Yahoo Pipes - A new spin on RSS

Today I watched the introduction to the Yahoo Pipes Beta at http://www.jumpcut.com/fullscreen?id=F4396574585311DC87A2000423CF0184&type=clip. It’s a little like Biztalk for RSS with a focus on a user rather than a machine process. You can take data from multiple sources, mangle/transform, and plop it back out again for general consumption via RSS. Quite interesting, in fact it gets me thinking about some other similar ideas…

Microsoft StyleCop - What is it? And what about FxCop?

I have been in many discussions about how to ensure a certain level of predictability and quality in source code. For those that haven't already discovered it Microsoft StyleCop brings to the table a new offering to complement FxCop in the land of static code analysis. It is important to understand that StyleCop is not a replacement for FxCop and that the two can (and should) live together harmoniously.

Here is a snippet from the initial release (full text here)

"We are very excited to announce the release of a new developer tool from Microsoft, Source Analysis for C#. This tool is known internally within Microsoft as StyleCop, and has been used for many years now to help teams enforce a common set of best practices for layout, readability, maintainability, and documentation of C# source code."

Securing Microsoft Code - CAT.NET & AntiXSS

In the past, securing custom written code has been typically an afterthought and usually not accounted for in the design of an application. These days, securing an application is not only critical for avoiding potential lawsuits, but also more widely accepted as worth investing resources into. With the advent of this new mindset and the fact that security has drawn such widespread attention from the media, we find ourselves (developers mostly) being asked to address potential security threats before code is placed into production.

We arent necessarily given any more time to create our applications, but yet we are expected to ensure they are secure. So how do we accomplish this? Well, a number of tools exist out there to analyze an existing (or in development) application by performing a surface scan of the applications endpoints e.g. Accunetix. However, what about addressing the security aspect as we write our code, or better yet, what about some libraries of code that we can include to make our applications secure without having to do additional work? In comes Microsoft to the rescue with some new offerings.

Managing Cross-Site Scripting Using CAT.NET and AntiXSS

Sharepoint & Visual Studio 2010 Development Preview

I just came across an excellent video demonstrating the new sharepoint development environment supported by Visual Studio 2010.

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/VisualStudio/Sharepoint-Development-with-Visual-Studio-2010/

Most notable is that we should finally be able to build, debug, and deploy sharepoint artifacts (web parts etc) as easily as a simple web application. Here are the highlights:

1) Extended Server Explorer - enables a detailed hierarchical view of a sharepoint instance (similar to the functionality provided for a SQL Server instance) allowing you to view the currently deployed webparts, lists etc. There are also other related enhancements like the Package View - similar to solution View but detailing the deployment structure of a solution.

2) Project Template Support - additional template types specific to sharepoint. You no longer have to figure out what a sharepoint solution needs - VS does that work for you.

3) Deployment enhancements - like what you may have seen with Biztalk deployment and also VS for Database deployment - one-click deployment experience. This is a huge step above the seemingly endless mess of manual intervention (and learning) currently involved.

New reverse engineering capabilities with EF

By now we should all know that the ADO.NET Entity Framework (EF) provides mechanisms for reverse engineering a database schema into a conceptual database model. However, limitations prevent complex hidden data hierarchies from being accurately represented in the model generated by the EF. EdmGen2 introduces new capabilites (data mining techniques) to determine these relationships so that the conceptual model can accurately reflect them without a developer needing to explicitly define them.

http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/2009/04/04/edmgen2-now-with-reverse-engineering-options.aspx