Today I was made aware that in my series on Amazon SimpleDB for Windows Phone, I had mentioned that part 4 would contain some code samples and talk about encryption. I was confused for a second because I knew there was no part 4 and I thought the series was done. The series is not done. This is part 4 where we’ll show how to decrypt the credentials sent from the TVM.…

If you’re like me and are a developer used to working with relational, typed databases in C#, inevitably one issue will pop up as you write your code. You’ll be sitting there with a bunch of numeric data in your domain (table) and do a comparison or sort based on an integer. And the results will be f***ed up. If you’re a typical developer, you probably didn’t read all of the instructions on SimpleDb and that will be why your code failed.…

In response to a question in the comments on how to do a PutAttribute on SimpleDB, I’ve put together this post. These are fragments of code and not a complete source file. Hopefully if someone is looking for information, this can help as a guide. This code was written for Windows Phone 7 (i.e. Silverlight). To implement this fully, you’ll need to fill in the methods named CalculateStringToSignV2 and HmacSign. It is done via a GET method so all of the data is sent in the query string.…

One important aspect of accessing SimpleDB on a Windows Phone directly is that it isn’t going through another service that can handle securing the credentials needed to access SimpleDB. SimpleDB, like most (if not all) AWS services, requires two pieces of information to secure a request of the service: AWS Access Key ID and Secret Key. These are two pieces of data that I would rather not put on a device that people carry around with them.…

Almost immediately after writing the code to connect to the SimpleDB, I started running into HTTP error codes. No 200’s for me. Since my code is directly working with HttpWebRequest objects and their corresponding HttpWebResponse objects, I could just look through the response object and its properties to see what went wrong. But if you want to see what actually went over the wire, both on the way out and back in, there’s such a better way to do it.…

The first thing to know about the SDK provided by Amazon for .NET (AWSSDK) is that it does not work on Windows Phone. You can’t reference the DLL because it hasn’t been compiled as a phone class library. If you try to put the source code in and compile it yourself, it won’t compile. This is because the SDK contains a lot of code that just doesn’t exist in the subset of .…