Free eBook: Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010

Well for those of you who want to learn about MS Visual Studio 2010 and are used to earlier versions, here is another great effort from Microsoft and it is free. Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 (Microsoft Press, 2011; 336 pages), written by Patrice Pelland, Pascal Paré, and Ken Haines.

The book is not a language primer, a language reference, or a single technology book. It’s a book that will help professional developers move from previous versions of Visual Studio (starting with 2003 and on up). It will cover the features of Visual Studio 2010 through an application. It will go through a lot of the exciting new language features and new versions of the most popular technologies without putting the emphasis on the technologies themselves. It will instead put the emphasis on how you would get to those new tools and features from Visual Studio 2010.

If you are expecting this book to thoroughly cover the new Entity Framework or ASP.NET MVC 2, this is not the book for you. If you want to read a book where the focus is on Visual Studio 2010 and on the reasons for moving to Visual Studio 2010, this is the book for you.

The book is written having three audiences in mind:

• Part I is for developers moving from Visual Studio 2003 to Visual Studio 2010
• Part II is for developers moving from Visual Studio 2005
• And Part III is for developers moving from Visual Studio 2008

You can download a PDF of the book here and can help Microsoft by filling out a survey at http://www.microsoft.com/learning/booksurvey.

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Making AJAX Applications Crawlable

Google Code is providing you with the info about making your AJAX applications crawlable. If you're running an AJAX application with content that you'd like to appear in search results, we have a new process that, when implemented, can help Google (and potentially other search engines) crawl and index your content. Historically, AJAX applications have been difficult for search engines to process because AJAX content is produced dynamically by the browser and thus not visible to crawlers. While there are existing methods for dealing with this problem, they involve regular manual maintenance to keep the content up-to-date.
Here at Google Code, you can find the details how to and examples with documentations, about incorporating the scenario.

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Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors

The 2010 CWE/SANS Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors is a list of the most widespread and critical programming errors that can lead to serious software vulnerabilities. They are often easy to find, and easy to exploit. They are dangerous because they will frequently allow attackers to completely take over the software, steal data, or prevent the software from working at all.

The Top 25 list is a tool for education and awareness to help programmers to prevent the kinds of vulnerabilities that plague the software industry, by identifying and avoiding all-too-common mistakes that occur before software is even shipped. Software customers can use the same list to help them to ask for more secure software. Researchers in software security can use the Top 25 to focus on a narrow but important subset of all known security weaknesses. Finally, software managers and CIOs can use the Top 25 list as a measuring stick of progress in their efforts to secure their software.
The list is the result of collaboration between the SANS Institute, MITRE, and many top software security experts in the US and Europe. It leverages experiences in the development of the SANS Top 20 attack vectors (http://www.sans.org/top20/) and MITRE's Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) (http://cwe.mitre.org/). MITRE maintains the CWE web site, with the support of the US Department of Homeland Security's National Cyber Security Division, presenting detailed descriptions of the top 25 programming errors along with authoritative guidance for mitigating and avoiding them. The CWE site contains data on more than 800 programming errors, design errors, and architecture errors that can lead to exploitable vulnerabilities.

Guidance for Using the Top 25

Brief Listing of the Top 25

Category-Based View of the Top 25

Focus Profiles

Organization of the Top 25

Detailed CWE Descriptions

Monster Mitigations

Appendix A: Selection Criteria and Supporting Fields

Appendix B: What Changed in the 2010 Top 25

Appendix C: Construction, Selection, and Scoring of the Top 25

Appendix D: Comparison to OWASP Top Ten 2010 RC1

Appendix E: Other Resources for the Top 25

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Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Launch Date

Microsoft has announced that the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 will launch on Monday, 12 April 2010.
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Microsoft Ajax Minifier

Scott Guthrie recently announced that the ASP.net team published a free tool that enables you to improve the performance of your Ajax applications by reducing the size of its JavaScript files. The new tool is named the Microsoft Ajax Minifier.

You can read Scott Guthrie’s announcement here.

Overview of the Microsoft Ajax Minifier

The Microsoft Ajax Minifier was created by Ron Logan (who is clearly a super-genius). The Microsoft Ajax team has been using this tool internally for a number of years. For example, they use the Microsoft Ajax Minifier to minify the Microsoft Ajax Library before publishing it.
The Microsoft Ajax Minifier enables you to reduce the size of a JavaScript file by removing unnecessary content from the JavaScript file. The tool supports two modes: normal crunching and hypercrunching.
When you use normal crunching, the Microsoft Ajax Minifier strips all comments, unnecessary whitespace, curly-braces, and semicolons from a JavaScript file. Surprisingly, just removing all of this unnecessary code fluff can make a significant difference to the size of a JavaScript file.
When you use hypercrunching, the Microsoft Ajax Minifer gets more aggressive about reducing the size of a JavaScript file. In hpercrunching mode, the Microsoft Ajax Minifier shortens the names of local variables (variables in functions but not global variables) and it removes unreachable code.
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