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New password-stealing virus targets Facebook

| Friday, March 19, 2010
Hackers have flooded the Internet with virus-tainted spam that targets Facebook's estimated 400 million users in an effort to steal banking passwords and gather other sensitive information.

The emails tell recipients that the passwords on their Facebook accounts have been reset, urging them to click on an attachment to obtain new login credentials, according to anti-virus software maker McAfee Inc.

If the attachment is opened, it downloads several types of malicious software, including a program that steals passwords, McAfee said on Wednesday.

Hackers have long targeted Facebook users, sending them tainted messages via the social networking company's own internal email system. With this new attack, they are using regular Internet email to spread their malicious software.

Read more: Reuters

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Project Manager’s vs. Developer’s View

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Flame: A Different Kind Of Online Drawing Tool

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Flame  is an online painting program, but it’s very different to other online tools available such as Aviary. It’s part of an experimental project called “I am artist” created by Peter Blaškovič of Escape Motions. Below you can see a screengrab of the entire user interface.

FlameApplication2_thumb.jpg

Read more: sitepoint
Official site: Flame

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Woman of the Year!

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Yahoo Pipes на страже автоматизации загрузок

| Thursday, March 18, 2010
Многим из нас нравится загрузить RSS ленту в utorrent(или ему подобный поддерживающий загрузки с лент), настроить правила и в дальнейшем не заботясь о выходе новых серий любимого сериала, передач, видеть их скаченными по-приходу домой. И все хорошо, когда речь идет о Новафильме или Лосте, но мир не сошелся на них клином, часто хочется настроить автоматическую загрузку с другого трекера. А трекер конечно, как на зло не содержит в своей RSS ленте ссылки на .torrent файлы, ведь авторы хотят чтоб вы постоянно заходили к ним на сайт и набивали счетчик посещений, проводили там свое время.

Сразу оговорюсь для чего мне это нужно. Я любитель посмотреть некоторые передачи регулярно выходящие на российском телеэкране. Все они постоянно записываются и выкладываются на различных «релизерских» трекерах, которые записывают ТВ вещание. В данной статье я рассмотрю такие как BigFANGroup и Кинозал.ТВ. Но вот беда, администрация забыла сделать понятной RSS ленту для торрент клиента, а может просто не захотела, ведь стоит мне настроить автоматическое скачивание и они лишатся уникального посещения каждый день. Сейчас с помощью Yahoo Pipes, мы решим эту проблему.

На примере 2-х нужных мне трекеров я попытаюсь просто и понятно объяснить, как оптимизировать их ленты для автоматической загрузки. По аналогии данные способы можно применить и к любым другим ресурсам.

Read more: Peer-to-Peer

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20 + tags introduced in HTML5 you really should know

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HTML 5 reduces development costs by making precise rules on how to handle all HTML elements, and how to recover from errors. It aims to reduce the need for proprietary plug-in-based rich internet application (RIA) technologies such as Flash, Silverlight, Pivot, and Sun JavaFX.

1. Article
2. Aside
3. Audio
4. Canvas

Read more: web developers juice

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Microsoft Employees Reveal Something Incredible

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I bring you two pieces of shocking news this afternoon.

No, really, sit down. I'm not responsible for the consequences if the following information causes your knees to give way out of pure shock. Are you ready? Phone in hand, just in case the news proves too much for your ticker and you need to dial 911? Then here we go:

Shocking Item One: Some 10,000 Microsoft employees use the iPhone, at least based on unnamed sources quoted in The Wall Street Journal, who apparently pulled the information from smartphones accessing the company's e-mail system. (That's around 10 percent of its worldwide workforce.)

Read more: Microsoft Watch

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Cracking open five of the best open source easter eggs

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apt.png

A number of humorous yet undocumented features are hiding beneath the surface of some of the most popular open source software applications. Although easter eggs are generally easy to spot when you can look at an application's source code, there are a few that aren't widely known.

Google's Goats
GNOME's fish
OpenOffice.org games
Firefox Robots
Super cow powers

Read more: ars technica

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Installing and using Apache Cassandra With Java

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I’m going to write a few postings on how to use the Cassandra database with Java, although i am in no way an expert on how to use Cassandra i am very intrigued about the database because of it’s small installation, high performance and scalability. During the writing of these posts i am also learning the Cassandra database and i’m sharing my experiences with it through my posts on this blog.

Like i said before, Cassandra is a very high performing and scalable database, it doesn’t follow the normal SQL database principles like schema’s, tables / columns, datatypes and a query language like SQL. Instead it’s a non-relational database similar to Google’s BigTable. Cassandra was initially developed by Facebook which has contributed it to the open source community. Currently it is used by websites like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Rackspace and many others. So even though it is still only version 0.6 at the time of writing this it has already proven itself in production environments.

Some of the key-features of Cassandra:

   * Fault Tolerant – Data is automatically replicated to multiple nodes for fault-tolerance. Replication across multiple data centers is supported. Failed nodes can be replaced with no downtime.
   * Decentralized – Every node in the cluster is identical. There are no network bottlenecks. There are no single points of failure.
   * Flexible – Read and write throughput both increase linearly as new machines are added, with no downtime or interruption to applications.
   * Highly Available – Writes and reads offer a tunable ConsistencyLevel, all the way from “writes never fail” to “block for all replicas to be readable,” with the quorum level in the middle.

Read more: Sodeso

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XBrowser - Headless Browser for .Net

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XBrowser is a "headless" web browser written for .Net applications using C#. It is designed to allow automated, remote controlled and test-based browsing sessions without any actual rendering overhead.

Whilst this is a new codeplex project, it has actually been used privately throughout several commercial projects, so has a good amount of maturity and debugging already behind it. As of first commit though, there is some tidy up and refactoring yet to be done before I am satisfied with giving it a "1.0" label.

Currently there is no support for JavaScript; it is purely and simply HTML-based with session/cookies persistence, GET and POST operations, HTML parsing and an internal LINQ-to-XML-based document querying system.

There is much to do but it is certainly usable in its current state.

Please expect breaking changes in future releases.

Read more: Codeplex

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NoSQL – Not only SQL

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ממי לביא העלה בפוסט המצויין שפירסם את הטעות שביצירת סכמת בסיס נתונים "גנרית" על בסיס נתונים רלציוני בעל יכולות ACID. כפי שאני רואה את זה הנושא שממי העלה הוא חלק ממרחב הבעייה הכללי העוסק בשימוש בכלי הנכון למטרה הנכונה. בהקשר של Data bases, או במונח הכללי יותר של data stores, אכן עולה צורך בבסיס נתונים גנרי עבור מערכות. הצורך עצמו לגיטימי בסוגי מערכות רבות ולכן רצוי למצוא עבורו את הפתרון הנכון ביותר. כפי שממי הסביר בצורה נכונה sql server או אף Oracle Database אינם בהכרח מתאימים לסוג כזה של אכסון ואחזור מידע.

אחד הפתרונות הקיימים לצורך זה הינו בקבוצה גדולה של data stores המאוגדים כולם תחת שם נושא כללי של NoSQL. למרות שבתחילה חלק אנשים שונים בתעשייה התייחסו אל הנושא כשלילת המודל הרלציוני בחיפוש אחר מודל חדש "טוב יותר" היום ברור לרוב העוסקים בתחום שמדובר למעשה ב"לא רק SQL".

אז מהו בעצם העולם הזה של NoSQL?

ראשית חשוב לציין שמדובר בתחום עצום, פעיל וגועש בו פעילים מספר רב של פרויקטים שמשתנים ומתעדכנים במהירות. לא ניתן לכסות בפוסט קצר את הרקע התיאורטי/אקדמי ואת הניסיון המעשי הרב שנצבר בשנים האחרונות בעולם בשימוש במוצרים אלו.

בראשית היו לנו אתרי אינטרנט עם פעילות הולכת וגואה שדרשו עוד ועוד שרתי Database מאחוריהם כדי לעמוד בעומס (כמו שרובנו חווינו, בסיס הנתונים הוא צוואר בקבוק קלאסי). חשבו רבים וטובים שניתן בעצם להוציא לcache את המידע ולחסוך חלק ניכר מהעומס מבסיס הנתונים וכך התפתחה ארכיטקטורה מבוססת in memory distributed cache + reverse proxies for data המשתמשת רבים מהאתרים הגדולים בכל אחת מהטכנולוגיות הקיימות בשוק. עם הזמן אנשים התחילו לתהות למה בעצם אנחנו ממשיכים להחזיק מאחורה בסיס נתונים רלציוני חזק ומתוחכם כאשר אנחנו לא באמת צריכים את היכולות שלו עבור חלקים ניכרים מהאפליקציה. תחושה זו היוותה בעצם את הקרקע הפורייה לרעיונות חדשניים ו"חתרניים" שהתפתחו לכדי עולם שלם של פתרונות המאוגדים תחת השם NoSQL.

