How to have an auto incrementing assembly version number (Visual Studio)?

The assembly version did not auto increment… why? if I was using AssemblyVersion correcty? (The “*” indicates which part of the version string you want to have autoincremented)

[assembly: AssemblyVersion("1.0.*")]

Well, it turns out the problem is that I was also using:

[assembly: AssemblyFileVersion("1.0.*")]

All I had to do is comment the line with AssemblyFileVersion in my AssemblyInfo.cs file, and it started working:

[assembly: AssemblyVersion("1.0.*")]
//[assembly: AssemblyFileVersion("1.0.*")]

Can I use JConsole to monitor an application through a firewall?

A fragment of JConsole documentation (bold type emphasis added by me):

The com.sun.management.jmxremote.port management property specifies the port where the RMI Registry can be reached but the ports where the RMIServer andRMIConnection remote objects are exported is chosen by the RMI stack. To export the remote objects (RMIServer and RMIConnection) on a given port you need to create your own RMI connector server programmatically, as described in the section

Mimicking Out-of-the-Box Management Using the JMX Remote API in the Java SE Monitoring and Management Guide.

I actually need to write code to be able to monitor a Java application through a firewall! Talk about an unfinished product! and Sun guys even have the nerve to act surprised angry when  people say that Java is over-engineered.

Simplicity and Hubris: Web vs Enterprise Development

I would find it really funny that most people do not understand the difference between intelligent and control interfaces if would not mean that lots of time and money are wasted trying to make intelligent interfaces work as control interfaces, or Web 2.0 Internet solutions work for Enterprise intranet problems.

It is the typical "since Google/Apple/Facebook/Twitter/SomeFreeAndPublicWebSite uses it for X/Y/Z/Q it should be great for the system I am building" syndrome.

Well, it might be great for them when they are trying to solve the X/Y/Z/Q problem, but as it turns out, many developers do not work at places that build the kind of systems this companies build, and are not trying to solve the kind of problems this companies are trying to solve.

Some people think that since our problems do not seem as technologically  impressive as those targeted by free public websites they must be easier, or that since a solution worked for the super huge public web site X then it should also work for the tiny intranet system we are building, well, the truth is that most of the times this solutions do not help at all. Please don't get me wrong, some of their ideas are usable, but we need to remember that in the dreaded Intranet Enterprise development world rules are very different:

• We do not have huge hardware resources at our disposal
• We do not have a huge budget and the hiring power to get the best and only the best experts to work with us
• Our systems are not of the"just register in this form this once and after this use the site with the mouse" kind, our users hate the mouse, because they are going to be capturing data all day, and for that, the keyboard is king (and the mouse is irrelevant)
• We need to interact directly with "special hardware" (such as scanners, printers, finger print readers etc) and browsers do not know how to talk to those, a browser can not even print with precision without help from Acrobat Reader.
• We need the behavior of our systems to be consistent and always the same (Web Search engine users do not care if the search results present different information or the same information in different order as long as the "relevant" stuff is in the first pages, Enterprise users expect search results to be exactly the same as last time, unless they have done something to alter that, and when they do, the change they expect is predictable)
• Our users want access to their data now, and do not care for excuses like "sorry but there is no access to the super massively great cloud because our infinitum connection/cable modem/whatever is failing"
• Our users want data to be confidential (although they do not even understand the meaning of security and its costs). Having all your data "in the cloud" sounds great, until the country where the clouds exists decides that it wants to apply "economic sanctions" to yours and begins by forbidding you access to the data in the cloud because the company that owns it is controlled by their laws. The day I see Google store its internal mission critical strategic information in Amazon's servers or vice-versa is the day I will believe that the Cloud is a safe place to store that kind of information.
  

All those "Web 2.0" companies have done little to help this stuff (In fact, they have created lots of problems, by forcing us intranet Enterprise developers to use primitive runtime platforms (web browsers) to deliver our applications . It is not that they are evil, it is just that they are not targeting the kind of problems Enterprise developers need to solve. And I hate when I see people recommending approaches that worked fine for this companies for problems that just can not be solved with them.

How can I use PowerShell to delete all the files with a particular extension

Just run the command:

get-childitem rootdir -include *.extension -recurse | foreach ($_) {remove-item $_.fullname}

And that is it. Thanks Scripting Guy.

This is specially useful for me because very often, after I make changes in project reference in VS.NET some .dll files are left “out of sync” and and make parts your project act as if you did not re-compiled them. Sadly there is no easy way to tell VS.NET to get rid of all the .dll files that may be causing problems.

