soft-cor.com

Recommended hot fixes for Visual Studio 2010

gareth@soft-cor.com — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 09:56:00 +0200

The new incarnation of the Visual Studio product has many improvements but unfortunately also a few issues. I will be collecting a list of Hot Fixes which may be useful to developers. The place to go when having any issues with any Microsoft product would be there Microsoft Connect site.

The list is as follows and will be updated regularly:

Securing Windows For Free

gareth@soft-cor.com — Mon, 24 May 2010 21:30:00 +0200

As the internet increases in popularity and more families have access to computers than ever before, security should be our main concern.

Unfortunately the current generation of parents and some children have not been educated about computer security and the implications of being online or sharing files etc.

Some statistics for January 2010 can be found here and gives us an idea of how far/fast malware is spreading.

This post describes how to protect your machine from malware,spam, hackers etc without spending a penny. This is by no means an exhaustive list of available security solutions but rather the solutions that I use to secure my own machines.

Firewall
- Windows Firewall with advanced settings (Windows Vista/7/2008) (http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-6098592.html)
- Comodo (http://www.comodo.com/home/internet-security/firewall.php)
Anti-Virus
- Microsoft Security Essentials (http://www.microsoft.com/Security_Essentials/)
- AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition 9.0 (http://free.avg.com/gb-en/download-avg-anti-virus-free)
- ClamWin Free Antivirus (http://www.clamwin.com/content/view/18/46/)
Anti-Spam
- Agnitum Spam Terrier (http://www.agnitum.com/products/spam-terrier/index.php)
Anti-Spyware
- Spybot - Search & Destroy (http://www.safer-networking.org/en/spybotsd/index.html)
Intrusion Detection Systems
- Snort (http://www.snort.org/downloads?)
DNS
- OpenDNS (http://www.opendns.com)

Selecting a Firewall

If you are using windows XP and upward you will already have a perfectly decent firewall pre-installed, if you are not happy using the windows firewall I would reccomend comodo which has an excellent reputation and has been around for ages.

Configuring and Installing Windows Firewall with Advanced Settings

Configuring and installing Comodo

Download and install comodo from the link above, run the executable on your local machine, I opt out from installing any of their other products as I'm only looking for a firewall.

On the following screen select Firewall or Firewall with Optimum Proactive Defence, click next

You can opt in to the comodo network also I dont usually use their DNS servers.

Do not make hotsurf my homepage or Ask.com my search provider thank you.

Selecting a Anti-Virus

Microsoft has recently released Microsoft Security Essentials which has had fairly good reviews by sites such as Virus Bulletin, other fairly good alternatives are clamwin and AVGFree.

Configuring and installing Microsoft Security Essentials

MSE Requires a geniune version of windows so dont try to install it without a properly licensed copy of
windows. There are no pitfalls during the installation wizard so just click next until complete. After
install the definitions will be updated and a scan will be performed.

Selecting Anti-Spam

Agnitum have a free anti-spam plugin which works with most popular windows mail clients this is the
only free Anti-Spam application that I have used for an extended period of time.

Selecting IDS

...

Mecurial on Windows Server 2008 R2

gareth@soft-cor.com — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 10:54:00 +0200

I switched from git to mecurial this week by following these articles.

http://www.jeremyskinner.co.uk/mercurial-on-iis7/

http://vampirebasic.blogspot.com/2009/06/running-mercurial-on-windows.html#comment-form

http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/archive/2010/02/26/setting-up-a-continuous-integration-server-for-a-codeplex-project-using-teamcity-and-mercurial.aspx

http://linux.die.net/man/5/hgrc

The only gotchas I faced were, "Bad Gateway" exception when trying to run hgwebdir.cgi from a web application which existed on a different drive to my main system drive. Also be sure to install the 2.5.4/32-bit version of python otherwise it wont work.

Subversion Sucks... Use Git on Windows!!

gareth@soft-cor.com — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 14:06:00 +0200

Its a harsh thing to say but subversion has a fair amount of issues with regard to the model it uses for for maintaining all the history that a version control system needs.
For one it uses deltas, which makes recovering corrupt repositories a nightmare if not impossible. Git doesn't suffer from this same affliction, Git also has a heap of other features.

So I have decided to use git instead check out the link below for the windows version and detailed instructions below that on installing and using git on windows.

http://code.google.com/p/gitextensions/

IIS 7/7.5 301 Http Redirect

gareth@soft-cor.com — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 22:01:00 +0200

I have recently had to redirect all requests for certain pages which have been renamed to their new conterparts. This is simple
Windows Server 2008 & IIS 7/7.5 using the following config section in the web applications web.config.

An example would be: