mustcodemore.com

Yay!

2008-01-28T12:13:00.000-05:00

Striving to be #2
http://www.actionscript.org/news/314/winners-of-tutorial-competition-announced/

Prototypes in Javascript

2008-01-10T10:14:00.000-05:00

Extensibility has always been an important charastic of Object Oriented programming. In JavaScript this is accomplished by using the prototype property. Using the prototype property one can extend both JavaScript's intrinsic object classes, as well as your own. Once a class is extended all instances of said class will inherit whatever additional properties (or overridden properties) you create in your prototype.

Its a handy feature, especially for tracking activities. Heres a simple example to extend a click event of an object in the DOM.

SomeObject.prototype.click = function(e) { 
  //perform activity tracking here
}

Basically your object "SomeObject" now has a modified click event, which (if you put some code in there) would perform your click tracking on a simple DTHML DOM element. This can include a call to server side scripts to perform a database insert or write to a log file.

Here is a link to a great multi-part article on prototyping in JavaScript :

http://www.webreference.com/js/column34/index.html

The Anatomy of Clickbot.A

2008-01-10T10:07:00.000-05:00

Interesting article on both the impact of the ClickBot.A Botnet as well as source code from the botnet admin tool. This is a relatively low noise Botnet however it does have some interesting features that make it a bit more "interesting" than other BN's out there.

IIS 7 + Access Control Error (HRESULT: 0x80070005)

2007-12-18T10:46:00.000-05:00

IIS 7 was working fine, then it stopped working. I was unable to debug sites running on IIS 7, furthermore i was not able to change any settings in IIS 7. For some reason my folders were set back to read only.

http://blog.crowe.co.nz/archive/2007/08/24/IIS7-Access-Denied-when-using-the-IIS-7-Manager.aspx

Tutorial on Actionscript.org

2007-11-28T10:09:00.000-05:00

i have just submitted my first tutorial on Actionscript.org. Its called :

Basic Activity Tracking with Flash, Actionscript 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0.

It shows the user how to interoperate between flash and ASP.NET in order to track activities like button clicks or roll overs in a flash movie. In this example i store these activities in a SQL Server Database.

The article touches on basic OOP Principals as well as creating a C# Application to house your flash movies.

http://www.actionscript.org/resources/articles/703/1/Basic-Activity-Tracking-with-Flash-Actionscript-20-and-ASPNET-20/Page1.html

Mixing Forms and Windows Authentication in ASP.NET

2007-11-27T12:12:00.000-05:00

This blog posts shows how a user enabled Single Sign On (SSO) for two web apps that mixed both Forms Authentication and IIS Integrated Security. Its a pretty good solution for this problem.

http://www.pluralsight.com/blogs/craig/archive/2004/07/24/1699.aspx

mcm

Session State in a Handler File

2007-10-01T15:02:00.000-04:00

For a project we're working on we need to use HttpHandlers to do a lot of the heavy lifting when a user first comes to a site. The handlers help us determine what "type" of user it is and help us fork off processes and objects to different pages or applications based on a number of inputs (which the handler gets).

Working with this was going well until i needed to supply a constructor a sessionId. No problem i gave it a bit of the old :

context.Session.SessionId;

To my dismay i realized that the entire sessioin object was null. Because the handler file intercepts the request before the asp.net frameword processes it there is no session information available (see ISAPI Extensions). What to do? What to do?!?!

Of course i sent a post out to a forum and then minutes after posting it figured it out myself. The key is to make your HttpHandler implement the IRequiresSessionState interface. This interface allows the Handler to write or read from the Session state.

There are two options for this interface (and it needs no construct)

IRequiresSessionState - Read and Write access to session object
IReadOnlySessionState - Read only access to session object.

Implementation is quite simple. Take a simple Handler Code class and add the following using statement:

using System.Web.SessionState;

Then inherit the class from the Interface (as well as your handler interface)

 public class BaseHandler : IHttpHandler, IRequiresSessionState  
{
        public virtual void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context)
        {

        }

        public bool IsReusable
        {
            get
            {
                return false;
            }
        }
}

Pretty easy huh? And now its session enabled so i can pass my objects to my page.

