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• "Refreshing" an XML feed on iPhone/Mac OSX

  - by Steve

  Hi all, I'm curious for those of you who are building iPhone apps based on REST/SOAP/XML-RPC or simply pulling down a dynamic XML feed, what does it mean exactly to you when a user says 'refresh' the feed? The straight forward way is to populate some collection, say an NSMutableArray, with whatever you bring down from the feed. If a widget on the UI is available to refresh, I typically do something like: [myMutableArray removeAllObjects]; // follow steps to repopulate myMutableArray It seems this is the least efficient algorithm for refreshing an XML feed. For instance many folks who are building Twitter clients, are appending changes to their existing feed, versus bringing down the entire feed in its complete form again. What kind of algorithms are you using to "refresh" your models when speaking to a server-side data source? Thanks all.

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• Ways to Unit Test Oauth for different services in ruby?

  - by viatropos

  Are there any best practices in writing unit tests when 90% of the time I'm building the Oauth connecting class, I need to actually be logging into the remote service? I am building a rubygem that logs in to Twitter/Google/MySpace, etc., and the hardest part is making sure I have the settings right for that particular provider, and I would like to write tests for that. Is there a recommended way to do that? If I did mocks or stubs, I'd still have to spend that 90% of the time figuring out how to use the service, and would end up writing tests after the fact instead of before...

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• Rounded corners, is this Mozilla specific?

  - by public static

  I was looking at how some site implemented rounded corners, and the CSS had these odd tags that I've never really seen before. -moz-border-radius-topright: 5px; -webkit-border-top-right-radius: 5px; -moz-border-radius-bottomright: 5px; -webkit-border-bottom-right-radius: 5px; I googled it, and they seem to be Firefox specific tags? Update The site I was looking at was twitter, it's wierd how a site like that would alienate their IE users.

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• Parsing a string for dates in PHP

  - by nickf

  Given an arbitrary string, for example ("I'm going to play croquet next Friday" or "Gadzooks, is it 17th June already?"), how would you go about extracting the dates from there? If this is looking like a good candidate for the too-hard basket, perhaps you could suggest an alternative. I want to be able to parse Twitter messages for dates. The tweets I'd be looking at would be ones which users are directing at this service, so they could be coached into using an easier format, however I'd like it to be as transparent as possible. Is there a good middle ground you could think of?

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• Creating a dynamic, extensible C# Expando Object

