Joe Stagner

In the early days of networked applications, application security was as simple as running programs on a "hardened box" behind a firewall. As general developer security IQ improved, we learned to write safer code, code that checked identities and principals, code that filtered user input. Most hacker activity was targeted at getting network access anyway, so security was thought of more as the network and database administrator's domain and not really the developer's responsibility. However, things have changed. The FBI estimates that 70% to 80% of attacks aren't going after the operating system or network software layers; they're after the applications that run on them. Most intrusion detection and incident response implementations address network layer attacks, not application level attacks, and for the most part assume human interaction. Besides all this, most ... (more)

Quickstart: Building User-Configurable ASP.NET Web Parts

For more than 20 years the software development industry has regarded reuse as the Holy Grail of software development. Programming language-based object-oriented features promised to deliver the significant benefits of increased productivity and cost-effectiveness by creating reusable objects, but in industry-wide practice OO itself hasn't delivered the results we hoped for. Enter "component-oriented development." As human beings we're "visual" beings. The ability to use visually represented objects come naturally to us and explains some of the popularity of programming processes... (more)

Using an RSS Feed as a Content Service in ASP.NET

RSS is the technology driving the blogging craze that's sweeping the Internet, but it's far more than a blogging technology. It's a prime foundation on which to build "service-oriented" applications. RSS was originally an acronym that stood for "RDF Site Summary" and it has a somewhat confusing version history. The roots of RSS date back nearly a decade to Ramanathan Guha's work at Apple in the mid 1990s on the Meta Content Framework (MCF). MCF was not XML based, but around 1997 Guha joined Netscape, teamed up with Tim Bray, and began building on the ideas of MCF by developing an... (more)