I have a few announcements to make so figured I would sum them up in one post 1. Edmonton Code Camp is November 29, 2008 and registration is now open. Hope to see you there (I will also be doing a talk at Edmonton Code Camp on Threat Modeling) 2. Almost a year ago now I brought on Brandon Lang to work for Solidhouse. In that time he has quickly become a great developer and now has launched his own blog! 3. I was selected to be the MVP Insider for November.   Although this interview pales in comparison to...

One of the features that I don't use is the shortcuts on the left hand side of an open/save dialog. I don't use my My Documents for storing files as I find that so many applications store their settings and other garbage in the My Documents folder that it is useless. Instead I have a folder on the root of my drive that holds most of my stuff in a form that I like... I just wish it was faster to access. After about 2 seconds of searching I came across this article that describes how to customize the...

Well it is getting really close to that time of year again. I am talking about one of the greatest conferences ever.... DevTeach! Some of the great things about DevTeach: Great size. There are enough people to make it a big conference but still small enough that you meet a lot of people Great speakers. I have been to DevTeach as an attendee three times now and I can not think of one talk that was disappointing Great tracks. Every year there are some great standard tracks like agile, architecture, web, .net, sql. There is also some specialized...

Although we are not qualified to do it, the fact is a lot of the time we are the technical people in our shops and are the ones who have to setup a new server. Because we can't know everything we can sometimes leave some things insecure. Here is some of what I do to harden a stand alone web server: Reduce The Attack SurfaceThe fewer entrances into a building means the fewer points an attacker can enter. Disable any unnecessary services If possible limit access to services by IP address (i.e. if you only remote desktop from...