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Published on 12 Jul 2006 from
Scientists say silk fibres could be used to repair severed nerves, possibly even helping patients with damaged spinal chords.
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Published on 12 Jul 2006 from
I noticed this on one of our internal aliases the other day - it's a question that seems to come up quite regularly so it's something worth repeating to get the word out a bit. The question was around personalisation. well specifically preventing users doing too much to their devices, whilst maintaining a level of control over them.
How can you personalize a device by writing custom code in order to:
Prevent installation of additional software on device (no SD Card, no active sync,…)
Prevent user overriding or adding new settings (GPRS, Exchange server, …)
No frills or games
Well we have quite a bit of documentation on provisioning a mobile device here. You can provision settings like GPRS, Exchange settings, and even customise the Home screen with over 40 CSPs (Chipset support packages) you have extensive control over settings. The device can receive XML using a variety of methods including tethered, SD card, and over the air. The Messaging and Securiy Feature Pack (MSFP) and Exchange also give you additional capabilities to push out policies and control access to a device. The security model of Windows Mobile 5.0 uses a 2 tier system which basically gives you a user account which can be restricted and an admin account to administer the device.
We've implemented a policy internally at Microsoft, nothing too draconian, just a security implementation that makes sure that the device is locked after a certain lennght of time. Simple but secure.. Still gives me the flexibility to install all of the new cool and funky stuff on my device when I find a new must have application...
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Published on 12 Jul 2006 from
Virtual PC now joins Virtual Server in being free!
Download the full version of Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 SP1.
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Published on 12 Jul 2006 from
Office Live beta is now available in the following countries:
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Published on 12 Jul 2006 from
Drink, Anyone?
Mmmmmm.
View in Zooomr
500 x 333 version
1024 x 682 version
Original Size - 3456 x 2304 version
View this photograph in the gallery
This post is part of the Photography Workshop series.
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Published on 12 Jul 2006 from
An Inflatable spacecraft that could kick-start the space tourism industry is launched from Siberia.
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Published on 12 Jul 2006 from
A brain-chip enables a paralysed man to control objects around him by simply using his thoughts.
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Published on 12 Jul 2006 from
IrishDev have just launched their new Careers area.
This is an expansion on the already existing in Jobs Portal with the following sections:
Top Dogs:
Insights and inspiration through interviews of visionary managers and industry thought-leaders. First words of wisdom come from Fiona O'Brien of Lenovo Ireland.
Career Ladder:
I really like this bit. It's an advice column on improving your working situation aimed at professional IT peeps and, of course, those seeking employment new!
On the Move:
Keep abreast of news of key industry moves and important hiring opportunities with this career-specific news tracker.
Check out the new section here. And click here for more formal details.
Don't forget to thank us when you're sitting pretty in your swanky new job position!!! ;)
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Published on 12 Jul 2006 from
Via Chris Lanier
You can now get YouTube on Media Center, I love watching old 80's music videos on Youtube so its great to get it on to Media Center.
download it from http://www.push-a-button.com.au/products/mce/YouTubeMCE.php
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Published on 12 Jul 2006 from
Via Chris Lanier
You can now get YouTube on Media Center, I love watching old 80's music videos on Youtube so its great to get it on to Media Center.
download it from http://www.push-a-button.com.au/products/mce/YouTubeMCE.php
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Published on 12 Jul 2006 from
Grant has a post on the latest ncoverexplorer features, be sure to read his thoughts on Jamie's recent news.
Steve Rowe has a post on prescriptive advice for successful unit testing.
Lastly this months "drunk and blogged it" award goes to Phil ;-)
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Published on 12 Jul 2006 from
Senior industry figure warns against turning games into serials like TV shows.
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Published on 12 Jul 2006 from
July 13th, 2006
The Media Center Show #66(MP3 - 14.6mb- 42mins 43secs)
LISTEN HERE
This week on the show is Jeff Lloyd, president and CEO from Inteset a company specialising in Media Center products for AV installers.
I also have a tip on building Caller ID in to Media Center
Send your questions and feedback to mailto:isdixon@gmail.com(feel free to send your questions in mp3)
or you can send your questions and comments in to the show Skype Line “MediaCenterShow”
Don’t forget your to check out Media Center Show Gear
The forums are at Iandixon.co.uk/forums
Sorry no times for the show this week I ran out of time before I had to leave for a short holiday :) , so here are the links talked about on the show this week. Oh and checkout download some of my music from HERE
Caller ID on Media Center
Media Center Book
Dual Monitor Display Solution
Onevoice
Inteset
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Published on 12 Jul 2006 from
July 13th, 2006
The Media Center Show #66(MP3 - 14.6mb- 42mins 43secs)
LISTEN HERE
This week on the show is Jeff Lloyd, president and CEO from Inteset a company specialising in Media Center products for AV installers.
