The GMail Notifier from Google is a must-have utility for GMail users. It runs as a tray icon and has some great features, including:
It’s patch-time again and this one’s not from Microsoft! (Let’s face it – poor security is an industry-wide problem.) Anyway, this one is brought to you by Sun Microsystems…
A vulnerability has been discovered in the Sun Java Runtime Environment (JRE) where applets can break out of the sandbox. This vulnerability applies to all OSs where Java can run. Only the latest JRE/SDK has the fix – 1.4.2_06 (and later) and 1.3.1_13 (and later). Here’s the security alert from Sun:
http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/document.do?assetkey=1-26-57591-1
For a chatty description comparing Java applets to Hannibal Lechter (Silence of the Lambs), check out:
http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?date=2004-11-23
Various security advisories with more details than the Sun security alert can be found here:
http://secunia.com/advisories/13271/
and here:
A few days ago I presented a talk to my company, Quadrus Development Inc., entitled Tools of the Trade: Must-Have .NET Utilities. I covered off the major tools that should be in any .NET developer’s toolbox. These include the usual suspects, many of which I noted here, as well as a few fun ones like devMetrics for checking your cyclomatic complexity. Enjoy!
EDIT: You can find an updated version of the presentation here.
Scott Hanselman has done it again. Scott’s List of Ultimate Visual Studio.NET AddIns is a list of great tools, mostly free, that integrate directly with Visual Studio .NET. Some are really useful (most of the list), some are fun (devMetrics), and some are just plain diabolical (devMetrics). Have you checked your cyclomatic complexity today?
You’ve downloaded the latest, coolest utility (for example, ZoneStripper) 
with source code. The source code is sitting on your local hard drive yet when you launch the solution in Visual Studio .NET 2003, you receive the warning:
The project location is not fully trusted by the .NET runtime. This is usually because it is either a network share or mapped to a network share not on the local machine. If the output path is under the project location, your code will not execute as fully trusted and you may receive unexpected security exceptions.
Your first thought is probably “What the heck? The solution is on my local drive!” What is causing this odd behaviour, you wonder? It’s Windows XP SP2 and Zone Identifiers. ZoneStripper will remove those annoying Zone Identifiers from your downloaded files. Hopefully someone other than myself finds this little utility useful. Enjoy!
It’s official. CruiseControl.NET 0.7 has been released. Check it out! Congrats and thank you to the team on finalizing the release candidate.
Here’s a cool little validation control (PasswordEntropyValidator), compliments of Dominick Baier, to ensure that users of your ASP.NET sites use strong passwords.
One of my collegues was asking me which tools I use for .NET Development, preferrably of the free or virtually free variety. So for everyone’s enjoyment (and my future reference):
Eric Sink and the gang over at SourceGear just released a beta of Vault 3.0 as well as a beta of a new bugtracking product called Dragnet 1.0. Definitely on my list of things to check out…
Thoughtworks has released a new version of CruiseControl.NET (CC.NET 0.7 RC-1), a continuous integration build system. Each release has dramatically improved the functionality offered. So I’m looking forward to checking out the new goodies that this release offers. (I’ve been running a nightly build rather than 0.6.1 to get some enhanced email reporting features.) I’m intrigued by the multiple schedule support and the new triggers system. I’m hoping that this release can better handle multiple, independent projects. (In previous releases, multiple projects running on the same CC.NET install would have their build results mixed in the ASP.NET app.) Well worth checking out!
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