Using Casablanca as the communication platform for a client/server SCADA system

Question

Dear Artur,

I was really impressed by the great platform that you have been developing namely Casablanca.

I've been a C++ programmer for over 15 years and I'm happy to hear that Microsoft continue to invest in C++ and that this language is not going to go away.

My company develops a big SCADA system, that is composed from many different applications, that interconnect using TCP sockets. Some of them are clients, others are servers.

Some of the applications are written in C++ MFC, while the others (new ones) are written in C# WinForms.

We are thinking about replacing our proprietary communication layer with a modern one, that will also give us security capabilities (SSL/TLS).

We are looking for a good platform that we can base our solution on and Casablanca seems to be a very good candidate.

However, we have some concerns doing so, so we have the following questions:

1. We plan to release the new version of our SCADA system at the end of 2013. When will Casablanca be ready for production?

2. Our customer still has lots of client machines running Window XP SP3 (32bit) and server machine running Windows 2003 server (32bit). Can we count on it that Casablanca will be available for these platforms in the near future?

3. What about C++/C# application interconnection? Is it possible? how much effort it will be to accomplish this?

Many thanks,

Dudi.

Answer 1

Dear Dudi,

Thanks for the kind words!

To your questions:

1. We expect that the first supported release will come out before the end of the winter. It will follow the same support model as other Azure SDKs. Better yet, we will release Casablanca as open source (we're hoping early January), allowing you to fork it and modify it to fit your needs.
2. We hear about the need to support XP/W2K3 from people on this forum and elsewhere, so we decided to make XP support a priority. If it doesn’t get into the first supported release, we will try to add it shortly thereafter.
3. Our library is designed to target native C++, because the .NET already has rich networking and Azure support. We’re not doing anything special to aid such interop scenarios, but the usual native/managed interop mechanisms such as C++/CLI and P/Invoke will still work, of course.
   

I’m excited that you found Casablanca to be a fit for your needs. We're looking forward to hear from you more!

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Artur Laksberg Visual C++ Team Microsoft

Answer 2

Dear Artur,

Regarding my question about "C++/C# application interconnection".

What I meant was if it is possible to call WCF services from C++ native application using Casablanca.

Another question.

What about HTTPS support? We need to have support on both sides, client and server. I've read that there is no support for client side certificates. Is there a support for server side certificate on server side?

Thanks,

Dudi.

Answer 3

Dodi,

WCF is designed to take advantage of the .NET Framework and is best used with a managed language like C#. Using WCF will require going through managed/native interop, which is entirely possible but Casablanca will not be of help in such a scenario.

Regarding HTTPS: It is supported on the client, both the Desktop and Windows 8. On the server, we don't support it explicitly but rely on the IIS.

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Artur Laksberg Visual C++ Team Microsoft

Answer 4

Dear Artur,

I understand HTTPS is supported on the client side. Are client side certificates supported?

We need to support client side certificates since it is one of the requirements of our security officer.

Thanks,

Dudi.

Answer 5

Hi Dudi,

Right now unfortunately we don't have support for client side certificates yet. I've made a note that this is a feature you would like to see. We will take it into consideration and prioritize with the rest of our work.

It sounds like this is pretty important for you, is that correct? Is this an adoption blocker?

Thanks, Steve