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Simple SST Unhooker

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1. SST: references
2. Algorithm
3. Memory mapped files
4. Implementation
5. Demonstration
6. How to build
1. SST: references

This article is a logical continuation to the article "Driver to Hide Processes and Files" by Ivan Romananko. You can find all necessary information about System Service Table (SST) and its hooking in it. In this article I would like to present how to write your own unhooker that will restore original SST hooked by drivers like Ivan's one.

2. Algorithm

My goal is to write a simple driver for SST hooking detection and removing purposes. This means that our driver should not use various Zw-functions and SST table because I suppose that SST table is corrupted by unknown rootkits. I do not care about filter drivers and function code splicers for now, but maybe I will come back to them in future. The simplest way to detect and remove hooks is to compare SST that is placed in memory with the initial SST from ntoskernel.exe file.

So the goal is:

  1. to find ntoskernel module in memory;
  2. to find the section of ntoskernel where SST is placed and to calculate relative offset of SST in the section;
  3. to find this section in the ntoskernel.exe file;
  4. to calculate real address of SST in the file;
  5. to read values from the file and to compare them with SST.

But before the implementation I would like to present some additional information.

3. Memory mapped files in kernel mode

"A memory-mapped file is a segment of virtual memory which has been assigned a direct byte-for-byte correlation with some portion of a file or file-like resource". (c) Wiki

Yeah, we want to parse the PE file and memory mapped files are very useful for this task. And it is easy enough to use mapped files API from the kernel mode, because it is very similar to Win32 API. Instead of CreateFileMapping and MapViewOfSection functions in kernel mode driver should access

Read more: Codeproject

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Did you know… you can have your External Tool’s text displayed in the Output Window ?

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ExternalToolsCurrentText_thumb.jpg

At the bottom of the External Tools dialog, you’ll see more options for customizing the external tool within visual studio.  Today’s tip is about the Use output window option.  The idea here is you’re running a .bat file, and you want to track the progress within Visual Studio.  (and if you have a great real-world example, please leave a comment.)

Using the command prompt as the tool, you can set the Arguments to something like “/C echo $(CurText)” where

/C – from cmd.exe, carries out the command specified by string and then terminates

and

$(CurText) is a token that comes from Visual Studio that represents the currently-selected text.

Read more: Sara Ford's Weblog

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What do those "IO requests taking longer than 15 seconds" messages on my SQL box mean?

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You may be sometimes seeing stuck/stalled IO messages on one or more of your SQL Server boxes. This is something it is important to understand so I am providing some background information on it.

Here is the message you may see in the SQL error log:

SQL Server has encountered xxx occurrence(s) of IO requests taking longer than 15 seconds to complete on file [mdf_or_ldf_file_path_name] in database [dbname] (dbid). The OS file handle is 0x.... The offset of the latest long IO is: 0x....”.

The message indicates that SQL Server has been waiting on at least one I/O for 15 seconds or longer. The exact number of times you have exceeded this time for the specified file since the last message is included in the message. The messages will not be written more than once every five minutes. Keep in mind that read IOs on an average system should take no more than 10-20ms and writes should take no more than 3-5ms (the exact acceptable values vary depending on your business needs and technical configuration). So anything measured in seconds indicates a serious performance problem. The problem is NOT within SQL Server, this message indicates SQL has sent off an IO request and has waited more than 15 seconds for a response. The problem is somewhere in the disk IO subsystem. For example, the disk IO subsystem may have more load than it is designed to handle, there is a "bad" hardware or firmware somewhere along the path, filter drivers such as anti-virus software are interfering, your file layout is not optimal, or some IO subsystem setting such as HBA queue depth is not set optimally.

Though the root cause is IO, you can see other symptoms that are a side effect and may lead you down the wrong troubleshooting path. For example, if enough IO is backed up behind the stalled IO then you may see blocking in SQL Server (because locks that are usually taken for very short periods of time are now held for seconds), new connections may not be allowed, and the CPU usage can increase (because many threads are waiting), and a clustered SQL Server can fail over (because the IsAlive checks which are just SQL queries fail to complete like all the other queued queries). You may see other errors returned to the user or in the various logs, such as timeouts.

There are two ways to approach this problem. You can either reduce the IO on the system (change indexes or queries or archive data for example) or you can make the underlying system able to handle the IO load (fix hardware/firmware problems, change configurations, add disks or controllers, change the file layout, etc.).

Read more: Cindy Gross - Troubleshooting, tips, and general advice about SQL Server

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XmlWriter, encodings and BOM

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Today I want to talk about XmlWriter and the generation of a Byte Order Mark  (BOM).

XmlWriter provides an API that generates, unsurprisingly, XML. This XML will typically end up as a managed string of characters or possibly a sequence of bytes. Of course, text transformed into bytes implies an encoding, as previously discussed.

Now XML has its own ways of determining the encoding that a document has, by peeking at the first bytes that make up an opening <?xml declaration or, more explicitly, with the encoding on this declaration.

Unicode is used for all sorts of puposes, not just XML encoding, and so it also has a mechanism to distinguish between small-endian and big-endian encodings, which determine which byte comes first in UTF-16 and UTF-32. It's also allowed for UTF-8, for that matter.

How do these mechanisms interact when using the .NET Framework classes? Let's write some code!

First, we'll write a short helper method to display the contents of a byte array.

private static void ShowBuffer(string linePrefix, byte[] bytes, long length) {
 int bytesOnLine = 0;
 for (long i = 0; i < length; i++) {
   if (bytesOnLine == 0) {
     Console.Write(linePrefix);
   }

   Console.Write("{0:X2} ", bytes[i]);
   bytesOnLine++;
   if (bytesOnLine > 16) {
     Console.WriteLine();
     bytesOnLine = 0;
   }
 }
}

Read more: Marcelo's WebLog

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Detecting memory leaks using the CrtDbg Library

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Memory is a very important aspect for an application to run. Applications that leak large amounts of memory or leak progressively may display symptoms ranging from poor (and gradually decreasing) performance to running out of memory completely. Worse, a leaking program may use up so much memory that it causes another program to fail, leaving the user with no clue to where the problem truly lies. In addition, even harmless memory leaks may be symptomatic of other problems.

When an application is very big, it could have having 100+ files and 1000+ functions and it would be tough to find memory leaks in the application, so we can use the CrtDbg Library APIs to find the memory leaks in that application.

For memory leak detection, we have so many tools available in the market, but for them you need to pay a lot. This article talks about a C Runtime Library which is free and available with all Windows OSs, and is called the CrtDbg Library. This library provides APIs which can be used to detect memory leaks.

Using the code

We can use CrtDbg library functions to detect the memory leaks in our application.

The technique for locating memory leaks involves taking snapshots of the application's memory state at key points. The CRT library provides a structure type, _CrtMemState, which you can use to store a snapshot of the memory state:
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_CrtMemState s1, s2, s3;

To take a snapshot of the memory state at a given point, pass a _CrtMemState structure to the _CrtMemCheckpoint function. This function fills in the structure with a snapshot of the current memory state:
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_CrtMemCheckpoint(&s1);

After calling _CrtMemCheckpoint(&s1), code can be written in which we can detect the memory leak. (_CrtMemCheckpoint can be used anywhere in the code.)

After writing your code, use _CrtMemCheckpoint( &s2 ) to take another snapshot of the memory at that time; after that, you can call _CrtMemDifference(&s3, &s1, &s2).

_CrtMemDifference compares two memory states s1 and s2, and returns their differences (debug version only). _CrtMemDifference(&s3, &s1, &s2) will return 0 if there is no memory leak between the s1 and s2 memory checkpoints, and returns 1 if the code written between the checkpoints s1 and s2 has a memory leak.

