Posts Tagged ‘c#’

Accessing authenticated Google App Engine services from a .NET CF client

Monday, August 24th, 2009

Google App Engine (GAE) gives you an easy way to build and host web applications for free.

For any address you specify in your GAE app, you can require users to be authenticated. For example, if you have this in your app.yaml:

- url: /authme
  script: myAuthenticatedService.py
  login: required

When a user goes to http://yourapp.appspot.com/authme in their browser, they get taken first to a google.com logon page and promtped for their google username and password.

Only if they authenticate correctly will Google pass them back to your page, and let them access your /authme page.

(This is kinda nice, because as a GAE app developer, you shouldn’t need to see the user’s password. Although, I guess most users won’t make a distinction between typing in their username and password into the google.com login page and into a login form on an appspot.com page.)

If you are writing browser-delivered apps, this is all fine and works as described. This is slightly trickier if you are writing a web service that you want to be accessed by a client app. I wanted to access a GAE web service from a mobile client – this is how I’m doing it.

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Programmatically making an Internet connection in Windows Mobile in C++

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

Although a lot of people seem to be finding my Twitter widget for Windows Mobile useful, it seems that there are also a few people who noticed that it was hacked together in a few hours overnight!

One of the more noticed issues was the fact that the widget reused the mobile’s existing Internet connection.

It was described in emails such as:

Some times I have to invoke a data session with PIE or another networked app before it will let me send a twit. Anyway to make it start it’s own network session if one doesn’t already exist?

and in tweets such as

ooh i'm liking cetwit. But not you, twittoday

oh and a side note to data apps everywhere: if you want a connection, REQUEST IT YOURSELF. I have better things to do than holding your hand

The issue is that when you use the web services APIs, this is all handled for you. But I rolled my own HTTP POST code using the wininet API. And these low-level calls aren’t so helpful.

It wasn’t a problem for me, because my phone is always connected anyway. But enough people have mentioned it, so I figured it was worth looking into!

If anyone is interested in how you start a connection programmatically in C++, read on.

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Programmatically getting the CellID from your Windows Mobile phone

Wednesday, March 12th, 2008

I’m still on paternity leave at the moment, so time near a computer is limited to 20 or 30 minute periods in the rare occasions while Faith is asleep!

But in the last few days, I’ve still been playing with a few new geeky things. One of these is FindMe – a Windows Mobile application from Electric Pocket.

screenshot of FindMeThe basic idea is:

  • it gets the CellID of the GSM transmitter that your mobile phone is currently talking to
  • if it hasn’t seen this CellID before, it displays “You are in a new place” and prompts you to type in a name for where you are
  • if it has seen this CellID before, it uses the name you last entered for it

Then it uploads your name for the CellID (your description for where you are) to your Facebook profile.

Hey presto – location tracking without the need for GPS.

It works quite well.

I’ve played with location based stuff on my phone before but never tried to use GSM cell id before. I did consider it, but after failing to find a free database that could transform the cell id string into a location I could plot on a map, I didn’t really pursue it any further.

Playing with FindMe encouraged me to give it a try.

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Building C code for Windows Mobile

Saturday, February 16th, 2008

I was asked to get a C application working on Windows Mobile. Some colleagues at work have got some hobby code : a bunch of C files which they want to try out on a huge range of mobile platforms such as a slug. On Linux-based platforms, it’s apparently fairly straightforward – without too much work, gcc or some such compiler turns the code into a neat little executable.

Now the plan is to try it on a Windows Mobile device. And, probably cos I won’t shut up about Windows Mobile, they asked if I’d fancy giving the code a try on Windows Mobile.

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Cryptography with C# in Windows Mobile

Monday, February 11th, 2008

I wrote last week about an evening I spent throwing together a password manager for Windows and Windows Mobile. As I wrote at the time, one of the motivations was to try writing some encryption code.

I’ve finally got around to writing it, and wanted to post it here with a few comments.

This is what I needed code to be able to do:

  • Encrypt and decrypt data based on a user-provided password
  • Encrypt/decrypt consistently on both Windows desktops and Windows Mobile devices – a file encrypted on a Windows Mobile PDA should be able to be decrypted on a Windows desktop, and vice versa

The System.Security.Cryptography library in .NET makes this fairly straightforward – the class I have written to add crypto support to the password manager app needed only a few hundred lines of code in total.

I’ve shared a simplified version of the source at the end of this post.

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Displaying constant names (rather than values) in PowerShell cmdlets

Wednesday, November 21st, 2007

I’ve mentioned before that I’m working on some PowerShell cmdlets for WebSphere MQ. I thought I’d pass on a few tips that I picked up this week on improving the usability of the information displayed by Get- cmdlets in PowerShell.

The easiest way to explain it is to demonstrate with an example:

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