  - by Rick Strahl

  I love dynamic functionality in a strongly typed language because it offers us the best of both worlds. In C# (or any of the main .NET languages) we now have the dynamic type that provides a host of dynamic features for the static C# language. One place where I've found dynamic to be incredibly useful is in building extensible types or types that expose traditionally non-object data (like dictionaries) in easier to use and more readable syntax. I wrote about a couple of these for accessing old school ADO.NET DataRows and DataReaders more easily for example. These classes are dynamic wrappers that provide easier syntax and auto-type conversions which greatly simplifies code clutter and increases clarity in existing code. ExpandoObject in .NET 4.0 Another great use case for dynamic objects is the ability to create extensible objects - objects that start out with a set of static members and then can add additional properties and even methods dynamically. The .NET 4.0 framework actually includes an ExpandoObject class which provides a very dynamic object that allows you to add properties and methods on the fly and then access them again. For example with ExpandoObject you can do stuff like this:dynamic expand = new ExpandoObject(); expand.Name = "Rick"; expand.HelloWorld = (Func<string, string>) ((string name) => { return "Hello " + name; }); Console.WriteLine(expand.Name); Console.WriteLine(expand.HelloWorld("Dufus")); Internally ExpandoObject uses a Dictionary like structure and interface to store properties and methods and then allows you to add and access properties and methods easily. As cool as ExpandoObject is it has a few shortcomings too: It's a sealed type so you can't use it as a base class It only works off 'properties' in the internal Dictionary - you can't expose existing type data It doesn't serialize to XML or with DataContractSerializer/DataContractJsonSerializer Expando - A truly extensible Object ExpandoObject is nice if you just need a dynamic container for a dictionary like structure. However, if you want to build an extensible object that starts out with a set of strongly typed properties and then allows you to extend it, ExpandoObject does not work because it's a sealed class that can't be inherited. I started thinking about this very scenario for one of my applications I'm building for a customer. In this system we are connecting to various different user stores. Each user store has the same basic requirements for username, password, name etc. But then each store also has a number of extended properties that is available to each application. In the real world scenario the data is loaded from the database in a data reader and the known properties are assigned from the known fields in the database. All unknown fields are then 'added' to the expando object dynamically. In the past I've done this very thing with a separate property - Properties - just like I do for this class. But the property and dictionary syntax is not ideal and tedious to work with. I started thinking about how to represent these extra property structures. One way certainly would be to add a Dictionary, or an ExpandoObject to hold all those extra properties. But wouldn't it be nice if the application could actually extend an existing object that looks something like this as you can with the Expando object:public class User : Westwind.Utilities.Dynamic.Expando { public string Email { get; set; } public string Password { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public bool Active { get; set; } public DateTime? ExpiresOn { get; set; } } and then simply start extending the properties of this object dynamically? Using the Expando object I describe later you can now do the following:[TestMethod] public void UserExampleTest() { var user = new User(); // Set strongly typed properties user.Email = "[email protected]"; user.Password = "nonya123"; user.Name = "Rickochet"; user.Active = true; // Now add dynamic properties dynamic duser = user; duser.Entered = DateTime.Now; duser.Accesses = 1; // you can also add dynamic props via indexer user["NickName"] = "AntiSocialX"; duser["WebSite"] = "http://www.west-wind.com/weblog"; // Access strong type through dynamic ref Assert.AreEqual(user.Name,duser.Name); // Access strong type through indexer Assert.AreEqual(user.Password,user["Password"]); // access dyanmically added value through indexer Assert.AreEqual(duser.Entered,user["Entered"]); // access index added value through dynamic Assert.AreEqual(user["NickName"],duser.NickName); // loop through all properties dynamic AND strong type properties (true) foreach (var prop in user.GetProperties(true)) { object val = prop.Value; if (val == null) val = "null"; Console.WriteLine(prop.Key + ": " + val.ToString()); } } As you can see this code somewhat blurs the line between a static and dynamic type. You start with a strongly typed object that has a fixed set of properties. You can then cast the object to dynamic (as I discussed in my last post) and add additional properties to the object. You can also use an indexer to add dynamic properties to the object. To access the strongly typed properties you can use either the strongly typed instance, the indexer or the dynamic cast of the object. Personally I think it's kinda cool to have an easy way to access strongly typed properties by string which can make some data scenarios much easier. To access the 'dynamically added' properties you can use either the indexer on the strongly typed object, or property syntax on the dynamic cast. Using the dynamic type allows all three modes to work on both strongly typed and dynamic properties. Finally you can iterate over all properties, both dynamic and strongly typed if you chose. Lots of flexibility. Note also that by default the Expando object works against the (this) instance meaning it extends the current object. You can also pass in a separate instance to the constructor in which case that object will be used to iterate over to find properties rather than this. Using this approach provides some really interesting functionality when use the dynamic type. To use this we have to add an explicit constructor to the Expando subclass:public class User : Westwind.Utilities.Dynamic.Expando { public string Email { get; set; } public string Password { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public bool Active { get; set; } public DateTime? ExpiresOn { get; set; } public User() : base() { } // only required if you want to mix in seperate instance public User(object instance) : base(instance) { } } to allow the instance to be passed. When you do you can now do:[TestMethod] public void ExpandoMixinTest() { // have Expando work on Addresses var user = new User( new Address() ); // cast to dynamicAccessToPropertyTest dynamic duser = user; // Set strongly typed properties duser.Email = "[email protected]"; user.Password = "nonya123"; // Set properties on address object duser.Address = "32 Kaiea"; //duser.Phone = "808-123-2131"; // set dynamic properties duser.NonExistantProperty = "This works too"; // shows default value Address.Phone value Console.WriteLine(duser.Phone); } Using the dynamic cast in this case allows you to access *three* different 'objects': The strong type properties, the dynamically added properties in the dictionary and the properties of the instance passed in! Effectively this gives you a way to simulate multiple inheritance (which is scary - so be very careful with this, but you can do it). How Expando works Behind the scenes Expando is a DynamicObject subclass as I discussed in my last post. By implementing a few of DynamicObject's methods you can basically create a type that can trap 'property missing' and 'method missing' operations. When you access a non-existant property a known method is fired that our code can intercept and provide a value for. Internally Expando uses a custom dictionary implementation to hold the dynamic properties you might add to your expandable object. Let's look at code first. The code for the Expando type is straight forward and given what it provides relatively short. Here it is.using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Dynamic; using System.Reflection; namespace Westwind.Utilities.Dynamic { /// <summary> /// Class that provides extensible properties and methods. This /// dynamic object stores 'extra' properties in a dictionary or /// checks the actual properties of the instance. /// /// This means you can subclass this expando and retrieve either /// native properties or properties from values in the dictionary. /// /// This type allows you three ways to access its properties: /// /// Directly: any explicitly declared properties are accessible /// Dynamic: dynamic cast allows access to dictionary and native properties/methods /// Dictionary: Any of the extended properties are accessible via IDictionary interface /// </summary> [Serializable] public class Expando : DynamicObject, IDynamicMetaObjectProvider { /// <summary> /// Instance of object passed in /// </summary> object Instance; /// <summary> /// Cached type of the instance /// </summary> Type InstanceType; PropertyInfo[] InstancePropertyInfo { get { if (_InstancePropertyInfo == null && Instance != null) _InstancePropertyInfo = Instance.GetType().GetProperties(BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.DeclaredOnly); return _InstancePropertyInfo; } } PropertyInfo[] _InstancePropertyInfo; /// <summary> /// String Dictionary that contains the extra dynamic values /// stored on this object/instance /// </summary> /// <remarks>Using PropertyBag to support XML Serialization of the dictionary</remarks> public PropertyBag Properties = new PropertyBag(); //public Dictionary<string,object> Properties = new Dictionary<string, object>(); /// <summary> /// This constructor just works off the internal dictionary and any /// public properties of this object. /// /// Note you can subclass Expando. /// </summary> public