News

We've updated the ConsoleAttributes class. The new version can switch between line input [the default console behavior] and character input. We also added a VB.NET version of the class.

The SSL subproject of the Security Library has been updated. This latest build fixes a problem where an SSL/TLS connection would suddenly hang.

This new release of the security library is a performance update. SSL and TLS communication should be a lot more efficient now [especially when sending lots of data over fast connections].

We've removed a bug from the Certificate subproject of the Security Library. This bug also caused SSL/TLS handshakes to sporadically fail.
Users of the Security Library are advised to update as soon as possible.

The final version of the Security Library has been released! It's been tested and known to work on a variety of platforms including the most down level platforms such as Windows 98 with IE 5.01.

We've uploaded a few new updates and bug fixes for the Security Library. Users of our library are advised to upgrade to the latest beta version.

We've released a new WaveFile class that -as its name implies- can play WAVE files. This class gives the user more control than our Multimedia class, but it can only be used to play WAVE files - other media formats are not supported.

There's another small update available for the Security Library users.
We also updated the documentation of the library a bit. This documentation can be found online over here.

We had some great feedback from our beta testers that lead us to another bug in the SSL library. An updated version is now available.

We found another bug in the SSL/TLS subproject. An updated version of the Security Library is available [version 1.0.13.670].

We've uploaded a new version of the Mentalis.org Security Library. It fixes some bugs in the certificate management subproject and the SSL/TLS subproject.

There's a new message board available to the users of our software. You're welcome to ask any (support) questions about our products in the appropriate forums.

The new version of the Security Library has finally arrived! It features a managed SSL and TLS implementation, several additions to the Cryptography section and new features in the Certificate Management library. People that are using the older version of the Security Library are strongly advised to upgrade to this new version as it fixes several bugs from the previous version.

We wrote a small x86 Assembly DLL a while ago that exported functions to get information about the processor [processor type, vendor, serial, features, etc]. We've updated the DLL somewhat and wrote a C# and VB.NET test application for it.

The CpuTime class is a class that can query the current CPU load. This is sometimes useful to dynamically adjust performance settings in server applications.

We removed a bug from the WindowsController class that caused it to malfunction on Windows 98 and Windows Millenium Edition.

We removed a small bug from the FileAssociation class.

We removed a bug from the Proxy server project that caused some problems with HTTP traffic.

We've removed some bugs from the Security Library that caused the handshake of some SSL or TLS connections to fail.

We've released our new Security Library project! This project merges the previous SecureSocket project and Certificate Services projects.

The Mentalis.org Security Library offers various security related functions, such as support for the SSL and TLS protocols, certificate management and cryptographic transformations.

The Url class now automatically fills in the default port number of well known protocols, if a port number is not specified. We also removed a bug in the ToString method of the VB.NET version of the class.

We uploaded a new version of the Packet Monitor project. The IsUserAdmin API function cannot be used on some Windows2000 systems, so we removed it and replaced it with a method that should work on any Windows2000 installation.

There's a new Packet Monitor project available. This project allows Windows NT administrators to intercept IP packets sent through one of the network interfaces of a computer. This can be useful when debugging a network application or when monitoring the network activity of an untrusted application.

We were notified about a bug in our SecureSocket implementation. People using the SecureSocket library should update to the new version.

The Certificate Services library is an implementation of much of the Windows Certificate API; it allows applications to load, save, verify and query certificates.
This library is the next big step in the development of our SecureSocket class, since the SecureSocket and Certificate Services libraries will be merged into one class library.

This is a small bugfix update. If you use the SecureSocket in one of your projects, I suggest you download this updated version.

We have updated the SecureSocket project. You can now select your own certificates to use during the key negotiation [currently only support for PFX/P12 certificates on Windows2000 and higher] and the search algorithm for a default server certificate has been significantly improved.
We also removed some bugs from the code that were pointed out by some of our users.

When I was writing a test application for our SecureSocket library, I needed to parse a URL into its components. I quickly wrote a small class to handle this and decided to put it online so other people that need to parse URLs too don't need to reinvent the wheel. The Url class constructor takes a string URL and parses it into its different components, which can then be accessed trough several properties of the generated Url object.

There's a new version of the SecureSocket Developers Preview online. It has several bug fixes and some new functionality (it's still a beta version, though).

