A curious omission in .NET is the ability to make a deep copy of an object which is independent of the original object – i.e. you can change the copy without changing the original. If you simply copy an object in .NET with assignment, all you are doing is pointing a second variable at the same object in memory, and …
Converting HTML to PDF in VB.Net with PDFSharp
An interesting little problem we’ve had to implement for a client recently; how to take an HTML (passed through as an email attachment), and convert it to a PDF in a VB.net command line program. There are lots of 3rd party libraries around that do that, but typically, they’re expensive and not terribly reliable, formatting the HTML that we wanted …
SQL Server Queries – Stripping Extra Characters from the End of a String
Yesterday while implementing a particularly difficult SQL report query, I came across the following question: Given a String ‘This is a test, this is a second test’, is there an easy method (preferably without using CLR) to search and replace the string to remove the word ‘test’ but only if it occurs as the last series of characters in a …
New Starter News
The Rectangle Red team expands again, with our new starter Andy Laird joining us. Andy brings considerable experience with over ten years experience in Microsoft development technologies, including .NET, together with an excellent knowledge of web technology and databases, a track record of developing innovative systems to tight deadlines, and has both an excellent customer focus and a can-do attitude. …
Security and WordPress Brute Force Password Cracking
There are ongoing botnet attacks on WordPress sites that try to gain access by brute force guessing a username / password to allow login to the site. If you have a WordPress site, we would recommend 2 urgent steps to prevent infection 1) Ensure all login accounts have hard to guess passwords. Easy to say, but in general any password …