Every once in a while, I receive emails stating that some of my libraries were utilized as part of larger project. Besides being very excited (and somewhat proud I must admit), I always felt a need to somehow share the information with the rest of the world. After some thought, I decided to simply write a post and provide author's original work for download (with author's permission).

The latest project that I received was Masters Project by Karlo Martin Zatylny from University of Texas at Austin. Karlo's project was to implement Korat - "a library for creating test structures and data" - in C# language (hence the name Korat#). Korat testing environment was originally implemented and utilized in Java programming language. Karlo enhances original Korat implementation by adding "regular-expression data generation engine to provide valid string-based input for the given methods and libraries" Karlo's paper and implementation can be downloaded below:

Download Karlo's Paper in PDF (473.81 kb)
Download Source Code (683.25 kb)

Couple of days ago, my blog application started crushing. At first, I assumed that my ISP provider is to blame. Somewhat irritated I submitted the question to the support crew and couple of emails later, they informed me that the blog application was taking over 100MB in RAM space (which triggers the server to stop the application). In addition I noticed that the number of visitors increased dramatically over the last couple of weeks. Quick look under the hood revealed that during post rendering, source code is rendered "on-fly", which utilizes Wilco.SyntaxHighlighter.dll control. Considering the fact that there are many posts that display the source code and that there are many visitors viewing them, it is possible that memory usage would increase drastically. To eliminate the issue I decided to render the code at the time of post editing (as opposed to rendering during page loading). The only elegant solution (in my case) was to use Windows Live Writer with source code plugin. However, I could not find a plugin that would satisfy my needs, so I decided to write my own.

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Lately, Adobe Flex has been getting more and more attention in programming community. Especially after the launch of open source version of Flex SDK developers are able to make rich Internet applications (RIA) using Flex, which (as everybody knows) produces a flash file (swf) that can be used in any web application. The article will focus on the following topics:

1. Communication between Action Script (HTTPService) and .NET (HTTP Handler);
2. Security - securing HTTP Handler calls from unauthorized access;
3. ASP.NET Forms Authentication and Authorization through Flex;
4. ASP.NET Handlers and session management;

It is assumed that the reader is familiar with basic concepts of ASP.NET handlers, forms authentication, and Adobe's Action Script.
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SQL Server 2005 has been released for a while now, and most of the new features are well known throughout programming community. Right after the initial release, I downloaded a copy of SQL Server 2005 Express, eager to explore new features. At first, there was a lot of reading and browsing the documentation; then I moved onto converting smaller projects to SQL Server 2005 edition, and finally I decided to move larger projects to my new favorite DBMS. Throughout conversion process, I was poised to utilize the newest feature of SQL Server 2005: CLR Stored Procedures.
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Multiple Document Interface (MDI) is a technique to separate data layer from presentation layer, which is primarily utilized in MFC. As an MFC developer looking to develop applications in .NET, I was searching for a similar concept. My interest was mostly in GUI design, rather than complete MDI/SDI solution. At first, I was very happy to learn that Windows Forms provided assistance in MDI development. As always, I fired up VS.NET 2005 and created sample project. Couple of minutes later, I had MDI-like application, where I could add/remove views very quickly. It felt too good to be true, which later proved that it was. At first I wanted all of my child views to be shown maximized. In addition, I wanted all child views without a control bar. Everything went well, except that my forms could not get rid of control bar. In addition, form resizing did not function properly. As always, I searched the web and found numerous attempts to solve these issues. All solutions suggested following steps:
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In my previous post Displaying .NET DataSet with Crystal Reports I discussed one way to report the data that does not come directly from a database. In this way, it is possible to preform more complex data analysis and present the result using Crystal Report engine. Following post addresses similar issue. However, here, the data to be presented is not stored in a DataSet, but rather in a .NET Collection, which implements IEnumerable interface.
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Couple of days ago, I started playing with Crystal Reports engine included with Visual Studio.NET. After creating several reports using SQL Express database, I started wondering how to create reports that require more sophisticated data analysis. At first, my thoughts were to utilize stored procedures to create report result, and and then display the result using Crystal Report engine. However, it turned out that Crystal Report engine has some limitations when it comes down to stored procedures. Crystal Reports documentation states that stored procedures can be utilized if they contain at most one SQL SELECT statement. In addition, the documentation states that no return parameters can be utilized (parameters declared by SQL keyword OUT, or INOUT). Clearly, complicated data analysis cannot be performed using single SELECT statement. Considering these limitations, I immediately started to investigate options to present a structure using Crystal Reports. At first, I considered a .NET containers, but Crystal Reports engine did not seem to provide any convenient way of displaying such structures. In addition, I noticed that every report that I designed, required the structure of the data to be known at report design time. At that time, two options came to my mind:
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Introduction

Authentication and authorization as fundamental part of a web application was tremendously simplified with arrival of .NET 2.0. Basic authentication and authorization can be performed using different DBMS systems. There are numerous examples implementing authentication using Access database. One such example can be found in the article ASP.NET 2.0 Authentication using Access Database. In this article the example implements bare minimum to achieve desired goal, namely authentication and authorization using access database. However, authentication and authorization is only first part of the user management system. Second fundamental part of user management is allowing users to create an account at will. In such instances, users can sign up and become members of the community without administrator intervention. Furthermore, the user should be able to provide contact information (email) so that he/she can be contacted if necessary. Contact information must be verified. This article focuses on very simple ways to achieve such goal.
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Introduction

Authentication and authorization is one of the basic components of web application development. When I first started web development, I quickly realized that authentication and authorization of resources were performed in variety of ways. Throughout years, I developed variety of web applications, primarily for my own use. With arrival of ASP.NET 1.0, authentication and authorization were simplified. ASP.NET 2.0 takes this feature even further by providing the user with powerful tools to quickly implement authentication and authorization. With these tools, a user can utilize MS SQL 2005 Server, XML data source, MS Access database and other data sources to retrieve user information. In this article I will focus on bare minimum needed to implement forms authentication using access database.

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