Reviewed

CryptoLicensing For .Net – License Your Software

CryptoLicensingCryptoLicensing – In a previous article I talked about Crypto Obfuscator For .Net which obfuscates your source code allowing you to protect your intellectual property.

As part of this first line of defense, you need to enable licensing in your commercially available software. CryptoLicensing from LogicNP Software is a very good and feature packed licensing tool.

Enabling the logic in your code is really easy. Follow along with the code samples below. (more…)

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Crypto Obfuscator – Protect Your Code And Intellectual Property

crypto obfuscator shieldCrypto Obfuscator – There are a few things that I consider rather important when developing an application for resale. Two of those are licensing and protecting your source code.

If you had to sell an application, would you be confident enough that the source could not be reverse engineered? There are free tools that can be downloaded that are very good at doing just that.

One of the ways to protect your code is through obfuscation. There are various tools that you can use. You can even use the community edition of Dotfuscator that comes with Visual Studio to protect your code. This however is basic obfuscation. (more…)

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DevExpress Document Server – Automate Office Without Microsoft Office Automation

DevExpress LogoDevExpress Document Server – A couple of years ago (long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away) I had to take over a project from a developer that had left the company I worked for. Unfortunately, she left in the middle of an implementation. The application was developed and installed, but there were many change requests and I had to develop these change requests into working solutions.

One of the biggest headaches was the fact that the application did some really funky Office Word manipulation. So much so that when the company upgraded to a newer version of Office, it broke many of the installed application features. More recently though we needed to give a customer the ability to export data to Excel. The only catch was that the customer wasn’t going to install Microsoft Office.

We could obviously not use Microsoft Office automation and DevExpress Document Server is a perfect solution for times like these. (more…)

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Parasoft Service Virtualization – Create Intelligent Test Environments

Parasoft Service Virtualization logoParasoft Service Virtualization is a product you need to seriously consider if you are developing applications that you have to test. But before I continue, let me step back a bit.

What is one of the first things you do when setting up a test environment? Well I guess that largely depends on your budget. Let us assume we all work for a company that conforms to best practices with regards to software development and the SDLC.

The easiest way to emulate the client site is to use virtualization. My current favourite being VirtualBox, but VMWare is also a great choice. Setting up a copy of the client site on a VM is the best method for testing your custom applications. It now gets even better with Parasoft Service Virtualization. (more…)

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Getting To Grips With StyleCop

stylecop code analysis how toStyleCop Code Analysis How-To is a nice read. At only 57 pages long, you can expect to work through the book in no time. I had the chance to check it out and I really enjoyed the read, not to mention learning a few things I didn’t know.

The book is aimed at .NET Developers that want to discover what StyleCop can do for them. Therefore it is written with .NET developers in mind.

The book is published by Packt which is also a bonus for me, because I really enjoy their style of formatting books they publish. As you can imagine, being only 57 pages in length, the price is also less than other titles in the Packt stable.

You can download sample chapters from the site and read reviews. For those that don’t know what StyleCop does, here is a quote from their CodePlex page. (more…)

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Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 Expert Development Cookbook – Reviewed

Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 Expert Development CookbookVisual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 Expert Development Cookbook – Being a programmer, I love technology related books. (Any programmer that doesn’t read is flawed. Sorry, it’s a fact, you will never grow.) I try to read as often as I can. I enjoy reading on-line, easily digestible content and therefore the more concise an article is, the better.

But with books, I often find that I simply scan through them because the content is so long winded or doesn’t get to the juicy bits quickly enough. If it were a spy novel, sure… build suspense, but don’t do that in a tech book I’m reading.

I want the information presented in an easy manner that is easy to understand or explained well. I am probably the most fussy of readers out there. Nicky Scrooby is a journalist friend of mine and that girl reads a lot. I doubt that I would ever come close to her with the sheer volume of books she reads. But nevertheless, I do try get a healthy dose of tech via well written books. (more…)

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iOS Succinctly – Syncfusion’s Free Ebook Reviewed

iOS succinctly free ebook syncfusioniOS Succinctly by Syncfusion is one of the most concise books on iOS I have read. It is the second book in a two-part series on iPhone and iPad app development. Objective-C Succinctly was the initial book and it covered Objective-C and core data structures used by virtually all iOS applications.

iOS Succinctly obviously assumes that you know Objective-C and am basically familiar with the Xcode integrated development environment (IDE). Both of these books are written by Ryan Hodson, so they obviously compliment each other perfectly.

iOS was designed with security in mind. Unlike other mobile operating systems (cough*Android*cough) iOS will not give your application access to the Apple device’s entire file system. iOS gives every application its own separate file system. This is also called sandboxing. What this means is that your application will not have access to files used and generated by other applications. (more…)

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Securing Your .NET Applications – A Summary Review Of Visual Guard

Visual Guard Summary NovalysI think any developer will agree with me that adding security features to an application can be an absolute pain. This is especially true if you don’t have a set template or module that you can slot into your application.

Well with Visual Guard from Novalys, the integration of security features is no longer a slog. Visual Guard makes this process very easy to do indeed. In a two part review, I looked at the functionality of Visual Guard. Below you will find a Visual Guard Summary which highlights areas of interest in my previous two detailed review posts (Part 1 & Part 2) of Visual Guard. (more…)

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Securing Your Application With Visual Guard – Part 2 (Dive Deeper)

Dynamic Permissions
Document Generation
Event Viewer
Visual Guard Authentication
Visual Guard Groups
Visual Guard Server
Check Security Actions
Managing Identity Federation With Visual Guard
Deploying The Visual Guard Repository
Final Thoughts

In my previous article, Securing Your Application With Visual Guard – Part 1, we were introduced to some basic features of this fantastic product. In this post I will dive a little deeper and get to grips with some of the more advanced features of Visual Guard. (more…)

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Securing Your Application With Visual Guard – Part 1

Visual Guard Features
Installation
Start Visual Guard WinConsole and create a Repository
Integrate Visual Guard Runtime with your Application
Connecting to your Repository / Set up your Application
Creating a User
Edit Password Policy

I think any developer will agree with me that adding security features to an application can be an absolute pain. This is especially true if you don’t have a set template or module that you can slot into your application.

Novalys Visual Guard

Well with Novalys Visual Guard, the integration of security features is no longer a slog. Visual Guard makes this process very easy to do indeed. In this post we will look at using Visual Guard with a plain simple Windows Forms Application, but Visual Guard can be integrated with .NET 2.0 and above, C#, vb.net, asp.net, Winforms, WCF, WPF, Silverlight, MVC3, MVC4, Windows Azure, PowerBuilder 8 and above, Microsoft Sharepoint and any technologies Supporting HTTP Requests (Java, C++…).

I have to admit that while much of the integration processes should be quite straight forward for most developers, the extensive help files and Developer’s Guide do warrant a read though in order to grasp some of the more advanced features of Visual Guard. (more…)

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