Martin Spedding's Blog

Lack of wireless security + problems with Visual Studio and Zone Alarm

The weather is improving so I decided to sit on the balcony and use my laptop. I have a wireless connection at home so I thought no problem I will just connect to my network. It would not stop a determined hacker but I am using 128bit WEP and limiting connections to a defined set of MAC addresses. I also run a personal firewall on the laptop. Anyway the one network I could not see was my own but I could see quite a few others. So my wireless card found a network was allocated an IP address and now I was using someone else's bandwidth. They had no security configured at all !!!

I also decided that I would install Zone Alarm, which can lead to some problems debugging with Visual Studio if you are not careful. The problem is that if IIS is running when you install Zonealarm you will find that after restarting the computer that you cannot debug an application running in Visual Studio, the IDE will simply freeze. Also you will not be able to use the MMC to manage IIS.

What you have to do is configure the IIS Admin Service so that it you can start it manually and then when you restart the computer Zone Alarm will start first. Once Zone Alarm has started you can start IIS. This way Zone Alarm will display a message box asking you if you will allow internet access for IIS.

The down side of abstraction

I normally put the telephone numbers of my friends in my mobile phone. So when I want to call one them I simply choose the person from the list and the phone rings the number. This is great until the battery on your phone dies or you forget to take your phone with you and you realise that you are so used to selecting "John" from the the dropdown list that you cannot remember John's number.

So what has this got to do with computing ? Well I find I often have the same problem at work.I am sure I can't be alone. I have written a Data Abstraction layer which means I don't have to manually code all the ADO.NET stuff. This is a great example of re usable code. Just like storing the telephone number under my friends name until of course you work on a project where you can't use your "helper" classes and need to use all the ADO.NET stuff and you have forgotten it. A simple example but I could give many more. 

The same thing happens when you have to move between .Net development and classic VB/VBA . Suddenly all that stuff that you have pushed to the back of your head you suddenly have to remember. 

I was recently updating my CV and of course you write down all your experience. When I started I was developing in Coral 66, RTL /2, PLM 86 etc. I write this all down on the CV but to be honest it would take a while for me to remember how I programmed in those languages

All these product delays are making it harder to sell .Net to businesses

First of all I just wanted to express my sympathy to all the victims of the appalling bombings in Madrid, there is no excuse whatever your political, religious or other beliefs for wantom murder of innocent people whose only crime was to be travelling to work. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Secondly, I posted a comment to Frans Bourma's excellent piece(http://weblogs.asp.net/fbouma/archive/2004/03/11/87836.aspx) on why the delays to Yukon should not delay the delivery of Whidbey. I would much rather that Microsoft released Whidbey this year. I thought the only technical connection between Yukon and Whidbey was the new System.Data.sqlServer namespace. I would suggest they leave this out until Yukon is ready and ship the rest. There are a number of ASP.NET 2 features that are really useful and there is no point in developing them yourselves if Whidbey is just round the corner. As the date keep slipping it is making it harder to sell .Net to customers. Telling them I need to write all this code now but I know MS will make it obsolete with Whidbey is not an easy sell. Also is WinFS based on the Yukon code ? If so at this rate we will not see Longhorn until the next decade. I thought the original idea behind the larger .Net vision was that instead of shrink wrapped software we would move towards a subscription model. For me that means continuous improvement rather a big bang approach. I would rather have a reduced version of a system ship early than all the interdepencies meaning I have to wait years for something to ship. I thought the idea behind a Service Orientated Architecture was to move towards a loosely coupled architecture. Now tight coupling of applications is slowing the whole process down. A question to the Microsoft Development teams: why not prioritize features and the amount of effort required to get the to work and then ask the development community how many of the features really have to be there for an initial shipping version? Otherwise, people will look increasingly towards alternatives.