Subsembly: the Smart Solution for Smart Cards in .NET - What is Subsembly?
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Subsembly is probably the first .NET class library, or rather a full fledged framework that can be used for easy access to Smart Card Readers and Smart Cards from the .NET applications that you develop. Using Subsembly not only allows you to use a convenient high level API to access and manipulate Smart Cards, but keeps you from having a hard time while trying to write a perfect P/Invoke wrapper on the WinSCard API.
To be more precise, it’s not just a wrapper on the native PC/SC API, but a complete framework that can be extended to support any Smart Card reader technology. The professional version of Subsembly for Smart Card offers support for MCARD API and the CT-API smart card readers, which are essentially different from the PC/SC readers.
Although it provides everything to the .NET framework for developing Smart Card enabled applications like the OpenCard Framework does for the Java Platform, it isn’t a stereotype of the same. It heavily improves upon the OpenCard Framework for simplicity, advanced features and utilization of the .NET framework primitives to the peak.
What does Subsembly provide?
The Smart Card Subsembly is available in several flavors to cater to the varied needs of developers. These are offered as SDKs that include extensive documentation and many sample applications with commented source code. It even offers a royalty free distribution of the binary Smart Card Subsembly with your product and free email support.
From a developers point of view the advantages of Subsembly can be enumerated as below:
- Reduced development time by eliminating the need to write your own P//Invoke wrappers.
- Using an OpenCard like High Level and more convenient API.
- Make your applications quite robust by not relying on the underlying actual Smart Card API’s in such a way that the same application can use a PC/SC Smart Card reader and a CT-API reader without any changes.
- Enhancements, Updates and Bug fixes with continuous development.
Furthermore, it takes advantage of the .NET framework to the max by having a complete implementation in the .NET Common Language Specification (CLS). Additionally, it supports C#, VB .NET, J# and all the CLS-compliant IL-oriented languages.
It also recognizes the PC/SC workgroup API compatible Smart Card Readers with support for T= 0 and T= 1 protocol. As I’ve mentioned earlier, it has built-in support for the CT-API compatible Smart Card readers. Recently, support for the ACR80 and MCARD specific cards has also been added by extending the Subsembly. That is what’s magical about the Subsembly: it allows you to extend it to any new card reader type. It even allows you to use any number of configured readers in parallel.
We can be grateful to the author Andreas Selle, or the .NET development team, or both, for providing the support for localization in the entire GUI stuff that Subsembly provides. Oh, I forgot to mention about the GUI! Yes, it provides convenient customizable GUI elements for prompting the user, PIN verification and PIN modification. And if you’re using an older version of the .NET framework, it’s still not a problem, because Subsembly supports v1.0 and v1.1 of the .NET framework.
Next: How do I use it? >>
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