Category Archives: Sample Code

New hands-on labs for jQuery Fundamentals

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Dan Wahlin has gone the extra mile and created a set of hands-on labs for his jQuery Fundamentals course. Plus subscribers can download them as part of the exercise files associated with the course. These labs walk you step-by-step through building several jQuery applications, with completed solutions available for reference. Here’s a brief summary of what’s included with each lab:

Lab 1 – Using jQuery Selectors
This lab focuses on using jQuery selectors.  Throughout the lab you will learn how to select different elements in a web page with jQuery so you can interact with the targeted elements using jQuery functions.

Lab 2 – The jQuery Event Model
Throughout this lab you’ll learn how to interact with different events using jQuery.

Lab 3 – Manipulating the DOM with jQuery
This lab focuses on manipulating the DOM with jQuery.  Throughout the lab you will learn how to interact with different DOM objects and functions using jQuery.

Lab 4 – Using jQuery Ajax Features
This lab focuses on using different Ajax features found in jQuery to load and process data. Throughout the lab you’ll see how jQuery can be used to interact with a WCF Service.

 

SelfCert: Create a Self-Signed Certificate Interactively (GUI) or Programmatically in .NET

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While this isn’t new, I needed a new home for it since my old Pluralsight blog is gone now. Hopefully you’ll find it helpful!

It’s a bit of a pain to create self-signed certs using MAKECERT. So here’s a GUI-based tool that uses a combination of the .NET Framework and the CryptoAPI to create self-signed X.509 certificates. And it’s factored so that you can use the underlying library standalone – you can easily create certs programmatically now.

Here’s the GUI:

The GUI has some nifty features: you can create a PFX file directly, or you can save directly to a cert store of your choice. When you save to a cert store, an extra dialog pops up showing you where the private key file resides, so that you can adjust the ACL accordingly. I’ve got a “view private key” feature that launches explorer with the /select argument, taking you to the private key file so that you can set the ACL on it. Anyway, this extra dialog gives you some quick info you typically want, like the thumbprint. And there are buttons for browsing the cert store and viewing the certificate as well from here.

The GUI gens the RSA key pair on a background thread, so a) the app doesn’t lock up on you, and b) if you get tired of waiting for the key to gen, you can cancel easily enough :)

Here’s some code that does this programmatically by calling the Pluralsight.Crypto library that is underneath all of this. Those of you who are familiar with the CryptoAPI will recognize the key abstraction here, CryptContext.

static void GenSelfSignedCert()
{
    using (CryptContext ctx = new CryptContext())
    {
        ctx.Open();

        X509Certificate2 cert = ctx.CreateSelfSignedCertificate(
            new SelfSignedCertProperties
            {
                IsPrivateKeyExportable = true,
                KeyBitLength = 4096,
                Name = new X500DistinguishedName("cn=localhost"),
                ValidFrom = DateTime.Today.AddDays(-1),
                ValidTo = DateTime.Today.AddYears(1),
            });

        X509Certificate2UI.DisplayCertificate(cert);
    }
}

Make sure you’ve got the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 installed. Self-Cert relies on it.

Download the project here, which includes binaries and sources. Feel free to use Pluralsight.Crypto in your own projects if you find it useful. Enjoy!