Read more: Codeproject

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Windows Phone 7 Series Programming Model

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image_thumb_2.png

Just sometime back I posted on the MIX 2010 announcements. One of the major aspects of the announcement was

“The application model supported on Windows Phone 7 series will be managed only and will leverage Silverlight, XNA and the .NET Framework”

That’s a mouthful and includes 3 framework names in once sentence :). This was already disclosed and has resulted in some flutter over the web and twitter. Let me try to explain how these 3 interplays in the application model with the following diagram

Read more: Geek Gyan

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שחזורי ראיונות עבודה בהייטק

| Wednesday, March 17, 2010
שחזורי ראיונות עבודה בהייטק

Read more: Jobhunt.co.il

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Download YouTube Videos the Easy Way

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sshot37.png

You can’t be online all the time, and despite the majority of YouTube videos being nut-shots and Lady Gaga parodies, there is a lot of great content that you might want to download and watch offline.

There are some programs and browser extensions to do this, but we’ve found that the easiest and quickest method is a bookmarklet that was originally posted on the Google Operating System blog (it’s since been removed). It will let you download standard quality and high-definition movies as MP4 files. Also, because it’s a bookmarklet, it will work on any modern web browser, and on any operating system!

Installing the bookmarket is easy – just drag and drop the Get YouTube video link below to the bookmarks bar of your browser of choice. If you’ve hidden the bookmark bar, in most browsers you can right-click on the link and save it to your bookmarks.

Read more: How-to-geek

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uTorrent banned by private trackers for "not playing fair"

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We told you a while ago about uTP, the new self-throttling torrent transfer protocol that first appeared in version 2.0 of the popular uTorrent app. As Sebastian explained in our previous post, uTP prevents network congestion by limiting its own bandwidth so that your Internet service provider doesn't have to. Ideally, this means nobody is subjected to ISP-level torrent throttling, and everybody wins. In practice, though, uTorrent may be unfair in a different way: it gives priority to other users who are running the new protocol.

That's caused several private trackers to boot uTorrent 2 off of their approved clients lists. Bittorrent Inc., the developers of the uTP protocol, has opened it up so that other torrent clients can incorporate it. Bittorrent Inc. admits that there might be a "downside to innovation" in this case, according to Torrentfreak, but it's working to take uTP mainstream, which would solve the problem. Other major clients, including Vuze, are already looking at incorporating the protocol into their software.

Read more: Downloadsquad

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Roadkil's Boot Builder

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Boot builder allows you to create your own custom boot sector from scratch. This utility allows you to recreate or restore boot sectors lost due to virus or other damage to a drive. Boot sectors can be imported/exported to a disk or created from a template. This program supports FAT and NTFS boot sector types.

Read more: Roadkil net

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Windows Phone 7 Series Emulator for PC

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The Windows Phone 7 Series emulator is out and here's a hands on look at what you can do, change the phone's settings and use Internet Explorer! The emulator ROM coming in at approximately 75MB allows for a limited number of activities outside of testing your WP7S applications.

Read more: MS Download

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Blazing Fast Password Recovery With New ATI Cards

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ElcomSoft accelerates the recovery of Wi-Fi passwords and password-protected iPhone and iPod backups by using ATI video cards. The support of ATI Radeon 5000 series video accelerators allows ElcomSoft to perform password recovery up to 20 times faster compared to Intel top of the line quad-core CPUs, and up to two times faster compared to enterprise-level NVIDIA Tesla solutions. Benchmarks performed by ElcomSoft demonstrate that ATI Radeon HD5970 accelerated password recovery works up to 20 times faster than Core i7-960, Intel's current top of the line CPU unit

Read more: Slashdot

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MySpace To Sell User Data

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Hot on the news of Netflix canceling its latest contest over privacy concerns, news has spread that MySpace is going in the opposite direction. Apparently, the one-time leading social network is now selling user data to third party collection firms. From the article, the data that InfoChimps has listed includes 'user playlists, mood updates, mobile updates, photos, vents, reviews, blog posts, names and zipcodes.' InfoChimps is a reseller that deals with individuals and groups, from academic researchers to marketers and industry analysts. So if you're worried about your data on MySpace being sold off to anybody with a few hundred dollars, now's the time to delete that little-used account

Read more: Slashdot

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SEC: Hacker Manipulated Stock Prices

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U.S. regulators are moving to freeze the assets and trading accounts of a Russian accused of hacking into personal online portfolios and manipulating the price of dozens of stocks listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market and New York Stock Exchange.

A New York federal judge on Tuesday sided with the Securities and Exchange Commission and froze the assets of Broco Investments, believed to be a one-trader operation based in St. Petersburg, Russia. The SEC said Broco capitalized by artificially moving prices of more 38 thinly traded securities — enabling Broco to profit from up-or-down price swings.

“These transactions have created the appearance of legitimate trading activity and have artificially affected the prices of at least 38 issuers,” (.pdf)  the Securities and Exchange Commission said in court filing.

Read More: Wired

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MS Virtual PC Flaw Defeats Windows Defenses

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An exploit writer at Core Security Technologies has discovered a serious vulnerability that exposes users of Microsoft's Virtual PC virtualization software to malicious hacker attacks. The vulnerability, which is unpatched, essentially allows an attacker to bypass several major security mitigations — DEP, SafeSEH and ASLR — to exploit the Windows operating system. As a result, some applications with bugs that are not exploitable when running in a not-virtualized operating system are rendered exploitable if running within a guest OS in Virtual PC

Read more: Slashdot

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Simpler "Hello World" Demonstrated In C

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Wondering where all that bloat comes from, causing even the classic 'Hello world' to weigh in at 11 KB? An MIT programmer decided to make a Linux C program so simple, she could explain every byte of the assembly. She found that gcc was including libc even when you don't ask for it. The blog shows how to compile a much simpler 'Hello world,' using no libraries at all. This takes me back to the days of programming bare-metal on DOS!

Read more: Slashdot
Read more: libc-free-world

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This is the future of computer graphics

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I've been waiting a loooong time for someone to solve this problem.  Absolutely cannot wait for games to start coming out that leverage this technology.  Should shake up the data visualization industry a bit as well.

Read more: jasonKolb.com blog
See video: Youtube

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Creating your First Crystal Report for Use in a .NET Application

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Have you ever had to create a custom report within an application you have written for a customer? Most developers have, and there are two schools of thought on how developers normally perform this task. Some choose to create the report using the same technology that the application was created in (ASP, WinFrom, WPF) while others choose to use a reporting package such as Crystal Reports. Using a reporting package will help create reports rapidly. This article walk you through the creation of your first report using Crystal Reports.  

by Jeff McWherter


Article Contents:

   * Introduction
   * Crystal Report Files
   * Data Schema
   * Crystal Reports Viewer
   * Beginner Tips
   * Conclusion


Read more: asp aliliance

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Unreal Engine games add Nvidia 3D display

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Stereoscopic technology to be integrated into Epic’s leading engine. Nvidia has sealed a deal with Epic Games to bring stereoscopic 3D technology to PC titles built using the Unreal Engine. Unreal-made PC games – which have in the past included Batman Arkham Asylum, Gears of War and Mass Effect 2 – will soon be able to integrate more easily with Nvidia’s 3D Vision package. Out of the box support for the 3D technology will be available after Unreal Engine 3’s next update. The chipmaker’s Vision package consists of wireless stereoscopic glasses and a USB emitter which, at least on PC monitors running at 120Hz, can bring games out into a full 3D display. “The combination of Unreal Engine 3 and 3D Vision makes already amazing games even more jaw dropping,” said Epic Games vice president Mark Rein.

Read more: develop

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Business Cards

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image.axd?picture=business-card.gif

I like to have business cards so I can easily give people my contact information. My amazing wife designed this for me to kind of keep the cards with a programming look and feel.

Read more: ryan

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Unit Testing in JavaScript. Introduction

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JavaScript is mainly (but not only!) clientside language. Therefore it poses some problems for developers who use unit testing in their projects. I’m going to point out most of them and solve bit by bit in next articles. If you don’t need explanation of this term itself, proceed right to the JavaScript Issues title.
Unit Testing

In short: We’re writing tests for our application which are independent of each other. We may quickly execute set of them as we modify the code. The new application is error-free if all go positively.

