Security
How to Implement an ASP.NET Color Picker
One of the components of the 360 Web Content Management System (website in progress) that I wanted to develop was an events calendar that allowed you to post events into color-coded categories. You can see a demo of it here. At first, I had it so that users would manually enter in a 6-character HTML [...]
How to Validate Email Addresses in C#
I was recently doing doing support for a client that had a newsletter system. The previous employee had neglected to do much in the form of format validation for email addresses from both a user-input standpoint and system-integrity standpoint. Since there were several email addresses in the database that didn’t meet the basic conventions of [...]
Hash Passwords in C# and Visual Basic Using SHA-512
We recently covered an easy way to hash passwords using SHA-1 in .NET using either Visual Basic or C#. In most cases, SHA-1 encryption is “secure enough”, but there are some mathematical weaknesses. Microsoft’s .NET platform (specifically the System.Security class) allows you to encrypt passwords with a number of differnet algorithms without having to know the [...]
How to Authenticate a User in Active Directory using ASP.NET
If you’re working in an academic or large corporate or government setting, changes are you’re going to have a network in place using Active Directory or an open-source equivalent. Every user in the organization will have some sort of an account to use. If you’re building an internal web-application or desktop-application, it doesn’t make a [...]
How to Generate Random Passwords in C#
If you’re developing a site that requires users to logon, chances are you’re going to need to be able to generate passwords at some point, whether it be when users initially create their accounts or after they lose their passwords and need to reset their account credentials. Here’s a very customizable function that will generate [...]
A Simple Way to Hash Passwords in ASP.NET
If you’re developing a website that requires your users to create an account, it’s a very good idea to not store their passwords in plain-text in the database. A good chunk of users use the same password for just about everything, so if your database is compromised, there’s the possibility of having some real reprocussions [...]
