december 2006 - Posts

31 december 2006
Prepping for exam 70-551
Apparently the boyscout motto is to "always be prepared". This certainly holds true for Microsoft Certificied Professional (MCP) exams. Last week I took the exam 70–551: UPGRADE: MCAD Skills to MCPD: Web Developer by Using the Microsoft .NET Framework . Here is how you can be prepared. Know this: The... Read More...
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30 december 2006
The need for Trusted Root Certificate Authorities
A web server will send the public key of its server certificate to set up a SSL connection with the client. The client checks whether the certificate is still a valid in this point in time the name of the server matches the one in the certificate the certificate has been issued by an authority it trusts... Read More...
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29 december 2006
Request and install a client certificate on the browsing computer
Browsers will need to have client certificates installed before any web server can receive them for authentication and authorization. Certificate Services can issue these certificates manually by a user, administrator or even programmatically. Let's assume that your users need to acquire a certificate... Read More...
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23 december 2006
Getting up in the morning
Take a look at this picture of my daughter Lieke: Looking pretty wise and smart, right? (Remember, this is her father talking). Well anyway, just to tell you the truth: that's not how she gets up in the morning. Follow this link to see how she looks without her first cup of coffee and make-up on. Read More...
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23 december 2006
Configure IIS for client certificates
Now that the web server is prepared with a server certificate you can continue with client certificates. By default IIS will ignore client certificates. You need to change some settings. Go to the properties of the particular web application in Internet Services Manager: There should be an active Edit... Read More...
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23 december 2006
Preparing IIS 5.x or 6.0 with a server certificate
The final goal of this exercise is to work with client certificates. But client certificates will not work unless you set up the web server with a server certificate. Even though there are loads of instructions to be found, let me add mine to the stack for the sake of completeness. I assume that you... Read More...
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22 december 2006
Using client certificates to authenticate web browsers
ASP and ASP.NET have a pretty easy mechanism to work with client certificates that a browser has handed to the web server. All it takes is this little piece of code: Response.Write(Request.ClientCertificate[ "Issuer" ]); plus or minus the square brackets and semi-colon. This will read and print the value... Read More...
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20 december 2006
Never-ending story of Close versus Dispose
Erno de Weerd recently posted a blog entry on how SqlConnection.Dispose removes the connection from the connection pool. He concluded this after looking in Reflector and seeing this: 1 protected override void Dispose( bool disposing) 2 { 3 if (disposing) 4 { 5 this ._userConnectionOptions = null ; 6... Read More...
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15 december 2006
WebDev.WebServer for easy website hosting
Visual Studio 2005 Websites and Web Application projects use the ASP.NET Development Server as a light-weight web server to host the websites. Pretty easy, but sometimes you need to host one or more websites and don't feel like starting a full-blown VS2005 instance just for that. And adding a Web Share... Read More...
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14 december 2006
SourceSafe 2005 over the Internet
The 2005 version of Visual SourceSafe is capable of connections over the Internet. Very handy if you, like myself, have the need to access your code repository while on the move. To use this yourself, you should first configure your code repository server and web server for VSS Internet access. Read... Read More...
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12 december 2006
Are you my type?
The 15th episode of the Dutch .NET Magazine has dropped in the mailbox at Class-A just a moment ago. Inside are many great articles. There is also an article (I dare not say "one of them") written by Stefan Onderstal from Qurius and myself. The article focusses on the problem of the default use of the... Read More...
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12 december 2006
Using new async invocation pattern in ASP.NET Web Services
My colleague Dennis just asked me how you would asynchronously invoke web services (in VB.NET). The new way As Dennis already figured out there is a new way to do this in ASP.NET 2.0. In fact, the new way is all over the .NET Framework 2.0 and is referred to as the event-based asynchronous pattern. There... Read More...
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12 december 2006
Revamp your Terminal Services Client
Microsoft support has released version 6.0 of the Terminal Services Client -or- Remote Desktop Connection at their website . This version allows you to connect to Windows Vista and Windows "Longhorn" Server terminal services. The new features include: Network Level Authentication Server authentication... Read More...
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02 december 2006
Out with CAPTCHA, in with NoBot control
It seems like almost everybody (including myself) was having big trouble getting a comment into my weblog. The main culprit was the CAPTCHA control that I found on the MSDN site and have been using since. It resulted not only in a lot of user unfriendliness, but also a lot of runtime errors (memory corruption... Read More...
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