Folks Two days back I asked Joe Stagner a.k.a MisfitGeek http://misfitgeek.com/ about his time management, how he works, gives time to family, what’s his routine? etc. I feel lucky to have his answer through an e-mail.

I am posting his precious comments with his prior permission on my blog, he wrote:

——–

Hello, 

Nice to meet you. 

You have asked about the hardest thing in life. 

I constantly struggle to find balance between my Family, my Work, and my personal interests.

 Many times the things that I want to do must come second to the things that I NEED to do.

 Always my Children and My Wife come first. The conflict is that being good at my job is how I support my family.

 I always struggle to discover ways to get more done.

 There are two things that I’ve done for the last year of so that have helped.

 -          I get up an hour earlier than I used to. (between 6:00AM and 6:30) that extra hour gives me a chance to do email and priorities what I need to get done for the day.

-          The second thing is I’ve given up television.

 I also try to work in spurts.  I’ll work a very late night once a week or so and work through the octagonal weekend so that I catch up and that makes the rest of my week a little more flexible.

 I also do a lot of work after my children go to sleep at night. That’s when I write code, do research, etc.

 It’s a constant struggle.

 I hope you’ll write back and let me know what kind of things end up working for you.

 Good luck,

Joe

————

We all know that storing password in plain text is not a professional or should I say Ethical approach by any means. If you are a student then still follow the line. Passwords can be stored in two ways either using Encryption or by Hashing. Encryption normally allows conversion to original text as you know be Decryption which still is not just as per my opinion. We would like to have a system that stores password in a one-way mode and if forgotten a new password should be sent to the user, without knowing the old password. Fortunately, it’s very easy to hash passwords in ASP.NET (and C# and Visual Basic in general).

So how to do it?

Microsoft has provided a very simple method of FormsAuthentication class that cn Hash the password with SHA-1, well SHA-1 is recommended by most security experts, so I will use this.

public static string PasswordHasher(string Password)
{
return FormsAuthentication.HashPasswordForStoringInConfigFile(Password, System.Web.Configuration.FormsAuthPasswordFormat.SHA1);
}

The above method will take a password that you enter and run it through the encryption function provided using the SHA1 format. You’ll get back a string with the generated hash of your password. Well that’s it we can also use SALT with this to make it more secure but lets keep it simple for now.

Hi

Many of us need intellisense in editing skin files in Visual Studio, which is not available by default. This can be achieved however with a simple tweak in VS 2008 IDE. Go to:

1. Tools > Options > Text Editor > File Extension

2. Add “skin” in Extension box and select “User Control” as editor from drop down menu and hit Ok.
Just close currently opened skin file and re-open and Vola you are all done, Enjoy!

Hi All

Good News ! We the .NET developers now have an API for Facebook like the PHP geeks already have

Now build your own FaceBook applications with ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, WinForms or Silverlight !

Read More

Download the SDK

• Facebook.dll: This is the main assembly that will be used by all applications. This has all the logic to handle communication with the Facebook application. This assembly also has specific support of XAML applications (Silverlight and WPF) to enhance the Facebook platform to make databinding and data caching easier.
• Facebook.Silverlight.dll: This is the Silverlight version of the main assembly that will be used by all Silverlight applications. This has all the logic to handle communication with the Facebook application. This assembly also has specific support of XAML applications to enhance the Facebook platform to make databinding and data caching easier. The REST API in this assembly is Asynchronous only.
• Facebook.Web.dll: This assembly should be used by Canvas applications. The main functionality supported in this assembly is to encapsulate the handshake between the Facebook application and a canvas application (both FBML and IFrame)
• Facebook.Web.Mvc.dll: Provide a support building canvas applications using ASP.NET MVC. Separated from Facebook.Web.dll to avoid all developers from needing to install the MVC bits.
• Facebook.Winforms.dll: This assembly provides support for writing Facebook applications using Winform technology. This provides a Component that wraps the API to make it easier to use from Winforms. This also contains some user controls to help display Facebook data easily.

MaximumASP is offering a free hosting account so you can get started with ASP.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010.

On this account you can test ASP.NET 4 applications in a hosting environment and try out the new publishing features with Visual Studio 2010 and the Microsoft Web Deployment Tool.

• Windows Server 2008 R2 / IIS 7.5
• .NET Framework 4 Beta 2
• 1GB disk space
• 50 MB SQL Server 2008 database
• MS Deploy Access
• FTP over SSL Access

The environment on which your apps will be running is a slimmed down version of our robust MaxESP platform. Experience some of the platform’s features such as instant scaling, application aware load-balancing, and the IIS Remote Manager. If you like what you see during the ASP.NET 4 beta, sign up for a full account. We would love to have you.

http://aspnet4beta.maximumasp.com/