I'm currently conducting a due-diligence review of a technical system. The system is a classic distributed, two-tier system with data held centrally and business-logic delegated to an application tier. I've been asked to perform a security analysis as part of my review. I can't tell you anything about the project itself, for confidentiality (and security) reasons, but I thought I'd share some of the thought processes behind what I've been doing.

A colleague has been asking how to do this and I've found a great post written years ago. I've linked it here...

This is just a quick addendum to a colleague's post about using JSON in .NET. Read more for an example and a link to the original post.

Have you ever wanted to change the default namespace of an XmlDocument in .NET. It's not as easy as it might be.

Today I've been talking to some of our developers about generics in C#. As part of it, we worked through an example, the Badger Example, which I've reproduced here for those intrigued!

I've been looking at the C# specification for the new keyword when used on a class member declaration and thought I'd share my findings. If you are a die-hard C# coder then you won't find anything new here, but of course that doesn't mean that you already know it! Maybe it would be better to check...

Have you ever wanted to remove a handler from an event, but haven't had a reference to the object receiving the event, or perhaps you don't even know what type the object has! .NET hides the details of events but with a bit of help from the Reflection classes, you can edit the handlers for your own purposes.

I was recently asked why some expressions didn't seem to be doing what the developer intended. Typically, this was due to the use of the short or byte data types. This post is a brief discussion on the related parts of the C# Language Specification (version 3.0).

I'm in the process of writing a Visual Studio template extension to automate the creation of Windows Communication Foundation components. As part of the Wizard, I want to allow users to configure options based on various enumerations. To help with this, I've developed a generic control that extends a ComboBox to manage a set of allowed values automatically. This way, the same code can be used with any .NET enumeration type.

Following my earlier post about WCF service design guidelines, I've created some WCF code snippets to simplify the implementation of services, operations, messages and data contracts.

Some of you might have recognised that we are using a customised version of the SubText blogging engine for these blogs. Recently, I've made some changes to support additional feeds and I thought I'd share them with you.

Microsoft has released an article comparing the performance of WCF and .NET 2.0 distributed application technologies such as ASMX web services, WSE web services, COM+ applications and .NET 2.0 remoting. The results are surprising.

I'm currently writing a service that needs to provide long-lived callback behaviour to a large number of clients. In this case, the WCF session semantics are not appropriate and so I can't use the ServiceContractAttribute's CallbackContract property.

The content of this post was written in response to a query by a colleague wanting to reclaim memory used by a .NET component used as part of a legacy application. Concerns were also raised about memory leaks in .NET. In this post I describe some of the basics of .NET and COM memory management, and how to explicitly manage .NET component memory use.

Microsoft have released significant parts of the .NET framework source code for developers using Visual Studio 2008. In case you've not been following the releases, this blog post includes links to configuration and hotfix resources.

By default, WCF limits the amount of data that can be transferred through an operation invokation in subtle ways. To override these default limits, you will need to alter both the client and service configuration. No changes to your code are needed, though.

I've recently begun playing around with developing an SOA solution using WCF. My focus is on implementing a service that is loosely coupled, autonomous, highly configurable and reusable. I might tell you more about it in a later blog, but for now I want to describe some of the design issues involved.

I've been playing around a bit with the idea of integrating Windows Workflow Foundation into custom web server controls. I've had some success but also hit something of a wall. If you have any experience with any of these issues, I'd love to hear from you.

I've recently hit an issue where some custom controls have been generating exceptions when unpublished pages exist in an EPiServer site. In these cases, the relevant (required) properties have null values.

Here's another product suggestion I've logged with Microsoft along the same lines as the previous one. This one is to allow you to dynamically specify the list of columns you want to unpivot. This might be from a stored procedure parameter or a subquery, either way you can't do it easily at the moment. Register your support here: https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=332512

I've logged a suggestion with Microsoft for support for the inclusion of NULLs when you use the UNPIVOT operator. Add your support if you think this would be useful: https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=332325 Read more if you want to see why this feature is useful...

Auditing the actual changes made to a table can be quite complex, but is often required. In SQL Server 2008, you can use the new feature Change Data Capture, but in 2005 you have fewer options. Here's an approach using common table expressions, table variables and a nice, big and hopefully fast query!

I've been looking at the performance of SQL Server 2008, following the recent SQL Bits conference (see http://www.sqlbits.com), and have been looking at creating some test data for my analysis. This is probably old stuff to most of you, but I hit an interesting issue...

How can you get the PageData object for a page when the current user doesn't have access. It took me a while to find out, but you can just read on...

Having added Flash content support to a website, I was getting this message in Internet Explorer 6. Internet Explorer 7 and FireFox both worked without any problems. I knew about the issue of Active Content and Internet Explorer 7, but I didn't know what was causing this problem in IE6. Read more...

When you are using the (very helpful) UpdatePanel, the browser doesn't keep track of the asynchronous postbacks. This means that when the user clicks the back button in the browser, they go to the navigation prior to the last full postback.

How can you resolve this?