24 April 2004

SQL Injection attacks

An article on SQL Injection Attacks and how to protect against them.

14 April 2004

Getting rid of Access

Now that the .Net framework allows you to open an xml document as a dataset, reading in a schema and then creating tables to contain the nodes of the document, is there any excuse for using MS Access? It's also possible to update the data and write out the xml.

06 April 2004

Angry animators?

Apparently, if you want to create successful animated movies the best plot line is to kill off the mother as early as you can in the movie. Don't worry about the censors as they will classify your work as "Universal"; suitable for all.

Just look at the evidence:-
Ice Age. (Mother drowned in icy water after being attacked by sabre toothed tigers)
Brother Bear. (Mother bear killed by hunters)
Finding Nemo. (Mother fish eaten alive by a really vicious looking barracuda thing)
I rest my case.

Remember, these films are fun for all the family and especially great for children of a nervous
disposition.

Please, can someone give the studios a new plot, this one is getting a bit thin.

25 March 2004

Microsoft Developer day

Some thoughts on a Microsoft Developer day that I was fortunate enough to attend:

1) Everything seems to have been mixed up into a huge identity crisis, so the file system is now a SQL database, databases can contain XML or objects, and video can be shown as the background on any control. Presumably all these design decisions MS are making are driven by a desire to improve things but it all seems so different that at this stage it's hard to tell how this will turn out. I am glad that Longhorn seems to be a long way off as it gives us all a chance to catch up.

2) I really must start doing something with web services, and reading about Indigo and Avalon.

3) Is it a good idea to keep saying to a room full of developers "You will need to write a lot less code..."?
ASP.Net 2.0 does look very impressive, and the code that you won't have to write is the awkward difficult stuff for handling things like paging. This is handled as everything else will be, declaratively, which is nice.

4) Whitehorse really should come with UML support out of the box, not as an add-on.

5) How is Linux going to compete with this?

Where did we meet?

It could only have been one of these places.


Unfortunately I've never been to Alaska or Hawaii, they are only shown red because I spent 3 days in New York. Well, that's the USA done!

You can make your own map here.

19 March 2004

News to me:-

1. An introduction to WinFS.

2. A new approach to User Interfaces from NASA, analysing nerve commands to the throat.

16 March 2004

News (to me):-
1. Knoppix is a free open source linux that boots from a cd.

2. Training on using Visual Studio with Office.

3. Microsoft bloggers + more

4. Foldable paper robots in pdf format.

5. Introduction to Avalon on the Longhorn SDK site.

6. XML Document Map is an annotated XML example


06 March 2004

Free online Microsoft training. Unfortunately, these are only sample modules from the courses.

14 February 2004

Finally, I got First Post.