A reader recently asked about enabling SSL for a web application, but without the hassle of applying for a verified certificate. This article will outline the process to enable HTTPS on a Windows XP machine, but the process of creating a self-signed certificate is applicable to just about any version of Windows.
What is a certificate?
A certificate is a file that contains a set of instructions, which are read by a client computer, outlining the process of properly encrypting and decrypting data. The certificate is unique to a website, and ensures the security of the client’s data to and from a server.
There’s nothing more amateur than displaying a big, yellow unhandled exception page for a .NET application. Professionally done ASP.NET websites need adequate error handling and recording. It’s not enough to catch exceptions and display a friendly error page — you need to record any unhandled errors so that they can be fixed.
Please, for your own good, preload your CSS images.
It’s becoming more popular to use the :hover pseudo-class to toggle a background-image in a <div> block to simulate various visual effects, but many developers are making the mistake of not preloading the :hover image. It looks unprofessional when a user hovers over an image and has to wait for a new background-image to download and display.
As you can see above, there is a small, awkward delay, which isn’t always so small, that occurs when a :hover background-image is not properly preloaded.
In response to my article on Custom Binary Serialization in .NET, a visitor asked me for a specific example of a custom serialization class of .NET’s MailMessage class.
As I mentioned in the article, I struggled with the MailMessage and MailAddress class because they cannot be serialized unless you use custom serialization (which can be a big pain because it takes quite a bit of time to create a custom class). I spent days trying to serialize the MailMessage class using conventional methods, only to find that there is no quick workaround for it other than custom serialization.
If you’re developing on a laptop with a smaller screen, you can use all the screen real estate that you can get. I have recently optimized my Firefox in order to maximize the amount of screen space available for web pages.
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