How To Manually Change ASP.NET MembershipProvider Passwords

How To Manually Change ASP.NET MembershipProvider Passwords

Don’t ask me why you find yourself working in ASP.NET. I know there are more effective ways to build a site.
Don’t ask me what reason could possibly explain needing to change some passwords. Why isn’t this functionality built in to the app? I know, I know…
But you’re there. Your app is using the MembershipProvider system, which saves the passwords in the database in some kind of encrypted form. And now you have to change some passwords quickly, probably for multiple embarrassing reasons, yet the app doesn’t offer you the functionality to do so, and you don’t have the time to add that functionality and re-build and re-deploy the app.
If only it were possible to go into SSMS and change the passwords using only T-SQL.
Now you can.

Empty Catch Blocks

Empty Catch Blocks

A normal user is going to click your button.
The user won’t see any kind of error message, which is maybe what you intended, but on the other hand, the button will seem to do nothing. The user will have no way of knowing whether she did anything wrong. The user will try it several times out of desperation. Then the user will attempt to contact you… No, actually that part may never happen. Then the user will close your app and go to bed because there is no conceivable way to determine what’s wrong or even if there is something wrong, and it’s literally too much trouble to ask. You’ll never know there’s a problem until nine months later when the user has to call you about a completely unrelated matter…

Is RSS Dead Yet?

Is RSS Dead Yet?

So I’m building these web apps in my spare time (because that’s what I do), and I’m adding RSS feeds for certain types of updates, et cetera. But when I think of my immediate friends and family, I don’t picture them using RSS.
So, on a whim, I type into Google something like “Who uses RSS?” But all the articles start with something more like “Who uses RSS any more?”

Automated Testing in the Real World

Automated Testing in the Real World

Why do we always talk about unit tests? Why is “unit tests” automatically added to the plan of any or all projects? I think it’s just because it’s an expression we’ve gotten used to hearing. There are an awful lot of “xUnit” packages nowadays.
But what is a unit test, anyway?

Style Wars

Style Wars

I recently realized that semicolons might be optional in JavaScript. I guess this is something I kinda sorta always knew but didn’t want to think about. JavaScript is a mess of proprietary non-standards, right? Well, maybe ten years ago. It’s okay to care...