Codeproject Highlight

Do you want to be informed the best stuffs of Codeproject every months? I have one good news for you. I’m gonna launch one new program called “Codeproject Highlight” started from this month in my blog. In this program, there will be there parts such as news, the best articles and the best posts in CP forum (mostly are from ASP.NET, Web development and C#. ).

The main reason why I start this program is that it saves your time for reading all of latest articles from CP’s feed and tracking all questions and answers from Codeproject forum.

News

Site Upgrading

The whole Codeproject site has been upgraded from Classic ASP to ASP.NET version with a lot of improvements . This is really big changes which is done during 8 years of running. As this site has really huge amount of traffic, it’s very hard for them to upgrade this site with new version. However, the CP development team has done the great job to upgrade the whole site successfully. Congratulation! CP team

Chris shared a few interesting things here ~

For those interested here are some whacky and amusing things we found:

  • SQL Server, IIS and the ASP.NET framework are possessed.
  • Using development settings instead of production settings is a Bad Thing.
  • Storing session state in a SQL database can be a performance killer. Especially when the database is an old P4 test harness machine 40 km away from the webserver. That was an interesting experience in scream therapy.
  • Always check your indexes. Especially the ones that absolutely positively are not and cannot be fragmented. They will be the ones most in need of attention.
  • 20,000 users hitting your application is wonderful load testing. We did load test but our testing machines did not generate the load you guys can generate
  • no matter how many ways you check code there’s always an angle that you haven’t looked at. We’re finding errors in 10 mins of being on that we couldn’t find from 3 months of beta testing. This is just nature.

The Best Articles

  • Silverlight 1.1 Fun and Games by Sacha Barber

    Silverlight Game and Fun

    Sourcecode : Download Source

    Note: This is an award-winning article of Visual Studio 2008 Competition.

  • Silverlight Alien Sokoban by Daniel Vaughan

    A fun Silverlight implementation of the game Sokoban. Contrasting Silverlight 1.1 and WPF, while showcasing some new features of C# 3.0, Expression Design, Expression Blend, and Visual Studio 2008.

    Silverlight Alien Sokoban

    Sourcecode : Download Source

  • Build Google IG-like Ajax Start Page by Omar Al Zabir

    Build a start page similar to Google IG in 7 nights using ASP.Net Ajax, .NET 3.0, Linq, DLinq and XLinq.

    Google IG

    Sourcecode : Download Source

    Demo : Ajax Web Portal

  • WCF / WPF Chat Application by Sacha Barber

    How to create a peer-to-peer chat application using Windows Communication Foundation

    Free Chatting Client in .NET

    Sourcecode : Download Source

  • ASP.NET Popup Control by Tomas Petricek

    Highly customizable JavaScript popup control for web page wrapped in ASP.NET custom control.

    ASP.NET Popup Control

    Sourcecode : Download Source

Links

The best posts in Codeproject forum

  • How to store the password in Database? Encrypting Vs Hashing, Salt

    This is a discussion about storing the password in database. As the user authentication used to be a part of almost every software system, the developers should have good understanding about how to store the password in database. We have discussed about encrypting vs hashing, adding salt or adding the user name after the password and etc.

    Summary

    • Don’t use encryption/decryption for password.
    • Don’t need to append the user name to the password.
    • Hashing the password with random salt (SHA2 might be the best for hashing.)

    You can read about it in the link below.

    Read More ~ guidelines on password encryption

  • Does the System.Deployment namespace cover a great deal of scenarios?

    I have been asked this question regarding ClickOnce deployment in CP forum. As I’m using ClickOnce APIs on SCSF (Smart Client Software Factory) project, I found a few missing things in System.Deployment namespace. The following are the things that ClickOnce can’t handle.

    Summary

    • No way to get the list of latest modules
    • The version of the whole application need to be updated if we wanna update just one module
    • ClickOnce doesn’t care about the version of assemblies.
    • DownloadFileGroup (“”) works only if “optional” is checked. There is no way to download the group of file by force

    Read More ~ An application that will get the updates from server automatically

  • ADODB.DataTypeEnum.adBigInt problem “Bad variable type!” in Windows 2000

    One people who are using ADODB in .NET asked the question below in our CP forum.

    The identity field of one of my SQL DB tables is a bigint, using ADODB to query the DB based on this bigint works fine in my XP machine, but gives me a “Bad variable type” error when I use my app in a W2000 machine.

    The W2000 machine has every service pack issued by MS, what could be the problem?

    Something works fine on XP doesn’t work on Windows 200 is very strange issue. As I never use ADODB (something that we used for VB6 projects in old days ) in .NET, I don’t have that experiences. The possibilities that I think of at that time did solve his problem.

    The trick is that casting the original datatype (long datatype in his case) to double datatype. :) Honestly, I’m not so sure why we need to do this but it did solve the problem.

    Cmd.Parameters.Append(Cmd.CreateParameter("TransId", ADODB.DataTypeEnum.adBigInt, 1, , CType(iTransId, Double)))
    

    Read More ~ In XP works fine, W2000: Bad variable type!

Okay. That’s all for now. This is just a taste of new thing in my blog. What do you think? Is it interesting? As this program is just started, your feedback is highly appreciated. I think that there are a few area that I can’t add in this post. Based on the feedback from all of you, I will make this program better and interesting.. If you like it, don’t forget to subscribe my feed ( http://michaelsync.net/feed ).

Thanks.

[Funny] – What a Pain…….

A woman wakes up during the night to find that her husband was not in bed. She puts on her robe and goes downstairs to look for him.

She finds him sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee in front of him. He appears to be in deep thought, just staring at the wall. She watches as he wipes a tear from his eye and takes a sip of his coffee.

“What’s the matter dear?” she whispers as she steps into the room. “Why are you down here at this time of night?”

The husband looks up from his coffee, “Do you remember 20 years ago when we were dating, and you were only 16?” he asks solemnly.

“Yes I do” she replies.

The husband pauses – the words were not coming easily. “Do you remember when your father caught us in the back seat of my car making love?”

“Yes, I remember” said the wife, lowering herself into a chair beside him.

The husband continued. “Do you remember when he shoved the shotgun in my face and said, ‘Either you marry my daughter, or I’ll send you to jail for 20 years?”

“I remember that too” she replied softly. He wiped another tear from his cheek and said, “I would have been released today.”

Keep smiling… :)

Note: Thanks to Rahul Singh for forwarding this mail.

Other Jokes that I’d like to share with you all

Have Fun! Have a nice weekend!

[Link] Free ASP.NET 2.0 Web Hosting

SOMEE.COM is offering FREE Web Hosting Service for ASP.NET 2.0 developers. You can have 105 MB web space and 3 GB Monthly bandwidth. ( You can check the detail in the pic below) .

All you need to do to get a free account is very simple. Just submit some of your information in their sign up page. Then, you will get the Free Account that you can upload your ASP.NET 1.1 or 2.0 project.

somee-free-hosting.PNG

URL: https://somee.com/FreePackage.aspx

Of course, There are some rules for using this *Free* Package.

  • Our web service can not be used as file storage.
  • Our web service can not be used as a source of images and or media for other sites (hot linking).
  • Adult or illegal content is not allowed.
  • Web site can not contain viruses of any kind.
  • You are not allowed to hide our advertisiment.
  • Web site must be visited at least 10 times per month.

If you are okay with these rules, just go and get an account here.

Note: The main advantage of having a free hosting is that you may have some understanding of how to manage/maintain a website. The most of people, even web developers, do not have that much experience in managing a “Live Website” because we, web developers, are just enjoying with localhost, internal web service and SQL/Database Server within our LAN. :)

UPDATE: