Nairooz Nilafdeen's Blog

A feature that every one loved in VS 2005 is to just type in you class and press Alt+Shift+F10 and Visual studio shows you the options to add the using statements. VS 2010 this has been extended, to create class stubs for you while you code. For an example, if I want to use a class called Person in my code and if the Person class is not there yet in your code base, all you got to do is type the following. Person p = new Person() Press Alt+Shift+F10 and it will show an option asking if it should create the stub Person, if you say yes, VS will create the Person class for you in your current project. Now next when you need to put a property into the Person class all you have to do is : p.Name = "Jack"; again press Alt+Shift+F10, and tell VS to create the property, now in the person class you will see the property Name. You can do the same to generate method stubs as well.

I started using the AntiXSS library that comes with the Microsoft Web Protection Library (WPL), this library gives you several APIs that can be used to protect your application from Cross Site Scripting (XSS). So, What is an XSS attack?, this is where a malicious user injects scripts into the web page the user is viewing and the script runs as part of the response from compromised web site. As a simple example, lets say a malicious user enters a comment on a blog post, with the comment he also appends a script that runs for 1000 times where a alert box is displayed. Now every time a user views the comment section of the particular post, the script would execute. An extream scenario would be where a user enter a script in the comment box where the script passes on the session id or a cookie of the logged in user to the hacker's web site. In not these cases, if the input of the comment text box was scanned for any malicious code before saving it to a data source. WPL supports APIs th...

So how do you access data from one database to another? (specifically talking about SQL SERVER) One possible way you can do is to create a Linked Server to the database you want to connect to. The easiest way to do this is to go to Management Studio, right click on "Server Objects" and click "New Linked Server" Now on the "New Linked Server" dialog you have 2 ways you can create a Linked Server. 1) Create a Linked Server pointing directly to a SQL SERVER instance 2) Create a Linked Server pointing to several set of supported data sources, this includes OlE DB data sources and also SQL SERVER. I prefer choosing the 2nd option to create a linked server to SQL SERVER, although I can do this easily by using the first option, the 2nd option gives me the flexibility to easily change my data source without effecting any objects that use it. For an example, if you use option one, you can access an object (eg an SP) in the other database by using a 4 part name, as ...

I was trying out Visual Studio 2010, but was disappointed that they have not included Workflow templates into the express edition (They did not in the 2008 express edition too.) However, you can still create workflows, as it is part of .NET 4.0, but with a lot of pain, that is you have to manually code what ever the designer does for you in the normal editions !. Well, this is where I start hating Microsoft :)

Yesterday, I completed my training on Windows Workflow foundation. In my opinion, it yet a new tech and provides you with a set of good features. However, a question that was racing my mind all the time was, why the hell do you need workflows, I mean almost all programs that we write have activities and business logic within them, so what the big use of using a framework to model workflows. These were some of the pointers the trainer think of if you need to go for workflows. 1) Activities can be clearly identified with boundaries 2) Whether to use state machine workflows can be determined if the logic is push based and not pull based 3) When rules need to be customized externally without rebuilding the system. 4) You have huge number of human interaction (to determine if you need to use state machines) 5) Long running process that can be done asynchronously without user intervention On the other hand, MS Workflow foundation has its own advantages. 1) A cool designer support. 2) Custom...