Looks like the folks at American Express are so good at protecting your information that they have decided to allow your password to be no more than 8 characters. Which is one of the more secure feature I have ever seen in any site, really, that was so brilliant, 8 characters is way more secure than say hmm 7?

I usually like to make password at least 12 characters long with a combination of multiple words, special characters and numbers just in case someone tries to brute force my account and guess my password. Usually hackers can get into someone’s account if they know your username then all they have to do is use brute force (try as many passwords as possible) until they get the password right, now with 8 characters that might not take long for someone to brute force the password at least not as long as a password that might be 12 or 15 characters long.

I would really like to know what were they thinking when they decided to make it no more than 8 characters.

Share This

This is old news but definitely worthwhile.

If you are like me and trying to get yourself familiar and get some hands-on experience with the Microsoft .NET framework 3.0 you should definitely take advantage of this free and very well designed training clinics that will help you get started with the new technologies that the .NET framework brings in its 3.0 release. The free training comes from Microsoft E-Learning:

Developing Rich Experiences with Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 and Visual Studio 2005

Basically free training is divvied into 3 clinics that cover the following technologies:

• Windows Presentation Foundation
• Windows Workflow Foundation
• Windows Communication Foundation

You can get to the clinics directly from here too:

• Clinic 5135: Introduction to Developing with Windows® Presentation Foundation and Visual Studio® 2005
• Clinic 5136: Introduction to Developing with Windows® Workflow Foundation and Visual Studio® 2005
• Clinic 5137: Introduction to Developing with Windows® Communication Foundation and Visual Studio® 2005

Here is an example of how the e-learning looks like:

Share This

Recently I’ve been trying to learn more and more about how to use the windows workflow foundation (WF), especially to see how it would be useful to have that functionality in ASP.NET websites, web services and SharePoint Sites. I recently been reading articles about it, also completed a very good and free e-learning course from Microsoft called Clinic 5136: Introduction to Developing with Windows® Workflow Foundation and Visual Studio® 2005. The clinic contains good interactive material like how-to videos and self-tests, that helped me and will help you get up to speed with Windows Workflow Foundation (WF).

You can start creating Windows workflow foundation projects if you have the beta version for Visual Studio 2008 or if you have the Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (Windows Workflow Foundation) Unfortunately I don’t have Visual Studio 2005 installed in my computer; I use the express products for the 2005 and 2008 (Orcas) editions.

So basically in order for you to be able to create workflow foundation project, looks like there are several options:

1. Get yourself a copy of Visual Studio 2005 (except express editions) and install the .NET 3.0 Extension that will allow you to create and run workflow foundation projects. If you are not able to get VS2005, in a future post I’ll explain how you can get a full working copy of visual studio 2005 standard editions (value $299) for only 10$.
2. Download and install the Visual Studio 2008 beta 1 from Microsoft.

    

Visual C# 2005 Express Edition: Available projects by default.

Visual C# Codename “Orcas” Express Edition: Available projects by default.

Share This

What’s better than reading about one of the coolest technology that the .NET framework 3.0 has? 

Watching an actual demo that is, In this demo you can very easy get an idea how useful LINQ is and how you could use it to speed up your development and also make your life much easier as well, by saving you time, you can use LINQ to create a more practical and descriptive data layer without writing lots of lines of SQL code, since LINQ will provide you a object model that maps to your relational database using object relational mappings. The video is short, to the point and shows you the key aspects of dealing with data access using LINQ
Get the video here

Share This

So I was trying out the other day the new features that are available in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), I really like the idea of developing and creating 3D object and scenes because it is very easy compared to what it used to be in the past, now I can construct my 3D object programmatically using code like C# or I can also define the the 3D objects in the XAML file.

In this case I started with a demo application that show some of the features of a WPF library called 3D tools, I used that as my skeleton application and build on top of that and create teh 3D object that I want to display.

I first started with a sphere where inside that sphere I  created an icosahedron, for all of the triangular faces of the icosahedron I recursively dived it into 4 more triangles and projected the new vertices into the sphere to create more triangles in my mesh,  so the more recursive calls I make then the more triangles I get in my mesh.

Finally after my desire resolution of triangles I paint every triangle with a color depending on the area of each triangle in relation to the area of all the triangles.

It sounds complicated but its pretty simple, and the application app looks pretty cool specially because the 3D tools library allows to zoom and rotate the object in my scene without me having to write that.

Share This

The other day I was reading a pretty good post about anonymous types from Scott Guthrie,  the post is very easy to read and follow and the samples screens gives you a good idea of how powerful and convenient are these new anonymous types in the .NET framework, here is the link to the article.

Share This