Unit Testing is connected with Agile methodology and techniques of producing a software such as Extreme Programming (XP) or Test-driven development (TDD). They assume that changes in application should be made frequently and in small portions. Unfortunately, it’s equivalent to frequent errors. Thanks to Unit Testing we are able to detect them rapidly.
Test-driven development

"My team has created very innovative solution, but we’re still looking for a problem to go with it."

Read more: Frontend Force

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A Quick-Start Guide of Process Mandatory Level Checking and Self-elevation under UAC

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Introduction

User Account Control (UAC) is a new security component in Windows Vista and newer operating systems. With UAC fully enabled, interactive administrators normally run with least user privileges. This article and the attached code samples demonstrate these frequently asked coding scenarios related to UAC.

  1. How to check if the current process is running as administrator?
  2. How to know if the primary access token of the current process belongs to user account that is a member of the local Administrators group, even if it currently is not elevated?
  3. How to check if the current process is elevated? The elevation information is available to only Windows Vista and newer operating systems because there was no UAC and "elevation" before Windows Vista.
  4. How to get the integrity level of the current process (System/High/Medium/Low/Unknown)? The integrity level information is available to only Windows Vista and newer operating systems because there was no UAC and "integrity level" before Windows Vista.
  5. How to show a UAC shield icon on the UI for tasks that require elevation?
  6. How to self-elevate the current process?
  7. How to automatically elevate the process when it's started up?

We provide code samples to demonstrate the above how-to scenarios in three programming languages (native VC++, VC#, VB.NET) to meet the needs of different developers.

Read more: Codeproject

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Transparent Data Encryption

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Transparent Data Encryption is designed to protect data by encrypting the physical files of the database, rather than the data itself. Its main purpose is to prevent unauthorized access to the data by restoring the files to another server.  With Transparent Data Encryption in place, this requires the original encryption certificate and master key.  It was introduced in the Enterprise edition of SQL Server 2008. John Magnabosco  explains fully, and guides you through the process of setting it up.

How TDE Works

Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) was introduced in SQL Server 2008, as a feature of the Enterprise Edition of that product. The Developer Edition of SQL Server 2008 also offers TDE, but its license limits its use to development and testing only.

As noted above, TDE's specific purpose is to protect data at rest by encrypting the physical files of the database, rather than the data. These physical files include the database file (.mdf), the transaction log file (.ldf) and the backup files (.bak).

The protection of the database files is accomplished through an encryption key hierarchy that exists externally from the database in which TDE has been enabled. The exception to this is the database encryption key, which was introduced to the database encryption key hierarchy specifically to support the TDE feature, and is used to perform the encryption of the database files.

Read more: simple-talk

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Visual Studio 2008 NUnit snippets

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A simple set of useful NUnit snippets, for Visual studio 2008.

Read more: Codeplex

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SQL Server 2008 Configuration Manager on a 64 bit machine does not display Network configuration & Native Client configuration options

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PROBLEM:

When you open SQL Server 2008 configuration manager you do not see the following options :

Scenario 1 (64 bit options):
1)            SQL Native Client 10.0 configuration
2)            SQL Server Network configuration

Scenario 2 (32 bit options):
1)            SQL Native Client 10.0 configuration(32 bit)
2)            SQL Server Network configuration (32 bit)

CAUSE:

SQL Server configuration manager pulls the details with the help of SQLMGMPROVIDER.DLL.
This DLL has got two versions - one is 64 bit and the other is 32 bit :
The location 64 bit DLL is: C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Shared\sqlmgmprovider.dll and the location 32 bit DLL is: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Shared\sqlmgmprovider.dll

If this DLL is corrupted then you will see this issue. In this case when I checked the property of the 64 bit DLL it was blank.

RESOLUTION:

Read more: Microsoft SQL Server Tips & Tricks

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Elmah vs Logging

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Elmah — это очень полезный инструмент протоколирования ошибок веб-приложения ASP.NET. Часто можно услышать вопрос: что лучше использовать — Elmah или библиотеку логгинга (например, log4net)? Чтобы ответить на этот вопрос, нужно понять какие функции выполняет каждый из эти инструментов. Основные функции Elmah:

   * logging (протоколирование) — логгирование ошибок со всей сопутствующей информацией;
   * reporting (отчетность) — предоставление информации об ошибках пользователю в удобном для чтения виде;
   * notification (уведомление) — уведомление пользователя о случившейся ошибке.

В качестве примера библиотеки логгинга в этом вопросе используется log4net, так что в дальнейшем повествовании понятия «log4net» и «библиотека логгинга» употребляются как синонимы. Итак, основная функция log4net только одна:

   * logging — протоколирование событий, происходящих в приложении;

Из приведенных списков видно, что log4net не обладает многими возможностями Elmah:

   * log4net не решает задачу reporting`а. Библиотека логгинга просто сохраняет протокол событий в определенном хранилище и не заботится об удобном представлении этого протокола пользователю. Доступные средства просмотра логов также не обеспечивают требуемого удобства, потому что они не предназначены для представления веб-специфичных параметров.
   * log4net не решает задачу уведомления пользователя об ошибке. Можно, конечно, использовать appender, отсылающий UDP пакеты или написать свой, но изначально log4net не предназначен для решения таких задач.

Кажется, что log4net отстает по всем пунктам. Но, с другой стороны, Elmah покрывает задачу логгинга не полностью. Ведь в протокол попадают только ошибки, в то время как в приложении может понадобиться следить за логикой последовательной работы нескольких систем и протоколировать множество дополнительной информации. log4net же поддерживает сообщения разных уровней — DEBUG, INFO, WARN, ERROR, FATAL.

Read more: Codehelper

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Microsoft(R) Silverlight™ for Symbian - Beta

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Silverlight, a cross-browser, cross-platform implementation of the .NET Framework for building media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web on desktop computers, is also available for Nokia S60 5th Edition devices. Silverlight includes a runtime that is optimized to display content on memory-constrained devices.

Read more: MS Download
Read more: Microsoft® Silverlight™ for Symbian – Beta Developer Tools

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Performance tuning a server in less than three minutes while being slashdotted

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So you wrote a blog post about something that seemed fairly innocuous, but for whatever reason, it caught the attention of one of the major sites and now your server load is at 110 and climbing, the ssh command line session is taking thirty seconds to respond to anything at all, and given that your post is on the front page of slashdot at primetime, this doesn’t look like it’s a temporary blip. What do you do?

Okay, first things first. You don’t have time to do a proper fine-tuning session. You need a quick & dirty tuneup here. Proper fine tuning you leave till after the traffic spike, and you can then come back at it with a plan and decent tools like siege and so on – but this is the “fix it in three minutes” version. So if you see stuff here that looks crude to you, despair not, everything looks crude when you’re trying to do it in that kind of timeframe.

First, you have to be able to actually use the server command line. The load’s at 110 – that’s not coming down anytime soon and until it does you can’t do the rest of the work you need to since it takes so much time for even a shell to respond. The load is being caused by Apache and MySQL taking on more work than the server can handle, causing the server to swap excessively; and you’ve got to dump that work or shut off the incoming new work to recover. You can try sudo killall -9 apache2 if you can get an open ssh terminal in to do the job (and it’s the first thing you should try), but the odds are that that server has to be reset. Whether that means a phone call to the data centre, or a walk down the hall to the server room, or just clicking a button in a web interface, that’s the first thing to do. Don’t hold off, because unless everyone stops reading your page right now, that load’s not coming down.

Once the box has rebooted (and I mean immediately – sit there watching ping until it comes back), ssh in and shut down apache. MySQL is okay for now, but the work is coming from Apache, so that has to get shut down until everything’s ready to go again. You’re going to lose a few minutes of service, yes, but that’s recoverable from for a blog (and if this is for something more serious than a blog, you’re going to be in trouble for not properly spec’ing the hardware to begin with anyway, so limit the damage now and take your licks later).

Read more: Stochastic Geometry

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Grid View with fixed header

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GridView Control of Asp.Net makes our task very simpler as comparison to HTML tables. But one problem which I always faced with GridView Control is of scrolling headers. I tried several forums and websites, but didn’t come up with good solution.

In this article, I am trying to solve the problem of scrolling headers in Asp.net GridView control.

This article will fulfill the following requirements.

