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Bob & Chris' MSDN Roadshow - Back for More! by phildenoncourt

For those of you local to New Hampshire, Chris Bowen and Bob Familiar will be back in town speaking about AJAX. I've been working with a client on an AJAX site and have been very impressed with the results.

Here's the information for the Roadshow:

We're back in the saddle again, gearing up for another five-city tour to bring deep technical content to a projection screen near you!

Dates, locations, and registration links are at the bottom of this post.

Note that we've changed venues from Farmington to Hartford, CT and Manchester to Nashua, NH.

See you on the road!

-Chris

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Bob Familiar and Chris Bowen are two guys who love to write code and can’t stop talking about it. And now they’ve decided to take their long winded rants and questionable demos to a city near you. And if you were at our last event, you know the line about questionable demos is no joke!

AGENDA: AJAX, Extensible Scrubbing Bubbles and that Cross Browser Cleansing Motion

8:30am Arrive, check in, grab a nosh and a seat

9:00 – 10:15 XML and the Database

SQL Server 2005 offers architects and developers a slew of great features for creating data driven solutions. For this session we will focus on the XML features including XML Indexes, XQuery, the XML Datatype, the FOR XML clause and validating XML within the database using XSD. The use cases for these XML capabilities will also be discussed.

10:15 – 10:30 <Break />

10:30 – 12:00 What’s New From The Patterns & Practices Group?

Like doing things the hard way? Well, unfortunately for you this session is all about making your life as a developer or architect easier. The Patterns & Practices group keeps churning out great tools, reference code, and guidance to show you Microsoft's recommendations for designing, developing and deploying great applications. We'll cover Enterprise Library 3.0, various Software Factories, the Guidance Automation Toolkit and more, explaining how they could fit in with your development efforts. If you suddenly find the hard way less thrilling, don't say we didn't warn you!

12:00-1:00 Grab a lunch and search for patterns in the carpet

1:00 – 2:15 Microsoft Silverlight (aka Windows Presentation Foundation / Everywhere)

At our last meeting, we dug into the Windows Presentation Foundation, a .Net Framework development library that sits overtop of DirectX allowing one to create the next generation of Windows user interfaces using advanced graphics, animation, rich documents and multimedia along with traditional UI controls. Windows Silverlight is a subset of the capabilities of WPF that can be used within browser based applications on the PC and the Mac. This session will discuss the architecture of Microsoft Silverlight and demonstrate how integrate XAML into your browser-based applications.

2:15-2:30 Take a break and animate

2:30 – 3:45 ASP.NET AJAX – Going Deeper

If you're developing applications for the web, you've likely heard about AJAX and how it can improve the usability and functionality of your site. In this session, we'll quickly introduce the main concepts of ASP.NET AJAX and then we'll roll up our sleeves for other details that will help you when you're in the trenches with AJAX. We'll talk about the client side library, Silverlight (formerly codenamed WPF/E) integration, enabling and invoking server methods and web services, debugging, best practices and more.

3:45 – 4:00 Zune Giveaway

Location Date Time Registration

Sheraton Burlington Hotel May 8^th, 2007 8:30am-4:00pm Register!

870 Williston Road

Burlington Vermont Event ID:

1032339883

RIT INN & Conference Center May 10^th, 2007 8:30am-4:00pm Register!

5257 Henrietta Road

W. Henrietta New York Event ID:

1032339884

Sheraton Hartford Hotel May 14^th, 2007 8:30am-4:00pm Register!

100 East River Drive

Hartford Connecticut Event ID:

1032339886

MESDA May 15^th, 2007 8:30am-4:00pm Register!

506 Main Street

Westbrook, ME 04092 Event ID:

1032339885

Sheraton Nashua Hotel May 17^th, 2007 8:30am-4:00pm Register!

11 Tara Boulevard

Nashua New Hampshire Event ID:

1032339887

Monday, May 07, 2007 3:51:33 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [0] ASP.NET |

Help in the fight against spam by phildenoncourt

Last night I posted a webcontrol that I wrote to my website that makes life more difficult for spammers. It's a substitute for hyperlink control in ASP.NET named the obscure hyperlink control

One of the ways that spammers get email addresses is that they have programs that spider the web, looking for email addresses embedded in webpages. They target forum based sites because people are more likely to leave their email addresses there. This has caused people to start leaving their email addresses in cryptic formats (for example: me {at} mydomain.com). I find these techniques annoying as an end user trying to contact someone, but I also have to believe that spammers have caught on and look for variants with the word "at" in them. The obscure hyperlink control can be used for any hyperlink, mailto or http. Besides thwarting spammers, another use of the control would be to link to an objectionable site without contributing to its search engine rank.

What the obscure hyperlink control does is scrambles (note - I'm not saying encrypt) the hyperlink when the page is being created on the webserver using a random technique. An scrambled example of my email address is 'mcstiostucoe@ipolamit:hldnnorascae.o'. You can see a functioning example here. A matching javascript function is added to the webpage that unscrambles the hyperlink when the user clicks on it. When you view the source of the webpage, the link is removed, and an onClick handler is added to the hyperlink. Nowhere will you see the text of the hyperlink. It is present in the onClick handler, but it is not very legible. The Url is not stored in Viewstate, so it can't be taken from there, either.

Here are pros & cons of this control:
Pros:

Easy to use (works exactly the same as the existing hyperlink control)
The hyperlink information is not in the href attribute, but in the onClick (an area that spammers don't always pay atttention to)
The diversity of scrambling algorithms makes it difficult for spammers to target a specific implementation
Doesn't require a lot of server resources

Cons:

Doesn't completely prevent spammers from getting email addresses. A determined spammer could reverse engineer the control. This is just adds a roadblock for spammers.
Requires that the user's browser supports javascript and that it is enabled.
Limited number of scrambling algorithms. Right now there are 5. If this fills a need, I intend to add more, but it will still be a finite number.

Thursday, October 27, 2005 4:02:31 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [0] Development | DotNet | ASP.NET |