SQL Server
Ah, database goodness
I was a bit of a selfish bunny at the London Girl Geek Dinner last week, and cornered Eileen Brown to see if she had a SQL minion that could help me try to get the client tools installed again; unfortunately the SQL Evangelist position is still open, but after refilling her wine glass and joking she owed me a support call for being her booze monkey she reached into her handbag and produced a quick assist card. If you've ever found yourself at a party and someone says "Can you fix my computer?", well Microsoft have the answer...
Last Thursday saw Chris Seary and myself presenting at the Microsoft offices in sunny (yes, really) Edinburgh for the Scottish Developers Group. Thanks must go to Craig and John for organising. I presented an updated (trendy white on black) "Hacking Websites for Fun & Profit", "Securing ASP.NET Websites and Applications" and "An Introduction to Windows CardSpace". An audience member (sorry, I didn't catch your name) asked me to put together some resource links on SQL Injection, XSS and so on. Probably the best breakdown of SQL Injection is Chris Anley's PDF, "Advanced SQL Injection In SQL Server Applications". The XSS FAQ is...
Last month I blogged about the problems I had when trying to upgrade to SQL Express SP2 (and MS's refusal to let me open a support incident on it). As the Scottish Developers day draws closer and one of my presentations depended on SQL Express I decided to try to clean everything up and try again. Eventually I managed to uninstall SQL Developer Edition. Once the machine was clean, and had I hand deleted a bunch of left over registry entries I tried the SQL Express SP2 install. It worked! Bliss. So next was installing SQL Developer Edition. This was problematic to...
SQL Express is a great idea; I use it when developing applications so I can isolate everything from my "grown up" version of SQL until it's ready to go live. Admittedly it has problems; when a program mounts a user instance of a database it connects as dbo, so if you've missed setting permissions on your tables and stored procedures you won't find out until you migrate, but that pain is minimal compared to how handy it is. This week I've been trying to upgrade me SQL Express instance to SP2; as you can guess from the fact I'm blogging about...
This month I've been doing some work in WinPE. For those that don't know what it is it's a stripped down version of Windows for Preinstallation Environment(s). It provides a bootable CD (or RIS image delivered over the network when a bare metal machine is booted, assuming it supports PXE). The environment is rather limited, but can be built to support Windows Shell Scripts, ADO and HTA. The client requirement was to write an HTA menu program which would write a bunch of database entries which would then be picked up by their existing SMS based installation environment. Setting...
The next meeting of the nxtgenug Oxford branch covers "Object Orientation";
Have we got object-orientation all wrong? "Object Thinking" (ISBN 0-7356-1965-4) by David West asserts that we have. Alan Dean explores this assertion, and demonstrates self-describing objects / self-evaluating rules with code examples.
The meeting will be held at the Research Machines offices, Abingdon on January 17th. If you want to attend please register and sign up on the nxtgenug web site. As a bonus we've finally gotten Dave Oliver to do some real work and he will be presenting a nugget on some of the BI tools that come with SQL...
So DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper is done and dusted. It was the first time I've given a presentation on how to hack web sites; I now await the results of the speaker score sheets. As if presenting wasn't stressful enough <g>. Unfortunately I didn't have as much time for questions and answers as I would have wished, but the wireless mic was rather fun. For those that are interested and can't wait till my presentation appears on the conference web site (Craig is stuck in a hotel with just a modem connection) I've uploaded the powerpoint deck and sample code.
Remember don't try this...