Expando() { Initialize(this); } /// <summary> /// Allows passing in an existing instance variable to 'extend'. /// </summary> /// <remarks> /// You can pass in null here if you don't want to /// check native properties and only check the Dictionary! /// </remarks> /// <param name="instance"></param> public Expando(object instance) { Initialize(instance); } protected virtual void Initialize(object instance) { Instance = instance; if (instance != null) InstanceType = instance.GetType(); } /// <summary> /// Try to retrieve a member by name first from instance properties /// followed by the collection entries. /// </summary> /// <param name="binder"></param> /// <param name="result"></param> /// <returns></returns> public override bool TryGetMember(GetMemberBinder binder, out object result) { result = null; // first check the Properties collection for member if (Properties.Keys.Contains(binder.Name)) { result = Properties[binder.Name]; return true; } // Next check for Public properties via Reflection if (Instance != null) { try { return GetProperty(Instance, binder.Name, out result); } catch { } } // failed to retrieve a property result = null; return false; } /// <summary> /// Property setter implementation tries to retrieve value from instance /// first then into this object /// </summary> /// <param name="binder"></param> /// <param name="value"></param> /// <returns></returns> public override bool TrySetMember(SetMemberBinder binder, object value) { // first check to see if there's a native property to set if (Instance != null) { try { bool result = SetProperty(Instance, binder.Name, value); if (result) return true; } catch { } } // no match - set or add to dictionary Properties[binder.Name] = value; return true; } /// <summary> /// Dynamic invocation method. Currently allows only for Reflection based /// operation (no ability to add methods dynamically). /// </summary> /// <param name="binder"></param> /// <param name="args"></param> /// <param name="result"></param> /// <returns></returns> public override bool TryInvokeMember(InvokeMemberBinder binder, object[] args, out object result) { if (Instance != null) { try { // check instance passed in for methods to invoke if (InvokeMethod(Instance, binder.Name, args, out result)) return true; } catch { } } result = null; return false; } /// <summary> /// Reflection Helper method to retrieve a property /// </summary> /// <param name="instance"></param> /// <param name="name"></param> /// <param name="result"></param> /// <returns></returns> protected bool GetProperty(object instance, string name, out object result) { if (instance == null) instance = this; var miArray = InstanceType.GetMember(name, BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.GetProperty | BindingFlags.Instance); if (miArray != null && miArray.Length > 0) { var mi = miArray[0]; if (mi.MemberType == MemberTypes.Property) { result = ((PropertyInfo)mi).GetValue(instance,null); return true; } } result = null; return false; } /// <summary> /// Reflection helper method to set a property value /// </summary> /// <param name="instance"></param> /// <param name="name"></param> /// <param name="value"></param> /// <returns></returns> protected bool SetProperty(object instance, string name, object value) { if (instance == null) instance = this; var miArray = InstanceType.GetMember(name, BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.SetProperty | BindingFlags.Instance); if (miArray != null && miArray.Length > 0) { var mi = miArray[0]; if (mi.MemberType == MemberTypes.Property) { ((PropertyInfo)mi).SetValue(Instance, value, null); return true; } } return false; } /// <summary> /// Reflection helper method to invoke a method /// </summary> /// <param name="instance"></param> /// <param name="name"></param> /// <param name="args"></param> /// <param name="result"></param> /// <returns></returns> protected bool InvokeMethod(object instance, string name, object[] args, out object result) { if (instance == null) instance = this; // Look at the instanceType var miArray = InstanceType.GetMember(name, BindingFlags.InvokeMethod | BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.Instance); if (miArray != null && miArray.Length > 0) { var mi = miArray[0] as MethodInfo; result = mi.Invoke(Instance, args); return true; } result = null; return false; } /// <summary> /// Convenience method that provides a string Indexer /// to the Properties collection AND the strongly typed /// properties of the object by name. /// /// // dynamic /// exp["Address"] = "112 nowhere lane"; /// // strong /// var name = exp["StronglyTypedProperty"] as string; /// </summary> /// <remarks> /// The getter checks the Properties dictionary first /// then looks in PropertyInfo for properties. /// The setter checks the instance properties before /// checking the Properties dictionary. /// </remarks> /// <param name="key"></param> /// /// <returns></returns> public object this[string key] { get { try { // try to get from properties collection first return Properties[key]; } catch (KeyNotFoundException ex) { // try reflection on instanceType object result = null; if (GetProperty(Instance, key, out result)) return result; // nope doesn't exist throw; } } set { if (Properties.ContainsKey(key)) { Properties[key] = value; return; } // check instance for existance of type first var miArray = InstanceType.GetMember(key, BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.GetProperty); if (miArray != null && miArray.Length > 0) SetProperty(Instance, key, value); else Properties[key] = value; } } /// <summary> /// Returns and the properties of /// </summary> /// <param name="includeProperties"></param> /// <returns></returns> public IEnumerable<KeyValuePair<string,object>> GetProperties(bool includeInstanceProperties = false) { if (includeInstanceProperties && Instance != null) { foreach (var prop in this.InstancePropertyInfo) yield return new KeyValuePair<string, object>(prop.Name, prop.GetValue(Instance, null)); } foreach (var key in this.Properties.Keys) yield return new KeyValuePair<string, object>(key, this.Properties[key]); } /// <summary> /// Checks whether a property exists in the Property collection /// or as a property on the instance /// </summary> /// <param name="item"></param> /// <returns></returns> public bool Contains(KeyValuePair<string, object> item, bool includeInstanceProperties = false) { bool res = Properties.ContainsKey(item.Key); if (res) return true; if (includeInstanceProperties && Instance != null) { foreach (var prop in this.InstancePropertyInfo) { if (prop.Name == item.Key) return true; } } return false; } } } Although the Expando class supports an indexer, it doesn't actually implement IDictionary or even IEnumerable. It only provides the indexer and Contains() and GetProperties() methods, that work against the Properties dictionary AND the internal instance. The reason for not implementing IDictionary is that a) it doesn't add much value since you can access the Properties dictionary directly and that b) I wanted to keep the interface to class very lean so that it can serve as an entity type if desired. Implementing these IDictionary (or even IEnumerable) causes LINQ extension methods to pop up on the type which obscures the property interface and would only confuse the purpose of the type. IDictionary and IEnumerable are also problematic for XML and JSON Serialization - the XML Serializer doesn't serialize IDictionary<string,object>, nor does the DataContractSerializer. The JavaScriptSerializer does serialize, but it treats the entire object like a dictionary and doesn't serialize the strongly typed properties of the type, only the dictionary values which is also not desirable. Hence the decision to stick with only implementing the indexer to support the user["CustomProperty"] functionality and leaving iteration functions to the publicly exposed Properties dictionary. Note that the Dictionary used here is a custom PropertyBag class I created to allow for serialization to work. One important aspect for my apps is that whatever custom properties get added they have to be accessible to AJAX clients since the particular app I'm working on is a SIngle Page Web app where most of the Web access is through JSON AJAX calls. PropertyBag can serialize to XML and one way serialize to JSON using the JavaScript serializer (not the DCS serializers though). The key components that make Expando work in this code are the Properties Dictionary and the TryGetMember() and TrySetMember() methods. The Properties collection is public so if you choose you can explicitly access the collection to get better performance or to manipulate the members in internal code (like loading up dynamic values form a database). Notice that TryGetMember() and TrySetMember() both work against the dictionary AND the internal instance to retrieve and set properties. This means that user["Name"] works against native properties of the object as does user["Name"] = "RogaDugDog". What's your Use Case? This is still an early prototype but I've plugged it into one of my customer's applications and so far it's working very well. The key features for me were the ability to easily extend the type with values coming from a database and exposing those values in a nice and easy to use manner. I'm also finding that using this type of object for ViewModels works very well to add custom properties to view models. I suspect there will be lots of uses for this - I've been using the extra dictionary approach to extensibility for years - using a dynamic type to make the syntax cleaner is just a bonus here. What can you think of to use this for? Resources Source Code and Tests (GitHub) Also integrated in Westwind.Utilities of the West Wind Web Toolkit West Wind Utilities NuGet© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in CSharp  .NET  Dynamic Types   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Tools and Utilities for the .NET Developer

