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July 2006 - Posts

Monday, July 31, 2006 5:00 AM

More Symmetric Cipher Suites

Block ciphers are more popular than stream ciphers , with several either in active use or recent enough to require supporting for legacy interoperability. I'll talk about the RC2 and DES algorithms today and cover the newer AES algorithm tomorrow. DES
Posted by Nicholas Allen | 4 Comments
Friday, July 28, 2006 5:00 AM

Symmetric Cipher Suites

The list of commonly used stream ciphers is very short because there's really only one. RC4, developed by Ron Rivest, is essentially the only stream cipher that has been widely deployed. RC4 is very fast and found in wireless networking devices, as part
Posted by Nicholas Allen | 1 Comments
Thursday, July 27, 2006 5:00 AM

It Hurts When I Set the User Agent

Consider the following simple test server that uses no WCF code at all. using System; using System.Net; class Server { static void Main( string [] args) { HttpListener listener = new HttpListener(); listener.Prefixes.Add( "http://localhost:1000/" ); listener.Start();
Posted by Nicholas Allen | 3 Comments
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Wednesday, July 26, 2006 5:00 AM

This message cannot support the operation because it has been copied

Has this error message happened to you? It's because the lifetime of a message only lasts for one use. Once you've looked at the contents of a message, or copied the contents somewhere, you can't read the message again. This is a common problem encountered
Posted by Nicholas Allen | 12 Comments
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Tuesday, July 25, 2006 5:00 AM

Symmetric Encryption Algorithm Design Issues

When using symmetric encryption, repetition is the enemy of security. For the basic stream cipher and block cipher algorithms, an attacker can exploit repetition in either the input or key to gain information about the protected message. Stream ciphers
Posted by Nicholas Allen | 1 Comments
Monday, July 24, 2006 5:00 AM

Where They Are Now

I still get a lot of hits for the series of documentation articles I did back in April and May. All of these articles are now in the Windows SDK, which is where you should go if you want to get the latest version with updates. I don't make any changes
Posted by Nicholas Allen | 0 Comments
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Friday, July 21, 2006 5:00 AM

How Stream Ciphers Work

Yesterday I kicked off the topic of symmetric encryption by talking about block ciphers . Stream ciphers are another common pattern for symmetric encryption algorithm. Unlike block ciphers that operate on chunks of input text, a stream cipher operates
Posted by Nicholas Allen | 8 Comments
Thursday, July 20, 2006 5:00 AM

How Block Ciphers Work

Back in May I gave a brief introduction to encryption and decryption . The next few posts are a short series on symmetric encryption algorithms, which use a shared secret key for both encryption and decryption. I've got a little bit of coverage about
Posted by Nicholas Allen | 11 Comments
Wednesday, July 19, 2006 5:00 AM

BindingInspector Source Code

I thought I'd share the binding inspector program I wrote a few months ago to explore the different settings for the standard bindings series of articles. You can access all of the articles in the series here: BasicHttp NetTcp NetNamedPipe WSHttp WSDualHttp
Posted by Nicholas Allen | 0 Comments
Tuesday, July 18, 2006 5:00 AM

Inside the Standard Bindings: NetPeerTcp

The last standard binding in the series is the NetPeerTcp binding for the PeerChannel transport. The peer transport is a multiparty network transport that sends messages across a mesh of peers. The NetPeerTcp binding requires installing the Peer-to-Peer
Posted by Nicholas Allen | 2 Comments
Monday, July 17, 2006 11:00 AM

July CTP Released

The July CTP .NET Framework 3.0 and Windows SDK are now available for download. This release is primarily for people that want to track the bug fixes that have happened over the last month. I won't have a post detailing the exciting new features of this
Posted by Nicholas Allen | 0 Comments
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Monday, July 17, 2006 5:00 AM

Inside the Standard Bindings: NetMsmq

It's been a while since the last article in the series on standard bindings, but there are only two left to go so I wanted to finish the series off. These last two bindings are a bit different than the others due to their specialization. Today is the
Posted by Nicholas Allen | 4 Comments
Friday, July 14, 2006 5:00 AM

Pieces of the Messaging Framework, Part 4

Here's a cheat sheet for the different parts of the messaging framework and their responsibilities. Hosting layer Hosting environment. Provides a process for the service to live inside. Standard choices are console applications, NT services, and IIS.
Posted by Nicholas Allen | 2 Comments
Thursday, July 13, 2006 5:00 AM

Pieces of the Messaging Framework, Part 3

On Tuesday, I left off the discussion of the messaging framework with the messaging layer, which sits beneath the hosting layer and service layer . The messaging layer is responsible for actually moving messages around. As you may have guessed from the
Posted by Nicholas Allen | 2 Comments
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Wednesday, July 12, 2006 5:00 AM

What Do You Need to Send Data?

There are three transports that I tend to refer to as the "standard" transports of WCF: HTTP, TCP/IP, and named pipes. These transports receive a lot more attention than the other transports we've written, MSMQ and PeerChannel, although it's tough to
Posted by Nicholas Allen | 3 Comments
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Tuesday, July 11, 2006 5:00 AM

Pieces of the Messaging Framework, Part 2

Beneath the hosting layer sits the service layer. The hosting layer took care of mundane chores like reading configuration files and starting processes. The hosting layer ensures that the service has a good home to live in. Inside the service layer is
Posted by Nicholas Allen | 3 Comments
Monday, July 10, 2006 5:00 AM

Pieces of the Messaging Framework, Part 1

There's no easy way to describe the division of responsibilities between layers of the framework in a WCF service. Although we encourage a particular structure for handling messages, we don't have enforcement to back that up. I'll talk for a few days
Posted by Nicholas Allen | 4 Comments
Friday, July 07, 2006 9:00 AM

A Glitch in the Matrix

The autoposter ate today's regular post so I decided to fill this space with a quick Q & A about the future. Q: Now that the June CTP is out, what we can expect in the next big release for WCF? A: Here's the timeline for the RC1 release: Vista RC1
Posted by Nicholas Allen | 1 Comments
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Thursday, July 06, 2006 5:00 AM

Controlling Connection Pooling for TCP and Named Pipes

Continuing on the themes of changes and quotas, today's post is about how the connection pool quotas and settings moved for the connection-oriented transports. The last time I talked about connection pool quotas , these knobs lived on the binding elements
Posted by Nicholas Allen | 3 Comments
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Wednesday, July 05, 2006 5:00 AM

Consistency for Timeouts and Quotas

A few weeks ago we spent some time thinking about the right way to think about quotas. This metathinking was triggered by a fix for a bug in the service host. The WCF service model layer, including the service host, sits on top of the messaging layer
Posted by Nicholas Allen | 4 Comments
Monday, July 03, 2006 5:00 AM

Some Changes for Channels and Transports in the June CTP, Part 5

We spent a lot of time before the last release looking for parts of the framework that either didn't work or were unnecessary to get the job done. An amazing amount of cruft can build up in a design over time. A great idea or new feature is often accompanied
Posted by Nicholas Allen | 4 Comments
 
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