We've updated the SecureSocket Developers Preview; it's finally feature complete, which means that it supports client and server connections, both synchronous and asynchronous. In addition, the SecureSocket Developers Preview also ships with a SecureTcpListener class, a SecureTcpClient class and a SecureNetworkStream class.

We've released a preview version of our newest SecureSocket class (a class that implements the Secure Socket Layer, Transport Layer Security and Private Communication Technology protocols). Unlike our previous version, it's 100% C# code and supports asynchronous Socket calls.

We have written a class that can query the whois information of a specific domain name, so if you ever need to query that information here's a small class that shows you how. Whois information contains the domain name, the name of the registrar, the nameservers of the domain name and optionally the address of the owner of the domain.

The .NET class library offers SSL support when you connect to an HTTP server, but unfortunately it does not offer SSL or TLS support for other Internet protocols.
There are several 3rd party libraries available that offer SSL and TLS support for .NET applications, but they cost a lot of money.

That's why we wrote a small wrapper DLL around the OpenSSL library (an open source freeware SSL and TLS implementation) and a SecureSocket object in C# and VB.NET that offers transparent access to SSL and TLS servers.
SecureSocket objects behave exactly like ordinary Socket objects; upgrading your projects to use the SecureSocket class is very easy.

Making sure your applications work with the internet isn't too difficult. The .NET framework offers some very nice interfaces for networking, like for instance the Socket class.
Unfortunately, these classes do not support proxies such as SOCKS4/5 proxy servers.

That's why we created the ProxySocket class; an implementation of the SOCKS4/5 CONNECT protocol.
With this class, you can connect to a remote host trough a SOCKS proxy server and optionally authenticate yourself with a username/password combination.

The .NET framework provides several ways to measure time intervals; you can use the DateTime.Now property or the Environment.TickCount property.
However, these methods are not very precise. In fact, the Environment.TickCount can have a worst case resolution of 500 milliseconds. If you need to measure short time intervals, these methods may not be good options.

That's why we created the StopWatch class. It implements the high-resolution performance counter API functions of Windows. It can measure time intervals up to a tenth of a millisecond.

The proxy project is an implementation of an HTTP, FTP and SOCKS proxy server and PortMap server.
It is very configurable and, as far as we know, very stable and secure. It is an excellent tool for .NET programmers that want to install a home network.

All the classes are fully documented and can be used in other projects that require similar functionality. The project does not require you to have Visual Studio .NET.

Sometimes you need to restart or shutdown the operating system from your applications (for instance, after the installation of a program). The .NET framework offers you an indirect way to restart the computer trough the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) classes in the System.Management namespace, however, there seem to be some problems in their implementation.

That's why we created the WindowsController class that implements some API functions to restart and shutdown Windows. It supports all the ExitWindowsEx modes and it can also hibernate and suspend the system.

INI files are not natively supported by the .NET framework although they are still often used. That's why we've made this IniReader class available that implements an interface to read data from and write data to INI files. It supports a number of different data types, including byte arrays (so you can always serialize a not supported object).

This class uses the Private Profile Win32 API functions, so it will not run on Linux or FreeBSD.

If you write desktop applications in .NET and you use your proprietary file extensions, it's always handy to associate that extension with your application. Unfortunately, the .NET framework does not provide an interface to do this. That's why we made the FileAssociation class.

The FileAssociation class implements an easy to use interface to add registry entries that associate your program with a specific file extension. For instance, if you associate your program with the file extension '.txt', your program will be executed whenever the user double clicks a text file in explorer.

We added four classes to the software section. It are four classes written in C# for the .NET platform that implement some things that are not available in the .NET class library, like pinging servers, showing the directory dialog, playing multimedia files (sound and video files) and modifying the Console layout.

This site, Mentalis.org, has been opened to the public. I guess you're wondering what you're going to find here in the future, but to be honest we don't know that either.
Mentalis.org will be a personal site; we will post whatever interests us (and potentially you, if your hobbies are compatible with ours).
The first section of the site we're building is the programming section. It will contain well-documented projects and class files that we want to share with you; perhaps you can do something useful with them.

Also note that this site will be updated very infrequently (whenever we have time).

If you have any comments or suggestions, email us.