Visual Studio 2012–First impression

The latest version of Visual Studio i.e. Visual Studio 2012 is no doubt a very promising and full of new features. I have experimented with the LightSwitch applications and I must say that this is quick and simple way to develop basic data management applications.

Visual Studio 2012 on Windows 8 will be a fun to use, as on Windows 8, it will allow to create Windows 8, touch centric applications.

“Exception Occurred” while refreshing setup project dependencies

A few days ago to make a build for a desktop project, I tried to refresh dependencies of a setup project, and encountered an exception with message “The operation could not be completed. Exception occurred”.

I closed the solution and then re-opened the solution to refresh dependencies again but again I saw the same error message. I searched the exception and have found some related problems and their solutions. Fortunately I found a thread on MSDN forums that pointed to a related thread on dotnet247.com which helped resolved my issue. As per the suggestion of the Good Answer on the page at dotnet247.com, I followed these two simple steps:

• Removed the Primary Output of the Entry Project from File System view of the setup project.
• Re-added the Primary Output of the Entry Project in the File System view of the setup project.

and voilà… the issue was resolved :)

Technorati Tags: Setup Project,.NET

TIOBE Programming Community Index - C is the TIOBE Programming Language of 2008!

TIOBE Programming Community Index is an index that determines the popularity of Programming Languages using the Search Hits by popular Search Engines like Google, Yahoo Search and MSN Search.

In the January 2009 Index, Java language is still leading the charts but the most surprising entry in the index is C language which is ranked as the 2nd Most Popular language. You can see the full history of C language popularity by visiting this page for C language on TIOBE site.

TIOBE Programming Community Index for January 2009

The Index indicates that Java language is on top with 19.022% rating which surprised me. I was somehow assuming that .Net based languages will be leading the popularity charts. To make myself feel better about my understanding I added the popularity ratings of Visual Basic and C# i.e. 9.161% and 5.609%. This simple calculation yielded a somewhat good number i.e. 14.77%. The index page also states that it has excluded the ASP and ASP .Net from the list of programming languages as they use other programming languages like VB .Net and C# .Net. This could also be the reason that Visual Basic and C# have lower popularity ratings compared to the Java language.

The TIOBE Programming community index contains a link to the definition of the index. The TIOBE Index Definition page contains usefull information about the index as well as it contains some advise with reference to the adaptation of a Programming Language. I am quoting the part of the page that I think is the most important to read.

From a supportability point of view, it is strongly advised to stick to mainstream languages for industrial, mission-critical software systems. This is for three reasons:

• The pool of skilled engineers is much smaller for non-mainstream languages
• Tool vendors do not write and maintain tools for non-mainstream languages
• In general fewer libraries are available for non-mainstream languages

Visit the TIOBE Programming Index page and give it a read. You will not regret the time you spent on that page.

Happing Coding!

Odd way to disallow execution of a Public method of an assembly - .Net Framework 2.0

I was trying to find a way to limit the execution of some public methods of a class in an assembly from assemblies which I have not written.

Let me first explain you the problem I was facing, then I will share the approaches I had tried or thought, and finally the ODD WAY I have figured to overcome the problem I was facing.

Problem:

I have a helper class, say CryptoHelper, in one of my assemblies to encrypt/decrypt the information. The class contains all the necessary information to encrypt/decrypt the string data passed to its public methods namely Encrypt and Decrypt. The user of the class simply instantiates it, sets the encryption algorithm provider and uses the methods

Scope of class is Public because I have to use it in other assemblies for encryption/decryption. I am happy with the helper class, as it is helping me very well in encrypting/decrypting the text passed to it. The problem I see here is that I have stored encrypted information in database using the class and the assembly deployed at client’s end can be used by some knowledgeable person to decrypt the information stored using the class in the assembly.

I want to stop the use of class from code that I have not written, or more specifically, the code that is not part of the project for which the assembly is deployed.

Approaches:

Following are the approaches I thought, and the reason why I have rejected them.

1. Obfuscate the code: Believe me, I seriously thought about obfuscating the code. This was the first idea that struck into my mind, but the very next minute I rejected the idea because I love the call stack information in the exception trace log. I don’t want to get lost into translation.
2. Use System.Runtime.CompilerServices.InternalsVisibleToAttribute: I don’t have any explanation to why I have rejected the option of using the InternalsVisibleToAttribute [See MSDN Library], but I have a story to tell you about how hard luck forces one to find the ODD WAY out. I was happy to find the attribute and changed the class scope from public to friend. I used the attribute in AssemblyInfo.vb file specifying the friend assembly name and friend assembly Public Key Token. Upon recompiling the project … I was shocked to see the compilation errors in the code that was using the class. The code that was consuming the class stopped recognizing the class. I tried again and again, following the instructions as specified in the MSDN documentation but it didn’t worked for me. I googled again and again to find the reason of failure, and after quite effort I have found the answer to my problem. Tim Ng, Microsoft Visual Basic Team member, had a bad news for me. According to his blog entry, the InternalsVisibleToAttribute doesn’t work with Visual Basic 2005 compiler.

ODD WAY:

The ODD WAY I have found is to use the assembly signing information to check if the calling code is signed with same key as that of the assembly which holds my CryptoHelper class. In Encrypt and Decrypt methods I have added a conditional statement which checks if the Calling Assembly’s Public Key Token Matches with the Public Key Token of Executing Assembly. Look at the following code snippet to get better understanding of what I am saying.

Public Function Decrypt(ByVal strTextToDecrypt As String) As String

‘……….

If System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetName().GetPublicKeyToken().Equals( _

System.Reflection.Assembly.GetCallingAssembly().GetName().GetPublicKeyToken()) = True Then

‘Code to decrypt the text

Else

Throw New NotSupportedException(“You are not allowed to use this method”)

End If

Return strDecryptedText

End Function

This is my ODD WAY out to fix the issue.

One quick improvement to the solution is to throw the exception from the class constructor using the logic mentioned above in the code.

I will look into the other improvements as well, but for now, I am going to end this post here.

Happy coding.

Jawwad Alam

Nothing to Write

I have nothing to write here.. but I want to fill the space.. I want to write something about someone.. but I am lost 

I have mixed feelings at the moment. I love reading books and hope that I could write a fascinating book in my life..

Do I need to finish this blog entry or should I continue..

I think I should end this entry right here