Been Awhile

I thought it had been long enough since the last entry. For awhile I was very busy which left me little time to work on the library.

Someone asked if VBCorLib supported any kind of encryption like the .NET counterpart. I had to reluctantly say no it doesn't. At that point I felt there was a big piece missing. Something that many people use.

I had been very busy so I couldn't do much with the library, however, things have slowed down a little bit. And through that crack of free time I've been studying the System.Security.Cryptography namespace. Cryptography is not my area of knowledge, so I've been having to study the CryptoAPI functions in windows and have knocked out a few of the classes to see how things can come together with such a large namespace. Eventually I will need to implement ciphers and hashes that aren't supported by the Windows API. But I want to have a solid foundation first.

The way .NET exposes cryptography is a bit different than normal in the sense that you can ultimately use a CryptoStream object to read or write data that gets encrypted/decrypted on the fly. My only experience in VB classes with ciphers is that I had to pass in all the data at once. Now I can write data in small chunks just like I would to a file. And the really cool thing about the CryptoStream class is that it reads or writes from an underlying stream, including another CryptoStream object. So you can use multiple ciphers simultaneously.

Well, it's a big set of very powerful classes, so like I said, I've been studying up on them to see how things work together. It can be pretty complicated at times. But, I'm sure it will be a useful set of classes.

Kelly