Wednesday 19 June 2013

Did you think you can simply remove cookie and be done with it? Nope. You are wrong.

I have been researching for few hours now different ways I could secure voting polls so that people would not be able to spam them with fake votes. So far I have been unable to come up with anything (due to infrastructure - load balancer, lack of sessions, no registration or captcha being available).

However, I have found one thing that blew me away. EverCookie. It is a library that inserts "a cookie" to every single possible storage so that even when person removes cookies or clears the cache you can still retrieve it from somewhere.

EverCookie Website


Monday 10 June 2013

Free Limited Team Foundation Server - TFS with Visual Studio 2010

Intro

I'm not sure if people are aware but Microsoft for a while now been trying to compete with sites such as "BitBucket" or "GitHub" when it comes to source control. At my previous work place we used TFS with our internal infrastructure which could be expensive. What Microsoft is offering is "cloud based" TFS. I have decided today to give it a shot.

Team Foundation Server - TFS

http://tfs.visualstudio.com/

Limitations that I have found - you can only share your project with up to 5 users for free. Apart from that I haven't found anything that would bug me yet.

Account creation

Very easy. Follow link above and use your existing live account or create new one.

Visual Studio 2010 setup

Visual Studio 2010 is currently unable to connect to TFS out of the box.
You need to install SP1 and a patch for TFS2012.

If you get an error of "Team Foundation services are not available from server https://xxx.visualstudio.com/tfs. Technical information (for administrator): HTTP code 203: Non-Authoriative Information." - Install a patch.
  1. Install Visual Studio 2010
  2. Install Visual Studio SP1
  3. Patch for VS2010 to let it connect to TFS http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=29082
    1. Details:
    2. Version:
      Date Published:
      1
      3/8/2012
      File name:
      File size:
      VS10SP1-KB2662296.exe
      19.3 M
  4. Start Visual Studio 2010
  5. In the toolbar
    1. Click Team -> Connect to Team Foundation Server ...
    2. Click "Add"
  6. In the Add window
    1. Name: your tfs link (without https://)
    2. Path: tfs
    3. Protocol: HTTPS
  7. Click OK and wait for Login screen to appear.

Long weekend goal - Create your first game!

Long weekend here in Sydney so I have decided it would be cool to do something fun for once since I just didn't feel like cleaning/catching up on some work etc.

So I have decided to create my first game - after quick research Unity 3D was my choice and below is one of the best tutorials I have watched in a very long time.
http://vimeo.com/51410700

Enjoy!