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June 2009 - Posts

Monday, June 15, 2009 4:27 PM

ClickOnce and Security

ClickOnce deployment is another area where Code Access Security needs to be kept in mind. ClickOnce deployments will often be used to deploy Visual Basic .NET (or hybrid Interop Toolkit) applications from a website or network file share. In these cases,
Posted by Eric Nelson | 0 Comments
Friday, June 12, 2009 4:24 PM

Introducing code obfuscation

If you recall from an earlier post, I said that the main reason for signing an assembly and giving it a strong name was to prevent it being tampered with. For example, many of the assemblies that make up the .NET framework itself are strong-named assemblies
Posted by Eric Nelson | 1 Comments
Thursday, June 11, 2009 4:12 PM

Code Access Security in action – calling Unmanaged Code

The following is an example of how code access security might affect your code when calling unmanaged code. Unmanaged code is a posh way of saying “It isn’t .NET code, it is the stuff you used to write before .NET” :-) In VB6 making a call to a Windows
Posted by Eric Nelson | 0 Comments
Wednesday, June 10, 2009 4:02 PM

Authenticode and ActiveX controls

For VB6 developers, one area where asymmetric keys and digital signatures cropped up was the requirement to sign downloadable ActiveX controls using Authenticode. The idea was to sign the controls using a digital signature so that the origin of the control
Posted by Eric Nelson | 0 Comments
Tuesday, June 09, 2009 3:58 PM

Cryptography

The second big security area in the .NET framework after Authentication and Authorisation is cryptography. Again, the framework contains a lot of powerful functionality, and again there is an application block that makes it all a bit easier to use. The
Posted by Eric Nelson | 0 Comments
Monday, June 08, 2009 3:56 PM

Authentication and Authorisation

As promised , the first in a series of posts about security relevant to a developer new to .NET (such as a VB6 developer). These are what most people will immediately think of when security is discussed. Authentication This is proving your identity by
Posted by Eric Nelson | 0 Comments
Monday, June 08, 2009 3:46 PM

Visual Basic .NET and Security – a few posts are required

One of the reasons for moving to VB.NET from VB6 may be the more advanced security models available in the .NET Framework - this is particularly relevant in the ASP.NET world where many .NET applications will need a security system. In the desktop arena,
Posted by Eric Nelson | 1 Comments
Sunday, June 07, 2009 5:33 PM

Virtualization and Visual Basic 6.0 applications

There may be some circumstances where upgrading a VB6 application is not feasible, for example it may rely on a control that simply does not work in the target operating system. I came across a couple of articles on MSDN that discussed the ways that virtualisation
Posted by Eric Nelson | 1 Comments
Friday, June 05, 2009 5:27 PM

In VB6 we had the API Viewer, In VB .NET you get the P/Invoke Interop Assistant

VB6 programmers will remember a useful little utility called the API Viewer, the helped out when you needed to make a Windows API call. There is now an equivalent tool for .NET, the P/Invoke Interop Assistant ( http://www.codeplex.com/clrinterop ). Not
Posted by Eric Nelson | 1 Comments
Friday, June 05, 2009 5:21 PM

Enhancing your VB6 Application with Interop

I’ve been having a look at some of the samples on the Visual Basic Resource Center to see what’s possible when we start using interop between VB6 and .NET. Here are some of my favourites. This article, “Sharing ADO Recordsets Between Visual Basic 6 and
Posted by Eric Nelson | 1 Comments
Friday, June 05, 2009 5:16 PM

Adding to the My namespace in VB .NET

Just as an aside - after experimenting with the Interop Forms Toolkit earlier this year I wondered how InteropToolbox ended up in the My namespace – it seems like a useful thing to be able to do. I didn’t have to look far, the answer was in the ActiveXControlHelpers.vb
Posted by Eric Nelson | 1 Comments
Friday, June 05, 2009 5:13 PM

That old friend Binary Compatibility – and a FREE eBook on COM Interop

A favourite topic for VB6 programmers! Adding a reference to a COM component in Visual Studio adds a reference to a specific version of the VB6 component, so rebuilding the VB6 component without binary compatibility will break the .NET project (you’ll
Posted by Eric Nelson | 1 Comments
Friday, June 05, 2009 5:05 PM

VB6 Migration tools are not as expensive as you might think

How long would it take you to manually convert 50,000 line of Visual Basic 6.0 code to Visual Basic .NET. My guess is… quite a long time :-) However two of the key partners in this space have special versions of their enterprise class tools targeting
Posted by Eric Nelson | 0 Comments
Friday, June 05, 2009 4:50 PM

Aberdeen Group report on Migrating from VB6 to .NET

Aberdeen Group have created a new report “ Migrating from VB6 to .NET: The challenge of software agility in a volatile economy ” Some bits that stood out for me: 50% will migrate all the applications, 36% will migrate some (86% in total will migrate)
Posted by Eric Nelson | 0 Comments
Friday, June 05, 2009 4:35 PM

Visual Basic 6.0 Migration – due diligence is a good thing

Choice in general is a good thing. When faced with moving a Visual Basic 6.0 application to .NET there is plenty of choices to be made. One of those choices is “Which tool should I go with to migrate the code?”. My advice in general is “Try as many as
Posted by Eric Nelson | 0 Comments
 
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