Tools Required

There are some assumptions that I’ve made while writing the application programming examples in this book. During the writing of this book, I used a Windows 2000 server and Windows XP workstation. There’s no guarantee that any of the code in the book will work with Windows 9x—in fact, most of the code won’t because Windows 9x doesn’t support most of the security features that you need to create a secure application. You must install the latest service packs for all products before the examples will work properly. .NET is a new technology and relies on the latest versions of many DLLs and the .NET Framework. In some cases, I’ll list other special requirements that you must observe before the example application will run.

I tested all of the examples in this book with Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Architect Edition and Visual Studio .NET 2003. None of the examples will work with any other programming language products and none of them will work with the educational versions Visual Studio.

All of the desktop application examples will work on a single machine. However, you should test network capable applications using a two-machine setup. The Web examples are set up to work on a two-machine setup—the configuration I encourage you to use to create a true test of the security features of your program. You can easily change them to work on a single machine setup and the book provides instructions on how you can accomplish this task. The mobile device applications are all tested using an actual device, but I also tested them using an emulator. Because the Visual Studio .NET 2003 IDE provides a built-in emulator, you might find this solution the easiest one to use.