Simone Chiaretta recently posted an overview of a recent Ajaxian poll that sought to determine the state of of AJAX usage among developers in the enterprise... whatever that means. :) Not happy with the lack of detail, Simone did a little number-crunching of his own to determine the usage among developers using the .net stack. He found that among the 381 developers using .net, roughly 36% of them are using Microsoft’s ASP.NET AJAX framework/implementation. Gettin' particular Taking it even further, Simo has now created his own survey targeted directly at .net developers. He’s used the same...

I almost fell out of my chair laughing when I read James' response to Phil’s Tweet regarding the recently announced open sourcing of parts of the .net code base. It went like this: Phil : Remember, "Open Source" is a trademark owned by the OSI. .NET is not open sourced, it’s being shared. James : I think shared might not be right either, more like shown. I am not sharing my ice cream with you if I just let you look at it. :) Open Source explained for the...

I don’t usually use by blog to pimp products, err... wait, sometimes I do. But it’s only because I really like those products and I want to share them with you, dear reader. OK, let’s get back on track... The super-smart consulting company I work for has just announced our first product, SpyDeny. In two sentences, SpyDeny fights back against web scraping. The product was developed to address a growing issue faced by web-enabled companies, losing data and IP to competitors through web scraping and harvesting. Visit the official product site over at SpyDeny.com for the why,...

Recently everyone’s favorite Redmond software company used their notorious Automatic Update service to push out a new security fix. This particular was also know as KB937061 - a fix for Visual Studio 2005 SP1. No big deal, happens all the time... right? Apparently not This particular update targets some security holes in the Crystal Reports component of the VS suite. It is also one of the more invasive updates as it requires you to restart your system before the fix takes effect. But that’s not the really fun part. The part is that even after allowing...

A recent post by security analyst David Kierznowske reports that 49 out of 50 WordPress blogs that he checked out were running an exploitable version of the WordPress blogging engine. According to the post, David looked at blogs running on versions as far back as WordPress v1.2 (with v2.2 being the most recent release, as of this writing). So does this mean that WordPress is buggy software that is to be avoided? No, not at all. It just means that those users need to do a better job of dealing with the bugs. The sky is blue and software has bugs...

Remote debugging can be a huge time-saver when dealing with a hard to reproduce bug, or trying to track down a Works on My Machine issue. I mean, what's better than stepping through the code on the remote machine that's having the problem? However, the hardest thing about remote debugging isn't actually using it - it's getting it correctly configured between your local (debugging) machine and the remote host. Luckily the MSDN site has a pretty solid How to: Set Up Remote Debugging guide that can get you most of the...

Like most netizens, IM is one of my primary methods of communication... and has been for many years. And like a good number of you I also have multiple IM accounts, AOL AIM, Google Talk, MSN Windows Live Messenger, etc... and one of the biggest pains of using multiple IM accounts/protocols is having to use multiple IM clients. Those in the know (like myself) have been using a great free (as in speech and beer) IM client to consolidate all of their accounts into a single IM client. That magical client's name? Gaim - well at least it used to...

So, you need to setup a VPN connection to your work/client/buddy's remote network. No problem, just use the Windows VPN client, fill in the remote VPN server IP address, your username and password... click Connect. And a few seconds later you're connected to the remote network and you can now access resources (servers, fileshares, etc...) on your work/client/buddy's network - and all traffic between your PC and the remote network is encrypted. Awesome! However, if you've ever dug into the Microsoft VPN client settings you might have noticed a little check box that says "Use default gateway on the remote network."...

Microsoft recently announced that the final version of Internet Explorer 7 will be released in October was released on Oct. 18th 2006. What's more, the long overdue upgrade will be pushed out to users as a High-Priority Update through the company's Automatic Updates service. Aww... but do I have to? No... not necessarily. According to the release announcement, ...to ensure that customers are prepared to upgrade, IE7 will not install without user consent. Microsoft recognizes that, as part of a managed deployment plan, some organizations may wish to block users from receiving IE7 through Automatic Updates and...

Last night I was having some major PC issues... corrupted USB 2.0 drivers, failing peripherals, and then to top it all off - Gaim started crashing immediately after it started the login process.. I was about to resort to a clean install of Windows and the two days of my life that I would lose while reinstalling and configuring all my apps. USB Issues... I was able to solve my USB issues by tossing my existing (and generic) USB 2.0 PCI Controller card and putting in a new Adaptec AUA-5100B card. After installing the Adaptec provided drivers, all was right with the...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is reporting that the latest verion of the Google Desktop search application has a new feature that poses an increased risk to the user's privacy. The new feature, "Search Across Computers" will store copies of the user's documents (Word, PDF, spreadsheet, etc...) on Google owned servers. The idea is to allow the user to search from any of the user's computers. -- I would also envision a type of _Search_From_Anywhere_ feature to be coming in the not so distant future, but this is pure speculation for now. -- According the the EFF, this new feature will...