1. GridView will have fixed header.
2. GridView can be scrolled horizontally.
3. GridView can be scrolled vertically.

Read more: Codeproject

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SQL Style Extensions for C#

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Are you addicted to SQL? Are you uncomfortable whenever you have to use pesky imperative languages like C#? Now you can use your favourite SQL functions inside C#, with the amazing new "SQL Style Extensions" class! Need to know if a value is in a short list of constants? In SQL you'd simply write "where State in ('QLD','NSW','VIC')" – but, until recently C# forced you to write:

   if (State == "QLD" || State == "NSW" || State == "VIC")

But now -- thanks to the aMAZzing new 'SQL Style Extensions' -- you can simply write:

   If (State.In("QLD","NSW","VIC"))

... then close down the IDE and get back to your Entity Diagrams in no time!

Do you miss the power of LIKE matching?

Read more: SecretGeek

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How to read the Google calendar in C#

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This article is described how to use Google data APIs to read your Google Calendar using C#. It will allow developers to write application which interacts with Google services that will have number of services such as Calendar, Google Documents, and Contacts...Etc.

Synchronization, import, and export of calendars are possible by using APIs.By using Google Calendar service, you can create new events, edit or delete existing events and query for events that match particular criteria.

Note: This article is described only about the Google Calendar Service. But in the same manner you will be able to use other services which Google has provided. Please get the source code  for more information.

Read more: Codeproject

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Converting C# to COBOL

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Description

I did a previous article, (August 22, 2009) on converting the many C# examples to COBOL. At the time there were a few examples out in the world of how to perform this conversion. Since that article has been written more and more examples have been popping up.

In this article I'd like to introduce you to a co-worker of mine who has presented what I believe to be the ultimate wall chart. This article is intended to be used as a model for you to follow when you run into a C# example and need to convert it to COBOL.

Visual COBOL!

I recently published a blog about a new product being introduced by Micro Focus called 'Visual COBOL'. Visual COBOL will be a whole new product from Micro Focus, not a rebranded current version of one of the compilers. Visual COBOL will have new syntax available that will make coding COBOL in the .NET environment much simpler and stream lined. In my previous article I proposed creating two projects, one in COBOL and the other in either C# or VB.NET. This was to enable you to learn the art of utilizing, and hopefully understanding, the realm of .NET namespaces and classes. By using the other .NET languages you could see how the syntax was composed and then translate that into COBOL. I used this method because there was no really good reference material out there at the time.

Well guess what...someone created what I believe is the ultimate syntax example. A while ago I was in Newbury at our headquarters testing the latest release of Visual COBOL. I had the pleasure of meeting some very talented developers. One of them, Dr. Alex Turner, had mentioned he composed a chart showing the syntactical differences between C#, VB.NET and COBOL. NET. My initial thought was that's cool, a couple more examples that we can use and blog about. Man was I ever wrong! Alex, I publicly apologize for underestimating your resourcefulness!

Syntactical Differences, or the "Mother of all Syntax Charts"

Read more: C# Corner

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“Utilities and SDK for Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications” Updated for Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2

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Utilities and SDK for UNIX-Based Applications is an add-on to the Subsystem for UNIX-Based Applications (referred to as SUA, hence forth) component that shipped in Microsoft Windows 7/ Windows Server 2008 R2.

This consists of the following components:
- Base Utilities
- SVR-5 Utilities
- Base SDK
- GNU SDK
- GNU Utilities
- UNIX Perl
- Visual Studio Debugger Add-in

This release enables 64-bit application development for SUA. development and porting of custom UNIX applications using the Windows OCI (Oracle Call Interface) and Windows ODBC libraries (collectively referred to as ‘Mixed Mode’ in the rest of the document).

Read more: Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day
Download: MS Download

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Fixing my SQL Directory NTFS ACLS

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I run my development server by boot to VHD (Windows Server 2008 R2 x64).  In that instance, I also have an attached VHD (I attach via script at boot up time using Task Scheduler).  That VHD I have my SQL instances installed.

So, the other day, acting hasty, I chmod my ACLS – wow, what a day after that.

So, in order to fix it I created this set of BAT commands that resets it back to operational state – not 100% of all what you get, I also didn’t want to run a “repair” – but, all operational again.

setlocal

SET Inst100Path=H:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100

REM GOTO SQLE

SET InstanceName=MSSQLSERVER
SET InstIdPath=H:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.%InstanceName%
SET Group=SQLServerMSSQLUser$SCICORIA-HV1$%InstanceName%
SET AgentGroup=SQLServerSQLAgentUser$SCICORIA-HV1$%InstanceName%

ICACLS "%InstIdPath%\MSSQL"  /T /Q /grant "%Group%":(OI)(CI)FX
ICACLS "%InstIdPath%\MSSQL\backup"  /T /Q /grant "%Group%":(OI)(CI)F
ICACLS "%InstIdPath%\MSSQL\data"  /T /Q /grant "%Group%":(OI)(CI)F
ICACLS "%InstIdPath%\MSSQL\FTdata" /T /Q /grant "%Group%":(OI)(CI)F
ICACLS "%InstIdPath%\MSSQL\Jobs" /T /Q /grant "%Group%":(OI)(CI)F
ICACLS "%InstIdPath%\MSSQL\binn"  /T /Q /grant "%Group%":(OI)(CI)RX
ICACLS "%InstIdPath%\MSSQL\Log"  /T /Q /grant "%Group%":(OI)(CI)F

ICACLS "%Inst100Path%"  /T /Q /grant "%Group%":(OI)(CI)RX
ICACLS "%Inst100Path%\shared\Errordumps"  /T /Q /grant "%Group%":(OI)(CI)RXW
(more...)

Read more: Shawn Cicoria

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Eclipse 3.6 M6 (Helios) available for download

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Just in time for EclipseCon, Eclipse 3.6 M6 is now available for download.  I’m pretty excited about some of the new features in this milestone, especially some of the things from PDE.
Feature based launches (and feature based targets) should make bundle management a lot easier.

Read more: Eclipse Source

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URI vs URN vs URL

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uri-url-urn.png

Do you know what does URI, URL and URN means? I bet you will say that I know about URL but what about URI and URN! Here is a good description on Wikipedia and that is enough to understand these three:

URI tells a unique path to a resource on the Internet.

Read more: Web scripting

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Get Safe File Name

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Here’s a quick utility that might come in handy. More than once I’ve seen code where the invalid chars were hard coded. The Path.GetInvalidFilenameChars  has been in the .NET Framework since 2.0.

The thing is you would expect something like this to be in the framework itself.

       /// <summary>
       /// Removes invalid characters from the string that is passed in.
       /// </summary>
       /// <param name="name">The name of the file.</param>
       /// <returns>The safe name with invalid chars removed.</returns>
       public static string GetSafeFileName(string name)
       {
           var safeName = new StringBuilder();
           foreach (var c in name)
           {
               if ((from p in Path.GetInvalidFileNameChars() where p == c select p).Count() == 0)
               {
                   safeName.Append(c);
               }
           }
           return safeName.ToString();
       }

Chris Martin posted an even tighter version of this code in the comments below. Thanks Chris.

Read more:  merill.net

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Reading RSS feed in Silverlight 3.0

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Objective

This article is going to explain; how we can read RSS feeds in Silverlight 3.0.

Expected output

  1.       User will enter RSS URL in text box.
  2.       On click of Fetch Feed button ; RSS items will get populated.
  3.       On Clear Search button click text box and list box will be cleared.

Read more: C# Corner

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Moq Examples

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My friend Jon  is starting a training course in an effort to quickly bring developers up to speed on test driven development. As part of this effort, he has developed a unit test suite aimed at helping folks understand Rhino Mocks, a popular testing tool. After looking through the tests and seeing a lot of the Rhino API that I wasn’t familiar with, I wondered if there were similar undiscovered nooks in my favorite mocking framework: Moq.

After getting permission, I took his tests that use Rhino Mocks and implemented them with Moq. It was a great exercise for not only learning the two APIs, but also for getting a side by side comparison of the frameworks. The differences in most cases are subtle, and ultimately I found the choice between each to be a matter of taste.

You can find Jon’s tests here, and mine here.
Points of Interest

Mocks & Stubs?

I’m in agreement with Jon that the differences between mocks and stubs are mostly semantic, and are best reserved for academic discussions. I called all the variables in my tests “mock” because the class for creating mocks and stubs with Moq is “Mock”.
API Surface

The reason I am such a fan of Moq is that the API “surface” is minimalistic. The methods I want to use most often are within clear sight and meaningful. There’s not a lot of extra jargon and noise that I have to think about. The methods that I use 20% of the time are tucked away in a manner that is still discoverable, but yet hidden enough to give me a signal that they’re not the first path I should choose.

