Helping your business to do more business
Last time, I wrote that I'd decided it was time to update our software and make use of technologies that have been more recently released than those we'd been working with over the past few years. One of those technologies is the Entity Framework.
Over the past few years we've steadily worked on our CRM and CMS software and have added new features and capabilities to it. However, while we were busy doing that the technologies that the software is built on was itself undergoing changes, some of which we made use of while others we chose to ignore. Fortunately those changes/enhancements usually maintain backwards compatibility with code that's already been written and so it rarely if ever breaks existing code.
I came across this article earlier today: Why passwords have never been weaker and I urge you to read it. For anyone running a web site or a network its message is quite worrying, basically with the data and hardware available to them it has never been easier for a hacker to break a password. Any way you look at it that's bad news.
In my last post I talked about a problem I had after I upgraded to 64 bit Windows and needed to archive a text based report output by an old DOS program which was now hosted in a virtual machine. I ended the post by giving an example of the report, which I replicate here:
When I read that all I would need to do to use SQL Azure and have a database in the cloud for my SQL Server based applications was change the connection string, it seemed to good to be true. There's always a gotcha somewhere.