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Firewalls can't protect very well against things like viruses or malicious software (malware). There are too many ways of encoding binary files for transfer over networks, and too many different architectures and viruses to try to search for them all. In other words, a firewall cannot replace security-consciousness on the part of your users. In general, a firewall cannot protect against a data-driven attack--attacks in which something is mailed or copied to an internal host where it is then executed.

Alternate Answer:
Properly configured firewalls can limit the propagation of worms - a form of malware.  Typically, firewalls are edge or parameter devices (separates network zones) and most viruses and malware targets end points (user workstations and servers).

The .NET Framework 3.5 provides the foundation for building connected and appealing applications, productively, on a wide variety of systems from the device to the data center.

Microsoft continues to support developers using the .NET Framework platform by providing support for applications built in previous versions to the 3.5 release, so existing applications built for .NET Framework 2.0 or .NET Framework 3.0 will continue to work.

The .NET Framework 3.5 adds new features in several major technology areas:

• Deep integration of Language Integrated Query (LINQ) and data awareness.
• Support for Web 2.0 AJAX-style applications and services in ASP.NET and WCF.
• Full tooling support for WF, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), including the new workflow-enabled services technology.
• New classes in the base class library (BCL) for the .NET Framework 3.5 address the most common customer requests.

In n-tier architecture the entire application is divided in several pieces. These pieces can be logical or physical. Each piece performs a specific task such as displaying user interface or data access. There can be any number of tiers or layers of such pieces. Hence, the name n-tier (Note that many times the terms tier and layer are used interchangeably). However, most commonly applications have 3 distinct tiers or layers. They are:

• Presentation Layer
• Business Logic Layer
• Data Access Layer

As you can guess, presentation layer is nothing but a piece of software that deals with user interface of your application. Displaying data to the end user and allow them to interface with it is the core functionality of this layer.

In most of the cases the data entered by the end user needs some kind of validation or further processing. This is the responsibility of Business Logic Layer.

Finally, your application data needs to be stored and retrieved in some data store (RDBMS, XML etc.). This task is handled by Data Access Layer.

In short, the process works like this:

• User requests for some application data.
• The data access layer retrieves the data and is forwarded to the presentation layer via business logic layer. Sometimes data access layer gives this data directly to presentation layer.
• Presentation layer receives the data to be displayed via business logic layer.
• The user changes the data and initiates the appropriate action (such as insert, or update).
• The business logic layer validates the data submitted by the user.
• If the data is valid it is handed over to data access layer for updating into the database.

Advantages of N-Tier ArchitectureAt first glance this division of tasks may seem to be unnecessary. However, it gives following benefits:

• The applications gets divided in logically isolated pieces reducing tight coupling between the UI, business processes and database.
• Change in the underlying database and data access methods do not have any effect on the presentation layer or client application.
• Client application no longer has SQL statements embedded in it. This makes it de-coupled from rest of the application.
• Table and column names can be effectively eliminated from the client-side code.
• The client application is unaware from where data comes (location transparency).
• It becomes easier to modify or extend your application, without breaking or recompiling the client-side code.

The downside of n-tier architecture is that you need to create many isolated classes and pieces of software. However, benefits of n-tier applications will far outweigh its disadvantage.

Security can be handled at the machine, domain, or sharepoint level.

PL/SQL exception handling is a mechanism for dealing with run-time errors encountered during procedure execution. Use of this mechanism enables execution to continue if the error is not severe enough to cause procedure termination.

The exception handler must be defined within a subprogram specification. Errors cause the program to raise an exception with a transfer of control to the exception-handler block. After the exception handler executes, control returns to the block in which the handler was defined. If there are no more executable statements in the block, control returns to the caller.