Microsoft has recently announced an open-source application software source code analysis tool, Application Inspector. Modern software development practices often require building applications from hundreds of existing components, whether they were written by another team in the organization, an external vendor, or someone in the open-source community. Although this will bring many benefits, such as faster development progress, software quality, and interoperability, etc., it will also bring hidden complexity and risks.
In response to this situation, Microsoft introduced that its internally used tool is Application Inspector, which is a software feature source code analyzer. It can identify software source code features by using static analysis and a customizable json-based rule engine to understand the function of the program. (link)
Use cases of Microsoft Application Inspector
Identifying key changes made in a component’s feature over time to know about a potential a malicious backdoor or increased surface for attack.
To identify and scrutinize high-risk components and components with unexpected features
Using Microsoft Application Inspector is fairly easy as it is a cross-platform, command-line tool that produces output in multiple formats such as JSON and interactive HTML.
Windows Runtime, or shortly WinRT, is a new runtime (siting on top of the Windows kernel) that allows developers to write Metro style applications for Windows 8, using a variety of languages including C/C++, C#, VB.NET or JavaScript/HTML5.
WinRT is a native layer (written in C++ and being COM-based) that is intended as a replacement, or alternative, to Win32, and enables development of “immersive” applications, using the Metro style. Its API is object oriented and can be consumed both from native or managed languages, as well as JavaScript. At the same time the old Win32 applications will continue to run just as before and you can still (and most certainly will) develop Win32 applications.
Microsoft has created a new language called C++ Component Extension, or simply C++/CX. While the syntax is very similar to C++/CLI, the language is not managed, it’s still native. WinRT components built in C++/CX do not compile to managed code, but to 100% native code. A good news for C++ developers is that they can use XAML now to build the UI for immersive applications. However, this is not available for classical, Win32 applications.
Before you start here are several additional articles that you might want to read:
Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer is an open-source toolkit for building small electronic devices using the .NET Micro Framework and Visual Studio/Visual C# Express.
Build all manner of electronic gadgets quickly and easily with .NET Gadgeteer.
If you have been developing iPhone applications and are interested in building your applications for Windows Phone 7, this guide is for you.
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Encodo C# Handbook – Covers many aspects of programming with C#, from naming, structural and formatting conventions to best practices for using existing and developing new code. (English / October 2009)
The goal of this article is to describe a more or less generic way to access .NET managed object from a native C++ application.
Introduction
The goal of this article is to describe a more or less generic way to access .NET managed object from a native C++ application. I will present a dynamic link library (dll) which can be used, for example, to augment legacy C++ applications with the power of managed code. The library is written in C++/CLI which is the only .NET language which can be used to accomplish such a task.
All code was written with Visual C++ 2008, it’s also possible to do this with previous versions of the Microsoft C++ compilers, but Microsoft has done a lot of changes to C++/CLI for VS 2008, so it’s now much easier to use than in older version.
The “more” generic in the first sentence means that the library can be used to call any function (with an unlimited amount of parameters) of any managed class. The “less” means that the parameter types are limited to the native C++ types and a few user defined types (string, date/time, …). It’s easy to provide support for your own types, but therefore the code for the dll has to be extended by yourself.
ILNumerics.Net is a class library for .NET software developers. It greatly simplifies the implementation of all kinds of numerical algorithms. Generic, n-dimensional arrays, complex numbers, linear algebra, sorting, cells- and logical arrays as well as 2D and 3D plotting controls help developing perfomant algorithms on every platform supporting .NET.
