At OffByZero, we use a wide range of operating systems including Ubuntu Linux, Mac OS X, and MS Windows. We also have a wide range of passwords and other business secrets that we must store securely.

Recently we went looking for a secure text editor that ran on all those OSs, offered an easy installation process and good user experience, and could be run entirely out of a source control checkout. We found nothing, so we wrote our own, with the intent of productizing it after we had dogfooded it ourselves.

It didn't work out exactly that way; we ended up writing three.

The first version was written in C#, and intended to run on Linux and Mac OS X using Mono. Sadly it suffered from several unresolved Mono bugs that made it unworkable on anything but MS Windows - and hence failed to offer a cross-plaftorm solution. The second version was reworked from the first to avoid the aforementioned Mono UI bugs; however it ran aground on a new set of Mono bugs, including astonishingly bad performance on Mac OS X.

So, we decided to re-write in Java and Swing. The process was relatively painless (it took longer to develop the installers for our supported OSs than it did to write the application in the first place), and we were left with a simple, secure text editor that we trust to store all of our important secrets.

Today, we're celebrating the release of OBZVault 3.2. Hopefully people will find it as useful as we have.

Windows Vista	Mac OS X 10.4	Ubuntu 9.04

We are about to release a product that is a built upon an internal tool we've been using for a while. One of the strengths of the product is that it runs on MS Windows, Linux and MacOSX through the wonders of Mono.

However we're being blocked by a bug in Mono itself; whenever I try to create an instance of the PageSetupDialog path, I get a NullReferenceException thrown by get_UseYardPound.

Anyhow, I've submitted it to the Mono team as Bug 499630, and I'll post any updates or workarounds as I learn them.

At the moment, my solution is to disable printing if the exception is thrown - which means the app is stable, but less functional on MacOSX. It's been one of those days, really ... :-(

Most .NET developers know they can use the MSDataSetGenerator tool in Visual Studio to automagically generate strongly typed DataSets from XSD schema files. I make use of this functionality on a regular basis, and naively assumed the generated code would build under Mono.

No such luck, unfortunately. There were two main problems; firstly, a custom attribute related to Visual Studio on the DataSet itself:

I am writing a simple application, initially for personal use but which I intend to productize. As is the norm (who me, picky?) I have a fairly exacting set of requirements. The framework in which I develop the application provide:

1. Support for Windows Vista and Suse 10.1 without any additional runtime installation.
2. A native (or apparently native) GUI on Windows Vista and Suse 10.1.
3. Test-driven development for the business logic and GUI layers.

Fortunately, all of the above can be done using .NET - specifically the Microsoft .NET Framework, Mono, and Gtk# - in a quick, easy manner.