Abandon all hope, ye who enter.

One program that is runnable in Perl, C, Befunge and BrainF*ck along with the general purpose techniques to use for your own such projects (as if!).

Ouch. My brain *still* hurts…

Craig Andera has provided a sample of how to write a self-installing NT service in .NET that doesn't require installutil (which won't install MC++ services).

Yasser Shohoud has generously posted the entire text of his web services book for VB developers online.

The video recordings of the Web Services DevCon are now available. Enjoy!

We've released the v0.1 version of Genghis. Enjoy!

Genghis is a set of extensions built on top of .NET and integrated with WinForms to provide application-level services in the same flavor as the Microsoft Foundation Classes. Genghis gets its name as the functional heir to Attila, a similar set of functionality built on top of ATL.

Are you building and deploying .NET applications in a secure environment, e.g. over the intranet or the internet? If so, they you’ve probably mourned the loss of the binary and SOAP formatters that can automatically serialize a graph of objects that are marked as [Serializable] and that may also implement ISerializable and IDeserializationCallback. Both of these formatters are dependent on reflection, which will not be available in a more restrictive security environment. Likewise, even ISerialization.GetObjectData is verboten if you wanted to do this kind of thing yourself. As far as that goes, [Serializable] and ISerialization should be forbidden in a secure environment, as it allows a client to get and set the private variables of an object, potentially causing harm.

Still, security is the enemy of usability, to paraphrase Keith Brown. So, in the spirit of a balancing the design need for objects that can serialize themselves with the goal of complete disclosure in a secure world, I’ve built my own “safe” formatter. It only uses facilities of the runtime that work in the most secure environment of the default settings for the internet zone. So that objects can guard themselves against malicious data, I define a new interface called ISafelySerializeable that they need to implement to support this serialization facility. The protocol is exactly the same as ISerializable, so if that interface is already being implemented, the implementation of GetObjectData can be shared between both interfaces.

Currently, the code is in alpha and is riddled with TODO statements, but its functional enough today for actual usage. My SafeFormatter and test harness are available for your feedback. Enjoy.