Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Amex Security Fail
Posted by Chaitanya in Uncategorized on December 18th, 2010
As Jeff Atwood pointed out on his blog, security on the web is generally a hard problem and passwords are the Achilles heel of such security. Companies should generally encourage customers to use strong passwords. What really irks me though is when a company like American Express, who should be taking this with the utmost seriousness tends to limit password complexity.
I am pretty sure that a few months ago, the password length could only be a maximum of 8 characters, that seems to have changed. But they still only allow a limited a set of special chars and here’s the kicker, the password is not case sensitive ! Is it just me or does this scream out home grown Crypto or some sort of direct pass through authentication to a legacy system? Bravo Amex, Braaavooo … *slow clap*
Powershell, Command Prompt and the Visual Studio Command Prompt
Posted by Chaitanya in Uncategorized on October 22nd, 2009
As an Enterprise Developer, I often find that there are plenty of batch files I need to run as part of my tool chain, either for code generation, deployment or testing. And its always annoyed me that they needed to be run from the Visual Studio Command prompt.
“oohh… look at me, I am a Visual Studio Command prompt. I am so cool. Only I can run these scripts. I am the greatest ! waahh, waah !”…. pfft … arrogant little command prompt. Who does it think it is? Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, running these batch files.
So I set out to take down the Visual Studio Command Prompt down a notch, which turned out to be pretty easy. Basically you just need to add some locations to the “Path” environment variable that Visual Studio Command Prompt has, but that an ordinary command prompt and Powershell don’t. An automated version of this process for Powershell can be found here
So find the vsvars32.bat file in your visual studio installation’s “Common\Tools” directory and copy the locations that are being added to the Path variable. See the picture below for more details …
Now add these locations to the end of the Path environment variable and Voila ! Your standard command prompt and Powershell, with all its inherent goodness, will suddenly start running your MsBuild scripts.