Archives

Archives / 2009 / April
  • Why we should attack our own systems?

    Web page that is not attacked by security team or developers and testers before going to live can be considered as unsecure because nobody knows how it behaves under attacks. Unfortunately there are many web pages that are not secure and not event tested with security in mind. If some of these web pages happen to be a e-commerce sites then it is not hard to guess what kind of data attacker may find in this system about us. How can we be sure that our systems are protected against attacks?

  • SharePoint: The security validation for this page is invalid

    Another day, another lesson. This time I struggled with the following error: “The security validation for this page is invalid. Click Back in your Web browser, refresh the page, and try your operation again.” This error occurs when you are on a custom form and try to save list item. I am sure that one can find many more scenarios where this error occurs. As usual, log contains error but not information.

  • SharePoint: Customizing standard forms

    I needed a little bit customized forms that look similar to standard ones for one SharePoint solution. I have list with many fields and it is very inconvenient for users to fill these fields if they are following one after another. As there is no simple solution for this I created my own custom solution.

  • Azure Developer Portal: some screenshots

    I am writing currently one simple web application that runs on usual hosting environment and also on Azure environment. Web application is already hosted in CodePlex and during next two months I will publish application binaries and also source code. I tested my application in Azure environment and here are some screenshots I made.

  • Tracer Bullet Development

    After reading the books Ship it! and The Pragmatic Programmer, I suggest you to read both of them, I got some proof that I am right and the fast way I sometimes like to move is not my personal bad behaviour but suggested way to develop software. Officially it is called tracer bullet development. This method suggest you to write some code to make system work for customer so they can see how the system is planned. But this is not a usual prototyping procedure but involves some real coding work too.

  • Removing SPAN-tags around server control

    I had to write some ASP.NET server controls for our current SharePoint portal project. We have very nice DIV-based layout and using standard components that generate table and a lot of JavaScript seems to me like an bad idea. I found out that server controls put container tags around their mark-up. I needed my own tags around output and I found a way how to achieve it.

  • SharePoint: Clean code for sequential workflow

    I put up here SharePoint workflow code for the next times when Visual Studio screws some workflow up. It is easy for me to take working code here and it is easy for you too. To make code more clean I removed unused namespaces and refactored code so it is a little bit easier to read.

  • Writing rich logging solution

    Tests tell us if our software works as expected. But they tell us almost nothing about side effects of technical environment where system lives. We can face different problems when test users start testing system in their environment and we want to be ready to react fast to all problems. To get information about system’s work we need advanced logging.

  • SharePoint: Custom property of web part doesn’t show up

    SharePoint usually surprises me on the most busiest moments. I wrote web part that has some custom properties. These properties were simple ones and it was okay to show these properties in Miscellaneous section of web part property sheet. Although properties were defined nothing new showed up in property sheet.

  • Example: resizing uploaded image

    One of my readers asked for example about my image resizing routine. Here you can find example and also some notes about my code design solution.

  • Resizing images without loss of quality

    ASP.NET provides us with System.Drawing namespace where we can find classes we can use to manipulate with images. There are many people out there who mistakenly think that Image.GetThumbnailImage is best choice for image resizing. You can easily create crappy images if you follow the code examples in previously pointed article. In this post I will show you how to resize images without negative side effects.