System.Security.SecureString
I recently had the opportunity to look into and make use of the Microsoft System.Security.SecureString class. This class is one of those dark corners of the .NET Framework that you don’t think about on a day-to-day basis but are really glad that it’s there when your security auditor starts asking questions about how PII data such as social security numbers are protected while resident in memory. The SecureString class takes care of this problem, helping you avoid a situation where unencrypted sensitive String data is left lingering around on the .NET heap. However, since this class does reference unmanaged memory buffers, its use is not entirely intuitive. I’ve attempted to demystify things with the explanation, drawing and code snippets in this post.
Offsite Backup Options
I’ve been sitting on my offsite backup upgrade for a long while now and finally decided to pull the trigger this week. I’ve used MozyHome for many years but the Mozy rate hike 6 months back agitated me. Combine this with the fact that, for more money, I’m not even getting the amount of backup I used to get and it was clearly time to move on, even though I’m nowhere near the 18 billion Gigabytes of storage Mozy claims I’m using.
Team Foundation Server Project Archiving and History
One of the things I was really eager to do was help one of our clients manage the archival and history of projects within their TFS repository. Historically, VSS volumes sizes have gotten out of control over time, resulting in commensurately poor performance. Obviously, a SQL Server backing database offers lots of advantages over the Jet database engine but even SQL Server performance will degrade over time as the history volume in long-running projects backs up.