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Elliptic Curve cryptography is the current standard for public key cryptography, and is being promoted by the National Security Agency as the best way to secure private communication between parties. Microsoft has both good news and bad news when it comes to using Elliptic Curve encryption algorithms. The good news is that it is natively supported in the Vista operating system through CNG (Cryptography API Next Generation). The bad news is that a managed library for using EC will not be available until the release of Visual Studio Orcas, which is currently slated for the end of 2007 or the beginning of 2008.

The code in the attached project attempts to fill this gap by providing a wrapper class that will give you access to the underlying Vista Crypto API, as well as offer simple methods for leveraging the Elliptic Curve algorithms. It is intended for educational purposes only, however, and requires much more testing and refactoring before it can be used in any serious way. In other words, please play with it, copy it, and manipulate it in any way you like, but don't use it in its current form to lift any heavy machinery.

As database developers, many of us have had to dip our feet into the wide ocean of XML.It should come as good news that in SQL Server 2005, you can store XML in the database with a new XML datatype. Although this is good news, many developers have been storing XML in the database for some time now. Without implicit support for XML, developers have been shoving XML documents into text fields since XML's inception.

Windows Vista has a very interesting new API called Wait Chain Traversal (WCT), which allows you to determine when and why a process is deadlocked. The good news is that WCT will report exactly what synchronization object you are deadlocking on. The bad news is that it only reports a limited set of synchronization primitives. Even with that limitation, it’s still a very useful API and something you’ll want to have in your debugging toolkit.

In this column, I want to discuss the WCT API, its usage, and its limitations. As part of this column, I give you a tool that pinpoints all the deadlocks supported by WCT. Because I insisted on writing the tool in .NET, I also get to show you a descent into the depths of interop despair and how I was able to get the WCT API working from the .NET Framework.

An easy way to publish your own news feed in ASP.NET

ASP.NET server library for creating CMS website (forums, articles/wiki, news, users/roles, ...), using NHibernate for data access

When consuming things like long web services or RSS feeds from external web sources, it might be nice to load all of the important parts on the page first and then load the slower loading part(s) later. This example will demonstrate how to load multiple blocks of RSS headlines after the main body of the page has had a chance to load. While the page is loading, placeholders are displayed to indicate that additional content is coming. After the page loads, the content for the placeholders is retrieved and displayed asynchronously.

Oftentimes, there can be a need to load something on a page that may take significantly longer to load than the rest of the page. In some cases, you can use caching to help with this issue, but it may not always be possible or be the only option. If something is going to take longer to load than normal, it is important to display some kind of visual feedback to the user so that they know to wait while something is happening. Retrieving information from a remote server, displaying large sets of data, and photo galleries are just a few examples where delaying the loading of specific content areas would be useful.

If you never need to use compression for your applications, consider yourself lucky. For the rest of us, the good news is that .NET 2.0 has two new classes to handle compression and decompression streams. Find out when, and how, to use these valuable facilities.

This article shines the light on a bug I came across in the ASP.NET HyperLink control implementation. In particular, when using URL rewriting the HyperLink control's ImageUrl property can be, in certain circumstances, incorrectly rewritten. The good news is that there is a simple workaround that's made possible by the flexible architecture of ASP.NET.

To consume external Web services in Atlas, you build a server-based Web service proxy to the service. The good news is that you can leverage Visual Studio and Atlas features to handle most of the work.

Long time ago, I wondered how Microsoft Access put an Edit control on the context menu! Then I got another idea ... why don't we use any control(s) on the context menu? This will make the user interface easier to use, learn and increase productivity. The good news here is that, you can make it the same way you design a user control or a form using the Visual Studio designer..