http://sourcemaking.com/design-patterns-and-tips

It contains an assortment/reference of design patterns, refactorings and other useful programming tips.

I wanted to use my real SSL Certificate that I had for my website to secure the communication
to my FTP Server and couldn’t find any instructions on how to do so. After a little
searching and some trial and error this is the solution I have come up with, I hope
someone finds this useful.

The real certificate was set up and installed in IIS6, so the first step is to export
the cert from IIS. The Directory Security tab in the properties section of your website
in IIS has a button labelled “Server Certificate” which will launch the Web Server
Certificate wizard. Once the wizard launches, click next and choose the option “Export
the current certificate to a .pfx file:

Enter the name and the path of the file and click next. Choose a password to encrypt
the exported file with and click next, then finish.

The program I used to convert the certificate is called XCA and
can be downloaded from SourceForge.
Once you have XCA installed launch the application, and under the certificates tab
select “Import PKCS#12″ and browse to the .pfx file that was exported from IIS:

It will prompt you for the password to decrypt the .pfx file and you will need to
use the password chosen when you exported it from IIS. In the next dialog, chose “import
all”.
You should now see an entry under the keys tab named “unnamed” and an entry under
the certificates for your imported certificate.

Now we are going to export the Key file and certificate file required by FileZilla.
To export the key select the “unnamed” key and chose export, check off option to Encrypt
the key with a password, the format will be PEM:

Then export the certificate in the PEM format also:

The final step is to configure FileZilla to use your key and certificate. Browse to
the key and certificate files and enter the passort you used to encrypt your key:

FileZilla will now use your real SSL Certificate and you will be able to secure your
FTP communications to your server!

I made a version of the Blingo toolbar for Firefox.

The current version is .1:

• Blingo
  Firefox Toolbar

I will be looking to add new features so suggestions are welcome.

All of the WinFX technologies have been announced as being renamed as the .NET Framework
3.0 (still based on the 2.0 CLR), this includes:

• Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
• Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)
• Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)
• Windows CardSpace (WCS) (previously known as InfoCard)

A few things I’ve picked up:

• Team System is looking more and more interesting. The newly released Visual
  Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals also looks very cool.
• Mark Russinovich and David Solomon
  from sysinternals are funny as hell and
  Filemon and Regmon are much handier than I thought. They will be merged into one utlity
  (Filemon and Regmon not Mark and Dave) and released for free in two weeks.
• Windows Workflow Foundation (i mean .Net 3?) is really, really cool stuff and I need
  to get deep with it right away.
• Click once (or 2 or 3 times in reality) is pretty limited and can get messy pretty
  quickly when you try do do anything slighlty complex.
• The memory managment and profiling tools provided in Visual Studio are ok, and combined
  with a few of the SDK utilities can tackle most of your common problems. I would still
  take MemProfiler any day.
• The Enterprise Patterns team really like pair programming as part of their overall
  Agile methodology.

I posted a few pics.

If anyone knows of a way to get this to happen in VS2005 (aside from coderush) please
let me know. Until then, I will continue my quest.

“Waterfalls are wonderful tourist attractions. They are spectacularly
bad strategies for organizing software development projects.” —Scott Ambler

Refactoring
Databases : Evolutionary Database Design
By Scott W. Ambler, Pramod J. Sadalage

    1 using System;

    2 using System.Collections.Generic;

    3 using System.Text;

    4 using iTunesLib;

    5

    6 namespace RemeberPlaybackPostion

    7 {

    8     class Program

    9     {

   10         static void Main(string[] args)

   11         {

   12             iTunesApp app = new iTunesAppClass();

   13

   14             // IITTrackCollection tracks = app.LibraryPlaylist.Tracks;

   15             IITTrackCollection tracks = app.BrowserWindow.SelectedTracks;

   16

   17             if(tracks == null)

   18             {

   19                 return;

   20             }

   21

   22             Console.WriteLine(“{0} tracks selected.”, tracks.Count);

   23

   24             for (int i = 0; i < tracks.Count; i++)

   25             {

   26                 IITTrack track = tracks[i + 1];

   27                 IITFileOrCDTrack vidTrack = track as IITFileOrCDTrack;

   28                 if (vidTrack != null)

   29                 {

   30                     vidTrack.RememberBookmark = true;

   31                     Console.WriteLine(“{0} RememberBookmark set to {1}”, vidTrack.Name, vidTrack.RememberBookmark);

   32                 }

   33                 else

   34                 {

   35                     Console.WriteLine(“Skipping {0}”, track.Name);

   36                 }

   37             }

   38             Console.WriteLine(“Done.”);

   39             Console.ReadLine();

   40

   41

   42

   43         }

   44     }

   45 }

Apex SQL Edit is a nice alternative
to Query Analyser with integration with source safe, Intellisenseand
Sql formatting.

Borland Together for Visual
Studio .NET has proved to be very useful providing audits for C# projects and UML
modeling that is always in sync with your code.

devMetrics is
a free tool that among other things provides metrics on various aspects of your code.
Useful for measuring the cyclomatic code complexity of your members, and flagging
potential areas that need some refactoring.
Gemini is an ASP.NET based issue
tracking program which I have been evaluating. Free for < 10 users or for Open
Source projects.