  - by mbcrump

  Tweet this list! Add a link to my site to your bookmarks to quickly find this page again! Add me to twitter! This is a list of the tools/utilities that I use to do my job/hobby. I wanted this page to load fast and contain information that only you care about. If I have missed a tool that you like, feel free to contact me and I will add it to the list. Also, this list took a lot of time to complete. Please do not steal my work, if you like the page then please link back to my site. I will keep the links/information updated as new tools/utilities are created.  Windows/.NET Development – This is a list of tools that any Windows/.NET developer should have in his bag. I have used at some point in my career everything listed on this page and below is the tools worth keeping. Name Description License AnkhSVN Subversion support for Visual Studio. It also works with VS2010. Free Aurora XAML Designer One of the best XAML creation tools available. Has a ton of built in templates that you can copy/paste into VS2010. COST/Trial BeyondCompare Beyond Compare 3 is the ideal tool for comparing files and folders on your Windows or Linux system. Visualize changes in your code and carefully reconcile them. COST/Trial BuildIT Automated Task Tool Its main purpose is to automate tasks, whether it is the final packaging of a product, an automated daily build, maybe sending out a mailing list, even backing-up files. Free C Sharper for VB Convert VB to C#. COST CLRProfiler Analyze and improve the behavior of your .NET app. Free CodeRush Direct competitor to ReSharper, contains similar feature. This is one of those decide for yourself. COST/Trial Disk2VHD Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft's Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). Free Eazfuscator.NET Is a free obfuscator for .NET. The main purpose is to protect intellectual property of software. Free EQATEC Profiler Make your .NET app run faster. No source code changes are needed. Just point the profiler to your app, run the modified code, and get a visual report. COST Expression Studio 3/4 Comes with Web, Blend, Sketch Flow and more. You can create websites, produce beautiful XAML and more. COST/Trial Expresso The award-winning Expresso editor is equally suitable as a teaching tool for the beginning user of regular expressions or as a full-featured development environment for the experienced programmer or web designer with an extensive knowledge of regular expressions. Free Fiddler Fiddler is a web debugging proxy which logs all HTTP(s) traffic between your computer and the internet. Free Firebug Powerful Web development tool. If you build websites, you will need this. Free FxCop FxCop is an application that analyzes managed code assemblies (code that targets the .NET Framework common language runtime) and reports information about the assemblies, such as possible design, localization, performance, and security improvements. Free GAC Browser and Remover Easy way to remove multiple assemblies from the GAC. Assemblies registered by programs like Install Shield can also be removed. Free GAC Util The Global Assembly Cache tool allows you to view and manipulate the contents of the global assembly cache and download cache. Free HelpScribble Help Scribble is a full-featured, easy-to-use help authoring tool for creating help files from start to finish. You can create Win Help (.hlp) files, HTML Help (.chm) files, a printed manual and online documentation (on a web site) all from the same Help Scribble project. COST/Trial IETester IETester is a free Web Browser that allows you to have the rendering and JavaScript engines of IE9 preview, IE8, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Windows 7, Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process. Free iTextSharp iText# (iTextSharp) is a port of the iText open source java library for PDF generation written entirely in C# for the .NET platform. Use the iText mailing list to get support. Free Kaxaml Kaxaml is a lightweight XAML editor that gives you a "split view" so you can see both your XAML and your rendered content. Free LINQPad LinqPad lets you interactively query databases in a LINQ. Free Linquer Many programmers are familiar with SQL and will need a help in the transition to LINQ. Sometimes there are complicated queries to be written and Linqer can help by converting SQL scripts to LINQ. COST/Trial LiquidXML Liquid XML Studio 2010 is an advanced XML developers toolkit and IDE, containing all the tools needed for designing and developing XML schema and applications. COST/Trial Log4Net log4net is a tool to help the programmer output log statements to a variety of output targets. log4net is a port of the excellent log4j framework to the .NET runtime. We have kept the framework similar in spirit to the original log4j while taking advantage of new features in the .NET runtime. For more information on log4net see the features document. Free Microsoft Web Platform Installer The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes getting the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer easy. Free Mono Development Don't have Visual Studio - no problem! This is an open Source C# and .NET development environment for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X Free Net Mass Downloader While it’s great that Microsoft has released the .NET Reference Source Code, you can only get it one file at a time while you’re debugging. If you’d like to batch download it for reading or to populate the cache, you’d have to write a program that instantiated and called each method in the Framework Class Library. Fortunately, .NET Mass Downloader comes to the rescue! Free nMap Nmap ("Network Mapper") is a free and open source (license) utility for network exploration or security auditing. Many systems and network administrators also find it useful for tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime. Free NoScript (Firefox add-in) The NoScript Firefox extension provides extra protection for Firefox, Flock, Seamonkey and other Mozilla-based browsers: this free, open source add-on allows JavaScript, Java and Flash and other plug-ins to be executed only by trusted web sites of your choice (e.g. your online bank), and provides the most powerful Anti-XSS protection available in a browser. Free NotePad 2 Notepad2, a fast and light-weight Notepad-like text editor with syntax highlighting. This program can be run out of the box without installation, and does not touch your system's registry. Free PageSpy PageSpy is a small add-on for Internet Explorer that allows you to select any element within a webpage, select an option in the context menu, and view detailed information about both the coding behind the page and the element you selected. Free Phrase Express PhraseExpress manages your frequently used text snippets in customizable categories for quick access. Free PowerGui PowerGui is a free community for PowerGUI, a graphical user interface and script editor for Microsoft Windows PowerShell! Free Powershell Comes with Win7, but you can automate tasks by using the .NET Framework. Great for network admins. Free Process Explorer Ever wondered which program has a particular file or directory open? Now you can find out. Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded. Also, included in the SysInterals Suite. Free Process Monitor Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. Free Reflector Explore and analyze compiled .NET assemblies, viewing them in C#, Visual Basic, and IL. This is an Essential for any .NET developer. Free Regular Expression Library Stuck on a Regular Expression but you think someone has already figured it out? Chances are they have. Free Regulator Regulator makes Regular Expressions easy. This is a must have for a .NET Developer. Free RenameMaestro RenameMaestro is probably the easiest batch file renamer you'll find to instantly rename multiple files COST ReSharper The one program that I cannot live without. Supports VS2010 and offers simple refactoring, code analysis/assistance/cleanup/templates. One of the few applications that is worth the $$$. COST/Trial ScrewTurn Wiki ScrewTurn Wiki allows you to create, manage and share wikis. A wiki is a collaboratively-edited, information-centered website: the most famous is Wikipedia. Free SharpDevelop What is #develop? SharpDevelop is a free IDE for C# and VB.NET projects on Microsoft's .NET platform. Free Show Me The Template Show Me The Template is a tool for exploring the templates, be their data, control or items panel, that comes with the controls built into WPF for all 6 themes. Free SnippetCompiler Compiles code snippets without opening Visual Studio. It does not support .NET 4. Free SQL Prompt SQL Prompt is a plug-in that increases how fast you can work with SQL. It provides code-completion for SQL server, reformatting, db schema information and snippets. Awesome! COST/Trial SQLinForm SQLinForm is an automatic SQL code formatter for all major databases  including ORACLE, SQL Server, DB2, UDB, Sybase, Informix, PostgreSQL, Teradata, MySQL, MS Access etc. with over 70 formatting options. COST/OnlineFree SSMS Tools SSMS Tools Pack is an add-in for Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) including SSMS Express. Free Storm STORM is a free and open source tool for testing web services. Free Telerik Code Convertor Convert code from VB to C Sharp and Vice Versa. Free TurtoiseSVN TortoiseSVN is a really easy to use Revision control / version control / source control software for Windows.Since it's not an integration for a specific IDE you can use it with whatever development tools you like. Free UltraEdit UltraEdit is the ideal text, HTML and hex editor, and an advanced PHP, Perl, Java and JavaScript editor for programmers. UltraEdit is also an XML editor including a tree-style XML parser. An industry-award winner, UltraEdit supports disk-based 64-bit file handling (standard) on 32-bit Windows platforms (Windows 2000 and later). COST/Trial Virtual Windows XP Comes with some W7 version and allows you to run WinXP along side W7. Free VirtualBox Virtualization by Sun Microsystems. You can virtualize Windows, Linux and more. Free Visual Log Parser SQL queries against a variety of log files and other system data sources. Free WinMerge WinMerge is an Open Source differencing and merging tool for Windows. WinMerge can compare both folders and files, presenting differences in a visual text format that is easy to understand and handle. Free Wireshark Wireshark is one of the best network protocol analyzer's for Unix and windows. This has been used several times to get me out of a bind. Free XML Notepad 07 Old, but still one of my favorite XML viewers. Free Productivity Tools – This is the list of tools that I use to save time or quickly navigate around Windows. Name Description License AutoHotKey Automate almost anything by sending keystrokes and mouse clicks. You can write a mouse or keyboard macro by hand or use the macro recorder. Free CLCL CLCL is clipboard caching utility. Free Ditto Ditto is an extension to the standard windows clipboard. It saves each item placed on the clipboard allowing you access to any of those items at a later time. Ditto allows you to save any type of information that can be put on the clipboard, text, images, html, custom formats, ..... Free Evernote Remember everything from notes to photos. It will synch between computers/devices. Free InfoRapid Inforapid is a search tool that will display all you search results in a html like browser. 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Even if you have problems uninstalling and cannot uninstall them from "Windows Add or Remove Programs" control panel applet.Revo Uninstaller is a much faster and more powerful alternative to "Windows Add or Remove Programs" applet! It has very powerful features to uninstall and remove programs. Free Security Essentials Microsoft Security Essentials is a new, free consumer anti-malware solution for your computer. Free SetupVirtualCloneDrive Virtual CloneDrive works and behaves just like a physical CD/DVD drive, however it exists only virtually. Point to the .ISO file and it appears in Windows Explorer as a Drive. Free Shark 007 Codec Pack Play just about any file format with this download. Also includes my W7 Media Playlist Generator. Free Snagit 9 Screen Capture on steroids. Add arrows, captions, etc to any screenshot. COST/Trial Available SysinternalsSuite Go ahead and download the entire sys internals suite. I have mentioned multiple programs in this suite already. Free TeraCopy TeraCopy is a compact program designed to copy and move files at the maximum possible speed, providing the user with a lot of features. Free for Home TrueCrypt Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux Free TweetDeck Fully featured Twitter client. Free UltraVNC UltraVNC is a powerful, easy to use and free software that can display the screen of another computer (via internet or network) on your own screen. The program allows you to use your mouse and keyboard to control the other PC remotely. It means that you can work on a remote computer, as if you were sitting in front of it, right from your current location. Free Unlocker Unlocks locked files. Pretty simple right? Free VLC Media Player VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player and multimedia framework capable of reading most audio and video formats Free Windows 7 Media Playlist This program is special to my heart because I wrote it. It has been mentioned on podcast and various websites. It allows you to quickly create wvx video playlist for Windows Media Center. Free WinRAR WinRAR is a powerful archive manager. It can backup your data and reduce the size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format. COST/Trial Available Blogging – I use the following for my blog. Name Description License Insert Code for Windows Live Writer Insert Code for Windows Live Writer will format a snippet of text in a number of programming languages such as C#, HTML, MSH, JavaScript, Visual Basic and TSQL. Free LiveWriter Included in Live Essentials, but the ultimate in Windows Blogging Free PasteAsVSCode Plug-in for Windows Live Writer that pastes clipboard content as Visual Studio code. Preserves syntax highlighting, indentation and background color. Converts RTF, outputted by Visual Studio, into HTML. 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• WCF WS-Security and WSE Nonce Authentication

