TEMPESTINI.NET

Observations in Software Development

Spring Cleaning LastPass

Posted by Rick Tempestini on April 13, 2012

Over time, I am getting more and more concerned with the security of my online data.  I, like many of us, have way too much trust with the internets storing my personal financial data, photos, files, etc.  The problem is that the online services make things so easy.  I don’t get bank statements mailed to me anymore, I don’t worry about file synchronization between my devices anymore, it just happens.

Since I know that I are only going to rely on these services more and more over time, I’ve taken steps to make my online experience more secure.  One service that I use is LastPass.  I learned about the value of LastPass through the Security Now podcast with Steve Gibson.  In Episode 256, Steve educated me on the value of LastPass and, not only has it made my accounts more secure, it has also made my life easier since I don’t have to remember all my passwords.

Life with LastPass has been great.  However, as I look at my LastPass vault 1 year later, I notice that it also created some bad habits, see below:

There is now a bunch of stuff here that doesn’t need to be there.  Two different entries for Skype?  A password stored for delicious.com that isn’t even valid?  According to LastPass the delicious.com entry has never even been touched.

So why expose myself by having all these extra accounts and passwords out there?  I was shocked at how big my LastPass vault has become.  In fact, I don’t even remember going to many of the other sites in my list.  I’m sure I had a reason to have LastPass save them at the time but now it is time for spring cleaning.

I highly recommend using LastPass if you are not using it today.  If you are a LastPass user, set a reminder to review your vault every couple months and remove entries you no longer need and even remove your accounts from these services that you no longer need.  The fewer the accounts you have the easier it is to stay secure!

Posted in Security | Leave a Comment »

Passing Values on the Tag Attribute

Posted by Rick Tempestini on May 31, 2009

I’m learning to develop in XCode for the iPhone.  Being a long time Microsoft developer I admittedly struggle with some of the most simple things in this new XCode/Objective-C world.  One of my recent struggles was when I  attempted to assign several controls in Interface Builder (or, IB for short) unique Tag attributes and then read them in the IBAction method.  I searched far and wide and finally found the answer.

In my scenario, I had several buttons in my View that I wanted to handle with a single method.  I needed to find a way to differentiate between them to find out which one the user clicked.

Solution:

In IB I created three buttons as shown below.  I then selected each one separately and assigned it a unique ‘Tag’ attribute.  The ‘Tag’ attribute is located on the ‘Button Attributes’ tab of the Inspector.

TagExample

That part wasn’t much of a challenge.  What, unfortunately, was a challenge was getting this value from within the IBAction method.  First, the action method is declared in my ViewController.h file like any other IBAction method:

#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>

@interface ViewController : UIViewController {
}

- (IBAction)push:(id)sender;

@end

Next, the important part.  I had to find a way to get the actual value in my push method.  After several unsuccessful variations of trying to call [sender tag] directly, I found the answer (shown in bold below):

@implementation ViewController

- (IBAction)push:(id)sender
{
 UIButton *btn = (UIButton *)sender;
 NSInteger tag = [btn tag];
 NSLog(@"Tag: %d", tag);

The answer is actually very simple.  Since sender is a generic object type I had to cast it to a UIButton before I could get to the tag property.

Stay tuned.  At this rate there are many more of these quick samples on the way…

Posted in iPhone Development | 1 Comment »

Is Further Specialization Needed?

Posted by Rick Tempestini on December 10, 2008

In our group we have always recruited “developers”.  Is this wrong?  Maybe in the past it wasn’t, but today?  Could be.  Here is what we are currently expecting all of our developers to be experts in:

ASP.NET, JQuery, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, LINQ, NUnit, Castle ActiveRecord, NHibernate, HQL, T-SQL, PL/SQL, Data Modeling, Stored Procedures, AJAX, Log4Net, Usability, and more.

Is it time to further specialize developers?  You bet.  Offshore, onshore, it doesn’t matter.  How can we realistically expect our entire development team to be “experts” in all the technology above and still deliver projects successfully?  I, for one, feel more comfortable writing “back-end” code such as business logic, SQL, etc. and I’m sure there are others like me out there.  I am nowhere near as strong a developer in client-side development (Javascript, AJAX, JQuery, etc.) and making pages look exactly like the prototype that was handed to me.

So, here is what I propose going forward.  We begin to evaluate our developer pools in a different ways than we have in the past.  In the past, we’ve interviewed candidates to find out which one could answer the most amount of questions in all the technologies listed above.  The one that could hold her own in the most areas won and was awarded a long-term contract where she had to keep her skills up in all these areas and more.  Over the past several years this hasn’t worked as well as it could so we are about to change it.  We are now going to reevaluate our talent and find out strengths, weaknesses, and areas of interest.  (Yes, you must find out where developers are interested too because these are the areas where they will probably be most successful).  We are going to separate them as shown below:

Front-end Developers:
ASP.NET, AJAX, JQuery, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Usability

Back-end Developers:
LINQ, NUnit, Castle ActiveRecord, NHibernate, HQL, T-SQL, PL/SQL, Data Modeling, Stored Procedures, Log4Net

Common Skills All Developers Must Have:
C#, XML

The list above is not absolute as there will always be a mixture of skill sets.  However, the goal will be to use the general categories to help staff projects.

