Website update with AJAX, WPF Password Manager, and Web Client Factory
Couple of things in this post. Firstly (and long overdue), I have updated my personal website to get rid of the Atlas CTP functionality and replace that with ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 features. There is not much actually a few update panels, and the inclusion of an AJAX Control toolkit control, the Accordion on the front page to help with useability and screen real estate. Here is a screen shot of the new layout:
With the website update comes an update to a way old application that I wrote many years ago as a kind of plaything, hack, whatever to test out cryptography streams and play with some windows forms features. This is the old Password Manager and is a .Net V1.1 app where only 1 encrypted file is used for storage, and allows easy merging (I used to have my lists on different systems and liked to merge them at later times). Anyways, it was really poorly written and not meant for much else, however it has been somewhat popular with around 1000 downloads (yeah not that much, but more than 1...)
The new version of the Password Manager I have developed is now available. It is fully .Net V2, and works fine under Vista. It is a much better written product than the first one, uses AES encryption and my very popular SecureString textbox control so that all passwords are held securely in memory. In addition, it is quite modular so that the engine is quite separate from the user interface. Currently it is supplied with a windows forms interface (the main one) but is also supplied with a very basic but functional WPF interface just to prove it's easy to wack a new UI on top of the main password engine. A screen shot of the supplied WPF interface is below (and yes, its very yellow.....)
It also comes with unit tests and all source code ofcourse.
Finally, as a lead in to my next post, I have been playing with the Web Client Factory lately, and I have to say I am impressed. In a previous post, I talked a little about how the MVP/MVC pattern is a little overused, and kind of hinted that a lot of web based implementations are not good. Well, the Web Client Factory uses the MVP pattern extensively, and is quite a lean, clean and very nice implementation of it. I a going to go further into detail on this in a later post and how to go about start using the PageFlow component.