  - by Rick Strahl

  WCF makes it fairly easy to access WS-* Web Services, except when you run into a service format that it doesn't support. Even then WCF provides a huge amount of flexibility to make the service clients work, however finding the proper interfaces to make that happen is not easy to discover and for the most part undocumented unless you're lucky enough to run into a blog, forum or StackOverflow post on the matter. This is definitely true for the Password Nonce as part of the WS-Security/WSE protocol, which is not natively supported in WCF. Specifically I had a need to create a WCF message on the client that includes a WS-Security header that looks like this from their spec document:<soapenv:Header> <wsse:Security soapenv:mustUnderstand="1" xmlns:wsse="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd"> <wsse:UsernameToken wsu:Id="UsernameToken-8" xmlns:wsu="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd"> <wsse:Username>TeStUsErNaMe1</wsse:Username> <wsse:Password Type="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#PasswordText" >TeStPaSsWoRd1</wsse:Password> <wsse:Nonce EncodingType="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-soap-message-security-1.0#Base64Binary" >f8nUe3YupTU5ISdCy3X9Gg==</wsse:Nonce> <wsu:Created>2011-05-04T19:01:40.981Z</wsu:Created> </wsse:UsernameToken> </wsse:Security> </soapenv:Header> Specifically, the Nonce and Created keys are what WCF doesn't create or have a built in formatting for. Why is there a nonce? My first thought here was WTF? The username and password are there in clear text, what does the Nonce accomplish? The Nonce and created keys are are part of WSE Security specification and are meant to allow the server to detect and prevent replay attacks. The hashed nonce should be unique per request which the server can store and check for before running another request thus ensuring that a request is not replayed with exactly the same values. Basic ServiceUtl Import - not much Luck The first thing I did when I imported this service with a service reference was to simply import it as a Service Reference. The Add Service Reference import automatically detects that WS-Security is required and appropariately adds the WS-Security to the basicHttpBinding in the config file:<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <configuration> <system.serviceModel> <bindings> <basicHttpBinding> <binding name="RealTimeOnlineSoapBinding"> <security mode="Transport" /> </binding> <binding name="RealTimeOnlineSoapBinding1" /> </basicHttpBinding> </bindings> <client> <endpoint address="https://notarealurl.com:443/services/RealTimeOnline" binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="RealTimeOnlineSoapBinding" contract="RealTimeOnline.RealTimeOnline" name="RealTimeOnline" /> </client> </system.serviceModel> </configuration> If if I run this as is using code like this:var client = new RealTimeOnlineClient(); client.ClientCredentials.UserName.UserName = "TheUsername"; client.ClientCredentials.UserName.Password = "ThePassword"; … I get nothing in terms of WS-Security headers. The request is sent, but the the binding expects transport level security to be applied, rather than message level security. To fix this so that a WS-Security message header is sent the security mode can be changed to: <security mode="TransportWithMessageCredential" /> Now if I re-run I at least get a WS-Security header which looks like this:<s:Envelope xmlns:s="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:u="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd"> <s:Header> <o:Security s:mustUnderstand="1" xmlns:o="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd"> <u:Timestamp u:Id="_0"> <u:Created>2012-11-24T02:55:18.011Z</u:Created> <u:Expires>2012-11-24T03:00:18.011Z</u:Expires> </u:Timestamp> <o:UsernameToken u:Id="uuid-18c215d4-1106-40a5-8dd1-c81fdddf19d3-1"> <o:Username>TheUserName</o:Username> <o:Password Type="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#PasswordText" >ThePassword</o:Password> </o:UsernameToken> </o:Security> </s:Header> Closer! Now the WS-Security header is there along with a timestamp field (which might not be accepted by some WS-Security expecting services), but there's no Nonce or created timestamp as required by my original service. Using a CustomBinding instead My next try was to go with a CustomBinding instead of basicHttpBinding as it allows a bit more control over the protocol and transport configurations for the binding. Specifically I can explicitly specify the message protocol(s) used. Using configuration file settings here's what the config file looks like:<?xml version="1.0"?> <configuration> <system.serviceModel> <bindings> <customBinding> <binding name="CustomSoapBinding"> <security includeTimestamp="false" authenticationMode="UserNameOverTransport" defaultAlgorithmSuite="Basic256" requireDerivedKeys="false" messageSecurityVersion="WSSecurity10WSTrustFebruary2005WSSecureConversationFebruary2005WSSecurityPolicy11BasicSecurityProfile10"> </security> <textMessageEncoding messageVersion="Soap11"></textMessageEncoding> <httpsTransport maxReceivedMessageSize="2000000000"/> </binding> </customBinding> </bindings> <client> <endpoint address="https://notrealurl.com:443/services/RealTimeOnline" binding="customBinding" bindingConfiguration="CustomSoapBinding" contract="RealTimeOnline.RealTimeOnline" name="RealTimeOnline" /> </client> </system.serviceModel> <startup> <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.0"/> </startup> </configuration> This ends up creating a cleaner header that's missing the timestamp field which can cause some services problems. The WS-Security header output generated with the above looks like this:<s:Header> <o:Security s:mustUnderstand="1" xmlns:o="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd"> <o:UsernameToken u:Id="uuid-291622ca-4c11-460f-9886-ac1c78813b24-1"> <o:Username>TheUsername</o:Username> <o:Password Type="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#PasswordText" >ThePassword</o:Password> </o:UsernameToken> </o:Security> </s:Header> This is closer as it includes only the username and password. The key here is the protocol for WS-Security:messageSecurityVersion="WSSecurity10WSTrustFebruary2005WSSecureConversationFebruary2005WSSecurityPolicy11BasicSecurityProfile10" which explicitly specifies the protocol version. There are several variants of this specification but none of them seem to support the nonce unfortunately. This protocol does allow for optional omission of the Nonce and created timestamp provided (which effectively makes those keys optional). With some services I tried that requested a Nonce just using this protocol actually worked where the default basicHttpBinding failed to connect, so this is a possible solution for access to some services. Unfortunately for my target service that was not an option. The nonce has to be there. Creating Custom ClientCredentials As it turns out WCF doesn't have support for the Digest Nonce as part of WS-Security, and so as far as I can tell there's no way to do it just with configuration settings. I did a bunch of research on this trying to find workarounds for this, and I did find a couple of entries on StackOverflow as well as on the MSDN forums. However, none of these are particularily clear and I ended up using bits and pieces of several of them to arrive at a working solution in the end. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/896901/wcf-adding-nonce-to-usernametoken http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wcf/thread/4df3354f-0627-42d9-b5fb-6e880b60f8ee The latter forum message is the more useful of the two (the last message on the thread in particular) and it has most of the information required to make this work. But it took some experimentation for me to get this right so I'll recount the process here maybe a bit more comprehensively. In order for this to work a number of classes have to be overridden: ClientCredentials ClientCredentialsSecurityTokenManager WSSecurityTokenizer The idea is that we need to create a custom ClientCredential class to hold the custom properties so they can be set from the UI or via configuration settings. The TokenManager and Tokenizer are mainly required to allow the custom credentials class to flow through the WCF pipeline and eventually provide custom serialization. Here are the three classes required and their full implementations:public class CustomCredentials : ClientCredentials { public CustomCredentials() { } protected CustomCredentials(CustomCredentials cc) : base(cc) { } public override System.IdentityModel.Selectors.SecurityTokenManager CreateSecurityTokenManager() { return new CustomSecurityTokenManager(this); } protected override ClientCredentials CloneCore() { return new CustomCredentials(this); } } public class CustomSecurityTokenManager : ClientCredentialsSecurityTokenManager { public CustomSecurityTokenManager(CustomCredentials cred) : base(cred) { } public override System.IdentityModel.Selectors.SecurityTokenSerializer CreateSecurityTokenSerializer(System.IdentityModel.Selectors.SecurityTokenVersion version) { return new CustomTokenSerializer(System.ServiceModel.Security.SecurityVersion.WSSecurity11); } } public class CustomTokenSerializer : WSSecurityTokenSerializer { public CustomTokenSerializer(SecurityVersion sv) : base(sv) { } protected override void WriteTokenCore(System.Xml.XmlWriter writer, System.IdentityModel.Tokens.SecurityToken token) { UserNameSecurityToken userToken = token as UserNameSecurityToken; string tokennamespace = "o"; DateTime created = DateTime.Now; string createdStr = created.ToString("yyyy-MM-ddThh:mm:ss.fffZ"); // unique Nonce value - encode with SHA-1 for 'randomness' // in theory the nonce could just be the GUID by itself string phrase = Guid.NewGuid().ToString(); var nonce = GetSHA1String(phrase); // in this case password is plain text // for digest mode password needs to be encoded as: // PasswordAsDigest = Base64(SHA-1(Nonce + Created + Password)) // and profile needs to change to //string password = GetSHA1String(nonce + createdStr + userToken.Password); string password = userToken.Password; writer.WriteRaw(string.Format( "<{0}:UsernameToken u:Id=\"" + token.Id + "\" xmlns:u=\"http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd\">" + "<{0}:Username>" + userToken.UserName + "</{0}:Username>" + "<{0}:Password Type=\"http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#PasswordText\">" + password + "</{0}:Password>" + "<{0}:Nonce EncodingType=\"http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-soap-message-security-1.0#Base64Binary\">" + nonce + "</{0}:Nonce>" + "<u:Created>" + createdStr + "</u:Created></{0}:UsernameToken>", tokennamespace)); } protected string GetSHA1String(string phrase) { SHA1CryptoServiceProvider sha1Hasher = new SHA1CryptoServiceProvider(); byte[] hashedDataBytes = sha1Hasher.ComputeHash(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(phrase)); return Convert.ToBase64String(hashedDataBytes); } } Realistically only the CustomTokenSerializer has any significant code in. The code there deals with actually serializing the custom credentials using low level XML semantics by writing output into an XML writer. I can't take credit for this code - most of the code comes from the MSDN forum post mentioned earlier - I made a few adjustments to simplify the nonce generation and also added some notes to allow for PasswordDigest generation. Per spec the nonce is nothing more than a unique value that's supposed to be 'random'. I'm thinking that this value can be any string that's unique and a GUID on its own probably would have sufficed. Comments on other posts that GUIDs can be potentially guessed are highly exaggerated to say the least IMHO. To satisfy even that aspect though I added the SHA1 encryption and binary decoding to give a more random value that would be impossible to 'guess'. The original example from the forum post used another level of encoding and decoding to string in between - but that really didn't accomplish anything but extra overhead. The header output generated from this looks like this:<s:Header> <o:Security s:mustUnderstand="1" xmlns:o="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd"> <o:UsernameToken u:Id="uuid-f43d8b0d-0ebb-482e-998d-f544401a3c91-1" xmlns:u="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd"> <o:Username>TheUsername</o:Username> <o:Password Type="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#PasswordText">ThePassword</o:Password> <o:Nonce EncodingType="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-soap-message-security-1.0#Base64Binary" >PjVE24TC6HtdAnsf3U9c5WMsECY=</o:Nonce> <u:Created>2012-11-23T07:10:04.670Z</u:Created> </o:UsernameToken> </o:Security> </s:Header> which is exactly as it should be. Password Digest? In my case the password is passed in plain text over an SSL connection, so there's no digest required so I was done with the code above. Since I don't have a service handy that requires a password digest,  I had no way of testing the code for the digest implementation, but here is how this is likely to work. If you need to pass a digest encoded password things are a little bit trickier. The password type namespace needs to change to: http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#Digest and then the password value needs to be encoded. The format for password digest encoding is this: Base64(SHA-1(Nonce + Created + Password)) and it can be handled in the code above with this code (that's commented in the snippet above): string password = GetSHA1String(nonce + createdStr + userToken.Password); The entire WriteTokenCore method for digest code looks like this:protected override void WriteTokenCore(System.Xml.XmlWriter writer, System.IdentityModel.Tokens.SecurityToken token) { UserNameSecurityToken userToken = token as UserNameSecurityToken; string tokennamespace = "o"; DateTime created = DateTime.Now; string createdStr = created.ToString("yyyy-MM-ddThh:mm:ss.fffZ"); // unique Nonce value - encode with SHA-1 for 'randomness' // in theory the nonce could just be the GUID by itself string phrase = Guid.NewGuid().ToString(); var nonce = GetSHA1String(phrase); string password = GetSHA1String(nonce + createdStr + userToken.Password); writer.WriteRaw(string.Format( "<{0}:UsernameToken u:Id=\"" + token.Id + "\" xmlns:u=\"http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-utility-1.0.xsd\">" + "<{0}:Username>" + userToken.UserName + "</{0}:Username>" + "<{0}:Password Type=\"http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#Digest\">" + password + "</{0}:Password>" + "<{0}:Nonce EncodingType=\"http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-soap-message-security-1.0#Base64Binary\">" + nonce + "</{0}:Nonce>" + "<u:Created>" + createdStr + "</u:Created></{0}:UsernameToken>", tokennamespace)); } I had no service to connect to to try out Digest auth - if you end up needing it and get it to work please drop a comment… How to use the custom Credentials The easiest way to use the custom credentials is to create the client in code. Here's a factory method I use to create an instance of my service client:  public static RealTimeOnlineClient CreateRealTimeOnlineProxy(string url, string username, string password) { if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(url)) url = "https://notrealurl.com:443/cows/services/RealTimeOnline"; CustomBinding binding = new CustomBinding(); var security = TransportSecurityBindingElement.CreateUserNameOverTransportBindingElement(); security.IncludeTimestamp = false; security.DefaultAlgorithmSuite = SecurityAlgorithmSuite.Basic256; security.MessageSecurityVersion = MessageSecurityVersion.WSSecurity10WSTrustFebruary2005WSSecureConversationFebruary2005WSSecurityPolicy11BasicSecurityProfile10; var encoding = new TextMessageEncodingBindingElement(); encoding.MessageVersion = MessageVersion.Soap11; var transport = new HttpsTransportBindingElement(); transport.MaxReceivedMessageSize = 20000000; // 20 megs binding.Elements.Add(security); binding.Elements.Add(encoding); binding.Elements.Add(transport); RealTimeOnlineClient client = new RealTimeOnlineClient(binding, new EndpointAddress(url)); // to use full client credential with Nonce uncomment this code: // it looks like this might not be required - the service seems to work without it client.ChannelFactory.Endpoint.Behaviors.Remove<System.ServiceModel.Description.ClientCredentials>(); client.ChannelFactory.Endpoint.Behaviors.Add(new CustomCredentials()); client.ClientCredentials.UserName.UserName = username; client.ClientCredentials.UserName.Password = password; return client; } This returns a service client that's ready to call other service methods. The key item in this code is the ChannelFactory endpoint behavior modification that that first removes the original ClientCredentials and then adds the new one. The ClientCredentials property on the client is read only and this is the way it has to be added.   Summary It's a bummer that WCF doesn't suport WSE Security authentication with nonce values out of the box. From reading the comments in posts/articles while I was trying to find a solution, I found that this feature was omitted by design as this protocol is considered unsecure. While I agree that plain text passwords are rarely a good idea even if they go over secured SSL connection as WSE Security does, there are unfortunately quite a few services (mosly Java services I suspect) that use this protocol. I've run into this twice now and trying to find a solution online I can see that this is not an isolated problem - many others seem to have struggled with this. It seems there are about a dozen questions about this on StackOverflow all with varying incomplete answers. Hopefully this post provides a little more coherent content in one place. Again I marvel at WCF and its breadth of support for protocol features it has in a single tool. And even when it can't handle something there are ways to get it working via extensibility. But at the same time I marvel at how freaking difficult it is to arrive at these solutions. I mean there's no way I could have ever figured this out on my own. It takes somebody working on the WCF team or at least being very, very intricately involved in the innards of WCF to figure out the interconnection of the various objects to do this from scratch. Luckily this is an older problem that has been discussed extensively online and I was able to cobble together a solution from the online content. I'm glad it worked out that way, but it feels dirty and incomplete in that there's a whole learning path that was omitted to get here… Man am I glad I'm not dealing with SOAP services much anymore. REST service security - even when using some sort of federation is a piece of cake by comparison :-) I'm sure once standards bodies gets involved we'll be right back in security standard hell…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in WCF  Web Services   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Announcing release of ASP.NET MVC 3, IIS Express, SQL CE 4, Web Farm Framework, Orchard, WebMatrix

