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You might have heard of the late talking about credit card security and the forth-coming PCI DSS standard, short for Payment Card Industry's DSS. According to PCI, DSS "is a multifaceted security standard that includes requirements for security management, policies, procedures, network architecture, software design and other critical protective measures."
In Finland, an organization called Luottokunta is the local representative for Visa and MasterCard credit cards. They have information about PCI DSS on their web sites, and for application developers, you need to be sure your application follows the PCI standards by summer 2008. Depending on your order volume, you can belong to four classes. On the lowest class, below 20,000 transactions a year, no audits are needed, just following the standard is enough. Be sure to get the technical specifications and start studying them, if you already aren't.
I noticed that when I'm running Windows Server 2008 Core on a Virtual PC virtual machine and Task Manager (by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc or Ctrl+Alt+Del and then selecting Task Manager). Normally, Task Manager uses about (less than) 5% of CPU, but in Server Core the utilization doesn't drop below 25%, and can be about 60%.
I'm yet to verify whether this is a problem with my virtual machine setup, but it seems strange that Task Manager would need so much CPU time in a virtual machine, since a virtual machine with identical settings running Task Manager on normal Windows GUI uses much less CPU time.
I had the pleasure to attend Microsoft's Visual Studio 2008 Channel Summit in Amsterdam earlier this week. From Finland, I had the chance to meet local Microsoft people, including old faces and the PM for Visual Studio. Also, I met two other Visual Studio Team System partners, we'll see what kind of co-operations we can figure out in the future.
A recent RegDeveloper article titled "New tune for Microsoft software design?" has some nice information about an old topic: are there already enough features in the software we use from day to day? A new person, a musician by heart, has joined Microsoft and has a fresh perspective: things (i.e. new software features) that don't make the life simpler should be abandoned. Not a novel idea, but reminds me of the old saying: even software can get rotten, and should sometimes be simply redisgned. Of course, that is often easier said than done.
I noticed that I've got probably quite addicted to source/version control in Visual Studio Team System (VSTS): I'd love to see a similar feature in Word, and directly from the operating system!
Of course, I could today use Windows Vista's shadow copies ("Previous Versions"), or Word's tracking of changes, or keep VSTS running and copy my projects there, but none of these solutions seem clean enough for me. Vista's Previous Versions comes quite close, but the problem is that it doesn't keep that many old versions, and isn't even guaranteening any previous versions. Maybe I need to hack a simple VSTS client that integrates with Word 2007. :-)
The future "Orcas" version of Visual Studio (version 2008 that is) contains a new feature called the SQL Database Publishing wizard. This little wizard helps developers, especially those developing web applications to move their local SQL Server database to the remote hosting server, possibly hosted by an ISP.
There's a nice blog post on MSDN about this new feature. Check it out.
Woohoo! Canon has announced that it will start to design new awesome lenses: 200mm f/2.0 and 800mm f/5.6. I can imagine what the 200mm will be; I guess nothing even comes close with this focal length. But of course, f/1.8 would have been even better. :-)
Another photography related tidbit for today: my ND400 filter (neutral density) finally arrived today. I had already placed my order from DT.fi in May (!), and delivery time was then said to be "several weeks". Well, I guess they were right.
I just noticed a very nice site on MSDN UK that resembles Channel 9: MSDN nuggets. This site features many short videos (about 10-15 minutes each) about many new technologies, including C# 3.0, Visual Studio 2008 and ASP.NET.
Enjoy!
As organizations are increasingly fighting against spam e-mail, technical settings in mail servers need to be tweaked to let e-mail flow. For example, some mail servers require the SMTP protocol EHLO/HELO greeting line to match the DNS reverse lookup name of the server's IP address.
Now, if you are running Windows Small Business Server 2003 domain and Exchange Serevr 2003 on it, chances are your default settings are not correct. That is, if you follow most suggestions regarding local domain names, you might name you internal SBS domain something like "company.local". If your server name is something like "sbs1", then the full computer name of your Exchange server will be "sbs1.company.local". Of course, this local name will not resolve globally on the Internet, and thus your Exchange server might not be able to send mail to such SMTP servers (domains). Symptoms are mails that forever stay in the mail queue, as the server on the other end simply drops the connection after an "invalid" EHLO/HELO greeting, and thus your poor Exchange server will keep on trying again and again.
Luckily, there's an easy remedy: simply change the name that Exchange server uses when greeting other servers. To do so, follow these steps:
That should do it!
The latest October issue of the Finnish Tietokone magazine has my newest article about Microsoft PowerShell. The article is titled "Komentorivin paluu", the return of the command line.
Enjoy!
Last week, I learned about a new Finnish blog about Microsoft Visual Studio from the current Microsoft Finland's Visual Studio Product Marketing Manager JW. As you can guess, I added Jukka's (aka Waldo's) blog to my blog roll instantly. Maybe you should, too.
The next version of Visual Studio 2008 will contain many new interesting features, and features grouped under the Code Analysis umbrella are near the top, at least on my list.
There's a nice new blog post on MSDN related to these new feaures. Check it out!
Here's the big news for today: Microsoft is going to make .NET source code available for all interested developers! This was announced here.
In the first release, base class library source code including ADO.NET, ASP.NET and WinForms is going to be released. Also developers do get a possibility to debug the code using Visual Studio.
Sounds great to me! Of course, the other side is that the license is somewhat restrictive, and there are people that don't like it. But for me, I've already signed so many NDAs and no-competition agreements, that I've lost count. So to me, this Microsoft reference license probably is a non-issue.
This week, I learned about a new SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) authentication method: AUTH=LOGIN (or AUTH LOGIN). I found out that this authentication extension is pretty simple (it uses Base64 for "encryption"), but even so, I could find official specifications of this authentication method.
Also, I noticed that .NET's SmtpClient class from System.Net namespace doesn't seem to support this authentication method. So if you run into this authentication method and are required to use it, you might neet write your own SMTP client, purchase a component, or dig the open source libraries to see if they support what you need.
Good luck!
If you have been reading blogs, you must have notices links below blog posts to social networking sites, such as Digg and Delicious. However, these two sites are very generic in nature, and thus a little bit more focused system would benefit readers of special topics, such as .NET development, and so forth.
Now, I've recently learned about a new site called DotNetKicks.com which is, as the name says, a "Digg for .NET people".
Since this blog is mostly about Windows application development with .NET, I might add links to DotNetKicks to my site. Do you think this would be a good idea? Or not? Let me know!
Developer.com has published my second security-related article, titled "The Basics of Manipulating File Access Control Lists with C#", and it is available on both Developer.com and CodeGuru.com.
The article talks about file access control on NTFS file systems, and discusses ACLs, ACEs and the like, with examples in .NET/C# code.
Enjoy!
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