September 11, 2012
Conferences
These days we’re lucky. SSL is becoming pretty pervasive. Facebook uses it. Twitter uses it. Most modern start ups now use it. Sadly there are still other sites or services that you may be accessing on the internet that are still insecure allowing others to listen in on your internet usage, and for these your want an encrypted VPN link to route your traffic through. VPN’s can be expensive though if all you have is a home PC and a laptop on the road – lucky for us this can be a magic combination that is all you need and saves the day.
September 10, 2012
Conferences
Today marks the official start to Microsoft’s TechEd Australia Conference on the sunny Queensland Gold Coast. With over 4 days of talks, product launch education, hands-on labs along with device and software manufacturers spruiking their wares, it is sure to be a great week – if you are around shoot me a tweet so that we can try and cross paths during the week.
September 6, 2012
General banter
In the IT industry employees experience a weird phenomenon once they begin to move up the ranks. You often start work in IT because you get to build stuff, monitor things, and watch your creations grow. The weirdest thing about this is that in our industry to step up in your career you often have to actually stop producing things. To move into management put down the tools, and loosen your grip on what you love.
August 26, 2012
Continuous Integration
I’ve been a long time supporter of Visual Studio Web Deployment projects. Not because I built ASP.Net websites and wanted to compile them, but more because they held so much unadulterated power from the simplicity of just being an MSBUILD file inside your solution. With the launch of Visual Studio 2012 Microsoft has made the call to no longer support WDP moving forward. This made me sad; but I was just being naive. Visual Studio 2012’s Publishing profiles are even more powerful, and they bring all your old friends along for the ride.
August 23, 2012
Security
When it comes to reviewing visitor site usage, server bandwidth usage, or forensic security investigations; IIS log files often hold the answers. Although as I'm sure you’re more than aware, gigantic text files can be hard to view let alone pull intelligence from. Investigating a website attack can be really daunting when looking at log files as an information source. In my previous post I covered a tool to help with Windows Security Logs. Lucky for us it’s just as awesome when dealing with huge IIS logs.
August 15, 2012
Security
When bad things happen to either your website or your server you’re usually faced with a situation that either makes or breaks you. Much like having a good backup and restore plan, being able to filter and scan log files for what you need to help draw conclusions on how a situation occurred or by whom it was conducted, is an important part of your security plan. However if you have a heavily traffic’d website, network share or part of your file system and you’re doing a lot of logging, you probably have files the size of the moon to wade through, so making sense of them can be a nightmare.
July 30, 2012
ASP.Net
In ASP.net land we are often lead to think the “Microsoft way” when it comes to a lot of things. Running performance tests and benchmarking is one of these tasks where we are often found looking into commercial tooling or products to help us find out how our applications handle load. Meanwhile a lot of web developers on other stacks are doing it with great free tooling. There is nothing stopping us from stealing the best parts from these stacks and bringing them back to the land of ASP.Net.
July 15, 2012
Continuous Integration
Microsoft Web Deployment projects are an easy way to add a MSBUILD scripting to your Visual Studio web projects. I use them all the time for personal deployment projects and at work so do all my team members. With the upcoming release of Visual Studio 2012 there is currently no Web Deployment project type. Luckily there is something we can try and do about it – Let Microsoft know.
July 11, 2012
E-mail
When delivering messages to people using email, companies and website owners have fallen into a common fallacy about the internet: believing its OK to show contempt for our readers by not caring for their reply. We do this every time we send an email, however important, that comes from noreply@mywebsite.com. Like a number of life’s oddities this doesn’t make sense – let’s look at why and how we can change it.
July 10, 2012
Accessibility
When placing audio and video elements on a web page I’ve worked on a number of pieces of work where, for one reason or another, clients want to have their media Autoplay. To us nerds it may seem like common sense that Automatically playing media to a visitor is a bad idea for accessibility. The W3C has made this clear with it’s WCAG guidelines – we’re nerds; we care about these kinds of things. It’s worth mentioning that as with most accessibility features though, proper use of Autoplay also does a lot for usability and visitor sanity for the rest of your audience as well.