Omniscient's Foundation - Blog

Store AppFabric cache structure

Steve — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 14:44:46 +0000

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

C# code format for blogs

Dave — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:38:26 +0000

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

Silverlight 3, databinding and anonymous types

Dave — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:35:05 +0000

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

Silverlight Configuration (almost) like regular .NET

Dave — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 02:31:47 +0000

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

Code Camp Montreal - Conference

Dave — Sun, 31 May 2009 18:41:17 +0000

[May 31th, 2009]For those of you who attended my speech at Code Camp Montreal last Saturday (I still can't believe how many you were!), you can download everything here:The demo: http://www.omniscient.ca/CodeCampDemo/Default.aspxThe code: http://www.omniscient.ca/CodeCampDemo/trunk.zipThe presentation (in French): http://www.omniscient.ca/CodeCampDemo/CodeCampMontreal2009.pptxNow, I'm leaving for a one week, well-deserved vacation!

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

Http Modules, Basic Authentication and IIS

Dave — Thu, 28 May 2009 02:30:52 +0000

Recently I've been called to work on an exiting project and that involved creating a basic authentication module for IIS and ASP.NET. I've already done modules in the past so that wasn't really new to me, but I took the time to go deep into that and see where that could lead us.Basic authentication is part of the http specification and involves sending an "www-authenticate" header to the client agent (http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.47), along with error code 401 (Unauthorized). In turn, the agent prompts for a username and password and replays the request, taking care to include the "Authorization" http header. That header has a value encoded in base64 (the most basic "encryption" (with quotation marks big as a house - I should rather use the term "obfuscation")). That value, once decoded, has the form "username:password", with whatever values provided by the end user. As a side-note, it should be clear that basic authentication should never occur on an unprotected channel.

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

Command pattern in Silverlight

Dave — Fri, 15 May 2009 00:50:10 +0000

Contrary to WPF, Silverlight doesn't really support Commands in the xaml. For example, the Button class doesn't have a Dependency Property called Command that allows to bind to a command. The command pattern is at the heart of the Model-View-ViewModel pattern (M-V-VM), and this pattern is probably the most important in WPF and Silverlight. Thus, we had to find a way to have it in Silverlight! (more...)

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

I, Model (Part I - An Entity Wrapper)

Dave — Wed, 13 May 2009 18:31:27 +0000

In my last post, I discussed how object relations (references and collections) should be kept away from an Entity but for extraordinary cases where an entity cannot live without being attached to other entities (strong relations). I discussed that if one describes relations directly in the entity (a reference to another entity, or a collection of entities), then one adds a lot of complexity to their system, because they have to tell the backend how "deep" entities should be loaded, how deep it should look for dirty entities upon saving, deal with circular references and somehow flag the references to tell when there's just no data as opposed to when the reference is lazy loaded. Plus, one looses the ability to quickly define different object graphs with their entities. (more...)

Original post blogged on b2evolution.