SQLSafe Method for C#

2007-09-26T16:33:00.000-04:00

We created this utility method a while back to help us provide another layer of security for SQL Injection attacks. Basically its a tiny little method that takes up to three parameters. It is used to trim a string to a specified length (generally the length of your database field) and throw an error if you want it too.

Parm 1. The string to evaluate and trim if necessary
Parm 2. The max length of the string
Parm 3. Thow an exception or not.

Heres the two methods (one with an override)

        /// <summary>
        /// Returns a string with single quotes escaped to protect against SQL injection attacks
        /// 
        /// This method will throw an exception if the supplied string's length is greater than maxlen
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="s"></param>
        /// <param name="maxlen"></param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public static string SqlSafe(string s,int maxlen)
        {
            return SqlSafe(s,maxlen,false);
        }
        /// <summary>
        /// Returns a string with single quotes escaped to protect against SQL injection attacks
        /// 
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="s"></param>
        /// <param name="maxlen"></param>
        /// <param name="ThrowExceptionOnTruncate"></param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public static string SqlSafe(string s,int maxlen,bool ThrowExceptionOnTruncate)
        {
            if(s==null)
            {
                return "";
            }
            if(ThrowExceptionOnTruncate && s.Length>maxlen)
            {
                throw new Exception("StringTools.SqlSafe string exceeds maximum length");
            }
            //replace apostrophies AFTER truncation 
            //(the doubles don't count for field length)
            return Truncate(s,maxlen).Replace("'","''");
        }

So this method is called from anywhere (usually i put it right in a parameter going to a SQL DataSource or some Object Data source right before insert or update).
Just call it like this


SBX.StringTools.SqlSafe(HttpContext.Current.Request.UserAgent.ToString(), 255);

In this example i have the SqlSafe method in a static class called SBX.StringTools. If you are going to use this put it in whatever framework class libraries you utilize in your web or forms apps. That way you can re-use it quickly and easily.

mcm.

My Goodness - Blogger Code Formatting!

2007-09-26T16:30:00.001-04:00

And its IN a Blogger Blog! Doesn't that just blow your mind?

http://formatmysourcecode.blogspot.com/

How to tell if a posted file is really an image

2007-09-26T16:12:00.000-04:00

This is a useful method to determine if a file posted for upload (via HTTP) is actually an image. This was created in .net 1.1 but also works in 2.0 without any modifications.

Heres a bit of background. Anyone can change the content type of a file before posting it. Its as simple as changing an extension of a file to something your looking for. So if someone wanted to upload a malicious program or file they could simply change the extension to an images extension (in this case) and upload something that .net initially thinks is an image but really is not.

All this method does is read the first 64 bytes of data from the posted file and compares the data in the header to determine if its an image. It takes a byte array as an input and returns either true or false to the calling method.

public bool IsImage(byte[] data)
{
    //read 64 bytes of the stream only to determine the type
        string myStr = System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetString(data).Substring(0, 16);
        //check if its definately an image.
        if (myStr.Substring(8, 2).ToString().ToLower() != "if")
        {
         //its not a jpeg
         if (myStr.Substring(0, 3).ToString().ToLower() != "gif")
             {
                //its not a gif
                if (myStr.Substring(0, 2).ToString().ToLower() != "bm")
                {
                   //its not a .bmp
                   if (myStr.Substring(0, 2).ToString().ToLower() != "ii")
                   {
                       myStr = null;
                       return false;
                   }
                }
            }
        }
        myStr = null;
        return true;
 }

Thats really all there is to it. Once this is in place you can actually add more if statements to look for more image types (like .tiff, etc). The reason we dont use a switch statement for this is because for different image formats the "identifying byte(s)" are located in different index positions. So to add more images you will have to dig around the net a bit finding out about what header bytes identify different images.

hope this helps someone out,
mcm.

ASP.NET 2.0 Roles and Memberships

2007-09-26T15:05:00.000-04:00

ASP.NET's Role management and membership providers are really, really easy to use and configure (once you figure out how to set up the database)

This article from 4Guys really helped me set it up properly and now that its up its quite easy to port and use for other applications. The design of it actually lets you use one Database to manage security and roles for several applications.

