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- IT Service Management Newsletter -
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IT Focus
IT Service Management

Already widely used in Europe, IT Service Management (ITSM)is gaining more presence in the U.S. ITSM is a set of processes and procedures that help organizations ensure end users are getting what they need from the IT department. This special series looks at several aspects of ITSM in the enterprise.

Getting ITSM Off the Ground

Making Knowledge Management Work With Service Management

ITSM Evangelist Talks Security

Product Watch
GFI LANguard Network Security Scanner - Freeware security scanner to audit your network security.
Active@ Kill Disk - Hard Drive Eraser - Hard drive eraser. Boot from floppy disk. DOS
Sun StorEdge T3 Array for the Enterprise - T3 Array for the Enterprise
Barbedwire IDS Softblade - Multifunction Appliances for IDS, VA, and Content Filtering
SurfAnonymous v1.0.0.1 - Hide Your IP Over The Net

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Microsoft .NET Secrets
September 8, 2003
By Brian Livingston

Brian Livingston Hiding within all Microsoft software, it seems, are secret features that never get into the official manuals. Whether the product is Windows or some other Microsoft offering, capabilities that offer you power and convenience somehow go undocumented for months or years.

No one knows this better than Dan Appleman, the president of Desaware Inc., a developer of coder add-on tools such as SpyWorks, StateCode, and CAS/Tester. He's found a treasure trove of hidden functionality within Microsoft's .NET Framework — the software giant's alternative to Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) — and he's happily revealing it in a series of e-books for harried programmers who are frantically churning out corporate projects.

Some of Appleman's findings so far:

User access to files and directories. Allowing end users to access only the files they're authorized to see, while granting more privileges to administrators, is one of the basic functions of a multi-user program. There's a steep learning curve associated with the Windows API functions that control file and directory access, known technically as Access Control Lists (ACLs). "You're talking dozens of lines of pretty complex code," Appleman says. But by using undocumented features of .NET, he says, this is reduced to a few easy lines.

Garbage removal. Although .NET is past its 1.0 days and is now in the 1.1 stage of its lifecycle, it still suffers from a few irritating bugs. One of these is that .NET programmers can't control the order that objects in memory are discarded when they're no longer needed. ".NET wasn't cleaning up some of its internal objects as quickly as I wanted them cleaned up," Appleman explains. "By calling the .Dispose method, which is private on internal objects, I'm able to force them to be disposed before my own objects are disposed."

Access to any file or process. Building on the above points, Appleman reveals the details of other "private" structures within .NET that sophisticated developers may want to take advantage of. For instance, .NET features can be used to control whether or not a specific person may run a given program. By disassembling .NET, Appleman reveals how you can discover and exploit little-known ways to use .NET's internals to do this and other tricks.

Using the above techniques in no way exposes security flaws in .NET, Appleman says. Security issues are completely separate from whether a programming platform has features that aren't documented.

But Is This Good Programming?

Appleman's e-books have been criticized by other developers for revealing techniques that may not work for long. Appleman himself warns that Microsoft might change something about .NET in the future so programs written using his techniques might fail. This could happen, he says, even with a minor "slipstream" upgrade that shouldn't break an existing application — but might do so anyway.

While this is an important concern, .NET offers hope that this problem won't arise. It's true that Windows suffers from "DLL Hell," a condition in which two different programs crash because they've installed conflicting versions of dynamic link library files. But .NET, by contrast, supports side-by-side execution. This means that a computer may have both .NET Framework 1.0 and 1.1 installed, and even 1.2 and 1.3 (when they're released). All the different versions should co-exist without a problem. In addition, you can "bind" a .NET program to the specific version of .NET that it needs.

Stepping Lightly Into the Future of .NET

That doesn't completely resolve the question of whether or not using undocumented features of .NET is "good." But Appleman makes it fairly painless to check these features out. His two e-books on the subject — PDF files that are each about 40 pages long — are offered on his Web site for the bargain price of $9.95:

Hijacking .NET – Vol. 1: Role-Based Security reveals the methods Appleman uses (and you can use) to uncover .NET's methods of controlling ACLs and other user-privilege functions;

Hijacking .NET – Vol. 2: Protecting Your Own Code builds on Vol. 1 by describing techniques to secure your company's proprietary programs from the kinds of access you don't want.

For more information, visit Desaware's books page.

After reading about these techniques for yourself, you may decide that you should or shouldn't use them in practice. But at least you'll be armed with the information before you might need it for a critical project.

Conclusion

No mere e-book can put to rest the overarching ".NET vs. J2EE" argument facing enterprises that need something working — today! But if your company has already chosen .NET, as Appleman has, his new works can shed light on corners of the environment that you might never have discovered on your own.

Brian Livingston is the editor of Brian's Buzz on Windows and the co-author of "Windows Me Secrets" and nine other books. Send story ideas to him via his contact page.


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