Make that PDF secure: Toy Security

Make that PDF secure! That is one of the funniest requests I have received from a boss at one of my jobs… I answered by asking: “Secure? How secure?” and my boss told me: well, I want the user to be unable to modify it, copy it or print it.

Why do I say that this request is funny? Well, because this was a web application, the typical HTML+JavaScript+JSON/XML+Choose-the-Server-Side-Tech-You-Like application. Now, of course you can not really “display” a PDF with that technology, you need to have a PDF viewer like Acrobat Reader so that your user can “see” the PDF, and, of course, all the indented users for this intranet web applications had it installed.

My boss had read that Acrobat had an option to make a PDF read-only with a password, and that it was even possible to “protect” the document so that it could not be printed… sounds like the solution… no? well, first of all , if you can see it, it means that the structure of the document is available to the reader, which means that the document is not really encrypted, and that means the any tool capable of reading and writing .pdf will be able to remove the password without even worrying about trying to guess it using a brute force (or even an heuristic) attack.

What can you do then? Well you can actually encrypt it… that will prevent the user from modifying it… but it will also prevent it from being seen… unless the user has the password… which also means he/she can un-encrypt the document and remove the protection.

There is no thing that can be done then? well, if security of this document is actually a priority, you could create a custom reader unable to print… that should work should it? Well, not exactly, the user can always just press the “printscreen” key that is available in all keyboards and get a copy of the document… I have read that it is possible to install some DRM level protections in some OSes that could detect that, but when you take it to that level, a new questions is brought in to the table: is it worth the cost? does the document actually needs that kind of security? if not, it means this is a case of toy security, your boss just wants this feature because it sounds like a feature that “would impress the user” but not something that is really required by the application, he/she has not really give this features (and its implications) some thought.

Lets say that at my boss says: “Yes, that level of security is really needed” (very unlikely, but could happen), well, that brings in the next question: what if the user just goes, takes one of then great modern digital cameras, and takes the picture from the screen monitor? (and then spends a few days retouching it in the Gimp or Photoshop).That means it will be able to steal the information, and even be able to print it. How can you prevent that from happening? How can you make a document that is actually secure even after that?

Well, the answer is that if what you want to prevent is the theft of information, the only way is to not allow the user to see the document, if the user can see it, the user can copy it, one way of another (there is even the possibility that the user has photographic memory) and there is no way you can make the user “forget” that he saw the document.

But lets say that what you want to do is detect if a document is a forgery that is, right at the moment that you see it printed on a paper, you want to be able to know if it came from your system (and it was altered by someone after it was copied or not)… the only way to do that, is embedding the same information that the document has in a 2D barcode (including something that uniquely identifies the document), and also embed in another barcode a digital signature that is able to validate the data. That is the only way I know you can demonstrate that the document is a forgery… obviously, by the time you have explained this to you boss (if he/she has managed to make sense from it) the most likely thing is that he/she is unwilling to ask you to do all that it is needed to achieve this goal, mostly because it is nothing like what he/she wanted in the first place: it something much more abstract, and requires a barcode reader to verify the document.

How to find files containing a string with Powershell

A while ago a wrote a small post to remind me of How to find files containing a string in Unix.

Now, I have learned how to do pretty much the same thing but with Powershell:

get-childitem {directory} –include {file pattern} -recurse | select-string -pattern "{string to Find}" -casesensitive

You can write a path in {directory} or nothing to use the current directory.

Understanding REST Verbs and its relationship with CRUD

I used to believe that REST verbs mapped to CRUD operations more or less like this:

GET -> Read
DELETE -> Delete
POST->Insert/Update
PUT ->Insert/Update

Yes, I mapped both POST and PUT map to the same CRUD operation, but now I am not that sure this mapping is completely right…

I have learned that the difference between POST and PUT is the URI, in PUT the URI identifies the entity enclosed with the request (the entity you wan to Insert or Update), while in POST the URI identifies the resource that will handle the enclosed entity.

So, POST is like saying "Resource X, do something with this Entity", while PUT is more like "Insert/Update this Entity as Resource X"

So POST is more like “Tell ‘X’ to do something with ‘E’” and that has really no direct mapping with a CRUD operation… of course, a POST, internally, can do one, or many of the CRUD operations using the data of the entity that is being passed to it as a parameter… Does that mean that POST maps to all CRUD operations?

I guess I need to learn more about this…