The only unfortunate part about these Roles and membership things is that the default web controls (specifically LoginView) are not really scalable. If you plan on having an ever growing list of roles and users you may not want to use these types of controls and instead programmaticlly control access to pages and page elements (see gridviews / formviews). This can be done pretty easily with the use of a secured page base class that you can inherit from.

Anyways, check the article http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/120705-1.aspx

mcm.

Image Uploading to a UNC Share w/ Impersonation

2007-09-26T15:02:00.000-04:00

This topic has helped me countless times. Think about full separation of an admin area from a front-end site. If you have to upload images this is a good way to go about it. It's really either this way or some sort of service that copies uploaded images to the other app directory.

http://aspalliance.com/336

GROUP BY in a DataTable

2007-09-26T10:45:00.000-04:00

this one helped me out a while back
http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/davidm/archive/2004/05/20/1351.aspx

The Expressions that can be formulated for a calculated column in a DataTable are a very handy thing. The problem is the aggregation operators only work for a parent-child relationship.

Optimizing ASP.NET 2.0 Web Project Build Performance (VS 2005)

2007-09-26T10:44:00.000-04:00

This posts covers how to best optimize the build performance with Visual Studio 2005 when using web projects. If you are experiencing slow builds or want to learn how to speed them up please read on.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/09/22/Tip_2F00_Trick_3A00_-Optimizing-ASP.NET-2.0-Web-Project-Build-Performance-with-VS-2005.aspx

AJAX search page

2007-06-20T14:20:00.001-04:00

This is just a test page im working on using the Google AJAX Search API.

http://search.mustcodemore.com.

No Enter Key. I love it!
mcm

Convert VB to C# and vice versa

2007-06-20T14:19:00.000-04:00

Pretty Neat Conversion util.

http://www.developerfusion.co.uk/utilities/convertvbtocsharp.aspx

PerfMonG - Minimalistic performance monitoring tool which sits on your desktop.

2007-06-12T16:10:00.000-04:00

I contributed to this. Helped add some features. It's pretty sweet now! Give it a try!

http://code.google.com/p/perfmong/

Sliced The Movie

2007-06-08T13:13:00.000-04:00

Check out this trailer. Wicked!!!

Lambda Expressions and Examples

2007-04-13T16:47:00.000-04:00

Anonymous Methods to Lambda Expressions
Pretty neat stuff, C# 3.0

Removing the Flash Player Plug-in on a Macintosh

2007-04-13T14:44:00.000-04:00

Recently i had to test some javascript flash detection scripts we are using to swap out flash content if a user does not have flash.

I downloaded the Macormedia Flash Detection Kit and incorpoated the scripts into a utils.js file i had for my application.
It all seemed to work fine, rendering the flash content across all browsers on both PC's and MAC's.

I removed the Flash Player from my PC easily enough, using another MM official un-installer and re-tested. Voila my JS rendered a nice img tag in place of the flash movie. Sweet.

So i moved over to our beast G5 and removed flash using the MAC version of the MM official un-installer. I then went to our staging site and was greeted with the Safari error message "This webpage attempted to load the Shockwave Flash Player plug-in but failed" (or something like that).

After a couple hours of spinning my wheels i threw some alerts into the MM javascripts. What did i find but the scripts were still detecting the flash plugin as being there. So the MM un-installer did not completely remove the plug-in.

I located the plug-in at : LIBRARY > INTERNET PLUG-INS
and manually removed the file : Flash Player.Enabler.plugin which the MM unistaller does not remove.

