Infinities Loop : TRULY Understanding ViewState

I recently stumbled across this article on ViewState. I wasn't expecting to learn much, but I was pleasantly surprised. Definitely worth the read if you are an ASP.NET developer.

Using code Tag to Display Code in Your Blog or Website

If you post code to your blog or website, you might want to consider using the <code> element to help separate your content from the code. This can be achieved nicely by setting the style for the <code> element in your CSS. I use the following style in my blog to help format code snips that I post.

code
{
background-color: #f6ffff;
border: solid 2px #bbbbbb;
display: block;
font: courier;
margin-left: -10px;
overflow: auto;
white-space: pre;
width: 410px;
}

Sample:

<code>
#include &lt;stdio.h&gt;

int main(void)
{
printf("Hello world!\n");
return 0;
}
</code>


Advanced OOP Design Patterns

This is, without a doubt, one of the best online resources I have come across, which clearly demonstrates some fundamental design patterns used in OOP. After reading the excerpts from the book, I'm convinced I'll be purchasing a hard copy as soon as possible. Whether you program in C++, C#, Java, or any other OOP language, these fundamental design patterns should be applied to your programs.

Another Linux Desktop: XGL

Speaking of Linux desktops, here is another favorable desktop for Linux known as XGL.

Project Looking Glass on Ubuntu

For years, people have regarded Linux as a toy for geeks. Many claimed that the capabilities of desktop Linux lagged far behind the power of the desktops offered by Microsoft in the Windows operating system. Fortunately, those times are changing as innovations to the Linux desktop have placed Linux well ahead of the enhancements brought forth by Microsoft's latest operating system, Windows Vista. One prime example of this is Project Looking Glass, which is brought to you by none other than Sun.

Complex Password More Weak?

Firstly, I'd like to point out that I am a developer, I am not a writer. That said, I apologize ahead of time if this reads like a high school student wrote it. I did my best.

At any rate, in this day in age, and with as much as we rely on the Internet for the important day-to-day aspects of our lives, we can never be too careful with our passwords. But is there a point in which password complexity can actually have an adverse affect on how secure a persons password really is? I say the answer to that question is an irrefutable, "yes".

I want to point out that I am huge on personal security. Actually, I've been told that I'm obsessive, at times. Having said that, I have come up with passwords that I'm thoroughly convinced that it would take more than a trillion monkeys pounding away at a typewriter, over 100 lifetimes to crack. They're secure, but they mean something to me, so they're easy for me to remember. For the times that I need more protection, I resort to encrypting my data with a passphrase, which is even more complex. However, even though I consider the passwords that I use to be reasonably secure, I can't help but wonder what the person/people were thinking when they came up with the list of requirements for a site I was recently signing up for. Following is a list of requirements.

1. must be at least 7 characters long
2. cannot contain the login id (exact or partial)
3. must contain at least one letter, one number, and one of the following special characters:
   $&#_!@%^*()-=+~\:;<,>.?/
4. cannot contain any repeat characters
5. cannot contain any of:
   |'`"

Two things from this list stand out. Firstly is that the password cannot contain any part of my login name. At first, I wasn't exactly sure how strict this rule would be enforced, but I later came to find out that any part of my login ID means exactly that. Any part. For example, if my login ID contains the letter 's', my password cannot cannot have the letter 's' anywhere in it. To make matters worse, the password also cannot repeat any characters. Yep, that means that you cannot have the same character in your password more than once.

Amazed by the complexity of the requirements, I was finally able to come up with a password that would comply; however, there was no way that I was ever going to remember it, considering the passwords complexity and that it was for a site that I'll rarely visit. So, if I ever want to be able to get back into my account again, I really didn't have much choice except to either write down the password or save it in an encrypted file.

In my opinion, this is an example of people getting quite ridiculous with their password requirements. As I mentioned before, I am pretty big on personal security, which is why I opted to save my password in an encrypted file. However, for the majority of the people that I know, this password format is so complex that their passwords will end up on a Post It note stuck under their keyboard. So much for security.

It is my hope that developers will read this post and realize that there is a point that going overboard on password complexity can have an adverse affect on what their original intentions were. This, in my opinion, was obviously an example of going extremely overboard.

C# 3.0: An Introduction

This article hopes to bring readers up to speed on some of the changes we can look forward to in the C# 3.0 specification. Some of the new features include:

• Object Initialization
• Type Inferences
• Anonymous Types
• Lambda Expressions
• Extension Methods
• Queries (LINQ)
• Expression Trees

SQL Injection Attacks by Example

Are your applications susceptible to SQL injection attacks? I recently stumbled on a decent article that hopes to educate readers by demonstrating sample SQL injection techniques. A recommended read for any SQL developers.

Search Engine Optimization for Beginners and Experts

Scott Bowler has written a great blog article detailing how to "achieve consistent results in the major search engines." I have found his blog post to be extremely useful and recommend it to others to read.

Custom Iterators

Bill Wagner has written a great article on custom iterators that I highly recommend reading. He takes you through a series of problems in great detail to help explain better ways of iterating through collections. A Word document version of the article is also available here and his blog can be found here.