Microsoft is going to publish it's source of .Net framework under a referance licience ,
According to this post of scott Gu , i will be intergated in the new Visual studio 2008.

after installing IE7 on my workstation, i noticed one thing that really annoyed me ,
the position of the menu toolbar.

for those that installed the browser, you probably noticed that the menu bar is positioned right below the address bar.
Ok, who tha hell in Microsoft thought that it will be convenient ?

Well, after doing some digging on the net, i found some interesting info about it (apparently not only me considered this "feature" as annoying)
So, what have i found ? what should we do to get things back to normal ?

(this is not the wanted position)

apparently, the only way is to change some registry values (aren't we love Microsoft ?)

• go to the registry editor : (type RegEdit in the Start-> run)

• go to this path :
  "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Toolbar\WebBrowser"

• add a new registry value and name it "ITBar7Position"
  

• Change the value of the new object to 1
  
  (this should look like this :)
  

• restart your Internet Explorer

• you're done !

now your IE7 menu bar will be placed in the normal position where it should be

if you don't want to mess around with the registry by yourself, you can download the file attached to this post,
it should do the job for you.

enjoy !

One of the most important rules about running an application (specially web application) is giving to the application only the needed permissions to run, and no more ! (running a web application with an administrator user is bad....).
Sure, it's very comfortable to give the application all the permissions that the system has, and not trying to solve permission related problems directly,
But this kind of an approach is a security-breach prone approach.
suppose, you wrote an application that has a minor security hole in it, and it allows the user to execute some unwanted script.
If it will run in a full permissions context, than it would be very easy to hijack the entire system, or even just do a system-wide damage.
But, if it will run only with the needed permission, then the attacker would have a hard time doing it.

So, what is the solution ?

First, create a new application pool that will run the wanted web application ( if you don't know how to do this , please refer to this article about application pool management ).

once, you have created the app pool, lets create the user :

• enter to the computer management, click on the users folder and add a new user :
  
  
• Set the user name and the password, and don't forget to check the "password never expires" option ( we don't want the application will stop working after some XX days...)
  
  
  
  
• confirm the pass
  
  
  
• now, this is a very important step, without this the application won't run.
  right click on the fresh added user -> properties -> click on the "Member of" tab -> Add the user to the IIS_WPG group, so it can run iis applications
  
  
  
  
• Set the new user to run the application pool that we created before.
  
  
  
  
• Do iisreset.( or just restart the application pool)

thats it.
you did it, now your application runs under a limited user.
the iis process will run now with the given user and not the admin.

you just made another step to a more secured application.

when planning a software solution, one of the most important things is to design the solution the best way it can be,
even before writing the first line of code, we need to know exactly how we should implement it.

so what would you do if you never planned/worked/implemented such type of a solution ?

needless to say that inventing the wheel all over again will be unnecessary ,
first you consult with the "elders" (the more experienced co-workers),
trying maybe google up the solution,
going over the references and the guide lines in developing this kind of a solution or at the given platform,
starting some thinking team and so ...

finally, you came up with a solution, and....
start implementing it.

now, in a perfect world, once you did the steps mentioned above, you have a perfect solution.
but in the real world, something must to go wrong.

recently i came across some interesting example of this phenomena.
while designing a "file Version manager solution" on SPS (Share point Server) platform,
following the SPS development guidelines, which says that you (the developer), should never approach the SPS database.
always, but always get the data through the object model.

so, by doing that, you came up with a working application,but..... catastrophic performance.
after consulting with other staff, we came to the conclusion that the bottleneck is in the object model itself.
so the only thing we had to do is the direct approach to the database ( a big NO NO on the guide lines).
and apparently the performance graph suddenly got a dramatic change (better performance).

i think that guide lines did not meant to become laws, but to be just as a suggestions to most of the cases.
what do you think about this issue ?