My Toolbox column in the July 2007 issue of MSDN Magazine is avaiable online. The July issue examines three products:
- ANTS Profiler - quickly and easily find performance and memory bottlenecks in your .NET applications with this helpful tool.
- Simian - duplicate source code can happen when developers cut and paste code. Such repetitious code is dangerous because if there is a bug in the duplicated code or if the business logic is changed, problems will arise unless all duplications of the code are appropriately modified. Simian can efficiently search through millions of lines of source code and alert you if it finds any duplicate blocks of code.
- Pixie - a free, light-weight color picker.
This month's issue reviewed Foundations of Security, by Neil Daswani et al. Here is an excerpt from the review:
Security requires planning and domain knowledge and its results are not easily measurable. Furthermore, since security spans physical, technological, and policy levels, it is easy for a developer to bury her head in the sand and assume someone else will implement or has implemented the necessary security precautions. Such attitudes, however, are an invitation to disaster. Security is an important aspect of any application and all developers should have at least a cursory understanding of key security concepts, potential attack vectors, and techniques for protecting against common threats. Foundations of Security: What Every Programmer Needs to Know (Apress, 2007), ... provides a solid overview of security fundamentals at a level appropriate for developers who may have little to no background in security.
As always, if you have any suggestions for products or books to review for the Toolbox column, please send them into toolsmm@microsoft.com.