Microsoft OS (XP or later) and .NET provides finest way to secure your data for storage and in-memory. This can be accomplished using following classes from Data Protectection API ProtectedData ProtectedMemory Above mentioned classes can be found in System.Security.Cryptography namespace. Also known as part of DPAPI, they are available since .NET 2.0 ProtectedData ProtectedData can encrypt and decrypt your data symmetrically. To encrypt data following code is used: ProtectedData.Protect(byteArrayOfOriginalData, additionalEntropyOrSalt, DataProtectionScopeValue); To decrypt data following code is used: ProtectedData.Unprotect(byteArrayOfEncryptedData, additionalEntropyOrSalt, DataProtectionScopeValue); In above code snippets additionalEntropyOrSalt can be some custom key / salt value / entropy data that you can add to the encryption / decryption process to increase security strength. DataProtectionScope in above code snippets can have any of the two values: CurrentUser - Allows decryption of encrypted data in current user context only. LocalMachine - Allows decryption of encrypted data in current machine context » Read more
The date time of your PC (specific for windows) sync with one of the listed NTP server. This time sync happens every 7 days and with time.windows.com by default. You can also manually sync or update your time. To do that: Click on your system time > "Change date time settings" > "Internet Time" tab > "Change settings and click on Update now to sync. You can also resync time from command prompt by using command line utility called w32tm: cmd> w32tm /resync The default time to automatically sync time with any NTP server is 604800 seconds which is 7 days if you convert. You can change this settings by making edits to REGISTRY using regedit. Warning: Always backup your current registry state before making any changes. The key to change the auto time sync - time interval settings is located at: » Read more
I recently bought a MAC Mini for development purposes and learning cross-platform / Xamarin development. Being windows / linux user for a quite long time now, I haven't ever touched or operated MAC OS before (I know, shame on me). So I have no prior experience with MAC world what so ever. In excitement, I opted for beta testing for early release of MAC OSX - Yosemite and was happy to use it. But when I experienced that my Xcode and Xamarin studio started breaking and acted weirdly, I decided to downgrade back to MAC OSX Mavericks. It was not an easy thing for me at first, after a few runs and tries I figured out a way to do it. This involved in preparing a flash drive to fresh install MAC OSX using recovery options. I prepared a flash drive with instruction from Apple and other developers and was successful to » Read more
