GMail Drive

GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google Gmail account, allowing you to use Gmail as a storage medium.

You can download it from http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm

Creating a Screen Saver with Visual Studio 2005

With VS 2005 it’s possible. You can create your own screen saver without any coding. I will explain the basic steps to create your screen saver in minutes. Of course you will get the complete help info from the VS itself. So lets start your RSS feed screen saver.

Open the VS 2005, File > New > Project

New project dialog box will appear. Select the Starter Kits > Screen Saver Starter Kit

Click ok. You can go ahead and change the code for your requirements or else you can keep the default. Build the project & go to the project BIN folder. You will find ssNews.scr file in it. Copy & Paste the file into the %SystemRoot%\system32\ folder.(e.g. WINNT\system32\) Your done!. Great VS has created screen saver for you in just seconds. Select the screen saver (News) from the Screen saver tab from the Display settings & change the RSS feed from the Screen Saver Settings. You can customize the background picture / RSS feed / shortcut keys... whatever since we got the source code. So try it & have fun.

I'm @ TechEd

It’s been some time that I couldn’t post anything in my blog bocoz of the tight schedule I had. Tech Ed was really great event especially for us as .net developers. There are loads of things to come from the next release of VS 2005 & SQL 2005. What Microsoft is trying to do is to cut down the development time & to focus more on the business requirements. There were some really good sessions about the Yukon(Sql 2005) from the Sql MVP Vinod Kumar & Vineeth Gupta. Vineeth Gupta demonstrated some really good new features like DB Mirroring, Data Encryption and Key Management and so forth. I was really stunned by the new VS Team System. I will post some articles about each & every new feature when the time permits. So I had fun & learn some new cool stuff at Tech Ed & hope to attend to the next year TechEd as well.



















(Im at teched with my very good old friend Sumudu)

TechEd ! im sponsered :-)

Im sponsered by my employer(E-Solutions Lanka) for the first teched in sri lanka. There are two developers(including me :-)) going to the teched. Yesterday i went through some of the key enhacnements in VS 2005/ASP.Net. Just a little preparation for the big event tommorow(12th Oct). But im wondering why microsoft didnt list teched sri lanka in their teched worldwide site. any ideas..??? http://www.microsoft.com/events/teched2005/worldwide.mspx

Brute Force Attacks.

Brute Force attacks are closely related to dictionary attacks. Brute force attack generates random user ids and passwords instead of reading them from a dictionary file.

You should be more concerned about dictionary attack than a brute force attack. A typical password dictionary has roughly 1,000,000 entries of common passwords. These include people’s names, common pet names, and ordinary words. Suppose an efficient dictionary attack can generate and analyze 10 guesses per second. If a user’s password is in the dictionary, the attack will succeed in at most 100,000 seconds or approximately 28 hours.

Now suppose a user has a six-character password that consists of upper-and lowercase letters, digits and 32 punctuation characters. There are 689,869,781,056 password combinations. A brute force attack would require 1,093 years on average to find the correct password. This comparison doesn’t mean brute force attacks aren’t a threat, but it does make it clear how much more dangerous dictionary attacks are. I will post a code sample about how to create a dictionary attack & how we can prevent from it. So stay tuned.

Visual Studio: What’s in a code Name?

Microsoft Commonly uses the code names for unreleased versions of products it’s developing. The code names for the versions of visual studio since its initial release in February 2002 have followed a geographical pattern. Everett, a town in Washington about 30 miles from Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, was the code name for visual Studio 2003, the currently shipping product Whidbey the next release is named for Whidbey island in Puget sound, offshore from the town of evrett. The Whidbey release is tied to next version of Sql server(code-named Yukon). The VS.net version Microsoft will release around the same time is code-named Orcas. Orcas island in puget sound is even further from Redmond than Whidbey island.