Thats that now the MAC displays the gif backup images in place of the Flash file, and it wasn't my code after all! (for once!)
mcm

Deep linking to flash from HTML

2007-04-02T15:46:00.001-04:00

Someone needed this today:

http://probertson.com/articles/2006/12/14/deep-linking-flash-application-states/

Flash Hacks from O'Rielly

2007-04-02T11:30:00.000-04:00

Found this interesting article off actionscript.org.
thought it's worth posting although its O'rielly sample chapters the tips and tricks can help any Flasher out.

http://www.actionscript.org/resources/articles/579/1/Flash-Hacks/Page1.html

mcm

New Site Launch

2007-04-02T11:21:00.000-04:00

Redux Media
http://www.reduxmedia.com
Html, Css, Splash of Flash, Touch of PHP.
designed by the Brazilian and produced by MCM-COM

Wii-mote Wrapper and Demo

2007-02-02T14:38:00.000-05:00

this is just great!
hooking the WiiMote into a wrapper class and using it for flash polling.

Endless flash wii-mote gaming possibilities.
mcm

Unicode and Character Sets

2007-01-30T11:24:00.001-05:00

Great article on Unicode albiet it was written 4 years ago.

Adobe Certified Flash 8 Developer

2006-11-22T17:56:00.000-05:00

Yesterday i took and passed the Adobe certification exam for Macromedia Flash 8.
Overall the exam went pretty well and i got a good mark. So i am now an Adobe ACE (i think) for MM Flash 8. One thing to note for anyone going to take the exam is this Flash 8 exam is a combination of both design and development disciplines. Unlike the Flash MX 2004 Exams or previous flash exams, there is no "Designer" or "Developer" route to go down, both are in one exam. So make sure to brush up on your development and coding if you are a designer or brush up on your design if you are a developer.

mcm

Free Web Services

2006-11-21T11:03:00.000-05:00

this forum post from actionscript.org has many, many free web services available that you can use from flash.

AS.Org link: link

more web services link

and here

mcm

Protecting .swf files

2006-11-02T16:52:00.000-05:00

This link has an interesting article about protecting your .swf files. We all know that you cant really completely protect your .swf files, and i have never met a .swf i can't crack. But there are a few good points about how you can make it more secure, and what NOT to put inside it.

http://www.gotoandplay.it/_articles/2004/04/swfProtection.php

A little COM can really mess up a XCOPY day

2006-08-23T15:16:00.000-04:00

.net article.

blinq

2006-06-23T10:15:00.000-04:00

asp.net released a new tool recently called blinq.

heres an excerpt:

Blinq is a tool for generating ASP.NET websites for displaying, creating, and manipulating data based on database schema. Just point Blinq at a SQL database and it will create a website with pages that display sorted and paged data, allow you to update or delete records, create new records, and follow relationships between tables in your database. You don't need to write SQL queries to use Blinq; LINQ will generate optimized queries for you that request just the data you want to show. Blinq uses the May LINQ Community Tech Preview to access data. The code Blinq creates is simple and easy to customize to fit your needs. Everything in the website Blinq creates is meant as a starting point for a website that meets your needs perfectly, so have fun customizing the pages, experimenting with the code, and making it yours!

http://www.asp.net/sandbox/app_blinq.aspx?tabid=62

RFID Security Report

2006-03-22T13:13:00.000-05:00

http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-3513_7-6466679-1.html

Its on CNet, it's about RFID, and it regards Security. You should read it.
Just remember, good programming means taking care of things like this. But, i predict
within one year, RFID support hardware makers will include software to check for injection attacks, etc in the conduit firmware. They should, anyways.

Targets and Paths with Actionscript

2006-03-16T12:49:00.000-05:00

Probably the most common question asked to me by someone learning Actionscript goes like this:

"My movie clip moved across the screen fine yesterday, but now that i've loaded it into another movie, it doesn't work! What did i do wrong? Nothing's changed!"

