the status of .netSavant…

I have this awesome little ADO.NET code generator called .netSavant.  It analyzes your stored procedures and generates an optimized wrapper class that encapsulates the logic for execution.  After using it myself for quite some time, I thought, oddly, that I could make a little extra cash from the endeavor.  Heh, sadly I was wrong.  Dispite a lot of interest, few people were interested in paying $50 for a visual studio addin that saved a LOT of time and buggy code.  Wierd, but whatever.

So, with mixed feelings I killed the project.  It simply cost too much money to maintain the website and merchant account for a product that only sold a handful of licenses over the 18-24 months.

I’m left wondering what to do with the project.  There are a few options:

1. Create a codeplex project
2. Host the source code myself
3. Release the addin as freeware (no source code)
4. Release the addin as freeware with sponsorship (uhg, gross right?) (no source code)
5. Leave the project inactive and move on to other exciting technologies

I’m wondering if I really want to spend more effort supporting the project as a whole, though with so much time invested, its hard to walk away from it.  Part of me would like to see more people use .netSavant, if only to justify the time I spent creating it.  I’d also like the challenge of updating some of the methodology used to generate the source code, and possibly provide some extensibility points to enhance the analysis features that it supports.

Perhaps some day .netSavant will be resurrected in a better form.  Until that time, thanks for your interest and support.

Joshua

you think your data is safe?

While working on some application security requirements for a client, I came across this little nugget about cracking pgp passwords using a cloud.

Cracking Passwords in the Cloud

It’s interesting to see how easy it  has becomes to brute force passwords using distributed computing. While brute force attacking passwords for the average person is still time-prohibitive, even with a cloud, the ability to reduce password cracking times from years to weeks is impressive.  Cracking performance will continue to increase as distributed computing becomes cheaper, faster and more widely adopted.

Take a look at the article and think of how this could affect your data:  Cracking Passwords in the Cloud

If you haven’t started to really focus on application data security, perhaps you should…

.netSavant 1.1.6 Released

I’ve been working on this latest release of .netSavant for some time now, and released it on 11/23/2008.  Its a pretty substantial update, though it may not look so much so at first glance.  There are a few things of note that are included in this release:

• Created Tools Options Page options to select which methods will be implemented for statements (stored procedures and inline sql).  This allows greater customization of the code that .netSavant generates by excluding methods that you never use.  Personally I never use DataTable or DataSet objects, so I have .netSavant configured to exclude these methods when generating my code.
• Simpler Unit testing support is achieved by not including code that you have no intention of using.  See the point above.
• Updated the VB.NET and C# code generation framework to format the generated code a bit more cleanly.  Who likes messy code right?
• Updated VB.NET generated code to use using statements rather than Try blocks for objects that implement the IDisposable interface.
• Updated the database connection form to default to the SQL Server provider rather than forcing you to select it each time.
• Numerous bug fixes.

I highly recommend upgrading to this version, visiting the Tools > Options page to set your preferences, and regenerating any legacy .netSavant code.

Enjoy!!!

handling unhandled asp.net exceptions

At some point in their career everyone who creates ASP.NET applications has had issues with their site throwing exceptions that aren’t trapped.  We end up displaying a friendly error page at best, and at worst display the yellow ASP.NET error screen of death.  Generally speaking it’s best practice to configure your ASP.NET application to use friendly error pages so that your users aren’t presented with an exception and stack trace that are meaningless to them.

But how do you find out what exceptions are being thrown by users who are not you?  Over the years I’ve created many versions of the same type of code to handle these situations, so last night I created a project on codeplex that I’m calling sigh.net.  Essentially, sigh.net is a provider based unhandled exception handler for ASP.NET applications.  You can download the source at http://www.codeplex.com/sigh.

It’s extremely simple to use and doesn’t require you to change or add any code to your application.  I currently have an email provider created and am in the process of creating a SQL database provider.

Enjoy!

creating streaming tutorials with silverlight

I’ve wanted to work with Silverlight for some time now, though I’ve not had a use for the technology until recently.  I wanted to create tutorial videos for .netSavant to help people learn a bit about the product.  After a bit of searching I found a fantastic code project article written by Karl Shifflett that walks you through the entire process of not only creating a high quality screen capture tutorial, but publishing it as a streaming silverlight video.

Click Here to read the article

To date I’ve only created and published a single tutorial for .netSavant.  I’ve several more planned that will hopefully be a bit more polished as I become more comfortable talking, effectively, to no one.

http://www.dotnetsavant.com/Overview/Tutorials.aspx

Enjoy!