Read more: Codeplex

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Installing an MSI in Compatibility Mode

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כידוע יש ב - Windows מה שנקרא "Run this program in compatibility mode" מה שמאפשר להריץ את האפליקציות ב"מוד" קודם של מערכת ההפעלה.

היום ניסתי להריץ msi כלשהו וקבלתי הודעת שגיאה שזה יכול לרוץ רק על xp או vista, חשבתי לעצמי שאוכל פשוט להריץ את ה - msi ב - Compatibility Mode, לדאבוני התברר לי שאין לקבצי msi אפשרות להרצה ב"מוד" קודם.

קצת שיטוט בגוגל והגעתי לכאן, הוא מציע להשתמש ב - Orca שזה הכלי של מייקרוסופט לשינוי קבצי msi אחרי שהם נסגרו (אפשר להוריד את זה מכאן)


בתירגום פשוט אלו השלבים:

1. התקינו Orca

2. קליק ימין על ה - msi ובחירה ב - Edit in orca

3. תחפשו ברשימה בצד שמאל מה שנקרא "LaunchCondition"

4. תחפשו בצד ימין שורה שמדברת על הגרסאות

5. הסירו אותה (בעזרת קליק ימין על השורה ובחירה ב - Cut Row)

6. לחיצה על Tools בחירה ב - Options תחפשו את הטאב database ותוודאו ש - "Copy embedded streams during Save As" מסומן.

7. לחיצה על File ובחירה ב - Save As

8. תצאו מ - Orca לפני הפעלה של ה - msi

בהצלחה

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Maintaining High Availability for the Microsoft.com site

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image_thumb.png

Wow, some interesting stats here. Check out the technet post at: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff467943.aspx

Read more: Chris Vidotto's Blog

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Troubleshooting Snapshot Agent hang

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I recently got a customer call where the SQL 2008 Snapshot Agent appeared to hang when started from SSMS.

image_thumb.png

As you can see, pop-up status window shows “Starting agent”.  So, looks like its running, but it stays this way forever. Replication Monitor also shows as “Running”.
If I double-click the I can zoom in on Agent details, however all I get is message the makes it sound like the Agent is busy, or maybe hung, but I’m not sure.

So, how can I tell what the Snapshot Agent is doing without all the high-layer status tools getting in the way.

Answer, since the Snapshot Agent is just Windows executable (…100\com\snapshot.exe), I can run it outside of SSMS but starting it from a Windows CMD-line, yes, we still use CMD prompt for troubleshooting.  Here is what I did.

Read more: REPLTalk covers Using and Tuning SQL Replication

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Internet Explorer 9

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HeaderLeft.png


Interested in checking out the new Web platform capabilities of Internet Explorer 9?
Download the Internet Explorer Platform Preview right now

Read more: IE Test Drive

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SQL SERVER – MAXDOP Settings to Limit Query to Run on Specific CPU

| Tuesday, March 16, 2010
This is very simple and known tip. Query Hint MAXDOP – Maximum Degree Of Parallelism can be set to restrict query to run on a certain CPU. Please note that this query cannot restrict or dictate which CPU to be used, but for sure, it restricts the usage of number of CPUs in a single batch.

Let us consider the following example of this query.

The following query usually runs on multicore on a dual core machine (please note it may not be the case with your machine).

USE AdventureWorks
GO
SELECT *
FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail
ORDER BY ProductID
GO

Read more: Journey to SQL Authority with Pinal Dave

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How to build your own DropBox personal clone

|
DropBox is a great time saver but it’s very limited in storage space. There seems to be no real other free alternative services (all online storage services don’t do automatic synchronisation and are not seamlessly integrated with the OS explorer). So why not look at opensource solutions ? There seems to be any ready-made one so you have to build it yourself by assembling several systems. fak3r has been experimenting with this; you can read his step by step instructions here though I didn’t test them myself as I don’t have a Linux but a Windows system. Any suggestion for Windows welcome or I will have to setup Linux one day

Read more: Ask Superuser
Instructions: Build DropBox

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XPerf Tool – Why Can’t You Live Without It?

|
Israel Burman (Israel is one of the ADPlus creators and the guy who taught me the XPerf tool) and Mario Hewardt told me I should blog about the XPerf tool.
Although I’m new to this tool I decided to follow their suggestions because I believe you’re going to wonder how you could live without using this tool after using it for the first time. J

So, when starting to write this article I decided to browse the internet to see how many articles from Microsoft I could find because I didn’t want to be redundant. As a matter of fact I found several great articles. (Am I late to the party? J) Some of these articles are very didactic and similar to what I had in mind.

That said, I’m not going to be redundant here, likewise I’m going to give you just an overview about the tool and mention those articles that details the configuration and usage of XPerf so you can get the necessary details from these articles without having to research the internet all over again.

WHAT’S XPERF?

-      XPerf is based on ETW (Event Tracing for Windows) which is a very efficient tracing infrastructure.
-      The overhead caused by XPerf is about ~2.5% CPU, in other words, very minimum.
-      The tracing can be dynamically enabled or disabled and it doesn’t require a reboot.
-      XPerf enables you to collect logs, create reports and see charts from the collected data.

Israel Burman (Israel is one of the ADPlus creators and the guy who taught me the XPerf tool) and Mario Hewardt told me I should blog about the XPerf tool.
Although I’m new to this tool I decided to follow their suggestions because I believe you’re going to wonder how you could live without using this tool after using it for the first time. J

So, when starting to write this article I decided to browse the internet to see how many articles from Microsoft I could find because I didn’t want to be redundant. As a matter of fact I found several great articles. (Am I late to the party? J) Some of these articles are very didactic and similar to what I had in mind.

That said, I’m not going to be redundant here, likewise I’m going to give you just an overview about the tool and mention those articles that details the configuration and usage of XPerf so you can get the necessary details from these articles without having to research the internet all over again.

WHAT’S XPERF?

-      XPerf is based on ETW (Event Tracing for Windows) which is a very efficient tracing infrastructure.
-      The overhead caused by XPerf is about ~2.5% CPU, in other words, very minimum.
-      The tracing can be dynamically enabled or disabled and it doesn’t require a reboot.
-      XPerf enables you to collect logs, create reports and see charts from the collected data.


WHEN SHOULD YOU USE XPERF?

-      When you need to isolate performance problems.
-      To get a better understanding of the Operating System.
-      Probably other scenarios where you can benefit for tracing the Windows components.

WHEN SHOULD YOU USE XPERF?

-      When you need to isolate performance problems.
-      To get a better understanding of the Operating System.
-      Probably other scenarios where you can benefit for tracing the Windows components.

Read more: Debugging Toolbox

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Announcing the Release of the Open XML SDK 2.0

|
Today, I am really excited to announce the worldwide availability of the Open XML SDK 2.0 for Microsoft Office! The Open XML SDK plays an integral part in creating Office document solutions that work on the client or server. The Open XML SDK allows you to create, consume, and manipulate Open XML files without needing to automate Office client applications. Combining the power of Office Services and the Open XML SDK enables even more scenarios, such as rich server-side document assembly solutions. No longer will you need to pay special attention to one of Office's most popular knowledge base articles that talks about how automating Office client applications on the server is not supported (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/257757).

Development of the Open XML SDK 2.0 spanned almost two years and involved the release of four Technical Previews in addition to the final release announced today. Your feedback via the blogs, MSDN forums, www.openxmldeveloper.com forums, and Microsoft Connect site helped shape the overall design of the SDK. Thank you so much for your support and feedback! Please feel free to continue sending us feedback with respect to the Open XML SDK.

Learn More about the Open XML SDK

Over the past year and a half, I have shown you guys a lot of real world scenarios/solutions that are built with the SDK. Here is a summary of links that will help you learn more about the Open XML SDK:


Read more: Brian Jones & Zeyad Rajabi: Office Solutions
Download: OpenXML

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Установка Windows 7 с флешки, правка дистрибутива Windows 7 с MDT

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Для начала давайте подготовим наш дистрибутив. Начиная с ОС Windows Vista для правок дистрибутива используется WAIK, это очень мощный продукт, с помощью которого можно провести множество манипуляций, но он не очень простой в использовании. В большинстве случаев рядовому пользователю не нужны все все функции WAIK, именно поэтому было создано приложение MDT которое удобнее и проще чем WAIK. Итак приступим.
Подготовка среды

Чтобы следовать инструкциям этого руководства, вам необходимо настроить следующую среду (или подобную):

   * Контроллер домена для домена contoso.com.
   * DHCP сервер с настроенным границами для аренды адресов клиентским компьютерам.
   * Рабочий компьютер с установленными MDT 2010 и Windows AIK 2.0.

