Mutual Authentication (2-way SSL)

I had to look into this today for a project I am working on. I found this blog which I think explains the concept very nicely.

One Way and Two Way SSL and TLS

Rich Client UI

Moving on to the UI the final step in proving the traditional n-tier and DAL architecture is to have a WinForms application that references only the Business Logic layer. Throughout this p.o.c. I have only coded up the reading part of the DAL CRUD operation, the reason for that being one of brevity. I could of course go back and code up the full operation if I so desired, but in this case the p.o.c will remain just that.

I created a WinForms app and added a ListView control to Form1, setting the properties to detailed view and adding two columns. I then added a handler for the Load method of the form as shown below and added the code to read the assets from the database and display them on the “grid”.

using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using BL;

namespace UIAssetTestHarness

{
    public partial class Form1 : Form
    {
        public Form1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }

        private void Form1_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)

        {
            // Load the grid with the asset data
            BLAssets assets = new BLAssets();
            List<UIAsset> assetsList = assets.GetAssets();
            foreach (UIAsset asset in assetsList)
            {
                ListViewItem item = new ListViewItem(asset.AssetTag);
                item.SubItems.Add(asset.Description);
                lstAssets.Items.Add(item);
            }
        }
    }
}

And that’s it. If I were to pursue this p.o.c any further it would be to code the BL layer as web services and have the UI consume those. I’ll be doing that later on.

Mike's Knowledgebase

I found this post REALLY helpful and worth a couple of hours working through the tutorials. It takes you through the process of setting up a WCF web service with a JSON payload to perform CRUD operations against SQL Server, and ultimately consume the service(s) in iOS.

http://mikesknowledgebase.com/pages/Services/WebServices.htm

RESTful web services

I've written SOAP WCF web services and I have heard the terms JSON (pronounced Jason) and RESTful services but I certainly have never written one or fully understand what they are. Wikipedia is always a good place to start, but a Google search of "rest web service example C#" came up with a very interesting first hit. I've spent some time today reading this article and looking at the code behind it.

REST Web Service using C# A walkthrough

Now I understand why Steve said I should use REST web services if I want my app to be usable on Android.