If you ever created a professional website/application you’ll probably know the value (you’ve probably learned it the hard way as I did ) of stress testing your web applications. There are plenty of tools you can use in order to stress test your web site, ranging from Microsoft Visual Studio to CMD Line tools. Yesterday I found another one StresStimulus. StresStimulus is an extension for Fiddler (an awesome and free web debugging proxy) which enables us to create instant load tests with virtual users. You can record a browser activity (like creating a user), replay...

Microsoft recently released a new flavor of IIS 7.x that is optimized for developer scenarios called “IIS Express” as part of WebMatrix. IIS Express combines the ease of use of the ASP.NET Web Server with the full power of IIS.  Specifically: It’s lightweight and easy to install (less than 10Mb download and a super quick install) It does not require an administrator account to run/debug applications from Visual Studio It enables a full web-server feature set – including SSL, URL Rewrite, Media Support, and all other IIS 7.x...

I guess most of you will know by now that ItPro|DevConnections is holding a lottery for two msdn subscriptions for all of those that took advantage of the early bird offer and subscribed for the event before the 30th of September. Well, I was assigned to perform the lottery which is going to take place today. This got me thinking, What would be the easiest (don’t have time) and geekiest (after all it’s a tech event) way to perform this lottery? And then it stuck me “why don’t I try LightSwitch, it’ll probably take me 10 minutes to prepare...

Last week two security researchers, Thai Duong and Juliano Rizzo, have discovered a bug in the default encryption mechanism used to protect the cookies normally used to implement Forms Authentication in ASP.NET. Using their tool (the Padding Oracle Exploit Tool or POET), they can repeatedly modify an ASP.NET Forms Authentication cookie encrypted using AES and, by examining the errors returned, determine the Machine Key used to encrypt the cookie. The process is claimed to be 100 percent reliable and takes between 30 and 50 minutes for any site. Everyone immediately focused on the bug not mentioning what is commonly known as...

Some of my colleagues are often reluctant to use ASP.NET 2.0 profile provider to store profile data for their web applications. The main reason for this is the fact that the default SqlProfileProvider that ships with ASP.NET 2.0 “blobicizes” Profile data using string, XML or binary serialization prior to storing information in SQL Server. This obviously puts a rather large overhead when you need to query your profile data. What most developers aren’t aware though is that you can build your own custom profile provider to store Profile data “in the clear” in the database so that the data...

I’ve been involved for quite some time now with a new Microsoft project codenamed “WebMatrix” but couldn’t say anything about it since all the info was under NDA. Today though, the public availability of the Microsoft WebMatrix Beta was announced, so I guess I’m no longer bound by the NDA agreement and can let you in on a few things. So first let me clarify a few things, and to do that I’m going to use an excellent explanation from David Ebbo’s blog. WebMatrix: a stack and a tool Let’s start with WebMatrix.  The term is actually...

I briefly got the chance to talk about MetaCMS, the content management system and e-shop platform I’ve designed and built, a while back. Since then a lot of sites have been built using it. Some of which (the biggest ones) include: www.nooz.gr (former www.flash.gr) ...

I’m starting a new line of blog posts in which I’m going to give out a few tips and tricks I’ve picked up during the past years. I’m going to start with one of the most common mistakes I often face when reading code. To demonstrate that, I’m going to use LinqToSQL as my data access method (although the problem can be found in any kind of Data access technology) and use the the same model I used in my earlier Caching series. As you can see the model is very simple and contains just three entities, a Peson, its Phones and...

Before picking up where I left off yesterday, I have to first make a small disclaimer. I received a couple of comments stating that the caching solution I presented wasn’t that sophisticated or complete or that the cache keys that I’ve used were not the right and the answer is of course “yes”. The solution I presented was far from perfect but it served well as a simplified demonstration of the problems one might face when caching Linq to SQL entities. Ok now that we’re done with the typicalities let’s see what was wrong with the solution shown earlier. To demonstrate...

A caching solution is always necessary if you want to build scalable applications which will handle lots of users and heavy data access without requiring more hardware resources. I’ve already talked about caching when using Entity Framework, but is there a way to use caching in Linq to SQL and what are the problems one might face. To explore caching in Linq to SQL I’ve built a small web site that had a single page. This page used Linq To SQL to access the AdventureWorks sample Database which you can download from Codeplex. The very simple Linq To SQL model that...