I also have a tip on building Caller ID in to Media Center
Send your questions and feedback to mailto:isdixon@gmail.com(feel free to send your questions in mp3)
or you can send your questions and comments in to the show Skype Line “MediaCenterShow”
Don’t forget your to check out Media Center Show Gear
The forums are at Iandixon.co.uk/forums
Sorry no times for the show this week I ran out of time before I had to leave for a short holiday :) , so here are the links talked about on the show this week. Oh and checkout download some of my music from HERE
Caller ID on Media Center
Media Center Book
Dual Monitor Display Solution
Onevoice
Interset
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Published on 12 Jul 2006 from
I've just noticed that Windows Small Business Server 2003 R2 will be available next month. Some of the more significant changes are the expanded Exchange mailbox limit to 75GB, Windows Server Update Services (WSUS). In addition, SQL Server 2005 Workgroup Edition is included in the Premium edition.
More information available here.
Cheers,
John.
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Published on 12 Jul 2006 from
Announced to day at the World Wide Partner Conference, Windows Server 2003 R2 Datacenter Edition (DCE) has undergone some revisions effective from 1st October 2006:
- It will be available through Volume Licensing
- License rights allow an unlimited number of virtualized Windows Server instances, whether that be Windows Server Standard, Enterprise or Datacenter Edition, or a mix of the tree without having to track the number of VMs or pay for additional Windows Server licenses. You simply license the server's processors with Windows Server Datacenter Edition.
- More OEMs will be providing DCE pre-installed on servers with 2 to 64 processors with and without the Datacenter High Availability program.
Cheers,
John.
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Published on 12 Jul 2006 from
Jeff Barr shows off some highlights regarding the Amazon S3 service I blogged about a little while ago.
It turns out that Microsoft's MSDN Direct Student Download program is one of the customers using the Amazon S3 service. From a press release:
"We needed a storage and delivery solution that made it simple, fast, and dependable for students in hundreds of countries around the world to download our software at any time," said Joe Wilson, Director of Academic Initiatives in the Developer Marketing division at Microsoft Corp. Microsoft wanted to scale the program up without any upfront or increased ongoing expenses, which is why it chose Amazon S3. Microsoft expanded the program while managing to cut storage costs by more than 90 percent since switching to Amazon S3. "In addition to being easy for our users, Amazon S3 allows us to deploy and scale up in a very cost-efficient manner," said Wilson."
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Published on 12 Jul 2006 from
Problem:
You are building an Intranet web application for your organization, and you want to authenticate the users visiting your site. Specifically, you want to ensure that they are logged in using a valid Windows account on the network, and you want to be able to retrieve each incoming user's Windows account name and Windows group membership within your application code on the server.
Discussion:
Authentication is the process of identifying and validating the identity of a client accessing an application. Put more simply -- it is the process of identifying “who” the end-user is when they visit a website.
Authentication is typically used in combination with Authorization -- which is the process of figuring out whether the authenticated user has permissions to access a particular page/resource or to perform some action. For example, when an end-user in a browser tries to access a page, ASP.NET might authenticate the user as “Scott”, and would then run through the configured authorization rules for the requested page to figure out whether “Scott” has permission to access it.
ASP.NET supports multiple ways to authenticate browser users visiting a web application, and implements a flexible set of ways to authorize which permissions they have within the application.
For Internet web applications, the most common authentication scenario to use it called Forms Authentication. Forms Authentication enables a developer to provide a standard HTML login form within their application, and then validate the username/password an end-user submits against a database or other credential store. Assuming the username/password combination is correct, the developer can then ask ASP.NET to issue an encrypted HTTP cookie to identify and track the user.
For Intranet web applications, the most common authentication scenario to use is called Windows Authentication. Windows Authentication avoids the need to create a login form within an application, and does not require end-users to manually enter their username/password credentials to login to the application. Instead, ASP.NET and IIS can automatically retrieve and validate the Windows username of the end-user visiting the site in a secure way. The benefit of this approach is that it improves the end-user customer experience since users don’t have to re-type their passwords, and/or maintain separate accounts. It also allows companies to re-use a common security identity system across their entire corporate networks (Windows clients, servers, file-shares, printers, and web apps).
Solution:
To enable Windows Authentication within an ASP.NET Application, you should make sure that you have “Integrated Windows Authentication” (formerly called NTLM authentication) enabled within IIS for the application you are building.
You should then add a web.config file to the root directory of your ASP.NET application that contains an <authentication> section which sets the mode to “Windows”.
You should also then add an <authorization> section to the same web.config file that denies access to “anonymous” users visiting the site. This will force ASP.NET to always authenticate the incoming browser user using Windows Authentication – and ensure that from within code on the server you can always access the username and Windows group membership of the incoming user.
The below web.config file demonstrates how to configure both steps described above:
<configuration>
<system.web>
<authentication mode="Windows" />
<authorization>
<deny users="?"/>
</authorization>
</system.web>
</configuration>
Note that the <deny users=”?”/> directive within the <authorization> section above is what tells ASP.NET to deny access to the application to all “anonymous” users to the site (the “?” character means anonymous user). This forces Windows to authenticate the user, and ensures that the username is always available from code on the server.
