Role-based Security and Webservices Grok Talk

On Wedesnday, May 3rd I'll be taking part in a Grok Talk courtesy of AACS (Ann Arbor Computer Society) . It will be a preview of the talk that I will be sharing with John Hopkins at Day of .NET on May 13th. More on that later.

Useful Subversion Documentation

I came by a blog entry at Frazzled Dad pointing to free online documentation for Subversion. I just started using Subversion for a project (I use Tortoise SVN as my client) and have mixed reviews. On the plus side, I like the fact that it is not tied to Visual Studio and the basics are simple to learn. My complaints include a couple of problems we had including our bin folders into source control that required us to rebuild the database. Fixing didn't seem to be an easy option. Though, in all fairness, maybe if I would have had this documentation, there would have been no problem. Would I recommend Subversion? if you have no source control system in place or you loathe your current system, then absolutely. If you are thrilled to pieces with the source control system that you already have, why change?

Shredding a File

I was wondering how to shred a file with C# the other day so I wrote the following lines of code.


System.IO.FileStream stream = new System.IO.FileStream(label1.Text, System.IO.FileMode.Open);
byte[] readbytes = new byte[stream.Length];
long length = stream.Length;
int position = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < readbytes.Length; i++ )
{
readbytes[i] = Randomize();
}
stream.Write(readbytes, position, (int)length);
stream.Close();
System.IO.File.Delete(label1.Text);


I know that the contents of the file will changed before it is deleted, but does the file get written back to the same exact location on disk? The great wiseman, Google, doesn't seem to be of much help on this one.

Composite UI Application Block (CAB) Talk

I'm sitting here are at the question and answer period of the Ann Arbor .NET Developers Group(www.aadnd.com). Tim Landgrave did a fantastic talk on the Composite UI Application Block from Microsoft. I don't have a lot of time right now, so instead of writing a lot, I'm going to throw in some links that could be useful if one might be interested in learning more...

• http://www.gotdotnet.com/codegallery/codegallery.aspx?id=22f72167-af95-44ce-a6ca-f2eafbf2653c
• http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/XSModuleCompMppr.asp
• http://www.rollthunder.com/Newsletter/newslv7n2.htm

Interesting thing about deploying webservices and a welcome back

After a long vacation from blogging, I have finally decided to jump back in. It's not that I've been short on ideas - there have been plenty of things for me to blog about. I've just been too busy to write. Enough about me, I actually have something interesting to post...

I have several webservices that i needed to deploy which seemed to go well initially. Then I needed to update one of them. It worked fine on my machine, but when I deployed the new DLLs, my new webmethods disappeared! Hmmmmmm. Google was of little help, so i started thinking about the differences between my machine and the remote machine. The only thing that i could come up with was the "App_Code" folder. The code on the remote machine was not up-to-date. I didnt think this should be an issue, since all that matters is the DLL, right? WRONG! Once i deployed the code file from the "App_Code" folder, my webmethods magically reappeared!

I stumbled onto this post that gives a nice explanation:
http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.webservices&tid=799d479c-02f4-4dfe-a613-a7bb6debde38