Month: March 2008

Access Windows Live Hotmail in Outlook

Microsoft Office Outlook Connector is a free program released by Microsoft which will allow you to access your Hotmail and Microsoft Office Live email accounts from within Outlook. Here is Microsoft’s official description of the application:

With Outlook Connector, you can use Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007 to access and manage your Windows Live Hotmail or Office Live Mail accounts, including e-mail messages and contacts for free! Calendar, tasks and notes synchronization are not available on all services. If your service offers calendar synchronization, tasks and notes will synchronize as well. See the feature list for your service for details.

Outlook Connector enables you to use your Live Hotmail accounts within Outlook:

  • Read and send your Office Live Mail/Windows Live Hotmail e-mail messages.
  • Manage your Live Mail Contacts.
  • Use advanced options for blocking junk e-mail messages.
  • Manage multiple e-mail accounts in one place.

With a paid subscription, Outlook Connector enables these additional features:

  • Manage, share, and synchronize your Windows Live Calendar in Outlook.
  • Access your Tasks and Notes.

You can download the application from Microsoft from this web page: Link

Microsoft Office Connector

PHP – How to Display REQUEST, POST, and SESSION Variables

Here is some quick and dirty PHP code to display all request variables available to a page. This is useful while debugging:

foreach($_REQUEST as $var=>$val)
{
   echo "$var=$val";
}

Replace _REQUEST with _POST or _SESSION and you can see those variables too.

Code

Using Robocopy to Copy Files and Folders While Maintaining ACLs

Robocopy is a Windows Server Resource Kit command line tool that allow you to copy files and folders while maintaining ACLs. In addition it allows you to copy files across networks with fault tolerance capabilities – if the network connection is disrupted, the copy operation will continue where it left off when the connection is restored. Robocopy will also allow you to synchronize local or remote directories and if changes are detected, only the changed bits in a file are copied as opposed to the entire file being copied.

How to use Robocopy to copy the contents of one directory to another while maintaining ACLs:

  • NOTE: Do not put a trailing backslash at the end of the directory paths. The destination directory does not have to currently exist.
robocopy c:\pathToSourceDirectory c:\pathToDestinationDirectory /E /SEC

Here is a link to a Microsoft article that talks about the GUI version of Robocopy: Link

Robo

C# – How to Create an MD5 Hash

MD5 hashes are useful for when you need a string of characters that will always be generated given the same input. MD5 hashes are used to uniquely identify files based on their contents and they have also been used to store passwords in an “encrypted” format.

A word of caution on using MD5 hashing to store passwords in a database is that there exists searchable online databases of strings to MD5 hash mapping which allow someone to do a reverse lookup of what a password is by looking up the MD5 hash to plain text password mapping. So if you are relying solely on a straight MD5 hashing to store you password in a database you may want to consider doing something else such as applying a salt to the resultant hash string before you store it in the database.

Here is sample C# code to generate an MD5 hash from a string:

string password = "foo";
System.Security.Cryptography.MD5CryptoServiceProvider x = new System.Security.Cryptography.MD5CryptoServiceProvider();
byte[] bs = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(password);
bs = x.ComputeHash(bs);
System.Text.StringBuilder s = new System.Text.StringBuilder();
foreach (byte b in bs)
{
   s.Append(b.ToString("x2").ToLower());
}
password = s.ToString();

MD5 Algorithm