Coding

Ever since I advanced beyond the “hello worlds” of Java, I had never stopped coding. This section is for documenting code usages that I had employed while solving the technological problems that I had encountered.

My experience with System.Data.SQLite in C#

It was time when simple file IO was not enough to manage data persistence in the .NET application that I had been building. Prior to encountering this situation, I had always wanted to gain practical experience with SQLite. With some googling, I found a .NET wrapper around the SQLite library that I could use in my application. This post documents my experience with using the System.Data.SQLite wrapper.

Implementing client-server communication using serialization and TCP/IP in C#

As software developers, we are always developing applications that can communication with other components: A server side script that echoes html to the browser, the client application that send information to a remote server endpoint and etc. One of the requirements that I got from my project was to display feedback from a windows service. However, because of session 0 isolation in windows 7, invocations of visual display logic from the windows service application is not enough to fulfill the requirement. In order to display feedback from a windows service application, I created a separate form application that runs when users log in and have the form application connects to the windows service application via TCP/IP to listen for feedback. Communication between the two applications is achieved via Object Serialization in .NET framework.

Sending a file and some form data via HTTP post in C#

A few weeks back, I wrote some logic to send a file and a from a windows client over to a Java server endpoint. There are a few ways to do that: via application protocols like FTP and HTTP or even implementing a custom protocol using TCP/IP. Since the Java server was already serving HTTP requests and that HTTP requests can usually get through firewalls quite easily, I chose the HTTP protocol.

How to retrieve the username of the user who logged onto Windows from windows service

Recently, I have been tasked to write a .NET application that will prepare the operating system environment for a user who had logged on a Windows 7 machine. As a first step, the application should grab some settings from the network by providing the username of the user to a server application. The application will then prepare the operating system environment based on the settings received.

Implementing the Singleton Pattern in Visual Basic.Net

Object creation can be expensive in terms of processing time and memory utilization. While there are cases where multiple object instances are inevitable to getting things done, there are certainly cases where only a single instance of object is sufficient. For example, if your program is only going to access a single database instance, it suffice to dedicate a single object that manages database connection(s) to your database server. Other examples are objects used for logging messages, objects used for loading/saving configuration details, objects used for managing threads and objects used for managing access to shared hardware devices such as the printer.