How do you handle exceptions in your live web app? Windows Event Logs? Log files on the web server? Log tables on a relational database? Are you using an exception handling framework? Of course not….. why bother when you can let your users know what the exception was and how they can exploit it to bring your system down?!!!!!

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...

I recently had a conversation with a client about the future of press and how digital magazines and newspapers are the future of the business. When we talked about that I had a few technologies in mind but nothing like Treesaver. Treesaver is a JavaScript framework for creating magazine-style layouts that dynamically adapt to a wide variety of browsers and devices. Both content and design is shaped with standards-compliant HTML + CSS and no JavaScript programming is required. It simply searches for the <article> tags and displays the content inside them, makes browsing them possible with...

If you’ve started developing websites using HTML 5 you will surely like this. W3C announced the official logo of HTML5 where you can insert into your HTML 5 built  websites. Besides the HTML5 itself, there are also logos for the features and principles HTML5 is built around like semantics, offline and storage, CSS3 and more. Other than the logos in multiple formats (including vector), there is an online badge builder provided where you can customize the icons to be used, select its orientation and get an embed code to start using instantly.

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...

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...

Since I’ve started talking about Sliverlight and analytics yesterday I thought this is probably the best opportunity to mention Silverlytics (Silverlight + Analytics). Built by Location3 Media an interactive marketing company, Silverlytics is a multitenant Windows Azure-based analytics service that uses Microsoft Live Labs Pivot for its data visualization.  All of its data is collected from Service Oriented Analytics behaviors in Silverlight applications.  The Windows Azure platform is perfect for web analytics because of its scalability and global reach while Pivot provides a very cool way to slice, dice, and understand the data.  Location3 Media is...

A common misunderstanding and argument I get, for not building web applications using Silverlight technology, is often, the lack of a way to keep stats of your application traffic. So I thought this worth a blog post in order to put a few things right and let people know that there is actually a solution they could use. This solution is Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework. Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework is a codeplex based open source Extensible Web Analytics Framework for Microsoft Silverlight Applications. It addresses the challenges of tracking Silverlight applications by enabling it in a number of scenarios like the...

This weekend I got the chance to speak about IE8 and the future (the next version IE9) in a different event from the ones I’m used to speak, MediaCampAthens. MediaCampAthens intends to bring together new media enthusiasts, explorers and professionals to share the current state and their visions for the future of the web, arts, new media, interactive advertising and marketing throughout one day. MediaCampAthens hopes to unlock the potential of new opportunities within the new media industry in Athens. Topics may include - but are not limited to – Web 2.0, entrepreneurship,...

A few months back I’ve started working with Giorgio Sardo on a Facebook IE8 Web Slice. In fact there were a few people that already were aware of that and have been bugging me for the download link ;-) since my TechEd 2009 interview and my IE8 talk at Microsoft Dev Days where I’ve shown just a glimpse of it. Well your wait is over, yesterday Microsoft officially released a set of very useful IE8 addons that target Facebook at the IE addons site that include the Facebook Web Slice. I can’t...