В моей тестовой среде один компьютер под управлением Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise x64 выполняет все эти роли.
Создание ресурса установки (Deployment Share)

Открываем Deployment Workbench на рабочем компьютере, правой клавишей нажимаем на узле Deployment Shares и выбираем опцию создания нового ресурса установки New Deployment Share. Запускается мастер создания нового ресурса установки. Нажимаем кнопку Обзор (Browse) и создаем папку под названием DeploymentShare$ в корне диска

Read more: Microsoft User Group Винница

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Open Source Android Applications for developers

|
As an Android apps developer, the best case study may be the open source android applications or samples. Below is my memo of open source android applications which I have found in the Internet, hope this will be useful for you.

No.1: Android SDK Samples: The best way to learn how things are done is to look at some code.

Website: http://developer.android.com/resources/samples/index.html

To help Android developers get started quickly, the Android SDK includes a variety of sample code and tutorials that illustrate key concepts and techniques of Android application development. The list below provides a summary of the sample applications that are available with the Android SDK:

1. API Demos
A variety of small applications that demonstrate an extensive collection of framework topics.

2. Bluetooth Chat
An application for two-way text messaging over Bluetooth.

3. BusinessCard
An application that demonstrates how to launch the built-in contact picker from within an activity. This sample also uses reflection to ensure that the correct version of the contacts API is used, depending on which API level the application is running under.
(more...)

Read more: cute androind

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Visual Guide to NoSQL Systems

|

There are so many NoSQL systems these days that it's hard to get a quick overview of the major trade-offs involved when evaluating relational and non-relational systems in non-single-server environments. I've developed this visual primer with quite a lot of help (see credits at the end), and it's still a work in progress, so let me know if you see anything misplaced or missing, and I'll fix it.

Without further ado, here's what you came here for (and further explanation after the visual).

Note: RDBMSs (MySQL, Postgres, etc) are only featured here for comparison purposes. Also, some of these systems can vary their features by configuration (I use the default configuration here, but will try to delve into others later).

Read more: Nathan Hurst’s Blog

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Using TCP for Low-Latency Applications

|
Last week I ran into a nasty little problem while implementing an application with soft real-time requirements. I was aiming at 1 ms or less for a TCP-based request-response roundtrip on a local network. Should be trivial, but why did my tests indicate that I wasn’t even getting close?

The scenario was simple: A server (my part) gets a request from a client. Before it can answer, it has to ask a backend system for some information. The backend system listens on a TCP port and answers in a query-response fashion (processing time is far below 1 ms). Both query and response typically fit in a single TCP segment. The response may sometimes be larger, which is one reason why TCP was an adequate choice for the backend system.

As a first optimization I used a TCP connection pool to get around TCP’s three-way handshake (SYN, SYN ACK, ACK) and thus cutting down latency. However, tracing showed response times around 40 ms on the local network. Actually worse than without the connection pool! Admittedly, the conventional use for connection pools is to circumvent TCP’s slow start mechanism. But still, something was very wrong.

Read more: Unmaintainable

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Microsoft(R) Silverlight™ 4 SDK RC

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The Microsoft® Silverlight™ 4 SDK RC contains online documentation, online samples, libraries and tools for developing Silverlight 4 applications.
Usage of the SDK is subject to the SDK License (included in the package).    <-- it doesn't have 'Go-Live' license !

Read more: MS Download

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Operator Overload

|
נניח שיש לכם את המחלקה הבאה:

class Dolar
{
   public double Value { get; set; }

   public Dolar(double value)
   {
       Value = value;
   }
}

וב - main


Dolar d1 = new Dolar(10);
Dolar d2 = new Dolar(20);

if (d1.Value > d2.Value)
{
}

לכאורה הקוד היה יותר קריא לו יכולנו לכתוב כך


if (d1 > d2)
{
}

כדי לעשות את זה צריך להוסיף למחלקה את הקוד הבא

public static bool operator >(Dolar d1, Dolar d2)
{
   return d1.Value > d2.Value;
}

public static bool operator <(Dolar d1, Dolar d2)
{
   return d1.Value < d2.Value;
}

Read more: שלמה גולדברג

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Silverlight at Windows Phone 7

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image_3B9D260D.png

Microsoft announced today, that new Windows Phone 7 Series will support Silverlight as one of 2 development frameworks. Second development framework will be XNA (will blog about it later).

So, what’s new for Silverlight developers there?

First, we have familiar tools: Windows Phone applications with Silverlight will be developed either with Visual Studio 2010, either with new “express” version called Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone. This “express” version will enable development with both frameworks (Silverlight and XNA).

Full Visual Studio 2010 will also get new project types to develop with both frameworks.

Read more: DevCorner

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SQL Express is not installed properly. Steps to be taken before reinstall again

|
To verify the SQL Server Express instance installed, you could use Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Setup Discovery Report. For more information, please see http://blogs.msdn.com/petersad/archive/2009/11/13/sql-server-2008-discovery-report.aspx

If the Setup Discovery Report doesn’t list the SQL Server Express instance, try the following steps to reinstall it:
1. Make sure you have administrative rights on the computer
2. Uninstall the existing SQL Server 2008 and all the components from the control panel. Remember to backup the user databases before uninstalling SQL Server.
3. Backup the registry.
4. Delete the following keys in regedit:
--HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server
--HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSSQLServer
5.  Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall  and delete all the sub-keys referencing SQL Server.
6.  Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services and delete all the keys referencing SQL Server.
7.  Rename all the SQL Server folders in the computer.
8.  Download and install Windows Cleanup Utility:
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=290301
Run the utility and remove any SQL Server components that you find.
9. Reboot the machine
10. Download and install Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5 SP1:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=AB99342F-5D1A-413D-8319-81DA479AB0D7&displaylang=en
11. Download and install Windows Installer 4.5. (Windows 7 has Windows Installer 4.5)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942288
12. Check if the computer has Visual Studio 2008.  If so, you need to install Visual Studio 2008 SP1. For more information, please see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956139
13. Download  SQL Server 2008 Express Edition Service Pack 1 and install it:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=01AF61E6-2F63-4291-BCAD-FD500F6027FF&displaylang=en

If it still fails, please provide us the error messages logged into the setup log files which are located in the %Program files%\Microsoft sql server\100\Setup bootstrap\Log\ folder. For more information about how to View and Read SQL Server Setup Log Files, please see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143702.aspx.

Read more: Nice things inside SQL Server

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GBackupSolution - Visual Studio Extension VSX 2008/2010

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Contents

   * Introduction
   * Features
   * Using the code
         o Create a basic add-in
         o Create a setting class to store your settings
         o Create options page form
         o Create class for backup purpose
         o Getting all item files of a solution
         o Compress all to the backup file.
         o The end.
   * Download and Installation
   * Summary
   * History

Introduction

When searching a way to backup my source code, I found a great application at CodeProject to do this kind of job:

   * Backup2Gmail: Backup Project Files to Gmail

I love the idea of an automated, daily, off-site backup and then send the backup file to Gmail for storing with their amazing services. But I think it’s dangerous to backup your source codes to Gmail without password, and it will save out times more than if this tool were written as an extension of Visual Studio then we can backup any time we want. Therefore, I began to find an add-in which can do the same but the pity is that there’s no add-in like that. BTW, I found some great projects in backing-up your solution to store locally:

   * ProjectZip 1.6: Zip up the source code for your latest CodeProject article
   * ZipStudio: Zip up a Visual Studio solution directly from the Visual Studio Solution Explorer window.
   * SolutionZipper: VS 2005 Add-in Cleans and Zips a Solution in One Step.

In the other hand, one of them does not have some options or features that I usually use for my job so I decided to make a new one. And I also show you how to create an add-in for Visual Studio step-by-step.

