Kenny Kerr

Am I the only one being hammered by comment spam all of a sudden?

Wow, it’s been a while since I last posted something here. We’ve recently moved to BC so I’ve been pretty distracted. I hope to be able to post more regularly in the coming weeks.

After a brief hiatus, I decided to post a few more parts of the Introduction to MSIL series.

MSDN Magazine recently made the sample code for my App Lockdown article available online. Unfortunately the code and structure was changed accidentally, resulting in the sample code not compiling. Download the original sample code, which should compile and work without any errors or warnings with Visual C++ .NET.

As you might have gathered, the MSIL series has come to an end. I originally set out to write a brief introduction to the Microsoft intermediate language to help programmers better understand managed code and also allow me to use MSIL in more interesting discussions without having to repeatedly explain the basics of MSIL. I could go on forever but I think the introduction is sufficient to allow interested readers to explore it further on their own.

The original draft of my latest security article for MSDN Magazine, App Lockdown, included sections covering web security. They were ultimately removed as they overlapped slightly with other articles already featured by MSDN Magazine. They are however part of the story I wanted to tell and so I include those sections here.

MSDN Magazine has made a preview of my new security article available online. App Lockdown features in the special security issue of MSDN Magazine coming next month.

In parts 1 through 5 of the Introduction to MSIL series we focused on MSIL and the constructs it provides for writing managed code. In the next few sections we are going to examine some common language features that are not intrinsic to instruction-based languages like MSIL. Understanding the intermediate language instructions that are generated for common, programming language statements is critical to acquiring an instinct for the performance characteristics of your code as well as to more easily track down subtle bugs.