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!

.netSavant rc1 released!

I’m proud to announce the release of my new code generating addin, .netSavant.  You can download the release candidate on the website from our download page.

The addin will help you create robust ado.net code with an intuitive drag and drop interface.  Additionally it will generate best practice implementations of three (currently) system interfaces:

• System.IEquatable<T>
• System.IDisposable
• System.ICloneable

Currently I am working on the example code that will help to explain how to best use the ado.net code that is generated.  I’m also working on more and better F.A.Q. entries to answer those pesky little problems that come along with learning a new tool.

If there is any functionality that you’d like to see added to the addin let me know; I’ll entertain any reasonable request.

Enjoy!

visual studio.net 2008 extension methods

Now that visual studio.net 2008 has been released developers have a much improved development environment and framework to produce high quality code with.  Extension methods are one of the new framework and IDE features that provides a powerful and clever method of extending objects that you do not have source code for or otherwise can’t directly extend.

Simply put, extension methods allow you to add new methods to the public contract of an existing type without sub-classing, decorating or recompiling the original type.  Prior to this release there were a few options available to solve this problem.