The results of this work are two major projects - NpgObjects and PagedDataGridView. NpgObjects is a simple ORM framework to enable the mapping database tables to objects in the common language runtime. It contains a specially designed generator which generates classes in C# from information obtained from the database. These classes are mapping on the database tables one to one. NpgObjects allows all the basic database operations - SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE. PagedDataGridView is a component for displaying tabular data. In cooperation with NpgObjects can paginate database data and manage the flow of data into application. It provides a comfortable user interface, which can easily navigate between different pages of data.

The design and implementation of business intranet system for Hestego s.r.o. company in attempt to enhance the quality and efficiency of internal communication, business culture and awareness of empolyees is the main focus of this thesis. Current status, limited to use of narrow-profiled information system is described as a part of analysis. Furthermore, commonly used practices in implementing business intranet, together with broadly acknowledged advantages for companies are provided. Based on the gained knowledge, a solution relying on implementing an independent intranet system utilizing database system and .NET web application is proposed. Within the practical section, company’s requirements with regards to functionality and design, conforming with provided logo guidelines are presented. As a final part of this thesis, proposed solution is implemented, documented and deployed in corporate enviroment. Moreover, the advantages of proposed solution for the company are evaluated.

This diploma thesis deals with design and implementation of a network application for monitoring of computers for a chosen company. The application allows administrators to automate the gathering of hardware and software information. The purpose of the application is also to monitor hardware values, such as processor temperature or harddisk free space. The design uses client-server architecture. Three applications were created: server, client and graphical management console.

This thesis deals with creating client - server application. Client part of the application is created with a help of the Compact .NET framework and it is running on the mobile facility (PDA). Server part is written on .NET framework and it is running on the desktop computer. In the first part I characterize PDA facility, it's using and also I discuss communication between SQL Servers and PDA facilities. Next part describes .NET platform and advantages, which this platform provides. Also I tried to show differences between client - server architectures, because of understanding in my working. The last part of this work deals with implementation of the client - server application.

This work describes the realization of information system of a learning center. It handles about the development and perspectives of its further development. The main part of it is dedicated to the development of system architecture, specification, creation of models and diagrams. An other part handles about the implementation, usage of programming methods and techniques. Highly stressed is the standardization of programming workflow, which enables easy understanding and future development of the system. Some parts handle about the developed framework, which provides the basic functionality, that can be used in other information systems as well. The work also describes the solution of  the cooperation with  other external systems and the used technology.

Thesis (M.Sc.(Computer Science))--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

The capacity to engage in web services transactions on smartphones is growing as these devices become increasingly powerful and sophisticated. This capacity for mobile web services is being realised through mobile applications that consume web services hosted on larger computing devices. This thesis investigates the effect that end-to-end web services security has on the interoperability between mobile web services requesters and traditional web services providers. SOAP web services are the preferred web services approach for this investigation. Although WS-Security is recognised as demanding on mobile hardware and network resources, the selection of appropriate WS-Security mechanisms lessens this burden. An attempt to implement such mechanisms on smartphones is carried out via an experiment. Smartphones are selected as the mobile device type used in the experiment. The experiment is conducted on the Java Micro Edition (Java ME) and the .NET Compact Framework (.NET CF) smartphone platforms. The experiment shows that the implementation of interoperable, end-to-end, mobile web services security on both platforms is reliant on third-party libraries. This reliance on third-party libraries results in poor developer support and exposes developers to the complexity of cryptography. The experiment also shows that there are no standard message size optimisation libraries available for both platforms. The implementation carried out on the .NET CF is also shown to rely on the underlying operating system. It is concluded that standard WS-Security APIs must be provided on smartphone platforms to avoid the problems of poor developer support and the additional complexity of cryptography. It is recommended that these APIs include a message optimisation technique. It is further recommended that WS-Security APIs be completely operating system independent when they are implemented in managed code. This thesis contributes by: providing a snapshot of mobile web services security; identifying the smartphone platform state of readiness for end-to-end secure web services; and providing a set of recommendations that may improve this state of readiness. These contributions are of increasing importance as mobile web services evolve from a simple point-to-point environment to the more complex enterprise environment.

