Glavs Blog

I have written a DPAPI Managed wrapper that was pretty much taken from MSDN examples and had some extra functions added for ease of use (EncryptString, DecryptString). It uses an attribute mechanism to sandbox calls to the unmanaged functions/libraries.

Well, not really, but I thought this might interest some. Note that I have not personally tried this, but might be worth having a look.

Session storage within .Net is a huge improvement over the classic ASP type methods. The inbuilt support for Inproc, StateServer and SqlServer is great. One thing that has plagued me for sometime though is that I have been unable to use it in almost every enterprise application I have written (bar one).

Had a “situation” today where some developers (new to .Net) had coded a 2 tier application on our dev servers, moved it into our UAT (User Acceptance test) environment and it wouldn't work. This was a simple 3 page app that simply saved some info in a database but it was designed/created with only 2 tiers in mind, and the UAT and PROD environment are 3 tiers. The DEV servers are not really 3 tier due to hardware purchase restrictions so all their testing before UAT worked fine.

The latest kid on the Application block is the Authorization and Profile application block. I haven't had a chance to get to know it very well yet but in our corporate envionment, this might come in very handy.

I posted earlier about some XBox problems I was having, and had a bit of feedback, so I thought I would update you on whats happened so far.

I have recently uploaded my WSCompression library which compresses web service/SOAP calls. It contains full source code, examples and VS.NET project file. No licencing mumbo jumbo so you can do as you will. Reason I uploaded it, is I mentioned it on the ASPAdvice email lists a little while ago and it generated quite a bit more interest than I had anticipated. So for all those interested, you can grab this library here. To use, just apply the [WSCompression(CompressionLevels.High)] attribute on both web service client/proxy and the service itself, and you are away.

Hope this hasn't already been blogged about (I've been out of the loop for a bit), but the “Improving .Net Application Performance and Scalability” document has recently been released in tis Beta 2 form. Its an excellent piece of work from the patterns and practices team and I encourage you to contribute to its development.