John Louros

The first step of any robust development workflow relies on a structured and well-defined build process. Having a manageable build process can spare your development team from wasted time, headaches and unnecessary complexity. If you're handling a handful of projects with low compilation overhead, this particular topic might be irrelevant to you. Today's article is mainly targeted for those who must work with multiple projects, of different kinds (Web applications, Scheduled tasks, Console applications, Mobile application, database script, so on) and deploy multiple artifact types.

Here's another quick tip for anybody interested in protecting sensitive information declared on your Web application web.config. In this example I'm going to use Windows Data Protection API (DPAPI) to encrypt connection strings and session state SQL connections string on all web.configs found under 'C:\inetpub' (default location for web applications running on IIS).

These days it might be a bit uncommon to find anybody creating new SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) web services. However that does not mean SOAP web services are dead. Due to public perception, Software companies avoid mentioning components that might be considered "old" (or not trendy). In a highly competitive market, where companies keep fighting for the best Developers, referencing older technologies might throw some candidates off. Still, that does not mean components developed with "older" technologies do not require maintenance.

Here's another post about automation. This time let's automate Windows Security input prompts text input. Disclaimer, use your best judgment to figure when you should or shouldn't use this scripts. Keep in mind that for the next set of examples passwords are kept in plain text. If you plan to actually use this files, at least use SecureStrings (check reference here). Please be careful, I won't be responsible for any misuse of the scripts presented in this post.

Lately, the anti-virus used by the company I work for have been giving me a few headaches. In a nutshell, every time Visual Studio is opened or the Visual Studio test framework tries find tests, the anti-virus starts his virus scan. By itself that shouldn't be a problem, the scan shouldn't consume too many resources. The reality is the anti-virus scan completely gets out of hand with the amount of resources it's using, making my computer unusable while the scan is being performed. On top of that, Visual Studio is on hold while the scan is running. Here's a few screenshots of the Task Manager while the Anti-Virus is running.