Obtaining the Logged-in Username via Code
Once you follow the above configuration steps, you can easily access the logged-in username and role/group mappings for the authenticated user within ASP.NET. For example, you could use the code-snippet below within an ASP.NET page to easily obtain the username of the visiting user:
Dim username As String
username = User.Identity.Name
The code-snippet above works because there is a “User” property built-in to all ASP.NET pages and user-controls. If you want to gain access to this user data from within a regular class or business object (which doesn’t have this property provided), you can write code like below to achieve the same result:
Dim User As System.Security.Principal.IPrincipal
User = System.Web.HttpContext.Current.User
Dim username As String
username = User.Identity.Name
The code above obtains the User IPrincipal object for the current request by accessing it via the static HttpContext.Current property that ASP.NET provides (this in turn uses call-context to retrieve it from the active ASP.NET worker thread). This avoids you having to pass this User object into your business classes directly, and instead allows you to access the User object from anywhere in the application.
Outputting the Logged-in Username on a Page
You can use the username string we retrieved above to programmatically output the username to a page however you want. For example, you could easily add an <asp:label> control to the page and write code like so to set it:
Label1.Text = "Welcome " & User.Identity.Name
ASP.NET 2.0 also ships with a built-in <asp:LoginName> control that you can use to declaratively output the user-name to the page:
<asp:LoginName ID="LoginName1" FormatString="Welcome {0}!" runat="server" />
This control provides an easy way to display the username within the application without having to write any code at all (note the use of the “FormatString” property on the control above – which allows you to easily specify a text mask to use with it).
Looking up Role/Group information for a User
ASP.NET provides a useful “Role Management” capability, which allows developers to map users into logical “Roles” that can then be used to better control end-user capabilities and authorization access. For example, as a developer I could create a role called “managers” for my web application, and then limit access to portions of the site to only those users within the “managers” role (note: I will be posting additional recipes in the future that discuss how to fully use the Role Management authorization and capabilities features more).
When using Windows Authentication, ASP.NET allows developers to create and populate roles from multiple sources. For example, a developer could setup the built-in ASP.NET 2.0 SqlRoleProvider to map Windows users to custom application roles that are store within a database. This approach is very useful for scenarios where there might be application-specific role mappings that don’t make sense to push into a centralized Active Directory tree/store.
ASP.NET also makes it easy to access central Windows and Active Directory group mappings from within an application as well. For example, if there is a Windows group on the Active Directory network called “DOMAIN\managers”, an ASP.NET application could lookup whether the current Windows authenticated user visiting the ASP.NET site belongs to this group by writing code like this:
If User.IsInRole("DOMAIN\managers") Then
Label1.Text = User.Identity.Name & " is a manager"
Else
Label1.Text = User.Identity.Name & " is not a manager"
End If
Note that the role/group look-up is done via the “User.IsInRole(rolename)” method that is a peer of the User.Identity.Name property.
Next Steps
Once you understand the basics above, you know how to authenticate and identify Windows users visiting your Intranet application, as well as to lookup what Windows groups and roles they belong to.
In a future Recipe we’ll walkthrough more advanced role-management scenarios, and also discuss ways to authorize and restrict access and capabilities within an ASP.NET application based on the authenticated user’s authorization rights.
Additional Discussion:
• Links to Tons of ASP.NET Security Content
• How To: Use Windows Authentication in ASP.NET 2.0
Hope this helps,
Scott
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Published on 12 Jul 2006 from
I installed the trial of Windows Live OneCare on my childrens machine at home last week - the 90 day trial is available here. If you haven't seen it yet, OneCare can be thought of as an all-in-one tune up and peace of mind package including Antivirus, Antispyware (Windows Defender), a 2-way firewall, a performance tuneup and a backup/restore program. I'm still investigating how it plays with WSUS for the OS updates part... on my list of things to look at.
Note that currently Windows Live OneCare is only available in the US [not that it worries me too much now ;)].
Cheers,
John.
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Published on 12 Jul 2006 from
Just seen that this is now available for download from http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx
Cheers,
John.
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Published on 12 Jul 2006 from
The UK's independent music labels want internet providers to become liable for illegal file-sharing by their users.
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Published on 12 Jul 2006 from
Effective immediately, you can now download Virtual PC 2004 SP1 from www.microsoft.com/virtualpc. When we release Virtual PC 2007 early next year, this too will be free. This brings parity with the changes for Virtual Server 2005 R2 earlier this year. The main change Virtual PC 2007 will bring is the ability to support 64-bit Windows Vista hosts. Note, guests will still be 32-bit only, but Windows Vista will be supported as a guest.
There is also a licensing change for Windows Vista Enterprise customers where the license will now permit the installation of up to 4 copies of the OS into VMs - this is for a single user on a single device. The licensing change is specific in that it requires Windows Vista Enterprise to be deployed on the host machine itself. If