Read more: Codeproject

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איי הבתולה הבריטיים (BVI – British Virgin Islands)

| Monday, March 15, 2010
איי הבתולה הבריטיים (BVI – British Virgin Islands)


איי הבתולה הבריטיים (BVI – British Virgin Islands) הם קבוצת איים בים הקריבי, אשר שייכים לבריטניה והינה חלק מארכיפלג איי הבתולה. איי הבתולה הבריטיים כוללים 4 איים עיקריים ועוד כ- 50 איים קטנים. אוכלוסיית האיים מונע כ- 22,000 איש ועיר הביה רואוד טאון שוכנת באי הגדול טורטולה.

כלכלה:

איי הבתולה הבריטיים (BVI – British Virgin Islands) הם אחת מקבוצות האיים המשגשגות ביותר. שני מקורות ההכנסה העיקריים ב- BVI הם תיירות ושירותים פיננסיים. 50% מההכנסות של המדינה, מקורם בתעשיית האופשור Offshore ומגיעים מאגרות שונות של רישום חברות זרות הרשומות באי ונהנות מהטבות מס כתוצאה מהיותו של האי אחד ממקלטי המס הנפוצים בעולם  לרישום חברות זרות.

רישום חברות זרות:

צורת הרישום של חברה באיי הבתולה הבריטיים הינה "חברה עסקית בינלאומית" (IBC – International Business Company) ומעוגנות תחת חוק החברות הבינלאומי משנת 1984 וחוק הבנקים והנאמנויות משנת 1990. הליך הרישום של חברות זרות ב- BVI מחייב נציג מקומי וכתובת רשומה בתוך האיים.
שם החברה:


נאסר על החברה להשתמש בשם זהה או דומה לשם של חברה קיימת. יש איסור על שימוש במילים הבאות בשם החברה, למעט בקיום רשיון או הסכמה רשמית של ממשלת איי הבתולה הבריטיים: בנק, נאמנות, נאמנים, ביטוח, ביטחון, ביטוח משנה, בניית הקהילה, חסכונות, הלוואות, לשכת המסחר, אוניברסיטה, קרן עירונית, קרן השקעות ניהולית או כל מילה מקבילה בשפה אחרת.

בעלי מניות:

לחברות זרות ישנה דרישה של לפחות בעל מניות אחד. בעל המניות יכול להיות יחיד או חברה. ב- BVI ישנו חסיון על בעל המניות והוא אינו מופיעה ברשם החברות, כלומר, המידע אינו נגיש לציבור. הרישום של  בעל המניות יופיע רק אצל הנציג המקומי.

דירקטורים:

ישנה דרישה של לפחות דירקטור אחד. הדירקטור אינו חייב להיות מקומי והוא יכול להיות יחיד או חברה.

דו"חות כספיים:

אין צורך בהגשת דוחו"ת כספיים

מיסוי:

חברות זרות הרשומות באיי הבתולה הבריטיים (BVI – British Virgin Islands) נהנות ממס של 0% על הכנסות שמקורם מחוץ לאיים. דיבידנדים וריבית המשולמים לתושבי חוץ פטורים מניכוי מס במקור. אין מס על רווחי הון, על מתנות ומס עזבון. ל- BVI קיימות אמנות מס עם בריטניה, יפן ושוויץ.

ביטויים רלבנטים – הקמת חברה באיי הבתולה,הקמת חברת BVI, רישום חברת

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gpkcs11

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What Is gpkcs11?
It is an implementation of the PKCS #11: Cryptographic Token Interface Standard, that you may freely download and distribute.

This software is only available in source code and is distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). The source code package also includes an interactive shell that is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Please refer to the file README for further explanations. Please note that this software is aimed at developers of applications with cryptographics functions and requires programming expertise to make use of. gpkcs11 is still in development and may lead to loss of data and has potential security holes. TC TrustCenter is not liable to any damages, direct or indirect, that arise through the use of the software.

PKCS#11 defines an interface for the communication of arbitrary applications with systems that perform cryptogrphic operations, like en- and decryption, signing and verifying. These systems, called token, may be Chipcards (with appropriate reader), discrete hardware systems or pure software implementations.

gpkcs11 provides support functions to make the development of support for new tokens easier and contains a complete software token, as well as an automated testing environment. In a later version this software token will be usable as complete and secure tool for cryptographic applications. In this phase gpkcs11 may serve as a testing tool in the development of new applications that contain cryptographic support.

Here you may download the latest version. The code was tested on Solaris 2.5.1/SPARC and successfully compiles on Linux 2.0.36/i386 as well. It should run on other UNIX platforms as well. Only the creation of shared libraries may cause problems. The libtool is used in order to help solve those problems on plattforms where it is supported. Unfortunately we do not have acces to other plattforms, but would be very interested in any reports on your experiences. The development is being done on Windows NT in parallel, and is buildable on it as well.

Starting with version 0.5.6 for the the workspace and project files for Microsofts Visual C++ 6.0 are included. This is a kind of trial balloon. The whole system is not buildable without manual intervention (e.g. you still need the seperate OpenSSL library). But the projects should help build gpkcs11 on Win32.

Read more: gpkcs11

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SWIG

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SWIG is a software development tool that connects programs written in C and C++ with a variety of high-level programming languages. SWIG is used with different types of languages including common scripting languages such as Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl and Ruby. The list of supported languages also includes non-scripting languages such as C#, Common Lisp (CLISP, Allegro CL, CFFI, UFFI), Java, Lua, Modula-3, OCAML, Octave and R. Also several interpreted and compiled Scheme implementations (Guile, MzScheme, Chicken) are supported. SWIG is most commonly used to create high-level interpreted or compiled programming environments, user interfaces, and as a tool for testing and prototyping C/C++ software. SWIG can also export its parse tree in the form of XML and Lisp s-expressions. SWIG may be freely used, distributed, and modified for commercial and non-commercial use.

Read more: SWIG

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PKCS Standards and .NET Framework

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This article will introduce the reader to the Public Key Cryptography Standards (PKCS). The emphasis will be on what is standardized in the PKCS (Public Key Cryptographic Standards) standards and the implementation in .NET 1.1 Framework. This tutorial assumes that the reader is familiar with basic terms in cryptography such as Public Key cryptography, Secret Key cryptography and Message Digest algorithms.

PKCS Standards

The PKCS standards are specifications that were developed by RSA Security in conjunction with system developers worldwide (such as Microsoft, Apple, Sun etc.) for the purpose of accelerating the deployment of public key cryptography. The goal is to facilitate early adoption of these standards by vendors.

These standards are used everywhere in the e-security realm. Any application developer choosing to implement security into his/her application would stumble upon these standards at some point of time. Applications ranging from web browsers to secure email clients depend on the PKCS standards to interoperate with one another. PKCS is defined for both Binary and ASCII messages in an abstract manner giving complete specifications. The representation format for the encoded messages is a preferred format. (The companion documents are ASN.1 = Abstract Syntax Notation 1, BER = Basic Encoding Rules, DER = Distinguish Encoding Rule).

Standards Description

PKCS # 1 The RSA encryption standard. This standard defines mechanisms for encrypting and signing data using the RSA public key system.
PKCS # 3 The Diffie-Hellman key-agreement standard. This defines the Diffie-Hellman key agreement protocol.
PKCS # 5 The password-based encryption standard (PBE). This describes a method to generate a Secret Key based on a password.
PKCS # 6 The extended-certificate syntax standard. This is currently being phased out in favor of X509 v3.
PKCS # 7 The cryptographic message syntax standard. This defines a generic syntax for messages which have cryptography applied to it.
PKCS # 8 The private-key information syntax standard. This defines a method to store Private Key Information.
PKCS # 9 This defines selected attribute types for use in other PKCS standards.
PKCS # 10 The certification request syntax standard. This describes syntax for certification requests.
PKCS # 11 The cryptographic token interface standard. This defines a technology independent programming interface for cryptographic devices such as smartcards.
PKCS # 12 The personal information exchange syntax standard. This describes a portable format for storage and transportation of user private keys, certificates etc.
PKCS # 13 The elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) standard. This describes mechanisms to encrypt and sign data using elliptic curve cryptography.
PKCS # 14 This covers pseudo random number generation (PRNG). This is currently under active development.
PKCS # 15 The cryptographic token information format standard. This describes a standard for the format of cryptographic credentials stored on cryptographic tokens.

Note: PKCS #2 and #4 do not exist anymore because they have been incorporated into PKCS #1.

Read more: Codeproject

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