Well, almost nothing. Something changed, the addressing of your clips. Lets learn why:

http://www.learnthat.com/computers/learn.asp?id=2064&index=11

AS 2.0 example of a unique id builder

2006-03-13T22:09:00.000-05:00

//06.13.06
function GenerateString(strLng:Number)
{
var resultString = "";
//cheated a bit with the array, could do something more elegant to deal with case sensitivity
var alphabet:Array = new Array("a", "b", "c", "d", "e", "f", "g", "h", "i", "j","k", "l", "m", "n", "o", "p", "q", "r", "s", "t", "u", "v", "w", "x", "y", "z" , "A" , "B", "C", "D", "E", "F", "G", "H","I", "J", "K", "L", "M", "N", "O", "P", "Q", "R" , "S", "T", "U", "V", "W", "X", "Y", "Z");
for (var i = 0; i < color="#333399">length; ++i){
//first decide to make a # or a Letter
var tmp = Math.round(Math.ceil(Math.random()*2));
//1 = letter - pick uCase or lCase
if (tmp == 1) {
var j = Math.round(Math.ceil(Math.random()*alphabet.length - 1));
resultString += alphabet[j];
}
//2 = a number
if (tmp == 2) {
var k = Math.round(Math.ceil(Math.random()*9));
resultString += k;
}
//you could just return this to the calling method instead...
return resultString;
}
}

Three Ways to Inject Your Code into Another Process

2006-03-09T21:14:00.000-05:00

How to inject code into another processes address space, and then execute it in the context of this process.
from codeproject.com

good read.

Using XML Comments in your C# Code

2006-03-08T12:53:00.000-05:00

XML Comments Let You Build Documentation Directly From Your Visual Studio .NET Source Files

What is RFID?

2006-02-09T14:28:00.000-05:00

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is quickly becoming a popular choice among manufactureres. Find out all about it here:

http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/articleview/1339/1/129/

Securing an ASP.NET Application with integrated IIS Security

2006-02-07T11:01:00.000-05:00

ASP.NET can be used together with Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) to authenticate Web users based on their Microsoft Windows 2000 or Windows Server 2003 user account credentials. The ASP.NET execution engine can also be configured to impersonate Web users, or to use its own Windows identity when it accesses resources such as databases or files.

http://www.dnzone.com/ShowDetail.asp?NewsId=504

SQL Find Duplicates Query

2006-02-02T14:01:00.000-05:00

Needed this today. Finds all occurences of a specified field that occurs more than once (or whatever number you want to replace)

SELECT email,
COUNT(email) AS NumOccurrences
FROM users
GROUP BY email
HAVING ( COUNT(email) > 1 )

also this finds only lines that have a single record

SELECT email
FROM users
GROUP BY email
HAVING ( COUNT(email) = 1 )

Wake On Lan Packet (C#)

2006-02-01T11:33:00.000-05:00

The following code will send out a WOL packet to a server specified by the MAC Address. Please note this only works for boards that have a WOL option in the CMOS.

using System;
using System.Globalization;
using System.Net.Sockets;
using System.Net;

//we derive our class from a standard one

public class WOLClass:UdpClient
{
public WOLClass():base()
{ }
//this is needed to send broadcast packet
public void SetClientToBrodcastMode()
{
if(this.Active)
this.Client.SetSocketOption(SocketOptionLevel.Socket,
SocketOptionName.Broadcast,0);
}

public static void Main()
{
WakeFunction("00018054D467");
}

public static void WakeFunction(string MAC_ADDRESS)
{
//now use this class
//MAC_ADDRESS should look like '013FA049'
WOLClass client=new WOLClass();

client.Connect(new
IPAddress(0xffffffff), //255.255.255.255 i.e broadcast
0x2fff); // port=12287 let's use this one

client.SetClientToBrodcastMode();

//set sending bytes
int counter=0;
//buffer to be send
byte[] bytes=new byte[1024];
//first 6 bytes should be 0xFF
for(int y=0;y<6;y++) style="color:#33cc00;">
//now repeate MAC 16 times
for(int y=0;y<16;y++) i="0;" z="0;z<6;z++)" style="color:#33cc00;">
//now send wake up packet
int reterned_value=client.Send(bytes,1024);
}
}

people who we meet

2006-01-31T23:39:00.001-05:00

mcmcom has interacted with many generious and kind companies in fields relating to advertising and technical production.

some of them are:

Toyota Canada
Lexus Canada
Hewlet Packard Canada
Saffron Designs
Saatchi & Saatchi

and we think they're great...

Hi There!

2006-01-31T23:36:00.000-05:00

Here you will find technical work and selected project samples created by mcmcom.