This weeks looks like a challenging one
Well, progress on Anvil has been slower than I would have liked this week. I seem to be tackling challenges that I wasn't quite prepared for. Its quite interesting problems which has made it enjoyable, if it wasn't for the pressures of the end of month coming up.
Microsoft PSS still doesn't have a solution for me. I am disappointed to see that the support guys aren't using virtualization for testing purposes. The engineer assigned to my case actually contacted me and said it may be a few days (and up to next week) as he has to build an SBS environment. WHAT?? I would think there is a working VPC image for every product they have. It should take no time at all to bring up an image to work with. Guess they aren't dogfooding their own VPC stuff for this kind of thing. Thats really to bad.
The AuthEngine stuff has also had some of its own challenges. The guys at CryptoCard have been working well with me to get this stuff working in .NET. They have written a new COM object that I can use so I don't have to PInvoke the C library. Problem is, they still have to document it and provide some tests, which means its been a bit hit and miss for me as I try to learn this stuff. On the flip side, I have rather enjoyed working with the guys over at CryptoCard as every time I come across something I don't understand, they are able to fill in the blanks for me with very little effort. Typically with internal documentation they have in hand from others who have come across these challenges.
So right now I am waiting for both Microsoft and CryptoCard to get back to me on some stuff. In the meantime, I am mindmapping the workflow process I expect to use for the deployment and enrollment of tokens to users when in the field. While talking with Cryptocard they have offered some interesting advice on what sort of difficulties they have seen in the field, and I am leveraging that information to make Anvil more user friendly... while meeting compliance needs of different market verticals.
Hopefully tomorrow will come with some solutions to these challenges so I can make some serious progress. This week has been killing my schedule.