Preloading View Model Data into a Knockout Model (Without the extra JSON call) in ASP.Net MVC

I’ve recently been playing around with Knockout and working it in with to my MVC apps.  It dramatically simplifies some of the complexities of keeping an interface up to date when performing JavaScript changes. One of the very first issues I ran into was, how do I load in some initial data from C#?  The …

Windows Azure Backups with Bacpac – Automating Exports with Data Sync enabled (Part 4)

Here comes the final installment of my azure backup series.  This time we’ll be looking at doing backups on databases with Data Sync enabled. Since I originally wrote the first post and made plans to do the four posts in the series, Microsoft has since fixed the issue with restoring a database with Data Sync …

Windows Azure Backups with Bacpac – Automating Cleanup (Part 3)

Welcome to part 3 of my azure backup series.  We’ll be looking at automating cleanup of your blob storage.  If you will be using this method of doing backups to blob storage (taking snapshots of the database every XX hours/days), eventually you’ll have a large build up of old backups that will be outdated.  So …

Windows Azure Backups with Bacpac–Automating Exports (Part 2)

This is part 2 of my azure backups “series”.  This will go into doing exports of an Azure database to Bacpac file in blob storage.  Part one just went over a couple of options for backups and how to do it manually. Today we’ll be looking at the simple case for exporting your databases.  By …

Windows Azure Backups with Bacpac (Part 1)

Backing up or snapshotting a Windows Azure database seems like it should be a pretty straight forward affair and in reality it is, unless you have a more than simple situation.  Whether you just want to have a copy of your data locally or snapshots in time, it shouldn’t cost you an arm and a …

SQL Merge Replication over SSL

I’ve spent the last few days pulling my hair out trying to get SQL Merge replication over SSL working on SQL Server 2008 R2.  The situation I have is basically I have a SQL server behind our corporate firewall with some data.  We are setting up a SQL VM on Azure and need to constantly …

Exchange Calendar Syncing with Exchange Web Services (EWS) API

I’ve been working with the Exchange Web Services managed API on and off for the past year and surprisingly there isn’t all that much documentation.  Sure there is the standard Microsoft documentation (here) but it only gives basic examples.  Which as it turns out worked out for the majority of the functions I need to …

Talk on Common Web Vulnerabilities

I recently gave a talk on common web vulnerabilities with my colleague Scott Kirkland (see a link to his blog on the right) at the 2011 IT Security Symposium at UC Davis.  If you attended the session, hope you enjoyed it!  Otherwise we’ve posted the demo and the slide deck on Github. We covered topics …

Bing Maps jQuery UI Widget

Recently I was working on a project that required the usage of a maps service.  I needed a map that could add pins dynamically (one to many) and have the ability to do routing between two of the pins.  So the obvious choices were Google Maps and Bing Maps.  I opted to use Bing Maps …

Active Directory Permitted Logon Times with C# .Net 3.5 using System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement

Recently I was working on a proof of concept for some active directory manipulation.  Using the System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement was the easiest and best option for managing accounts (as the name implies).  However, the one thing that I really needed was a way to restrict when a particular user would be able to logon. What I discovered …