I will be presenting at the Edmonton .NET User Group tommorow night. My talk will be on common hacking vectors as well as protecting secrets via cryptographic techniques. Date: Thursday, February 28th 2008 Time: 6:00pm  Location: Milner Public Library Hope to see you there!

In a former life I was a network guy. In that time I saw the rise switches instead of hubs for networks. For those of you who were not networkers here is the definition: Hubbed Network The hub is a device that acts as a repeater out to the other connected computers. If I am trying to talk to Joe's computer every other computer receives that information. The other computers investigate the packet and drop it as it is not destined for them. Joe's computer accepts the packet as he says it is for him. ...

   While .NET does a lot of great security things for us one of the things it lacks is an easy way to do input validation. To that end I created a control with some common validations built right in (note that these are server side validations that are only evaluated on post back). It is easy to provide your own custom validation  as well: By default if validation fails the control will throw an exception upon postback. You can change this behaviour by changing the notification type to raise an event or...

In a lot of my talks I harp on the fact that using Random.Next() is not actually all that random. The data for Random.Next() is based off of seed data. If the same seed is specified (as you can do in the constructor for Random()) you will get the same outputs every time. Random random = new Random(27); for (int i = 0; i< 5; i++) { Console.WriteLine(random.Next(50)); } Every time I run this code I get: 41, 36, 32, 16, 19 The reason for this is that the generation of the next random number is...

In the last year I have had the pleasure of attending many speaking events both as a presenter and an attendee. To that extent I would like to point out some tips that may be helpful to other people planning events. Note that I have never planned an event myself. This is just my outside view of things. Do have wireless access for everyone. I have never heard more complaints than events that don't have Internet access. Do provide lunch. Especially when in a remote area where it is not easy to find lunch. Do...

That is right today is the one and only Igloo Coders birthday! Justice asked us to write our favourite story of Donald today. I figured I would tell a mostly true story about DevTeach Montreal. Now Don and I found this great little place called Ye Olde Get Way To Drunk And Try To Find Your Way Home... or something to that effect. This is usually the place we started and ended up at.           The staff were great...

A while back I found Sara Ford's blog (it actually says weblog in the title.... weird... what is a weblog?). Unlike everyone else, Sara just posts tips on the IDE. From shortcut keys, docking tips, to other hidden little gems. I find it a really refreshing and helpful blog especially for those of us addicted to shortcut keys.