coder++

A 20 minute crash course reviewing the essentials of computer programming

Can’t understand most of the german…. but I’m so excited I found this long documentary on YouTube about my most favourite of nightclubs…. all my graffiti filled east german memories come flooding back when I see and listen to this documentary..

I first went to Berlin around 1999, every visit since then has not been the same, I still love the city though :)

My usual way to find the ID of a database to reliably filter a trace running in profiler is to look through the sysobjects table in master.

I found this way is far nicer select db_id(‘yourdatabasename’)

DOH!

In the process this week of doing a rediculous amount of devlopment work, part of which is migrating my three sites hosting on windows 2003 server with iis6, to windows server 2008 with iis7….

If you are also wondering why as in my case jMail was not happy on iis 7 win2k8, it seems to be because it’s now using the network service account rather than IUSR, so you need to assign the correct execute permissions to the dll that you need to access….

I’n my case, I just granted execute permisson to C:\Program Files\Dimac\w3JMail\jmail.dll to “everyone”… now that machine happily sends emails using that object…

So it’s 10pm, and I think I finally cracked it… thanks to this tutorial http://www.brianlegg.com/post/2011/05/09/Implementing-your-own-RoleProvider-and-MembershipProvider-in-MVC-3.aspx I suspect I have tied an MVC3 application to a small set of credential fields in an existing database table on SQL Server.. I need to get away from the bloat of the default SQL membership and role provider structures..

The next issue will be working out if the hash between the existing web based application that uses the table I have integrated with now and the hash of my one are compatible… I will leave that until tomorrow.

On a separate note a great presentation I saw on my iPad this week was from here http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/DEV333
where Adam Tuliper discusses web application security including some nice open source addons to make MVC less vulnerable to XSS attacks and SQL injection amongst other things. One thing that stood out as nice and simple, but essential was how easy he makes it to encrypt a section of web.config, see the screenshot from the video below. Essentially the first statement encrypts, and the second one will decrypt on the same machine, (the machine identifier is used in the algorithm so can’t be decrypted on another machine (unless you are uber cracker))..

Later this week… integrating a 3D secure payment provider to my MVC3 application… interesting days!