The mission was to create a prototype of a menu system for the company System Andersson AB. The instructions were that it has to be as interesting and modern now as in 20 years. We had to look at technology from the cutting edge of development to make our prototype survive in the future. Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) was the technique we focused on. There are only a few applications that take advantage of WPF today, but it is predicted that WPF will be the next generation method for developing applications to the Windows platform. To make our menu visually appealing, easy to use and at the same time functional, we followed the clear path and guidelines that are available in interaction design. Those guidelines tell us how the design process should be executed. Through usage of the six basic ideas of interaction design and taken the principles of richer user experience further, we were able to build a menu system that will be as modern in 20 years as it is now. We took the thoughts of physical design into account to make the menu understandable and easy to use. / Examensarbetets uppdrag var att skapa en prototyp av ett menysystem åt System Andersson AB, som enligt instruktioner ska vara intressant och modernt, även om 20 år. För att lyckas med detta tittade vi på "cutting edge" av vad som används idag för att inte systemet skulle riskera att bli föråldrat i framtiden. Tekniken som vi undersökte och använde oss av var Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). I dagsläget är det endast ett fåtal applikationer som använder WPF men utvecklingsmetoden spås vara morgondagens sätt att programmera windowsapplikationer. För att vår meny skulle bli estetiskt tilltalande, enkel att använda och samtidigt funktionell så finns det inom interaktionsdesign klara riktlinjer om hur designutvecklingen bör gå till väga. Genom att nyttja de sex grundtankarna: att ett system ska vara effektivt, ha hög verkningsgrad, säkert att använda, vara användbart, enkelt att förstå samt okomplicerat; i designen och att bygga vidare med principerna så anser vi att vi har kunnat åstadkomma ett menysystem som kommer att se lika intressant och modern ut om 20 år som det gör nu. För att menyn skulle uppfylla de sex grundtankarna, bland annat att vara klart förståelig och enkel att använda så använde vi oss av de tankar och teorier som framgår i fysisk design.

