http://www.midniteblog.com Ruminations and ramblings about the world of coding for a living Thu, 21 Aug 2008 19:59:08 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en So, regarding my last post, perhaps I owe an apology to YouTube regarding malware distribution.  I have been chasing the problem for about a month now, and have finally narrowed it down to a virus known as "MPack" from Russia.  This is a really nasty one and appears to have ... http://www.midniteblog.com/2008/08/21/malware-everywhere/ Publishing and managing web sites is always an interesting challenge and it helps to be able to generate extra income from them from programs like AdSense.  Recently, Google has allowed its publishers to monetize YouTube views/clicks by putting some script on their sites. That is great, or so I thought, until ... http://www.midniteblog.com/2008/08/05/you-tube-videos-distributing-malware/ Now let's say we have a "C" exported function that looks something like this: void MyFunction(void* myData); This, of course, is inherently unsafe, because the void* could represent anything. In the wonderful world of "C", however, such a construct is frequently used. We must assume that the caller knows exactly what the ... http://www.midniteblog.com/2008/06/11/more-fun-with-interop/ Coding with C# is fun (most of the time) and really takes a lot of the work out of stuff, like memory allocation/deallocation, that was pretty grungy in C++. Unfortunately, sometimes a new .NET component has to talk to a legacy C++ API and that's where things can get ... http://www.midniteblog.com/2008/05/29/fun-with-interop/ Sometimes working with a managed language like C# can make you lazy. Having cut my programmers teeth on C++, I learned very early that if you "new" something you must also "delete" it. Forget and you get a memory leak. After moving to C#, however, I occasionally become complacent and begin ... http://www.midniteblog.com/2008/04/05/closing-your-database-connections/ Continuation of Part 1  AJAX sample code - calling from a .NET page with C# Now the good stuff.  How do we implement AJAX in our .NET pages?  The answer is surprisingly and pleasantly simple, as it turns out, and is not actually particular to any one scripting language, be it C#, ... http://www.midniteblog.com/2007/11/18/making-ajax-calls-from-a-net-web-page-part-2/ AJAX, (which stands for "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML") is a really cool technology.  Although not a perfect solution, AJAX has solved some difficult problems related to creating a "rich" user experience in a web browser.   With a traditional web page, the browser makes an http request to the server.  The web server delivers ... http://www.midniteblog.com/2007/11/16/making-ajax-calls-from-a-net-web-page/ Amazon web services are one of the most feature and information-rich sources of queryable product data available. They even have user and editorial reviews that you can present to your customers to induce them to buy through your site. The best part is that it's free for developers (Get it at Amazon.com). Here I ... http://www.midniteblog.com/2007/07/29/parsing-amazon-web-services-aws-with-c-and-net/ What with the big push to have XML adopted as a cross-everything data format, it seems like it should be fairly straightforward to parse an XML file in .NET.  For the most part, I would say that it is, but I ran across a situation recently that was a bit ... http://www.midniteblog.com/2007/06/10/using-c-to-parse-xml-feeds/ Having recently purchased a new Gateway desktop computer recently, I was pleased to learn it had Vista Ultimate loaded on it.   This is Microsoft's top of the line OS so I was expecting great things. Having also heard that Vista really sucks up the RAM, I purchased way more than recommended -- ... http://www.midniteblog.com/2007/06/09/getting-vista-to-recognize-more-than-3-gb-of-ram/