Any application using data benefits from having a separate data layer. This enables the administrator to select which data source to use. It also makes your application have an advantage, making it easier to sell.Besides from the advantages for the end-users, it’s also best practices to separate the data layer from your presentation and...

The Pocket PC I recently received was completely in French, so I figured 'I'll just change this to English'.It can't be that hard, can it? Apparently it was trickier then I thought.The Pocket PC has the OS in it's ROM, and it has limited ROM, so no multilanguages in there.It quickly became obvious to me the ROM had to be flashed with an English...

The Pocket PC I recently received was completely in French, so I figured 'I'll just change this to English'.It can't be that hard, can it? Apparently it was trickier then I thought.The Pocket PC has the OS in it's ROM, and it has limited ROM, so no multilanguages in there.It quickly became obvious to me the ROM had to be flashed with an English...

A while ago I blogged about Alternate Data Streams and how they are hidden from the users.At that time, you could presume when an ADS was present, it was something special, because not many normal files have an ADS attached to it.But yesterday I got an interesting question about XP SP2 showing a Security Warning when you want to execute...

Yesterday I gave a presentation about eID in .NET, if somebody is interested I have uploaded the presentation together with some sample code to my personal website: Cumps.beThe purpose of this session is to give an idea about what's possible with the eID card in .NET and what is needed to get it working.Some background information about eID is...

Yesterday I gave a presentation about eID in .NET, if somebody is interested I have uploaded the presentation together with some sample code to my personal website: Cumps.beThe purpose of this session is to give an idea about what's possible with the eID card in .NET and what is needed to get it working.Some background information about eID is...

Yesterday I got invited by Microsoft France to Paris, to the Wax Club, to see the French Visual Gaming Finals.My team mate, ZogStriP, participated in the High School competition there, so it was very exiting!It was also a very good experience to learn french ;) And to get to know Paris, where the people are really crazy in traffic. Apparently,...

I just found the Microsoft USB Flash Drive Manager trough Ohad Israeli and when I checked for updates, I got sent to this site, which had something funny on it ;)I think Google will like it Microsoft promotes their product above MSN Desktop Search ;)

When developing an application it’s possible to use debug mode to figure out why something is wrong, but when it’s time to deploy the application something else has to be integrated. To solution to this is logging. Implementing good logging functionality will make the Operations people who have to deploy your application happy as well,...

To configure the solution, Enterprise Library was used. This contained a Configuration Application Block which allowed defining various configuration sources externally from the application. This approach gave to ability to switch from XML configuration files to a database without having to change anything in the code. Because of this, it was...

After everything was done on the server-side of the Remoting implementation, inside the Windows Service, it was time to add the consumer side. In the case of this project, the consumer was an ASP.NET Webservice running on the same machine.This required little effort. First, System.Runtime.Remoting had to be referenced, together with the...

When the Windows Service was successfully running, a way had to be found to control it. There was a ServiceController class which allowed controlling a service and sending messages to it trough the ExecuteCommand method. This method was limited to sending integers without getting anything back. A better solution was to use Remoting to control...

Normally, a windows service is used to provide a system service to other applications, such as an antivirus service for example. The best practice for a business application providing a service would be to create a Windows Forms application, which runs on the desktop of a server. A user would be used to login to the server, start the...

To demonstrate the possible use of eID in Windows applications, I created a small client/server application. This application contains a central server, which listens on a certain port for possible clients. After a client connects, it has to authenticate with the user’s eID card. The server then validates the certificate and checks if it is...

Another thing I had to do was a feasibility study on eID. This means I had to look into this technology, research what the possible uses are, if they can be implemented and how they have to be implemented.The eID project is an initiative from the Belgium government, to replace the current passport of every citizen by an eID card. This is a...