Toolkits
Development toolkits, neat things that enhance efficiency, and all the fun little toys we like to bring to our jobs.
One of the neat things Microsoft incorporated into Windows with the release of Internet Explorer 4 (which was provided for Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 3) was the CryptoAPI, which provided not only services for secure hashing and stream ciphers, but also implemented Microsoft's Authenticode (r) code-signing verification. Authenticode is the technology that allows a Certification Authority (CA) such as Verisign to issue certificates to its clients in order to establish that software...
Thank God I don't have to install Visual Studio 2003 onto Vista. Well, that may be a bit premature. I have to make sure that debugging and the like will still work. But I don't see why it wouldn't. So yes, it does turn out that you can work on .NET 1.1 projects in Visual Studio 2005 with a couple of project templates called "Everett Compiler". The Everett Compiler project templates include Console Application and Class Library templates that use a custom MSBuild .targets file that directs the compiler...
As a web marketing firm, my company manages to generate quite a bit of e-mail for our clients (all opt-in, of course), and one of the ways that we do that is by templating out the entire HTML e-mail into a user control. The nice advantage to this is, of course, that we're able to pull in whatever kind of data we need and basically treat the e-mail like a page. Our production team can generate some really great artwork and layout, and up until this point it's worked great. They've been doing extensive...