  - by ScottGu

  I’m excited to announce the release today of several products: ASP.NET MVC 3 NuGet IIS Express 7.5 SQL Server Compact Edition 4 Web Deploy and Web Farm Framework 2.0 Orchard 1.0 WebMatrix 1.0 The above products are all free. They build upon the .NET 4 and VS 2010 release, and add a ton of additional value to ASP.NET (both Web Forms and MVC) and the Microsoft Web Server stack. ASP.NET MVC 3 Today we are shipping the final release of ASP.NET MVC 3.  You can download and install ASP.NET MVC 3 here.  The ASP.NET MVC 3 source code (released under an OSI-compliant open source license) can also optionally be downloaded here. ASP.NET MVC 3 is a significant update that brings with it a bunch of great features.  Some of the improvements include: Razor ASP.NET MVC 3 ships with a new view-engine option called “Razor” (in addition to continuing to support/enhance the existing .aspx view engine).  Razor minimizes the number of characters and keystrokes required when writing a view template, and enables a fast, fluid coding workflow. Unlike most template syntaxes, with Razor you do not need to interrupt your coding to explicitly denote the start and end of server blocks within your HTML. The Razor parser is smart enough to infer this from your code. This enables a compact and expressive syntax which is clean, fast and fun to type.  You can learn more about Razor from some of the blog posts I’ve done about it over the last 6 months Introducing Razor New @model keyword in Razor Layouts with Razor Server-Side Comments with Razor Razor’s @: and <text> syntax Implicit and Explicit code nuggets with Razor Layouts and Sections with Razor Today’s release supports full code intellisense support for Razor (both VB and C#) with Visual Studio 2010 and the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express. JavaScript Improvements ASP.NET MVC 3 enables richer JavaScript scenarios and takes advantage of emerging HTML5 capabilities. The AJAX and Validation helpers in ASP.NET MVC 3 now use an Unobtrusive JavaScript based approach.  Unobtrusive JavaScript avoids injecting inline JavaScript into HTML, and enables cleaner separation of behavior using the new HTML 5 “data-“ attribute convention (which conveniently works on older browsers as well – including IE6). This keeps your HTML tight and clean, and makes it easier to optionally swap out or customize JS libraries.  ASP.NET MVC 3 now includes built-in support for posting JSON-based parameters from client-side JavaScript to action methods on the server.  This makes it easier to exchange data across the client and server, and build rich JavaScript front-ends.  We think this capability will be particularly useful going forward with scenarios involving client templates and data binding (including the jQuery plugins the ASP.NET team recently contributed to the jQuery project).  Previous releases of ASP.NET MVC included the core jQuery library.  ASP.NET MVC 3 also now ships the jQuery Validate plugin (which our validation helpers use for client-side validation scenarios).  We are also now shipping and including jQuery UI by default as well (which provides a rich set of client-side JavaScript UI widgets for you to use within projects). Improved Validation ASP.NET MVC 3 includes a bunch of validation enhancements that make it even easier to work with data. Client-side validation is now enabled by default with ASP.NET MVC 3 (using an onbtrusive javascript implementation).  Today’s release also includes built-in support for Remote Validation - which enables you to annotate a model class with a validation attribute that causes ASP.NET MVC to perform a remote validation call to a server method when validating input on the client. The validation features introduced within .NET 4’s System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace are now supported by ASP.NET MVC 3.  This includes support for the new IValidatableObject interface – which enables you to perform model-level validation, and allows you to provide validation error messages specific to the state of the overall model, or between two properties within the model.  ASP.NET MVC 3 also supports the improvements made to the ValidationAttribute class in .NET 4.  ValidationAttribute now supports a new IsValid overload that provides more information about the current validation context, such as what object is being validated.  This enables richer scenarios where you can validate the current value based on another property of the model.  We’ve shipped a built-in [Compare] validation attribute  with ASP.NET MVC 3 that uses this support and makes it easy out of the box to compare and validate two property values. You can use any data access API or technology with ASP.NET MVC.  This past year, though, we’ve worked closely with the .NET data team to ensure that the new EF Code First library works really well for ASP.NET MVC applications.  These two posts of mine cover the latest EF Code First preview and demonstrates how to use it with ASP.NET MVC 3 to enable easy editing of data (with end to end client+server validation support).  The final release of EF Code First will ship in the next few weeks. Today we are also publishing the first preview of a new MvcScaffolding project.  It enables you to easily scaffold ASP.NET MVC 3 Controllers and Views, and works great with EF Code-First (and is pluggable to support other data providers).  You can learn more about it – and install it via NuGet today - from Steve Sanderson’s MvcScaffolding blog post. Output Caching Previous releases of ASP.NET MVC supported output caching content at a URL or action-method level. With ASP.NET MVC V3 we are also enabling support for partial page output caching – which allows you to easily output cache regions or fragments of a response as opposed to the entire thing.  This ends up being super useful in a lot of scenarios, and enables you to dramatically reduce the work your application does on the server.  The new partial page output caching support in ASP.NET MVC 3 enables you to easily re-use cached sub-regions/fragments of a page across multiple URLs on a site.  It supports the ability to cache the content either on the web-server, or optionally cache it within a distributed cache server like Windows Server AppFabric or memcached. I’ll post some tutorials on my blog that show how to take advantage of ASP.NET MVC 3’s new output caching support for partial page scenarios in the future. Better Dependency Injection ASP.NET MVC 3 provides better support for applying Dependency Injection (DI) and integrating with Dependency Injection/IOC containers. With ASP.NET MVC 3 you no longer need to author custom ControllerFactory classes in order to enable DI with Controllers.  You can instead just register a Dependency Injection framework with ASP.NET MVC 3 and it will resolve dependencies not only for Controllers, but also for Views, Action Filters, Model Binders, Value Providers, Validation Providers, and Model Metadata Providers that you use within your application. This makes it much easier to cleanly integrate dependency injection within your projects. Other Goodies ASP.NET MVC 3 includes dozens of other nice improvements that help to both reduce the amount of code you write, and make the code you do write cleaner.  Here are just a few examples: Improved New Project dialog that makes it easy to start new ASP.NET MVC 3 projects from templates. Improved Add->View Scaffolding support that enables the generation of even cleaner view templates. New ViewBag property that uses .NET 4’s dynamic support to make it easy to pass late-bound data from Controllers to Views. Global Filters support that allows specifying cross-cutting filter attributes (like [HandleError]) across all Controllers within an app. New [AllowHtml] attribute that allows for more granular request validation when binding form posted data to models. Sessionless controller support that allows fine grained control over whether SessionState is enabled on a Controller. New ActionResult types like HttpNotFoundResult and RedirectPermanent for common HTTP scenarios. New Html.Raw() helper to indicate that output should not be HTML encoded. New Crypto helpers for salting and hashing passwords. And much, much more… Learn More about ASP.NET MVC 3 We will be posting lots of tutorials and samples on the http://asp.net/mvc site in the weeks ahead.  