Securing Asp.net applications by hidding response header

Although it’s fairly obvious that a website is running asp.net (through session cookie and the viewstate) you may protect your server by removing a few response headers that advertise the iis and the asp.net version. The most common response headers you should remove are the following:

• X-Powered-By:ASP.NET
• X-AspNet-Version:*.*.*
• Server:Microsoft-IIS/*.*

Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh patch to run after expiration date

Once upon a time I won a Silverlight coding competition by writing a simple game in Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh. A few weeks ago a beta tester of my game requested to play with it, once more. Installing the redistributable (thanks god I keep an archive of these because I couldn’t find it on Microsoft’s site) I came up with a message box that said that this version has expired (the alpha version should expire on 1st nov 2007).

Integrating WSS 3.0 Document Library into an existing asp.net application. Setting up the authentication.

If you search around the net, you’ll most probably find a lot of articles discussing how to create windows sharepoint services (WSS) modules or even how to install WSS on top of existing web site. In my case, I have to create a document management system in an existing asp.net application. In order to do so, I will be using the office integration that is provided by the document library of WSS and will be writing custom forms to handle the rest of the gui.

Redirecting any unauthenticated requests to a login form located on another asp.net application

If you have configured forms authentication across multiple asp.net applications, you may want to force users to authenticate in a single signing form. To do so you may implement a simple HttpModule that will be handling the AuthenticateRequest and redirecting to the corresponding login form.

Configuring forms authentication across asp.net applications

In order to enable forms authentication across multiple asp.net application you will have to setup the forms authentication to specify the same name, protection and path among all the asp.net applications that will be collaborating.

Asp.net HTTP module to force authenticate user via Basic WWW-Authenticate dialogue

Playing around with the available authentication methods I came up with a simple Http module that forces the browser to display the build in credentials form and authenticates the user by simply adding a line in the web.config file.

VCARD quoted-printable decoding and importing to outlook

My father replaced an old LG KU380 and wanted to transfer his contacts to his new Ericson mobile phone. Unluckily for me, LG provided some software that was promising to synchronize the mobile phone with the outlook, but it wouldn’t stay connected with the phone for more than one minute. Thus, every 100 contacts it would stall and start over again. The next available option was to export the contacts in a vcf file from within the mobile phone and transfer the generated file via Bluetooth.