(Shreeraj Shah) A Web Application Firewall (WAF) is emerging as the first line of defense for Web applications. A WAF provides sound content filtering on both incoming and outgoing HTTP(S) traffic. Its working is simple: It looks for malicious attack vectors arriving at the Web application—vectors t

(Jeff Hewitt) From authenticating application users against Active Directory, to programmatically adding users to Active Directory groups, it seems that a developer in a Microsoft supported environment is never too far away from Active Directory. At least this has been true in my experience. In rece

(Jeffrey Juday) Administration, isn’t that what we developers discuss after we’ve constructed the solution? Admittedly, administration can be an afterthought in some software development arenas. Enterprise application integration (EAI) with BizTalk is not one of them. For BizTalk EAI, administration

(Alex Homer) For the past year or so, I’ve been involved in documenting frameworks that help developers write better code, and create applications that are more efficient and easier to test, debug, maintain, and extend. During that time, it has been interesting to see the continuing development of b

(Brian Eastwood) One of the biggest additions to Visual Studio 2005 was the introduction of Visual Studio 2005 Team System, or VSTS. This product — now available in editions for developers, architects, software testers and database programmers — emphasizes collaboration throughout the software dev

(Mike McIntyre) This is part one of a multi-part article about ADO.NET 2.0. Part one introduces the ADO.NET 2.0 Object Model and provides source code which implements the ADO.NET Connection, Command, and Reader objects using the System.Data.SqlClient data provider.

(Tony Patton) Developers have been grappling with the stateless nature of the Web since its inception. That is, once a page has been requested and loaded, the connection to the server is gone. The AJAX movement has put the spotlight on the XMLHTTP object, which enables server communication in the ba

(John Peterson) If you’re like most Web developers, when you were first learning HTML, you probably spent a great deal of your time playing around with your browser. The fact that you could simply do a “View Source” and see how an interesting web page was implemented was one of the things that helpe

(Paul Kimmel) New software can be evolutionary or revolutionary. The problem with revolutionary software is that sometimes people aren’t ready for the revolutionary. So, in general most software plods along with relatively simple changes. Whether there is a long term design or plan, it is hard to sa

(Irina Medvinskaya) If you’ve ever had to change all the controls on a form in runtime, you know how tedious it can be to modify the controls one by one. Here’s a simple way to perform this useful function with VB.NET.