Project 31-A

Introduction In all development processes, you need to perform a security review in order to responsibly handle your user’s data . With my Windows Phone 7 application, the process turned into a huge decision and many incremental steps to handle. This blog post will enumerate how I took my unsecured WP7 app and corresponding Windows Azure website and secured them. This blog includes a detailed step-by-step of deploying a SSL certificate on Windows Azure. Process Summary DNS Name Change : Mapped my subdomain (wazup.berryintl.com) to my Windows Azure subdomain (*.cloudapp.net) via a CName change to my DNS on Network Solutions. Cert Provider : Found an SSL Cert provider. Dev Box/IIS : Created the certificate request in the IIS Manager. Cert Provider : Since I was requesting a wildcard certificate to handle all subdomains as well, I received two files: one for the domain and one to handle the wildcard subdomains. Dev Box/Certificate Manager : The next part of the pr...

Yesterday I spent a hour and a half with a local developer who develops websites for local firms. He called because of my earlier posts on copyright issues. After getting a night to sleep on it, I suddenly said “dung, it’s a legal mine field today”. I will scenario two cases: A site using some form of open license software (i.e. JQUERY etc) A site using some 3rd party component that the developer is licensed for (for example, FLASH, TELERIK etc) “Our contract says that the customer owns the code” Without a lot of clean legal qualification of what the exactly means – you are in breach of contract with both of the above scenarios! The customer would need to sign the dozen of pages of legalesse required to qualify this. Why???? If you are giving them ownership of the code and using JQUERY, then you are saying that they own JQUERY and can legally sue anyone else that uses the JQUERY. If you exclude 3rd party components but supply code that sets or alter properties ...

Recently I was reminded (by being an observer to some drama) of the legal constraints that developers should know but frequently do not know – especially the new self-taught developers. I suspect that even some Computer Science graduates are ignorant here. Monkey See, Monkey Do –Lawyers Knock! Jack develops websites and a customer points him to a website that he wants emulated. Jack goes to the site and copy portions of the code from the site. Often the code is nothing more than a JavaScript function or a chunk of CSS. He uses these code fragments exactly as written (no renaming variables, changing line orders etc). He brings in a graphic designer that does a brilliant original design.   The site is ready, the customer is happy, Jack drops a check in his pocket.   Two months later, the customer phones Jack – he has just received a letter from a lawyer to take down the web site because it contains copyrighted material. Jack talks the customer into leaving it up. ...

Apparently, Source Safe and Visual Studio have to have the projects as sibling nodes both on the hard drive and in source safe. The source safe names must match the Visual Studio project names. So after dinking with both to try to get them to talk to each other, I scraped my current visual studio node and reorganized my hard drive directories so that all projects are siblings and the solution files are in the parent directory. Then I tried to tie Visual Studio to Source Safe by hand. Since it still didn't work, I renamed my visual studio parent node just to save it instead of deleting. Then I had the Visual Studio solution add all the projects to source safe. This is definitely not the recommended method but everything is still small. One of these days, I just code. And code. And code.