Aaron Tiensivu's Blog

Although I will admit I am biased against ZoneAlarm due to prior problems I've had with the product in the past, the July 2008 MS Security patch related to a DNS exploit does not 'play well' with the ZoneAlarm software. It is highly recommended that you download the updated version of ZoneAlarm from here before installing the security patch from KB 951748.

The initial knee jerk reaction to this problem might be to uninstall KB 951748, but I would advise against that due to the fact that there is an updated version of ZoneAlarm available.

Personally I am more of a fan of ESET's security suite and I have also had good experiences with Comodo's personal firewall, which is free. Of course, despite having a bit of a bad reputation in the past, the built in Windows Firewall isn't half bad these days either. You can even do per-process outbound blocking with Windows Live OneCare and the updated firewall in Vista and Server 2008 is much more feature-ful than what was included in XP.

Currently I'm "dogfooding" builds of the Forefront Threat Management Gateway at home on my EVDO connection and all the devices in our home are the clients. It is what would normally be called ISA 2008 or ISA 2009, renamed. The differences between ISA 2004 and ISA 2006 were pretty minimal, overall, for a compelling reason to upgrade from 2004 to 2006, but this version has a lot going for it, including Snort-like blocking signatures and other additions.

This problem occurs because a recent revision to an Office 2003 Service Pack 1 update causes some WSUS 3.0 servers to incorrectly synchronize the revised update with the update’s approvals. When the affected client computers communicate with such a server, the Web service is unable to process the approvals. Therefore, the detection is unsuccessful. To resolve this problem on a server that is running Windows Server Update Services 3.0 Service Pack 1 (WSUS 3.0 SP1), install the 954960 update.

Microsoft Source Code Analyzer for SQL Injection is a static code analysis tool for finding SQL Injection vulnerabilities in ASP code. Customers can run the tool on their ASP source code to help identify code paths that are vulnerable to SQL Injection attacks.

A handy tool to use to check over code to help prevent the nasty automated attacks that have been occurring against sites on the Internet.

My wife comes from a Flash background and I've been slowly but surely convincing her to look more into the Expression Studio, first with v1 last year with Silverlight 1.0 and this year with the updated Expression Studio 2.0, which eventually will have Silverlight 2.0 support if I am reading all the documentation correctly. I'd love to have a dual MVP household much like Charlie and Sharon have.

One nice thing about Expression Studio 2 is that it supports the EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) file format, which earlier betas of Expression Studio 1 had support for, but apparently had issues with the exporter so it was removed from the final release of v1. Cassandra needs this format to upload her vector graphics/illustrations to iStock for publication.

Strangely enough, Expression Studio v1 was a great round-about way of getting a licensed copy of Visual Studio 2005 Standard, and Expression Studio v2 continues that tradition with a bundled copy of Visual Studio 2008 Standard.

With all that said, I spotted the Beta 2 release of the Silverlight Tools for VS 2008 on the Microsoft download center today.

Silverlight Tools Beta 2 for Visual Studio 2008 includes:
Visual Basic and C# Project templates, Intellisense and code generators for XAML, Debugging of Silverlight applications, Web reference support, WCF Templates, Team Build and command line build support, Integration with Expression Blend, and Enhanced Setup with upgrade support.

You can download the update for Visual Studio 2008 here.