Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

Those nasty spammers have apparently reappeared, using a private domain registration through GoDaddy. What they do is capture your Windows Live Messenger credentials under the ruse that they will show you all your blocked contacts (which is easy enough to do yourself with libraries like DotMsn - without the security risks). What they don't tell you is that if you do this, your account is now compromised -- and they'll send every one of your contacts a message (since it's your credentials, it appears from you , a trusted contact) that tells you to go visit their site and sucker for it too. There's only one solution if you suckered for it - you have to change your Live.com password immediately . Just look at this: "The longly[sic] awaited feature for MSN Messenger, completely for free[sic]!" When you click on their Privacy page link, you get nada! What a scam. Unfortunately, from reading the newsgroup and forum posts, it appears that thousands of people are ge...

Q: Who was the pitcher to pitch the only perfect game in the World Series? A: Don Larsen, October 8, 1956, as the New York Yankees beat the Brooklyn Dodgers, 2-0. I've seen a few compilations on this subject, but the methodology in some cases seemed either flawed or not objective enough (surprise), so I though it would be useful to conduct my own research piece. If you take the "authority" approach on this, it makes it a lot easier to rank these various sites and eliminate the vast majority since they simply aren't strong enough to appear on the radar. Basically I got lists of networking sites and did a Google PageRank on all of them. Everything below PageRank 7 was thrown away. That narrowed down the field to 9 sites (boy, that part was easy!). Then, I got the Quantcast.com visitor counts and the Compete.com visitor counts. Then I compiled a composite number of inlinks for each site. Finally, I got the Alexa rank for each. What I did then was to try and come up with ...

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut" -- Ernest Hemingway One thing I've learned to do pretty quickly with VIsual Studio 2008 is to make a backup of the original Visual Studio 2005 .soln and .csproj files and store them in a little .rar or .zip file in the Solution folder. This makes it easy to "go back to the future" as long as your work doesn't include namespaces that don't exist for VS 2005. Yes, I know you can choose to make a backup during the conversion. I'd just rather be safe. I also learned that the conversion process when you load a 2005 Solution and go through the conversion wizard can be quite slow. Here's a neat way to speed it up. Devenv.exe has a /convert flag. So, make a little batch file that looks like this, and save it in your Solution / project folder: "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe /convert" %1 To run this, drop into a C...

Recently I've noticed a significant increase in the number of 419 scam emails that land in my junk mail folder before I clean it out daily - and occasionally a few don't even get dumped into the junk mail folder - they end up directly in the inbox!   Most of us already have learned to trash this utter bullshit, but it's a numbers game. The scammers know that if they send out 50,000 of these at a time (and believe you me, that's exactly what they do) -- that some poor uninitiated soul will respond, not knowing any better. And unwitting respondees do lose real money to these scumbags. As an old commodities trader once advised me as a rookie broker - "There are only two factors that control the market - fear, and greed" - and these scammers are finely honed experts at working the greed factor. For those who aren't totally familiar with the iterations of this scam, it operates as follows: the target receives an unsolicited fax, email, or letter often concern...

Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1 (x86): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=79bc3b77-e02c-4ad3-aacf-a7633f706ba5&DisplayLang=en Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1 (x64): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=029196ed-04eb-471e-8a99-3c61d19a4c5a&DisplayLang=en Note that the 2.0 Service Pack is actually a full Framework install. If you uninstall .NET 2.0 SP1 (even if you had .NET 2.0 installed beforehand) the whole .NET Framework is removed. It does NOT revert you back to .NET 2.0 RTM. Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 Service Pack 1: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ec2ca85d-b255-4425-9e65-1e88a0bdb72a&DisplayLang=en When you install the .NET Framework 3.5, these service packs are required prerequisites and are installed automatically; these are available as separate downloads for those who aren't ready to deploy .NET Framework 3.5. If you are installing Visual Studio 2008, you don't ne...

"The kind of pictures they're making today, I'll stick with toilet paper" -- Dick Wilson (Mr. Whipple, R.I.P.) Well, it's Monday AM Nov 19th and the good news is that VS 2008 RTM is available for download by MSDN subscribers. The bad news is that the traffic jam has long since started, so it's not likely too many people will be able to get their copy today. (Oops - spoke too soon, just got an FTM going at 8:50 AM)! Also available is the Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Training kit. http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7602397 (120MB). This includes presentations, hands-on labs and demos -- and is designed to help you learn how to utilize the Visual Studio 2008 features and a variety of framework technologies including LINQ, C# 3.0, Visual Basic 9, WCF, WF, WPF, ASP.NET AJAX, VSTO, CardSpace, SilverLight, Mobile and Application Lifecycle Management. There are some very specific instructions on what to do if you have pre-release versions of VS or any rela...

Here is an interesting newsgroup post that illustrates a common problem of programmers (usually new ones, but - not always!): "I have just started to rewrite my application using the Presenter First Design Pattern to make sure my business logic is not in the Gui itself. I've got the general idea but I'm a bit unsure as to how I should be launching a dialogue window from my main application window. What i have done is this in a nutshell. My main application window comprises of a Model, Presenter and a View. The Popup window also has a Model, Presenter and View. This is the process of what happens when the button is clicked is as follows. 1. Button clicked, delegate function in presenter called from main View. 2. Method in main presenter calls a method in main model to open the window. 3. Method in main model instanciates popup view, popup model and binds with popup presenter. 4. Method in main model calls method in popup model to open the window. 5. Method in popup model us...

"My Karma ran over your dogma." - Unknown This was an interesting little C# newsgroup nugget. User has a registration code with 4 unused bytes, and wants to know how to store a date in same. (Actually I believe the user was thinking of 4 extra characters in a string - not "bytes", but the exercise is still a good one). Suggestions were made to store an integer representing the number of days from a fixed date. That would certainly do it, but it doesn't convey any context. Here's my take: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Text; namespace _bytedate { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { // this makes sorting by date on an integer value perfect, // e.g. year+month+day, padded to make an integer int myDate = 20071105; byte[] b = BitConverter.GetBytes(myDate); Console.WriteLine(b.Length.ToString() + " bytes."); // reads "4 bytes" // And -back again: Console.WriteLine("Original: " +BitConverter...

Recently I chimed in on a newsgroup thread to an OP (Original Poster) who was questioning why he was losing Cache items. This individual would load a dataset from the Cache object into a local object to use to perform processing. He had been using httpcontext.current.cache and noticed that sometimes he was not able to get the dataset out of the cache. He tried switching to HttpRuntime.Cache and it seemed to help. The OP claimed that the application is under heavy hits, and once or twice every month he would see this error. He wanted to know why does the HttpContext.Current.Cache call work sometimes, while some other times does not. A couple of posters replied, one of whom is a respected MVP who usually makes very astute, high-quality posts. He posted," The cache is only valid during the life of the request. how is you[sic] code using the cache?" Somebody else (also pretty astute, usually) responded, "Cache is valid during lifetime of application not request.....". W...