.Net – geoMusings

Catching Up with Microsoft

2019-05-07 by Bill Dollins

Recently, I’ve gotten back in touch with .Net in the form of .Net Core. I’ve been shaking off some the coding rust and building some tools to help with data handling related to the Foresight data service at Spatial Networks. It’s been fun to get my hands dirty again and also interesting to see how .Net has evolved over the past few years.

It’s been a few years since I’ve done a lot with .Net and, after spending some time in the Node ecosystem, this was my first foray into .Net Core. The application I was working on just wasn’t coming together correctly in Node, so I started prototyping out the logic flow in .Net Core, with the intent to port it back to Node when I had a good reference implementation. The more I kept using .Net, the more impressed I got, so I just kept the application there.

Client Certificates In a Desktop Application

2016-04-20 by Bill Dollins

Lately, I’ve been working on a project that involved retrofitting authentication via client certificates, similar to CAC/PIV smart card authentication, into an existing set of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) web services and a desktop (yes, desktop) client application that was designed to interact with them. The first part was pretty easy to figure out; the second part was less so.

The truth is that the code needed for the client application is not onerous. The trick was finding any documentation/examples that pointed the way. If I had ever doubted that desktop applications are second-class citizens (I didn’t), this task confirmed it.

If you’ve accessed a web site that required smart card or certificate authentication (which are really the same thing), the dialog above is probably very familiar to you. With a web application, the browser is the actual client, and it detects that the back-end site or service needs a certificate. The browser then prompts you to provide a certificate and, assuming you do, passes you through to the site. With a desktop application, you need to build all of that interaction in. (In case you’re wondering why all of the certificates above say “DO NOT TRUST,” it’s because I applied a filter to show only Fiddler dummy certificates for the screen shot.)

Data, Apps, and Maps

2014-04-01 by Bill Dollins

It’s been a quiet month-and-a-half here on the blog, mostly owing to an abundance of project tasks. I recently started a short-term project to help one of my Federal customers extend data source support for an application they have been developing. This customer is technically a new one but the project team is made up of government developers that I have worked with on a few other projects so there is a great deal of familiarity.

The application, which has been under development for some time, is written in .Net and make use of the open-source (MIT) GMap.NET mapping library. The application features a desktop version running in Windows and a mobile version running on Android tablets. The .Net back end works seamlessly on both through the use of Xamarin, although I have not had the chance to get my hands dirty with that yet due to limits on Xamarin licenses and available Android devices. To its credit, GMap.NET seems to work fairly well in both environments.

SharpMap 1.0 RC1 Released

2013-03-28 by Bill Dollins

Over on Google+, Diego Guidi let me know that the SharpMap 1.0 Release Candidate has been released. There was a time when I worked with, and wrote about, SharpMap a lot. During that entire time, the stable version of SharpMap sat at some version number that started with “0.9”. The release of a 1.0 candidate is a signal that the project is moving forward.