them in Windows, and although standards are an important source of inspiration for each, the connection between them is seldom so complete that one could really claim that they are 100% implementations (as an example, some National collation standards tend to specify behavior for punctuation as well as language, while Windows does not tend to change its punctuation-specific behavior for individual locales).

Also (and this is me just speculating), if we documented such a direct connection via a compliance claim, Microsoft could be required to break its own stability guarantees regarding results anytime there was such a difference between the MS implementation and the one in the standard -- and changes in the standard would lead to new sorts and keyboards being needed whether they are used in country or nor....

Instead by using standards as "important, knowledgeable informants" to be considered alongside other sources of information, the appropriate distance is kept that allows the unique technical factors affecting Microsoft platforms to be taken into account without leading to conformance problems....

In addition, I am kind of being polite by implying that National standards for keyboards and collation differ from Microsoft only in such details and that they are completely valid descriptions with no problems in them; there are definitely times where (were I a less polite version of myself) I could easily start blasting countries or regions for flaws within their standards, causing all sorts of incidents.

And of course there are the times (especially in keyboards, especially with MSKLC available) that a government standard is the source for the layout that we ship which differs from their actual standard in some way (we do not do compliance testing on such things since of course it isn't our job to make sure they are following their own standards in such cases!), and putting direct connections on a web page (even a non-official page such as blogs are!) could easily get Microsoft into an uncomfortable support situation.

So I apologize to both Ivan and Georges for not having such lists (or similar lists for code pages that I to put up here). Sometimes the best way to not find oneself holding onto something nasty is to not pick it up in the first place....

 

This post brought to you by dž (U+01c6, aka LATIN SMALL LETTER DZ WITH CARON)

We are excited to launch the ASP.NET Developer Wiki Beta! With the initial content provided by Scott Hanselman we invite you to browse the content, leave comments, subscribe to the RSS feeds, and submit your own updates to share with the community. Receive community recognition points for your contributions and give us feedback.

Scott Hanselman just announced the launching of the ASP.NET Wiki (Beta).  If you are wondering why a Wiki this is what Scott has to say:  "To provide a targeted, categorized, human-hand-edited, and living Wiki for finding answers to ASP.NET questions."

If you have some great content on your blog that is not in there, get it in there.  :)

Cross posted from my blog at http://schema.sol3.net/kbarrows

There are lots of articles on the net about doing this but there were some things that I found really problematic in my efforts to get an update out. My Business Problem My company uses Scrum (generally) for project management. Therefore, we have planned "Sprints" that break down into tasks. These sprints have start and end dates and a status value. There is a specific project that is quite large and will involve a number of sub-projects that will be managed individually. So, naturally, we set up...(read more)

Check out the first Developer Cubed Comic strip "Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows".

To stay up to date with the latest comics, bookmark Visual Studio 2008 Portal.

~ Jen

This article provides an implementation of a POP3 MIME client using .NET 2.0 and C#.