This is the first post on the new blog engine's website.  For notes about this check the About page on this blog's website.  Thank you and come back often to see the latest news concerning HSS.

This comment to the admin user's post was added directly to the post as a test of my main blog user's new permissions at managing the blog site. It looks like the only way to access other admin user's posts you must go to the home page of the blog site and edit the post from there. The manage user posts feature only allows access to Blog Author user's posts.

We have published a new version of the Food Allergy Checker web form application that integrates a barcode scanner to ease data entry when searching for food products.  The barcode scanner is implemented client side in javascript.  We evaluated a couple of scanner packages that are implemented using javascript.  The one we chose for our application is an open source package that works with the top browsers including browsers on mobile devices such as Safari on iOS platform.

The package is found on github at https://serratus.github.io/quaggaJS/.  Adding this package to our web application was fairly straightforward.  This scanner software is configurable to scan several barcode formats including UPC format common in U.S. market place for food products.  The effort for integrating this package with our web application took less than a full work day for one software engineer thanks to the excellent example page that is part of the github download.  Special thanks to Christoph Oberhofer for his work on the example code which was largely used in our web application.

To see the changes to our Food Allergy Checker go to this link https://horvathsoftware.com/FoodDatabaseApplication.aspx.  Thanks for giving our web applications a try and for reading this post!

For our users of PRESS that are updating passwords that are also stored in web.config files of your websites, we have added a new macro action, "Update Web Config".  This will aid you by automating the process of updating an account that is associated with a web.config entry of its password.  This new macro action is available only to Change Password macros and is implemented using text parameters stored in your macros.  The first parameter is the path of the web.config file in your development environment's source code directory.  This parameter is required and is validated to make sure that there really is a web.config file at the path location.  The second parameter is optional and defines the path to which to deploy the web.config file.    Both these paths may be either UNC path or DriveLetter: (\\server\path or c:\path) path depending upon your particular environment.

Thank you for reading our post and for being a loyal user of our password manager, PRESS.

We have published a new web form application to our website.  The new application is a food allergy checker that makes use of USDA data to assist in checking many food products for your allergies.  This is a free service that further demonstrates web form application capabilities.  The application does NOT make any guarantee for checking 100% certainty that any given food does not contain one or more of your allergens, but when it does flag a food as containing an allergen you should avoid that food.  We cannot guarantee a food does NOT contain any of your allergens because of limitations of the data received from the USDA and because food manufacturers may update their processes or ingredients at any time and the data from the USDA may lag these changes.  We do plan on keeping up to date with the latest USDA releases of information; however, if you have a food allergy and we do not flag a food product as containing your allergens, please contact the food manufacturer for up to date information.  

Thanks for reading our post and for using our new food allergy checker!  As always, if you have any application ideas that you would like to see developed but cannot or don't want to develop yourself you may contact us.  We will gladly evaluate these ideas and work with you to see that they become a reality.

https://horvathsoftware.com/FoodDatabaseApplication.aspx

A new sample ASP.Net web form page has been added the the Horvath Software Solutions website.   This new page is located at https://horvathsoftware.com/OnlinePasswordGenerator.aspx.  Passwords generated on this page are not stored anywhere on our web server.  You may control the behavior of the password generator by entering your desired parameters in the Online Password Generator web form.

Here's the list of input controls:

1. minPasswordLen - the minimum password length and when greater than or equal to the maxPasswordLen this sets the fixed password length.  When less than maxPasswordLen a random password length is generated between the two length settings.
2. maxPasswordLen - the maximum password length.
3. excludedSymbols - for passwords with symbols in them this controls what symbols are excluded unless the Allowed Instead checkbox is checked.  When Allowed Instead is checked then only the symbols in the text box are used when a symbol is added to the password.
4. AllowedInstead - this checkbox controls the behavior of the excludedSymbols text box.
5. PasswordCharacterSelections - this drop down list allows you to select your desired picks for each character of the password.  The settings on this control are self explanatory.

Also included are these buttons:

1. Generate Password - will generate a new password using the settings displayed in the input controls
2. Save Settings - will save your settings (uses cookies to store them), also will copy the password textbox to your clipboard
3. Retrieve Settings - will retrieve your input controls settings for use in generating passwords
4. Export to PRESS - will create an export file that is compatible with PRESS's import feature that will allow you to save any password to your password vault