Today I researched how to implement in C# a method that forces a COM port to close when it is open by another process. This was found to be a complex task that involves using undocumented Win32 API functions. I didn’t finish it because I found another way to workaround the problem but the idea

I am working on an ActiveX control that allows using a device for scanning personal ID cards in a Web application (based on ASP.NET). The card scanning device (called RTE reader) is accessed using a native DLL that communicates with the device through the COM port by using a proprietary protocol. It is pretty complicated

I needed to enumerate all COM ports in C# and get their name (e.g. COM1, COM2, …) and their description shown in the Windows Device Manager (e.g. “Communications Port”, “RT USB MRTD Reader”). You could find lots of unmanaged code for doing this but I think this C# code could be helpful to people who

Recently my team of 20 authors and few editors working on creating a contemporary book about the fundamentals of computer programming, data structures and algorithms is ready with the public official release of the book: http://introjavabook.googlecode.com/files/Introduction-to-Programing-with-Java-Book-v1.01.pdf. The book “Introduction to Programming with Java” focuses on the fundamentals of computer programming, logical, algorithmical thinking, problem solving,

Last few nights I was debugging very strange bug. Few months ago we shipped Java applet signing Web forms in the client’s Web browser. It was tested under IE 6, IE 7, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Opera 9 and Safari 3 for Windows. We tested with Java 5 and Java 6 in Windows and Linux

I use SWING for long time but I am amazed how slowly this GUI framework evolve and how far is it comparing to Windows Forms, WPF and Flex. One of the small missing things in Swing is that there is not standard way to display an error message with Exception stacktrace. So I created such

For development purposes and small applications I prefer using Oracle Database 10g Express Edition instead of the heavyweight Oracle Database 10g / 11g Enterprise. It can be installed and run for just 2-3 minutes but it has a small problem: by default the TNS Listener listens for connections on port 1521 from the local machine

Last week I was invited by InterConsult Bulgaria (ICB) as speaker at their 6-th annual software engineering conference in 12-13 September in Pomorie. My talk was about the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) trends in 2008: SOA and Web 2.0 SOA in Internet (Web-Oriented Architecture) SOA in the enterprises SOA adoption Virtualization and computing clouds Download