Yesterday evening I attented an interesting session, with a lot of people, from Brad Abrams (Program Manager at Microsoft and author of the book Framework Design Guidelines ).

Most of the things he told were already known in a technical point of view, but what made it so interesting is the reason why some things are built in the .NET framework.

When to use a property in stead of a method, after all... A property is a method?!

When to use an extention method combined with a namespace and add overload methods to an interface or to manage dependencies?

Why shouldn't I define extension methods on the System.Object? ;)

And my favourite:
Do as little as possible now (but no less) to ensure room for extensibility in the future

How to achive the secret of great productivity?

did I get your attention?

Brad has provided us with the slides which can be downloaded from here

always nice to learn some new things :)

Paul S. Randal has written a very interesting article about SQL Server Security, most of you already know all the things he wrote, not? ;)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/maga ... #id0100060

Content:

Physical Security
Network Security
Attack Surface Minimization
Service Accounts
Restricting Use of Administrator Privileges
Authentication
Authorization
SQL Injection
Disaster Recovery
Auditing
Summary

A quick summary of some key combinations in Windows 7:

Win+Home: Clear all but the active window
Win+Space: All windows become transparent so you can see through to the desktop
Win+Up arrow: Maximize the active window
Win+Down arrow: Minimize the window/Restore the window if it's maximized
Win+Left/Right arrows: Dock the window to each side of the monitor (If you've got dual monitors, adding Shift to the mix (e.g., Win+Shift+Right arrow) will move the window to the adjacent monitor.)
Win+T: Focus and scroll through items on the taskbar.
Win+P: Adjust presentation settings for your display
Win+(+/-): Zoom in/out
Shift+Click a taskbar item: Open a new instance of that application

More information about these shortkeys can be found here

This is something I stumbled upon recently and most of you already have this option already in their tools menu in VS. this post is especially to those that just like me did not know it.

While developping a custom layouts page, you need to specify the assembly name where the asp page his code behind class can be found.

something like: Namespace, Version=1.0.0.0,Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=****************

To retrieve this token you could drag and drop your assembly in the gac and copy the token from there. Sn.exe combined with external tool in visual studio offers you a simple menu that displays the public key token of the current signed assembly in no time.

In Visual Studio 2005, click Tools -> External Tools...
Click Add and enter the following into the different fields as displayed in the following screenshot:
Title: Get Public Key
Command: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\Bin\sn.exe
Arguments: -Tp "$(TargetPath)"
Uncheck all options, except Use Output window\

A small tip while using the OntaskChanged activity, if you want to check if the assigned has completed his task don't use the AfterProperties.PercentComplete property .

Problematic situation:
A user modifies the task and the OntaskChanged_Invoked eventhandler is triggered. In this eventhandler the system checks is the user completed the task by setting the PercentCompleted formfield.
When the user doesn't uses the PercentCompleted field, but he uses the Status field. The workflow will crash because the code that is written behind the PercentComplete property of the AfterProperties object uses the StringToNumber(...) method.

//This will crash if the user leaves percentcomplete empty
string perComp = AfterProperties.PercentComplete;

Solution
AfterProperties contains a hashtable called ExtendedProperties, this hashtable has a guid as key(these guids can be found here ) and the current value as a string.By using this hashtable the system can first check if the Guid is available and if the stringvalue is valid.

//Get the percentcompleted value of the task by using the hashtable   
string perComp = AfterProperties.ExtendedProperties(Microsoft.SharePoint.SPbuiltInFieldId.PercentComplete);
if(String.IsNullOrEmpty(perComp)){
...

You should also check if the user didn't use the status combobox to set his task as completed.

//Get the status value of the task by using the hashtable
string status= AfterProperties.ExtendedProperties(Microsoft.SharePoint.SPbuiltInFieldId.TaskStatus);
if(status == "Completed"){
...