.NETly News 301
Lots of .NET stories in the news today and yesterday; it's a total coincidence that Microsoft started a huge marketing push on Wednesday, including the occasional Doubleclick ad running on Slashdot. BrendanL79 writes: "Peter Wright at Salon.com contributes to public awareness of Microsoft's .NET with this exuberant piece. The praise borders on sycophancy ("Gutenberg ... Babbage ... now Gates") with no apparent tongue in his cheek. Comments?" Reader vw writes: "Active State has just released Visual Perl 1.2, Visual Python 1.2, and Visual XSLT 1.2 as plugins for Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET. Wonder how long it will take for a Mono hack." Numerous readers pointed to several stories about a buffer overflow problem in Visual Studio .NET which was supposed to be immune to buffer overflows - but it had passed Microsoft's stringent new security audit.
Story not complete (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wait a second (Score:2, Informative)
Re:No buffer overflows? (Score:1, Informative)
Compiler: Stackguard! (Score:5, Informative)
It's not actually a _compiler_ overflow.
Instead, it's a subversion of the "buffer overflow protection" that's built-in to the compiler. The most startling piece of this technical review is that the Microsoft "Overflow Protection" in the compiler appears to be a port of StackGuard. The reviewers point out that an examination of the binary output reveals that the compiled code is nearly identical to the StackGuard output.
Re:Perl, Python under .NET? (Score:3, Informative)
Visual Perl and Visual Python are development environments for Perl and Python for people that are using Visual Studio.
PerlNET takes any Perl code and wraps it up as a
If there is enough interest in a PythonNET, we will build that.
-- Dick
Michael, why must you be so ignorant? (Score:4, Informative)
From the summary (yes, it was written by Michael, not the submitters): Numerous readers pointed to several stories about a buffer overflow problem in Visual Studio .NET which was supposed to be immune to buffer overflows - but it had passed Microsoft's stringent new security audit.
Where to begin with this mess of falsehoods?
On a side note, since this only affects unmanaged code, it's not really related to the .NET/CLR stuff.
Re:Guttenberg, Babbage, & Gates (Score:2, Informative)
The reasons Babbage never developed a prototype are different from different sources. He spent a LOT of the money he was given for the analytical engine designing the (more general purpose) difference engine.
Eventually the government got fed up of giving him money - he'd burned through a
In addition he fell out with his leading craftsman who he accused of padding the contract, and spent quite a lot building workshops and so on at his house in order to develop things on-site.
The analytical engine was definitely acheivable at the time. The difference engine more doubtably so. But while the technology was willing, the project management was missing. Something the IT industry still hasn't learned...
Re:I dare you. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Story not complete (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft's alternative, of course, was to create a totally safe environment that wouldn't run any legacy code and wouldn't allow direct calls into the OS. But of course that's been done before (Java). Remember,
Re:I dare you. (Score:3, Informative)
The Simplest Way to Define .NET [microsoft.com] by Sanjay Parthasarathy, Vice President, Platform Strategy, Microsoft Corp.
Re:Perl, Python under .NET? (Score:1, Informative)
This lets you use Perl code from