I feel like I’m in the homestretch of my migration off of my current hosting provider – FullControl. Nothing against these guys; they’ve been an absolute stellar service provider. I just don’t need the dedicated virtual server I was paying for with them. It’s a short story that came down to rightsizing my hosting provider to align with my current needs. I’ll tell the somewhat longer version of the story in this blog post though since there are a couple of interesting corollaries along the way.
I recently had the opportunity to look into and make use of the Microsoft System.Security.SecureString class. This class is one of those dark corners of the .NET Framework that you don’t think about on a day-to-day basis but are really glad that it’s there when your security auditor starts asking questions about how PII data such as social security numbers are protected while resident in memory. The SecureString class takes care of this problem, helping you avoid a situation where unencrypted sensitive String data is left lingering around on the .NET heap. However, since this class does reference unmanaged memory buffers, its use is not entirely intuitive. I’ve attempted to demystify things with the explanation, drawing and code snippets in this post.
I’ve included below my Amazon.com review of the book “Making It Big In Software: Get the Job, Work the Org, Become Great”. I diligently read this book from cover to cover and just couldn’t seem to like it. It became pretty monotonous after a while to go through what felt like a very academic handling of what could have been a very interesting topic. This is in stark contrast to the other book I’m reading now, “Delivering Happiness” by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, which is a pragmatic blow-by-blow tale of how someone actually made it big by leveraging technology. My review:
Everybody loves lists of tools. Scott Hanselman’s annual list of Windows tools has been immensely popular over the years and has opened my eyes to a bunch of new tools. The topic of tools has also been the subject of some very popular books, such as Windows Developer Power Tools and Java Power Tools.
These tool discussions are also recurring themes on all of the major discussion forums. It seems that every so often one of these questions hits StackOverflow and everyone chimes in with their favorite current tools. Invariably, for the .NET tool lists, there are some tools that always show up and; enjoying near universal advocacy in the .NET developer community. This includes tools like Reflector and Fiddler on the free side and Ants Profiler and Resharper on the commercial side.
I was up at Penn State IST school this past week giving a lecture to a class as part of our recruiting. As part of the class, which was about application integration, I touched on the HTTP protocol. I believe that it’s extremely important that everyone starting out in web application programming or web-based integration have a deep knowledge of the HTTP protocol. Although you should eventually read a book about HTTP and ultimately read the protocol itself, sometimes it’s easier to learn by tinkering. Along these lines, I thought it would be interesting to provide a quick demo of using Fiddler to inspect the HTTP protocol. I’ve included the screencast here. My apologies for the speed of the screencast. I was in a hurry to get it done and it sounds like I had an energy drink of five too many when I did the voice-over.
Performance counters for WCF have been available ever since the first release of WCF with the .NET 3.0 Framework. As long as these counters have been available, Microsoft has been cautioning about the memory requirements and potential performance degradation associated with insufficient shared memory allocation. I thought that I had heard at the PDC that WCF 4 would fix some of this but going back to the WCF session video, it looks as if these counters won’t really be addressed by WCF 4 but instead superseded by the ETW instrumentation present in AppFabric. So, until everyone moves to AppFabric, I see a need for a bit more guidance than the “allocate enough memory” that Microsoft offers us.
I’ve been blogging for 4 years now and never have filled out the “About Me” section on my blog. I’ve had good intentions for a while but just never got around to it because my vision involved scanning in a bunch of older materials. I’ve finally carved out a bit of time to update the default blurb with suitable material, which you can find here. Unless you’ve known me for a long while, you’re sure to find out an interesting new thing or two. Give it a look!