Identity and Authentication

A superb article highlighting why identity and authentication must remain distinct. I picked it up from Bruce Schneier’s blog.

Follow the link

Hackers create rougue CA certificate using MD5 collisions

I Love the way they have hacked it. A group of hackers/researches have found success in forging digital certificates trusted by ‘modern’ web browsers using a cluster of PS3 game consoles! wow!!

The research also shows a significant weakness in the MD5 algorithm currently used by 6 CAs to issue certificates.

This also means that they have managed to break the secure ‘SSL’.

I loved it. Follow the link.

44th US Presidential Inauguration Coverage with Photo Synth

Check it out.

Visual Studio 2008 Tips and Tricks

A superb video covering VS 2008 in action. You can also find the MVC  (Multiple Virtual Server, not model-view-controller) demo. Follow the link.

Interview with Adware author..

Mark Knox, a talented Ruby instructor and coder talks about his early days designing and writing adware for Direct Revenue. Follow the link

Investigating Silverlight Exception: System.ArgumentException: Value does not fall within the expected range

Hi,

Good to be back in action after a long break. I just found this nasty little exception when i was adding a user control to a Grid in Silverlight 2. Took me some time to understand what was happening though, until i found that it was a known issue on the silverlight forum.

I managed to get a work around that problem which i promptly shared on the same forum.

System.ArgumentException: Value does not fall within the expected range at Ms.InternalXcpImports.MethodEx(IntPtr ptr, String name, CValue[] cvData)

Turns out that every container needs a unique 'Name' property to be set for it's child. I have managed to get it fixed with the following self explanatory code snippet.

private static int componentID = 0;

private Grid tableGrid;

FrameworkElement element; //this is a user control.

element.SetValue(Canvas.NameProperty, GetComponentID().ToString());

private static int GetComponentID()

{

return componentID++; 
}

//This will not give the 'Value does not fall within the expected range' exception. 

tableGrid.Children.Add(element);