Daily Archives: July 6, 2005

Kathleen Dollard coming to Vermont.NET next week

dotNET

Many moons ago, when I made the transition from FoxPro to Visual Basic, my first resource I hit up was the newsgroups. There was Kathleen Dollard not only present but answering questions and she was the only woman’s name I saw anywhere in those groups. She was very nice and answered some of my really dopie newbie questions. I emailed her offline and said that i really appreciated her presence there, I didn’t feel like such an alien.

Years and years later, I have now developed a wondeful friendship with Kathleen, but only get to see her at random events like TechEd, DevConnections or the MVP Summit. So I am truly thrilled that she is coming to speak at Vermont.NET on Monday – thanks to the fact that she is an INETA speaker! She will be flying in on Saturday and so we get to play for a few days before the meeting.

She will then be heading up to Montreal to present at GUVSM on Tuesday night – again, courtesy of INETA. If I can get enough work done, I will go up with her and give her a mini tour of that beautiful city.

Kathleen will be presenting on Tracing in VS2003 and VS2005. I am not great at tracing, so when Kathleen says it sucks in VS2003 and has been overhauled and is wonderful in VS2005, I believe it! And I certainly need to get this lesson myself.

We will also have our 2nd .NET NEwbie session on Monday. After Laura Blood’s wonderful job at beginner OOP in .NET in June, Rob Hale from IDX is going to follow up with a presentation on Inheritence and Polymorphism in .NET.



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Some clarity on public and private keys and their role in encryption

Tools

This is something I have learned is very confusing to people, as it was the most often asked question in my Security Basics for WSE talk. I have learned now to explain it as part of the talk, but thought to put it here as I had the same question asked in an email this morning.

You can encrypt data with either the public or private key.

It depends on your goal.

If your goal is confidentiality (i.e. only the recipient should be able to read/comprehend the message) then you want to encrypt with their public key so taht only their private key is able to decrypt the message.

If your goal is authentication (for example, when encryption is used as the process of digital signatures, the source of the message needs to be authenticated) then you need to encrypt with your private key. The recipient then uses your public key to decrypt and that will ONLY work with a message that was encrypted with the correct private key.

If you encrypt with a private key, you can only decrypt that message with the public key from the pair.

If you encrypt with the public key, you can only decrypt the message with the private key from the pair.

It is definitely confusing when you see some cases (eg: confidentiality) where the public key is used to encrypt and others (eg: digital signatures) where the private key is used to encrypt.

www.acehaid.org

Tablet PC Memory Leak fix (and a little iis woes)

Tablet

I’v been heads down this morning with major IIS problems on my web server. Something about a windows 2003 server patch, Application Pools mucked up, Service Unavailable on everything. Anyway, I uninstalled and reinstalled IIS and am now updating windows 2003 SP1 again, and had a minute to look at blogs and saw lots of pointers to the Tablet PC Memory Leak fix.

When I solve my server problems, I’ll blog about it. Thanks to Brad Kingsley and Mike Campbell for lots of help with that today.

www.acehaid.org