Presently, most spacecraft are controlled from ground involving activities such as up-linking the schedule of daily operations and monitoring health parameters. These activities lead to a cognitive overload on human operators. Imaging/science opportunities are lost, if any discrepancies occur during the execution of pre-planned sequences. Consequently, advanced space exploration systems for future needs demand on-board intelligence and autonomy. This thesis attempts to solve the problem of providing an adequate degree of autonomy in future generation of spacecraft. The autonomous spacecraft accept high-level goals from users and make decisions on-board to generate detailed command schedules satisfying stringent constraints posed by the harsh environment of the space, visibility criteria and scarce on-board resources. They reconfigure themselves in case of any failure and re-plan when needed. Autonomy concepts are derived in the context of complex systems by drawing analogy to living organisms and social organisations. A general autonomy framework may be defined with a six level structure comprising of the following capabilities -reflexes, awareness, self-regulation, self-healing, self-adaptation and self-evolution. A generic and reusable software architecture is proposed using hybrid multi-agent systems, which are arranged in a hierarchical manner using two types of decomposition viz. stratum and layer. The software architecture of the autonomous spacecraft is modeled as a stratified agent with a deliberative stratum, which achieves adaptive behaviour and a reactive stratum, which achieves reactive behaviour. Each individual agent has a generic structure comprising of perception, action, communication and knowledge components. It achieves the specialist capability through model-based reasoning. The knowledge models encompass: Planning knowledge describing higher-level goals, task structure and method of achieving the goals, Control knowledge encompassing the static and dynamic models of the spacecraft and Diagnostic knowledge incorporating the cause-effect relationships. The deliberative stratum is capable of planning in different time horizons and is, in turn, organised into a hierarchical agent system with three layers corresponding to different time horizons. It is composed of a long-term, medium-term and short-term planning agents, focusing on strategic issues, spacecraft level resources and specific spacecraft states respectively. The power of Petri nets is exploited for knowledge modeling as well as for plan representation. The ability of Petri nets to represent causality, concurrency and conflict relations explicitly makes it an excellent tool for representing the planning problem. Hierarchical Timed Petri Net is chosen for our modeling, since it captures the temporal requirements of the real-time spacecraft operations as well as facilitates the modeling of the system with multiple levels of abstraction. The necessary primitives for the plan representation are defined. In hierarchical modeling using Petri nets, refinement is done by a compound (high-level) transition. A compound transition models either a complex activity, which corresponds to high-level operation on spacecraft or a method, which corresponds to the agent capability. At the lowest layer, a transition in the plan represents a primitive command to the spacecraft, such as ‘switch on camera’. The Petri net unfolding technique, which is a partial order approach, is applied to derive the plans from the dynamic knowledge models. This tackles the problem of combinatorial explosion. A hierarchical planning approach is followed, in which the abstract plan is recursively decomposed using the unfolding technique and refined by way of exercising the appropriate decisions in each layer. The reactive stratum is configured with three peer level agents. The control agent executes the command schedule and has the capability for reflex action. Structural properties of Petri nets are exploited by the execution-monitoring agent and the diagnostic agent for system level diagnosis. Fault tree method is applied for fine granularity diagnosis. The resultant architecture is a cost-effective solution, since it permits reusability of knowledge models across similar missions. The knowledge models are formally verified for ensuring the absence of deadlocks, buffer overflows, recoverability and detection of unreachable modules using Petri net properties such as reachability, liveness, boundedness, safeness, reversibility and home state. The high-risk components are subjected to safety property verification, which makes the system rugged. The hierarchical composition of Petri net models (which are independently verified), preserves liveness and boundedness characteristics and thus ensuring the reliability of the integrated models. This, in turn, ensures that reliable plans are generated on-board using these good quality models. The models of the system components viz. partial order plan, conditional plan, dynamic world model, reflex model, resource model and the hierarchical models are developed and demonstrated using HPSIM and Moses Tool Suite, using examples from spacecraft domain. The long-term planning agent, with hierarchical world models, for handling high-level goals is developed and simulated using Moses Tool Suite. The plan generation using unfolding approach is demonstrated using VIPTool, which has the partial order analysis capability. In summary, the main contributions include (a) Definition of a general framework for spacecraft autonomy; (b) design of a generic and reusable architecture for autonomous spacecraft using hybrid multi-agent concepts; (c) unified knowledge representation and reasoning using Petri nets across various strata/layers; (d) application of Petri net unfolding technique in a hierarchical manner for plan generation; (e) use of structural properties of Petri nets for fault identification and location; (f) verification and validation of Petri net models using Petri net properties and (g) simulation and demonstration of the system components viz. partial order plan, conditional plan, dynamic world model, reflex model, resource model and hierarchical models, by developing examples from spacecraft domain, using HPSIM and Moses Tool Suite and demonstration of plan generation using unfolding technique using VIPTool.

The work targets the very important part of service oriented architecture -- web services. It is focused at one of its practical implementation, from the Microsoft Corporation, especially in the last two releases of .NET Framework. The main target of this work is comprehensive summary and demonstration of Microsoft web services development. The principles of web services and their base in the .NET Framework are described here. At the beginning of this work the web services are put into the scope of service oriented architecture and their main principles are described. Subsequently the .NET Framework is explained with its main principles and with the comparison to the JAVA technology. This part is finished with the explanation of classic ASMX web services. The main part of this work focuses at detailed description of the theoretical and practical aspects of web services in the Windows Communication Foundation and the Windows Workflow Foundation context. Even the development of Windows Forms application is not left out, because they also have done a large progress and they are often consumers of web services. The options of securing web services in the .NET Framework are shown both theoretically and practically including authentication and authorization. The methods of transactional behavior are shown too. The work also focuses at the orchestration of web services including the explanation of workflows with the deployment example. At the end of the work there is revealed how to guarantee interoperability with other technologies, how to manage web services and how to ensure their versioning.