In many application be they web or otherwise it can be important to secure parts of the configuration files incase the file is compromised by a hacker or you simply don't want anyone to know what the true values are. It turns out that this is fairly easy to do using the ASP.NET IIS Registration Tool (Aspnet_regiis.exe) (obvious right?). To illustrate the point I'll show you a typical config file and what's required to encrypt parts of it. More...

When I work with collections I’ll often want to retrieve information from the collection by its key. So my options are usually to make use the following generic collection (who uses any other type of collection now? Unless you’re stuck on .NET 1.1):

   1: System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary<TKey,TValue>

This is great collection except if you want to ever serialize it! Then you’ll have some problems. So the issue becomes do I want a collection which is searchable via an index and is serializable or one that is keyed but can’t be serialized. The problem however, is that in a lot of cases you actually want to be able to use both methods, that is search by ordinal number or index and be able to search by a key, which maybe a business key. To solve this issue many have resorted to inheriting from IList<T> then adding another item overload which iterates through the collection until you find a match. This works, but is probably not too efficient on large collections. Also it’s a pain to have to write this code each time.

With the introduction of .NET 2.0 Microsoft released a collection object which doesn’t get a lot of press. The reason why it’s not discussed very often is because it’s only provided in an abstract form. That is you have to create a concrete implementation before you can use it. As it turns out this is not that hard to do. For example the following C# code is an example of a simple implementation for an Order class: More...