Reviving The Health Revolution » Web development

Sharing Your WalkMe Pedometer using E-Mail Signature

vaibhavb — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 02:43:00 +0000

Several folks have asked me how can one get the WalkMe pedometer to show in Outlook signature. I’m outlining the steps below, for the restless folks most important step is Step 7.

Sign-In the WalkMe HealthVault application
Click on the “Share” tab
Make sure the “Allow Other to see my WalkMe data” checkbox is checked
If you check the box the page refreshes, saying Sharing is turn on
Scroll to the bottom of the page – to Share your steps as an image option
Click on file part of “Save this file as your outlook signature”
Save the walkme.htm file in your C:\Users\[YourUserName]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Signatures director. Please note the part after [YourUserName] of this directory is hidden and you will manually need to type it in your Windows explorer to get to the full directory. Let me know if you can’t locate this directory on Windows systems other Vista or Seven (it should be under C:\Documents & Settings\[YourUserName]\Application Data\Roaming\Microsoft\Signatures on Windows XP).
To test the signature open Outlook and and create new mail. Click on the “Signature” part of ribbon (outlook 2007) and you will see WalkMe in drop down. If you select WalkMe signature you should see something like below in your outlook email :

Enjoy your walking and keep yourself motivated by communicating your live pedometer through the signature.

Security Resources for .NET Web Applications

vaibhavb — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 22:43:57 +0000

Web applications have a class of security vulnerabilities, at times much widespread and trivial than the infamous buffer overflow.

.NET Web Application Security

Here are some interesting Security resources on .NET Web Application:

.NET Security at MSDN – I specially like Improving Web Application Security white paper.
AntiXSS Library - Microsoft Anti-Cross Site Scripting library to protect web apps from XSS.
FxCop - A tools which analyses managed code assemblies
Guidance Explorer – Developer guidance (a 15000 foot view though)
.NET Security Blogs: Shawnfa, Michael Howard, CLRSecurity
MSDN Security Developer Center - General guidance on writing secure code. The featured video on exporting and importing certificates would be helpful for doing certificate management as a HealthVault application.
Update – Threat modeling web applications is a great read. The SDL Threat modeling tool and forum are of great utility as well.

Please leave a comment if you know of any valuable security resources.

Testing your application on older versions of IE – Web app compat that is!

admin — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 21:00:00 +0000

Recently I ran in a bug in our AHA application on IE 6. Coming to the terms with testing across multiple browsers is a painful realization of the evils of web development. I tried several ways by which i can install IE 6 on my Vista machine, including tricky thing like DLL redirection. But this is way too painful – however I stumbled on a sweet way of doing application compatibility tests – virtual pc!!

Here is the cook-book way to get different version of IE for compatibility tests -
1. Deploy your application on a staging server
2. Install Virtual PC 2007 (it works on Vista)
3. Get the IE testing images from here.

One downside of this approach is that you cannot step into and debug you application because virtual pc is a painful to configure for running on your corporate LAN .