How safe is our personal information?

What you will learn

• How bad guys use information already exists on the net to gain access to:
• your email accounts,
• your financial information such as credit cards, PayPal accounts etc,
• your internet hosting accounts (if you have any),
• your personal web sites,
• your personal life in general!
• How you can protect yourself by such bad situations by following some very simple but very efficient security rules.

The actual incident that this article is based on was 100% real but for privacy reasons all referred user names are not the real ones and they have been chosen randomly. According to the same reason all images have been obscured.

Testing Web Server Performance

Talking about Web Server Performance is a serious matter and for sure is not an easy one to perform. We can safely say that it is one of the few things that make the difference when we are involved in a professional site project development.

One of the main questions that the client ask is how many simultaneous visitors  can the site handle. Well, we are all know that this is a very general question and can be affected by many factors. To state our client's question in a more technical view, let say this:  
We want to check our web server responsiveness when many simultaneous requests hit on it.

Implementing asynchronous callbacks in asp.Net 4

Internet application development can be seen as the a stateless client-server programming using a thin client.In case that we don't like this approach, we have several methods to change it.
The cause of such adaptations most often stems from specific business needs and rules.

Sometimes, software engineers want to make the client a bit more thick. They usually do this by adding code to the client side, i.e. JavaScript, vb-script, etc. Other times, want to make UI more... feasible. By 'feasible' I mean that it is not necessary to post-back a whole page just for a very simple calculation. One solution to this issue is to put simple calculations to the client side (using JavaScript). But again, what if the operands are members of  some more generic object that cannot be transferred to the client, such as a large database table? Is then the post-back a one-way solution? Well, no. The answer can be called AJAX or in other words (a more MS oriented ones) Asynchronous Callbacks.

BCP on SQL server and how to export metadata like table headers

A known limitation using "bcp" utility in SQL Server (2k5,2k8,2012) is that there is no way to include meta-data (say header names) to any exported table. There are some trick you can do to overcome such problem.
The basic idea is to create two ascii files, one with the header and one with the data. Then, you can create the final file that is the result of the concatenation of the above. Note the trick that is used in order to get a string that contains the columns of the respected table with the use of the global temp table.
I hope that this solution (that is indeed not very elegant) will help any friend facing the same problem.