They're watching you - you know that? They've been scoping out your site for quite some time, looking at ways to screw with you and your site. All right, you think your code is secure, eh? Got the latest handy-dandy encryption on your stuff, all up to snuff on your patches and service packs. But you know what? You're making a critical blunder on your site, and you might not even know it. If you're taking information passed in on a Querystring and then you Response.Write it out on the page, uh-oh brother, you've got problems... You're ripe for the picking with Cross Site Scripting. Unless you already know where I'm going with this, read on. [read article...]

Someone's been stealing your content. Really. It's easy to do, too. I'm talking about all the fancy jpgs, docs and pdfs on your site. Guess what? If I can hit them with a URL, they're mine. Don't like it? Too bad. If you have a default page, I can set up a spider to snake out all of your content in a couple of minutes. Google has been doing it for quite a while - they finger your site, snatch out all of your graphics and your entire HTML. So, what's the solution? Enter the HttpHandler. [read article...]

Security has always been a 'problem' with IIS, mostly because of the lackadaisical work habits of system administrators... I'll walk you through some of the easiest ways to lock down a machine and fix some of the snags that you might encounter when deploying an ASP.NET application. First Rule: If you don't know what you're doing, don't do it. Second Rule: Make sure you plug those holes that would make the "little Dutch boy" blush. [read article...]

Not too long ago, if you wanted some particular information off of a particular web site, you'd have to snake the HTML off a page and incorporate it into yours. Whether you did that manually via cut and paste or with a homegrown process was up to you - usually it involved some pain and misery to get it right. I'm going to show you how to do a little constructive scraping in order to put more content out on the web. [read article...]

Once upon a time in the tech world, obscurity was security - this being most true in the early years of the industry, when there were gaping holes in privacy policies and confidential client information was bandied about from site to site without a care as to who actually could read the information. With the new Cryptography classes in .NET, there's absolutely no excuse for not hiding even the most innocuous user data. [read article...]

Are you scalable as you could be? If you're pulling a lot of your content from a database, don't count on it. Here's a secret - if you want scalability - check out XML, XSL and XSLT Processors. [read article...]

Tab delimited and Comma delimited files once were the standard in representing data outside of a relational database. With the inception of XML, developers can now represent their data in a much richer and more descriptive environment without the overhead or cost of relational databases. Converting legacy delimited files into an XML format allows developers to take advantage of many of the new technologies that have been created around XML. This article will demonstrate the conversion of a delimited file into a DataSet or an XML file. [read article...]