Month: February 2025

I’m working on a C# project, using a SQL Server database. I have been asked to add the possibility to work with another database.

The current database handling is done via some <db_Name>DB.dbml files and their corresponding files, so I’d like to have some file like that for the new database.

First, I have created the *.dbml file myself, I’ve added a corresponding *.layout file but that seems not to work out.

Then, I figured “Why not let Visual Studio such a file and I will fill it in afterwards”, but this led me to this other question, where the accepted answer mentions doing an “Add new item”, and then make the right choice in the “Data” chapter (“Linq-to-SQL classes”), but I believe this screenshot clearly explains my problem:

Now I have two choices:

• Either I accept I don’t have that feature in my Visual Studio 2022 environment, I don’t care and I continue adding the *.dbml files (and layout and designer files) manually and hope I will get it to work.
• Either I understand that there’s no way I can get this thing to work without that LinQ-to-SQL feature (or its replacement).

Can anyone give me a clue? And in case LinQ-to-SQL is replaced by another feature, what’s the name?

The world of AI is evolving at a breathtaking pace, and today brings an exciting milestone for developers and tech enthusiasts alike. Anthropic’s newest release, Claude 3.7, is now available directly within GitHub Copilot for Visual Studio 2022 17.13, heralding a new era of seamlessly integrated, advanced AI coding assistance. This new Sonnet model supports the non-thinking modes in Copilot.

How to Access Claude 3.7

Getting started is easy:

• Open the Chat Window: Click the Copilot badge at the top right of your Visual Studio interface.
• Launch Copilot Edit: Open the chat window to initiate an editing session.
• Select Your Model: In the prompt box, open the model picker. By default, ChatGPT 4 is selected, but you can easily switch to Claude 3.7 Sonnet to harness its advanced features.

If you don’t see Claude 3.7 as an option, there could be two reasons:

1. It’s not available for Copilot Free users. Only paid Copilot users have access to this model.
2. You need to enable the policy for 3.7 Sonnet in your GitHub profile. Make sure this setting is turned on for the model to appear in Visual Studio.

Learn More

For further details, check out the Using Claude Sonnet in Copilot Chat – GitHub Docs. 

We’re super excited about this enhancement to our development environment and can’t wait to hear your feedback. Let us know what you think!

I’m trying to import a user’s certificate from an SQLite database instead of using an actual file, but I’m encountering issues when attempting to use it with the pyhanko library for signing a PDF.

Here is my pdf-signer.py code, which implements a simple PDF signing process:

import sqlite3
from pyhanko.pdf_utils.incremental_writer import IncrementalPdfFileWriter
from pyhanko.sign import signers, timestamps
from pyhanko.sign.fields import SigSeedSubFilter
from pyhanko_certvalidator import ValidationContext
from pyhanko.keys import load_cert_from_pemder, load_certs_from_pemder_data, load_certs_from_pemder


with sqlite3.connect("pki.db") as conn:
    cursor = conn.cursor()
    cursor.execute("SELECT certificate FROM Users WHERE username=?", ('alice',))
    result = cursor.fetchone()


certificate_pem = result[0]
certificate_bytes = certificate_pem.encode("utf-8")
certs = list(load_certs_from_pemder_data(certificate_bytes))
user_cert = certs[0]

# Create the signer
signer = signers.SimpleSigner.load(
    cert_file=user_cert,
    key_file="key.pem"
)



root_cert = load_cert_from_pemder('rootca_cert.pem')

# FREE-TSA time stamper
timestamper = timestamps.HTTPTimeStamper(
    url="https://freetsa.org/tsr"
)
freetsa_root_cert = load_cert_from_pemder('tsa.crt')
signature_meta = signers.PdfSignatureMetadata(
    field_name="Signature", md_algorithm='sha256',
    subfilter=SigSeedSubFilter.PADES,
    validation_context=ValidationContext(
        allow_fetching=True,
        trust_roots=[root_cert, freetsa_root_cert]
    ),
    embed_validation_info=True,
    use_pades_lta=True
)
with open('input.pdf', 'rb') as inf:
    w = IncrementalPdfFileWriter(inf)
    with open('output.pdf', 'wb') as outf:
        signers.sign_pdf(
            w, 
            signature_meta=signature_meta, 
            signer=signer,
            timestamper=timestamper, 
            output=outf
        )

The SimpleSigner.load() method expects a certificate file path (cert_file), but I’m trying to pass a certificate loaded from the database as a variable. How can I correctly load and use the in-memory certificate for signing?
I have tried loading data as bytes from the db with (load_certs_from_pemder_data(certificate_bytes)) and other methods but i keep getting the error : Could not load cryptographic material ,AttributeError: ‘NoneType’ object has no attribute ‘get_signature_mechanism_for_digest’