This is meant as a follow up to my previous post where I talked about the dangers of just leaving your keys laying around when you want to decrypt an XML file. Well, I devised just one solution that can help make your code a little harder to crack. This article will be a little easier to follow (I hope) if you read the last post, because this post is really a supplement to it.
One of my professors at Purdue always raved about XML and how it was a powerful language. I thought it was a cool language, sure, because you could make up your own tags, but the ways I could use it escaped me at the time. However, I’ve begun using XML as a database, and it coupled with XPATH have opened to my eyes to a dynamic data storage world. It makes it easy to create and read data, but it also makes it easy to share between applications. Up until this “aha!” moment, I found XML only to be useful for RSS feeds and weather data.
But, the easy readability of XML comes at a price: if you’re storing sensitive data, any person who can read has a pretty good shot at understanding it. So, I went on a quest to find out ways to password-protect or encrypt XML files, and found out that recently the .NET framework began supporting a few easy to use methods to make encryption/decryption a fairly simple task. I’ll cover both of these, with some caveats, in Visual Basic .NET, since that’s the language I’ve been writing in.
I’ve been insanely busy this last week! I haven’t had time to work on iPhone app development at all, because I started working with a client on a new site, among my other work. In my last post, I talked about my work in VB.NET and I was planning on doing some HTML5 + AJAX stuff. The VB work is still underway, and I haven’t touched any HTML5 yet (this whole working thing is getting in the way of me playing around with stuff), but I did do some templating work for my new client, that involved some work in Illustrator. The project called for creating some wave aspects, and Illustrator was my weapon of choice. I thought I’d share with you all my little technique for making (x-repeating) waves, Illustrator style! (more…)
Just making a quick post here to say that I’m stuck in a little holding pattern with iOS development. Apparently, I needed to have my OSX updated to 10.6 in order to install the iPhone SDK with XCode. Whoops! So, I ordered the upgrade since it wasn’t too much, and it should arrive sometime this week, I hope.
In the meantime, I’ll be working on client projects. We’re doing some cool stuff with a point of sale system, and then integrating a load cell with a code project. I’ll try to share what I learn here, if of course it won’t give away too many secrets!
I also have plans to make a little rock-paper-scissors game using HTML5 and JavaScript, so that way I’ll be able to say I’ve actually used HTML5, and it will be fun to develop. More coming soon!