Schmap, publisher of over 200 free online travel guides, has opened access to their guides for iPhone and iPod Touch users by way of a remarkably nifty web application. The guides cover cities throughout the US, Europe, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, and provide information on everything from the city’s historical background to the best places to get your drink on.

As portrayed in the image, the web app utilizes the iPhone’s gyro sensors and a Safari specific JavaScript function to determine how the device is currently oriented, and swaps between two display modes accordingly. If the device is oriented vertically, points of interest are displayed as a simple list; if horizontal, the points are overlaid on a map of the area. This allows the user to jump back and forth between modes without having to dig through menus, and is an ingenious way to make the most of the [...] Continue Reading…

Perhaps the two best examples of this axiom are the data-bound control from Visual Basic 3.0 and the Visual Interdev Design Time Control (DTC). The VB3 data-bound control made great demos, but its performance effects on the underlying database had even Microsoft’s own consulting services group recommending against its use in a production application.

Interdev DTCs are legendary for the number of developers who were suckered into using them for a simple application, only to find that they had to rewrite the functionality from scratch when they wanted to extend them or modify their output because the DTC was neither modifiable nor extensible. Consequently, when I first saw the .NET DataSet object, I was cautiously optimistic. Unfortunately, many developers chose not to be cautious at all.What’s wrong with the DataSet?
I’m not saying that there’s anything inherently wrong with the DataSet object. But it’s like any other tool—you need to understand [...] Continue Reading…

When designing .NET assemblies, you can take several potential approaches to managing the granularity of your software development and deployment strategy. Let’s look at a few of the alternatives and their advantages and disadvantages.

.NET assembly represents both a deployment and a loadable unit of code and metadata. To develop systems that can be deployed efficiently, system architects must consider the proper location for each component in a .NET application. Unfortunately, there are no hard and fast rules.

Many times I would consider an assembly boundary to be the boundary between the tiers (presentation, business, and data) of an application as well, but there are just as many cases where I would break the processing tasks handled by a specific tier into two assemblies in order to accommodate a technical requirement.

One component per assembly or project
Unless the component is incredibly complex—which isn’t a good thing anyway—this level of granularity makes development [...] Continue Reading…

Despite improvements over previous standards, ASP.NET still has its fair share of vulnerabilities. Use these tips from to help secure your ASP.NET applications

From a security standpoint, ASP.NET represents a big improvement over previous incarnations of ASP. With the new platform, developers have easy methods to programmatically validate user input and access to built-in features that lock down an application. Additionally, the .NET runtime’s support of garbage collection and safe strings largely negates the success of traditional attacks. A properly secured .NET application is not only hardened against an attack, but it also limits the amount of damage that an occasional breech can create.

But despite these significant gains, ASP.NET is certainly no security panacea. Security analyst H.D. Moore, who presented three fairly major security holes in ASP.NET at the CanSecWest conference in April, says all these wonderful new features don’t amount to a hill of beans unless developers use [...] Continue Reading…

Among the most confusing and misunderstood elements of the .NET framework are the purpose and uses of attributes. Read this article to see why attributes are a good thing.

Since attributes are new to both C++ and VB developers, there’s no context for easy comparisons to familiar language elements. But the addition of attributes to the Common Language Runtime (CLR) gives developers new abilities to associate information with their classes via an annotation mechanism, which the CLR can then use to operate on the objects at runtime.

Attributes can be used to document classes at design time, specify runtime information (such as the name of an XML field to be used when serialising information from the class), and even dictate runtime behavior (such as whether the class should automatically participate in a transaction). More importantly, you can develop your own attributes that specify architectural standards and enforce their use. In this [...] Continue Reading…