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  • Sarah Palin and Security Questions

    I've always looked at security questions used to automate user password recovery with quite a bit of skepticism . What's the point of requiring strong passwords if you allow anyone to reset the password on an account by answering a (potentially inane) question? And just how many good security...
    Posted to Security Briefs by keith-brown on 10-09-2008
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  • Zermatt in Community Server

    I'm about to embark on a mission to get Zermatt integrated into pluralsight.com as our single-sign-on solution, and a big part of that is getting our Community Server installation wired into that. I'm curious if anyone else has seen any work being done in this area, or if I'll be the first...
    Posted to Security Briefs by keith-brown on 10-06-2008
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  • A tip on using ASP.NET validation controls

    Executive summary: ValidationSummary controls look at the ErrorMessage field to figure out what to display, so always use ErrorMessage in a verbose enough way that it will be helpful from a ValidationSummary control. If you need a shorter message to display inline (i.e., where the validation control...
    Posted to Security Briefs by keith-brown on 09-03-2008
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  • Null Strings in ASP.NET Declarative DataSource Updates

    I just spent about 15 minutes debugging a problem where a document was getting unexpected nulls where empty strings should have been. Indeed controls like the TextBox have code in them that allows you to set the Text property to null and the TextBox will convert that into an empty string. So it's...
    Posted to Security Briefs by keith-brown on 08-29-2008
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  • Serializable XmlDocument

    ( Updated 9 Oct 2008: replaced my custom MemoryStream.CopyUpToSeekPointer() extension method with MemoryStream.ToArray(), a built in method on MemoryStream that I overlooked and should have been using) It's surprising that XmlDocument isn't marked [Serializable], because it's very natural...
    Posted to Security Briefs by keith-brown on 08-18-2008
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  • Two-way formatted data binding in ASP.NET

    Two way data binding in ASP.NET is easy, just use the Bind expression and data will flow between your web controls and your data source flawlessly. Until that is, you try to use a format string: Bind("AmountCharged", "{0:C}") While this displays just as you'd expect (e.g., $200...
    Posted to Security Briefs by keith-brown on 08-15-2008
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  • Where to get Password Minder

    We recently updated our website and some links have broken as a result. Here's the place you should go to get the latest version of Password Minder: http://mercury.pluralsight.com/tools.aspx Sorry for any inconvenience!
    Posted to Security Briefs by keith-brown on 08-05-2008
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  • Better exception reporting in ASP.NET part 2

    This is the third post in a series. The first post described the problem: ASP.NET wasn't reporting inner exception stack traces. The second post described my solution. This post shows the code I used to solve the problem: a custom email provider for the Health Monitoring system in ASP.NET. Enjoy...
    Posted to Security Briefs by keith-brown on 08-04-2008
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  • Comments

    We recently switched our blog engine out, and I'm still getting the hang of the new system. Looks like due to a misconfiguration, several comments have been waiting for moderation for days or weeks. If yours was one of them, please accept my apology - I didn't have email notifications turned...
    Posted to Security Briefs by keith-brown on 08-01-2008
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  • Better exception reporting in ASP.NET

    In my last post , I commented on how ASP.NET health monitoring doesn't output stack traces for inner exceptions, which can be problematic due to its heavy reliance on reflection. I spent the morning doing some further spelunking with reflector , and my first solution was to implement a custom WebEvent...
    Posted to Security Briefs by keith-brown on 08-01-2008
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  • ASP.NET Health Monitoring doesn't log inner exception stack trace

    This can be a problem, especially when an ObjectDataSource starts throwing exceptions. The stack trace looks the same because of the way the methods are invoked (via reflection) - you end up with a stack trace for a TargetInvocationException, which basically says, "I used reflection to invoke some...
    Posted to Security Briefs by keith-brown on 08-01-2008
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  • Simulating Email in .NET

    I use email as a notification mechanism a lot, and often in class I'll demo sending email via a technique that I use frequently when developing code. It allows you to simulate sending an email message. The trick to doing this is not to hardcode things like host, port, etc. for your SMTP server when...
    Posted to Security Briefs by keith-brown on 08-01-2008
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  • Controlling column width in a GridView

    I've been building some internal pages for our sales team here at Pluralsight , and many of those pages make use of the ASP.NET GridView control to display rectangular data. It's generally a really easy to use control, but I've always struggled with getting column widths to look right. My...
    Posted to Security Briefs by keith-brown on 07-30-2008
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  • Introducing Microsoft Code Name Zermatt

    For a couple of years now, I've been giving talks about "claims-based identity", and "claims-aware applications". The most concrete example of a claims-based identity architecture that I've been able to show so far is Active Directory Federation Services v1 (ADFS) and Windows...
    Posted to Security Briefs by keith-brown on 07-09-2008
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  • Welcome, David Starr

    One of the main reasons that Fritz , Aaron , and I wanted to create this company was to provide a home for people who love to teach. We didn't want to build an empire, and we weren't out to get rich. We just wanted a place where we could comfortably practice what we love to do: giving software...
    Posted to Security Briefs by keith-brown on 07-09-2008
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