Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

From last few weeks I'm using VS 2010 for my daily coding work. Apart from lot of feature add-ons, this time VS got a new look. Check out these captures;

• Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 - Splash Screen

• New Startup Screen

VS 2010 Rocks!!!
Scott Gu is running a series on VS 2010 and .Net 4.0 new features. Do check them out at his blog
Cheers!

Simplest way to prevent Phishing Attack on IE 8

Phishing attacks are becoming common these days. Recently there was a massive phishing attack reported on Hotmail. There are few easy ways by which we can prevent phishing attacks.

I use IE 8 as my default browser and it provides a nice feature known as Smart Screen Filter which helps us in identifying phishing attacks. There is also a online publication provided by Microsoft that helps in identifying phishing attacks.

I follow a simple funda while browsing web sites, whenever I require entering important information like user name, password or financial information, I look at the IE 8's address bar and identify the actual domain name of the URL. IE 8 highlight the domain name by marking it black in color while rest of the url remains grey. This helps a lot. Screen shot of Windows Live login screen is shown below.

Happy Surfing!

Library Design - Documenting Exceptions

I’m sure most of you might already know but I thought of sharing this. If we are coding for a class library then we should always try to explicitly provide exception type that our code (method) will throw. If we provide exception values in XML Comments then those exceptions will appear in intellisense while we are using that library method. This will be handy for developers using our library. I remember this is also mentioned somewhere in framework design guidelines.

• Method definition: Explicit exception details provided

• Method Usage: Intellisense contains list of exceptions

Cheers!
Currently Playing : PROTOTYPE

Functional Programming

Few days back while reading about F# I got hold of a nice old article on Functional Programming. Check it out here

I'm on my F# journey from past few weeks. Let us see how far this goes.

SQL Server 2008 - Policy Based Management

Few days back I posted an article on MSDN related to SQL Server 2008 Policy Based Management. Check it our if you are interested in Server 2008 new features.