5 Minute Wonder

There will be those who disagree with me (hi DBAs!) but ORMs totally rock. Object Relational Mappers have been around for a while now and you may know them by names such as LINQ to SQL, NHibernate and Entity Framework (among others). The idea of ORMs is that all the plumbing between entities in the app and entities in the database can be abstracted away into a managed framework so that data access can become a no-mess, no-fuss affair. As with many automated ways to build apps, ORMs have their p...

In case you’ve been living under a rock this year, AppHarbor [https://appharbor.com/] is one of the hottest things to hit .NET since, well, just about ever. It packages up the entire app lifecycle of source control, build, deployment and hosting and makes it dead simple; in fact it couldn’t be easier. It then adds a comprehensive collection of add-ons [https://appharbor.com/addon] to do everything from persisting data (MS SQL, MySQL, MongoDB) to caching services (Memcacher) to load testing (blit...

Consider this guidance now deprecated! The membership provider stored passwords as a salted SHA1 hash which is insufficient by today's standards and easily cracked [https://www.troyhunt.com/2012/06/our-password-hashing-has-no-clothes.html]. Refer instead to ASP.NET identity [http://www.asp.net/identity] which is a sufficient stronger and more modern implementation. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Often times I’ll have a discussion with a softwa...