Best Practices

Localize It Baby

Devin Rychetnik — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 21:47:00 GMT

I plan to use the new localization features in ASP.NET 2.0 in my next personal project that I deem cool enough to be truly international. Here is an article that shows how simple it really is: http://www.codeguru.com/csharp/.net/net_asp/miscellaneous/article.php/c12407__1/.

Interlocked Operations for Multithreaded Integer Manipulation in .NET

Devin Rychetnik — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 04:43:00 GMT

Today I came across a set of sweet little atomic operations for manipulating integers in .NET: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/sbhbke0y.aspx.

So instead of doing this:

private object counterLock = new Object();

lock (counterLock)
{
counter++;
}

You just do this:

Interlocked.Increment(ref counter);

This has two advantages. First, the code is much cleaner. Second, the performance is much faster. Why? I think the interlocked method is all executed within user mode whereas the other would require the overhead of switching to kernel mode.

Script Kiddies or Not, Stop Them

Devin Rychetnik — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 01:42:00 GMT

I was just helping a buddy of mine do some cross-site scripting (XSS) prevention and came across some good resources. If you don't know what XSS is, there is decent introduction here: http://www.counterhack.net/xss.ppt.

Now on to the ones that I really wanted to post:

This one is from Microsoft Patterns & Best Practices. How To: Protect From Injection Attacks in ASP.NET
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnpag2/html/PAGHT000003.asp?_r=1

Here is a download for Microsoft Anti-Cross Site Scripting Library V1.0.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9a2b9c92-7ad9-496c-9a89-af08de2e5982&displaylang=en

And this is a nice walkthrough of how to do code review for XSS vulnerabilities.
http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel9.CodeReviewXSS

Oh, and I almost forgot! This one gives you a load of examples to check your site for XSS.
http://ha.ckers.org/xss.html

Seattle Code Camp v1.0

Devin Rychetnik — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 05:07:00 GMT

I attended the Seattle Code Camp this weekend (where I could) and had quite a bit of fun. In addition to learning a few things, I got to preview a bunch of upcoming technologies and meet a lot of distinguished developers in the area. For those of you who weren't able to attend or didn't see the same presentations I did, I'll just share some of my notes:

Refactor! is a great tool that I already blogged about before, but they deserve a special plug since Mark Miller largely contributed to the event and frankly the tool is sweet for a measly $90. Also, the VB version for VS 2005 Beta 2 is available for free.

Windows Mobile and .NET Compact Framework was made clear to me by Ed Kaim and you can get the Mobile 5.0 Developer Evaluation Kit that has everything you need to get started today. It also includes a free copy of VS 2005 Beta 2, which should hold you off till the November 7th release. Also, for those of you who plan on doing some serious mobile development you can get unlocked and unrestricted phones from www.expansys.com and find lots of amazing open software resources at www.opennetcf.org.

Next up I saw a new and potentially revolutionary way of developing software in VS 2005 using software factories from Martin Danner. The definitive book on the subject is Software Factories published by Wiley and the specific way this is done in VS 2005 is by utilizing the guidance automation toolkit (GAT).

Brad Abrams shared his wisdom on framework design guidelines and gave us these four key points to remember and ponder: 1) the power of sameness, 2) framework design matters, 3) tools for communication, 4) the pit of sucess. He described the pit of success as designing your framework so simply that the user can do what he/she is intending to do as easily as it is to fall into a pit. He also shared a great motto to follow when designing your framework, “make the simple things simple and the hard things possible.” He also gave away a free copy of the book he co-authored on the subject.

The next day I saw some of the amazing things you can do with LINQ from Tim Shakarian. If you haven't looked at this stuff in depth yet I highly recommend it. Although it is almost scary to see how easy it could be abused or misused, it is certainly going to save a lot of development time and improve the way we do data related operations in the future. I also got a preview of C# 3.0, which adds some extremely powerful new features like type inference and anonymous types.

The last session I went to was with Peter Provost who gave a screaming run through of how to build a smart client application using the Composite UI Application Block (CAB). In just one hour, bystanders witnessed him tear through the code necessary to build the basic structure of a tabbed web browser with a bookmarks list. He also mentioned that this application block will have some sort of integration with the next version of the User Interface Process (UIP) block in the future.

Also, one thing that came up over and over throughout the weekend was FXCop, a free code analysis tool for checking .NET managed code assemblies and their conformance with the Microsoft .NET Framework Design Guidelines.

Lazy Loading

Devin Rychetnik — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 04:54:00 GMT

Here is a technique that I only recently came to know as “lazy loading“. First, it is useful when the variable will not always necessarily be used and therefore will not always need to be loaded. Second, since it checks to see if the variable has already been loaded, it will not reload the data multiple times. This is especially important to do performance-wise for variables that may load large amounts of data so that it does not needlessly allocate extra space in memory.

In this example, assume that GetEmployeeDataSet() instantiates, populates, and returns a very large DataSet object.

                // member variable
        private DataSet _employeeDataSet = null;

        // property
        public DataSet EmployeeDataSet
        {
            get
            {
                if (_employeeDataSet == null)
                    _employeeDataSet = GetEmployeeDataSet();

                return _employeeDataSet;
            }
        }