I was scheduled to speak @ the Richmond.NET User Group's December meeting on last Thursday. Around 40+ people showed up for the meeting including Kevin Hazzard and Justin Etheredge.

Decent crowd showed up (40+) and I had fun speaking about IIS 7.0 and its integration with ASP.NET. I am making the slides available on this blog; I hope that would help.

IIS 7.0 Architecture and Integration with ASP.NET [ Presentation ]

Last night I spoke @ the Richmond .NET User Group meeting. The topic was Advanced ASP.NET Concepts and Tips/Tricks. A decent number of people showed up (around 40+) and I sure had fun delivering the presentation. I hope the attendees also had fun and were able to grasp some of the concepts and techniques that I shared with them.

After the presentation I received the email addresses of around 16 people who wanted me to email them the copy of the presentation and the code. I will do that tonight and I am also making the presentation and the code available for download from the following links.

Advanced ASP.NET Concepts and Tips/Tricks [ Presentation ] [ Code ]

Microsoft just released the beta version of a Visual Studio Add-In that would scan your code in order to detect the potential issue that can make your code vulnerable to "Cross-Site scripting" attacks.

Check out the tool here

Check out some background information and tips here to learn how to write code to avoid such attacks.

ASP.NET 2.0 introduced a new feature called Profiles where a web application can create users' profile - ASP.NET provides all of the plumbing work for you; all we have to do is define some settings in the web.config file and get/set properties on the Profile object in our code. Pretty simple.

I have been using the Profile feature for quite some time without any problems but yesterday I ran into a problem. No matter what I tried, I always got the Profile object null. After performing a little bit of research I came to know that the problem is with the Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS) which is also installed on the development machine that I was working on!

Under the hood, ASP.NET Profile feature is implemented by a ProfileModule (an ASP.NET module) which gets run and initializes the Profile object during each request. When MOSS is installed on a machine, it clears some of the modules from the HTTP request processing pipeline and ProfileModule is one of those modules!

Hence adding the following line in my web application's config file did the trick for me.

<add name="Profile" type="System.Web.Profile.ProfileModule" />

Hope this tip would help others who might be facing the same problem.