Daily Archives: September 2, 2004

WSE2 – do you believe in magic?

Tools

Well, I don’t. That is why I am spending a lot of time trying to learn how the pieces of cryptography that are being used by WSE work. And appreciating how hard the designers of the WS-Security and WS-Trust and WS-SecureConversation specs have worked out all of the what-if’s and come up with lots of cool ways to prevent them. Derived Keys are a great example of that.

But my problem is this: if you define a chair to me and said “well, it has a seat and 4 legs and a back”, I’m going to ask you what legs are and what is a back and what is a seat. That is exactly why I have been driving myself a little nutty with WSE2. Once I understand what legs are, how they were made and how they work, I am going to be a LOT more comfortable sitting in that chair.

Derived keys are made up of a combination of things. I need to know what these pieces all are and where they have come from, so I just keep reading and reading until I find an explanation that doesn’t just say derived key is made up of a few things and then move on. (Oh, if you’re curious, there are some great explanations: here and of course, here). Having looked this over, now I don’t mind just using the DerivedKeyToken class and passing it my security context token that I have created for a secure conversation and being done with it. (oh thank you Microsoft for WSE2)

I just don’t like it all being “magic under the covers stuff”. How about you?

Chanterelles

Purely Personal

Found a great spot in the woods with gobs of Chanterelles on our dog walk today. If this is my last post ever, you’ll know I was mistaken! 🙂 (Don’t worry, I have books and triple check everything on the web.) There are also some gem-studded puffballs (also choice) in here.

Huge report files created by Crystal Reports

Tools

My Crystal report files get bigger and bigger for no reason. I found this discussion of the problem on their website but as it suggests “unchecking the Save Preview Picture” option, which has never been checked in any of my reports, that didn’t help. Just because…I checked it, saved, built, unchecked, saved, built. My files are getting up to 2MB.

If anyone knows what is up with this, I’d be happy to know and to share the info here.

Google didn’t get me far.

FoxPro 2.6 (16 bit app) and new super fast computers

Just Rambling

Yes, let me get this out of the way. I have a FoxPro 2.6 application I still use to run a project for a client. In fact, I use the windows version to do the data entry and the DOS version to print out 300 pages of reports for them monthly. (All this STILL on Windows XP SP1 – thank you Raymond Chen & co.!)

However, I have a new computer. It is 2.8 ghz and has 2 GB of RAM. It’s the speed that is creating a problem, not the O/S.

I have found ONE documentation of this problem anywhere on the web and it was on www.experts-exchange.com so I thought I would also make note of it here. It wasn’t until I read the thread, that I realized the pattern.

FoxPro 2.6 still works, but after about 24 hours of uptime on the computer, it stops working with this error message when you try to start up FoxPro.

The Win16 SubSystem has insufficient resources to continue running. Click on OK, close your applications, and restart your machine.

I have mucked with file handles and all types of settings to no avail. Right now my solution is to reboot. But I will eventually juggle some computers around. Give Rich the one I just stopped using which is a little faster and newer and has USB ports and use his computer for doing this process. This is acceptable. It’s an old program. But I’m worried about the hundred or so people out there who use a foxpro real estate application I wrote and rely heavily on it. I have explained the problem pretty clearly on the support page for that product, but I think it will be a while before these people have to worry about this.

In the meantime, I need to test it on sp2, though I trust it will be fine.

for google: win 16 win16 fpw26 foxpro 2.6 foxprow

Update Jan 2006: I have loaded both FoxPro 2.6 Windows and FoxPro DOS on Windows Vista CTP 5270 and run some applications. I haven’t tested them throroughly (and not done enough testing to check on the problem that this post is about, but they run!)

Do you know about the Vermont Small Business Development Center?

dotNET

I didn’t until today. http://www.vtsbdc.org/

“The SBDC mission is to strengthen existing business entities, and assist start-ups through high quality, no cost counseling, and high quality, affordable training programs”

What an awesome resource. It’s not uncommon for many of us developers who are contractors or small consulting firms to want some basic advice (maybe accounting or legal) but it doesn’t seem to justify the high cost of a lawyer or accountant.

Vermont Software Developers Association – getting closer

dotNET

I am on the steering committee for a new group being formed in Vermont, the Vermont Software Developers Association (working title maybe). The steering committee meetings are getting more frequent as we head to our goal of having our first official meeting at the end of September in downtown Burlington. There are statewide and regional software developer associations around the country. This is going to help Vermont businesses who are in teh business of software (consultants, contractors or vertical market software companies), regardless of the technology they use, share their business knowledge and hopefully help the rest of the world with this common problem of being shocked when they here there are software companies in Vermont. Vermont is so well known for its maple syrup, cheese, Ben & Jerry’s and of course our cows. There is a LOT of tech going on here. A lot of very good tech. Just looking at the Microsoft spectrum here, we have had a lot of developer’s and companies on board with .NET since the very beginning and now many are pretty advanced. Anyway, I’m very excited about this. I will be contacting people from different sda’s around the country to see if anyone would be willing to talk with us to give us ideas of what has and hasn’t worked for them. Unfortunately becuase part of most of the SDA’s goals is to promote their area’s business, there is a slight conflict of interest. But hopefully, I can find some folks who will see past that and just grok the good for the software developers as a whole.