Now, on our upcoming projects, we are going to pair the developers and divide the work based on thier skill sets.  In each project we will do our best to split the skill sets 50/50 (or close to it) as needed.  This way, the developers that really shine in front-end development can spend most of their time building the web pages, working on the AJAX and working on the user experience.  The back-end developers can spend their time where they are the strongest in wiring up the database and building the business logic.

Posted in Other | 1 Comment »

Upcoming MS City to Shore Bike Ride

Posted by Rick Tempestini on July 26, 2008

The National MS Society is kicking off its annual Bike MS: City to Shore Ride. My son Ryan and I are planning to be a part of this exciting event and we are asking you to join us in the fight against MS by making a contribution to support our effort.  Our goal is to raise $500 and we need your help.

The National Multiple Sclerosis Society is dedicated to ending the devastating effects of MS by funding research for a cure while helping people who currently live with MS lead more fulfilling lives. We believe in the work they do, and we invite you to see for yourself all the good they’ve done for the MS community. More than 400,000 Americans live with MS, and your support can and will make changes in their lives.

Please help by making a donation – large or small – to fight MS. Or, why not join us on the day of the event as a cyclist or a volunteer? Become a participant and we can work together in to raise the funds to make a difference.

Whatever you can give will help! We greatly appreciate your support and will keep you posted on my progress.

Sincerely,
Rick Tempestini

Click here to get to my personal page and make a secure, online donation.

[Update:  Thanks for all your donations!  It was a great ride.  Ryan and I were able to raise over $1400.  We are looking forward to next year...]

Posted in Other | Leave a Comment »

GetUpperBound

Posted by Rick Tempestini on March 12, 2008

The GetUpperBound method of an array actually takes a single parameter in .NET. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s documentation on MSDN does not provide a clear explanation of the purpose and usage of this parameter (in my opinion).

First, the GetUpperBound method of an array will return an integer with the number corresponding to the highest number “element” that can be placed into a array. For example, Label1 would display the number ’4′ after the following snippet of code because the array was created to hold five (5) values (remember, arrays in .NET are zero-based)

GetUpperBoundSingle2

In the code above, however, a zero (0) was used when calling the GetUpperBound method. Since the array was declared as a single-dimensional array, there was only one dimension to get the upper bound value from. Therefore, a zero (0) was passed in to represent the first (and only) dimension of this array. Note: dimensions of the array are even zero-based and that is why a one (1) was not passed in.

On a two-dimensional array, this parameter can now take a zero or a one based upon which dimension you want to return a value for as seen in the following example:

GetUpperBoundMulti

In the code above, a two-dimensional array is created with three (3) as the first dimension and four (4) as the second dimension. Again, since the dimensions of an array are zero-based, the call to GetUpperBound(0) will represent the first dimension and the call to GetUpperBound(1) will represent the second dimension.

Posted in Other | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

Permanent vs. Temporary Cookies

Posted by Rick Tempestini on August 18, 2007

Cookies, by default, when created using the following code sample, expire when the browser closes:

code-sample-cookie-no-expiration.jpg

If, however, the Expires property is set to a date and time in the future of the current date and time, a persistent cookie file will be written to the local client hard drive. For Internet Explorer, cookies are placed in the c:\Documents and Settings\[user_name]\Cookies directory.

Therefore, the code sample below will write a permanent cookie to the clients hard drive because the Expire property was set to a time in the future.

code-sample-cookie-with-expiration.jpg

Now, looking into my local cookies directory I see my new cookie file:

file-explorer-with-new-cookie.jpg

If I open the cookie, I can now see the name of the cookie “TestCookie” and the name-value pair that I stored in the cookie: setting1-test.

test-cookie.jpg

Posted in Other | Tagged: , , | 4 Comments »

Lab 19 – Terraservice

Posted by Rick Tempestini on July 22, 2007

You will create a simple web application that will call a web service located on the Internet. The Terraservice web service is a publicly accessible web service that can be used by any SOAP-compatible web service.

Lab19
Default.aspx
Default.aspx.vb

Posted in Labs | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Lab 18 – Web Services

Posted by Rick Tempestini on July 22, 2007

You will create a Visual Studio solution that contains two projects: a web site project and a web service project. The web site project will reference the web service project and make a call to the web service at runtime. In addition, you will use the IIS manager to configure an IIS virtual directory for the web service.

Lab18
Lab18.sln
Default.aspx
Default.aspx.vb

Posted in Labs | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Lab 17 – Membership

Posted by Rick Tempestini on July 22, 2007

You will recreate the application from Lab 16. This time, however, you will create the application with the ASP.NET membership web controls. This application will use a SQL Server Express database to store the user accounts. Also, the ASP.NET membership controls will automatically use this database for registration and login.

Lab17
Default.aspx
Default.aspx.vb
Login.aspx
Login.aspx.vb
Register.aspx
Register.aspx.vb
web.config

Posted in Labs | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »

Lab 16 – Security Fundamentals

Posted by Rick Tempestini on July 22, 2007

You will create an application that will be restricted to only logged in users. This application will have a registration page that will be used to create a single user account in a local XML file. A login page will also be created to verify a typed in user name and password prior to letting the user into the site.

Lab16
Default.aspx
Default.aspx.vb
Login.aspx
Login.aspx.vb
Register.aspx
Register.aspx.vb
web.config

Posted in Labs | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »

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