Below are two good ASP.NET MVC 3 tutorials available on the site today: Build your First ASP.NET MVC 3 Application: VB and C# Building the ASP.NET MVC 3 Music Store We’ll post additional ASP.NET MVC 3 tutorials and videos on the http://asp.net/mvc site in the future. Visit it regularly to find new tutorials as they are published. How to Upgrade Existing Projects ASP.NET MVC 3 is compatible with ASP.NET MVC 2 – which means it should be easy to update existing MVC projects to ASP.NET MVC 3.  The new features in ASP.NET MVC 3 build on top of the foundational work we’ve already done with the MVC 1 and MVC 2 releases – which means that the skills, knowledge, libraries, and books you’ve acquired are all directly applicable with the MVC 3 release.  MVC 3 adds new features and capabilities – it doesn’t obsolete existing ones. You can upgrade existing ASP.NET MVC 2 projects by following the manual upgrade steps in the release notes.  Alternatively, you can use this automated ASP.NET MVC 3 upgrade tool to easily update your  existing projects. Localized Builds Today’s ASP.NET MVC 3 release is available in English.  We will be releasing localized versions of ASP.NET MVC 3 (in 9 languages) in a few days.  I’ll blog pointers to the localized downloads once they are available. NuGet Today we are also shipping NuGet – a free, open source, package manager that makes it easy for you to find, install, and use open source libraries in your projects. It works with all .NET project types (including ASP.NET Web Forms, ASP.NET MVC, WPF, WinForms, Silverlight, and Class Libraries).  You can download and install it here. NuGet enables developers who maintain open source projects (for example, .NET projects like Moq, NHibernate, Ninject, StructureMap, NUnit, Windsor, Raven, Elmah, etc) to package up their libraries and register them with an online gallery/catalog that is searchable.  The client-side NuGet tools – which include full Visual Studio integration – make it trivial for any .NET developer who wants to use one of these libraries to easily find and install it within the project they are working on. NuGet handles dependency management between libraries (for example: library1 depends on library2). It also makes it easy to update (and optionally remove) libraries from your projects later. It supports updating web.config files (if a package needs configuration settings). It also allows packages to add PowerShell scripts to a project (for example: scaffold commands). Importantly, NuGet is transparent and clean – and does not install anything at the system level. Instead it is focused on making it easy to manage libraries you use with your projects. Our goal with NuGet is to make it as simple as possible to integrate open source libraries within .NET projects.  NuGet Gallery This week we also launched a beta version of the http://nuget.org web-site – which allows anyone to easily search and browse an online gallery of open source packages available via NuGet.  The site also now allows developers to optionally submit new packages that they wish to share with others.  You can learn more about how to create and share a package here. There are hundreds of open-source .NET projects already within the NuGet Gallery today.  We hope to have thousands there in the future. IIS Express 7.5 Today we are also shipping IIS Express 7.5.  IIS Express is a free version of IIS 7.5 that is optimized for developer scenarios.  It works for both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC project types. We think IIS Express combines the ease of use of the ASP.NET Web Server (aka Cassini) currently built-into Visual Studio today with the full power of IIS.  Specifically: It’s lightweight and easy to install (less than 5Mb download and a quick install) It does not require an administrator account to run/debug applications from Visual Studio It enables a full web-server feature set – including SSL, URL Rewrite, and other IIS 7.x modules It supports and enables the same extensibility model and web.config file settings that IIS 7.x support It can be installed side-by-side with the full IIS web server as well as the ASP.NET Development Server (they do not conflict at all) It works on Windows XP and higher operating systems – giving you a full IIS 7.x developer feature-set on all Windows OS platforms IIS Express (like the ASP.NET Development Server) can be quickly launched to run a site from a directory on disk.  It does not require any registration/configuration steps. This makes it really easy to launch and run for development scenarios.  You can also optionally redistribute IIS Express with your own applications if you want a lightweight web-server.  The standard IIS Express EULA now includes redistributable rights. Visual Studio 2010 SP1 adds support for IIS Express.  Read my VS 2010 SP1 and IIS Express blog post to learn more about what it enables.  SQL Server Compact Edition 4 Today we are also shipping SQL Server Compact Edition 4 (aka SQL CE 4).  SQL CE is a free, embedded, database engine that enables easy database storage. No Database Installation Required SQL CE does not require you to run a setup or install a database server in order to use it.  You can simply copy the SQL CE binaries into the \bin directory of your ASP.NET application, and then your web application can use it as a database engine.  No setup or extra security permissions are required for it to run. You do not need to have an administrator account on the machine. Just copy your web application onto any server and it will work. This is true even of medium-trust applications running in a web hosting environment. SQL CE runs in-memory within your ASP.NET application and will start-up when you first access a SQL CE database, and will automatically shutdown when your application is unloaded.  SQL CE databases are stored as files that live within the \App_Data folder of your ASP.NET Applications. Works with Existing Data APIs SQL CE 4 works with existing .NET-based data APIs, and supports a SQL Server compatible query syntax.  This means you can use existing data APIs like ADO.NET, as well as use higher-level ORMs like Entity Framework and NHibernate with SQL CE.  This enables you to use the same data programming skills and data APIs you know today. Supports Development, Testing and Production Scenarios SQL CE can be used for development scenarios, testing scenarios, and light production usage scenarios.  With the SQL CE 4 release we’ve done the engineering work to ensure that SQL CE won’t crash or deadlock when used in a multi-threaded server scenario (like ASP.NET).  This is a big change from previous releases of SQL CE – which were designed for client-only scenarios and which explicitly blocked running in web-server environments.  Starting with SQL CE 4 you can use it in a web-server as well. There are no license restrictions with SQL CE.  It is also totally free. Tooling Support with VS 2010 SP1 Visual Studio 2010 SP1 adds support for SQL CE 4 and ASP.NET Projects.  Read my VS 2010 SP1 and SQL CE 4 blog post to learn more about what it enables.  Web Deploy and Web Farm Framework 2.0 Today we are also releasing Microsoft Web Deploy V2 and Microsoft Web Farm Framework V2.  These services provide a flexible and powerful way to deploy ASP.NET applications onto either a single server, or across a web farm of machines. You can learn more about these capabilities from my previous blog posts on them: Introducing the Microsoft Web Farm Framework Automating Deployment with Microsoft Web Deploy Visit the http://iis.net website to learn more and install them. Both are free. Orchard 1.0 Today we are also releasing Orchard v1.0.  Orchard is a free, open source, community based project.  It provides Content Management System (CMS) and Blogging System support out of the box, and makes it possible to easily create and manage web-sites without having to write code (site owners can customize a site through the browser-based editing tools built-into Orchard).  Read these tutorials to learn more about how you can setup and manage your own Orchard site. Orchard itself is built as an ASP.NET MVC 3 application using Razor view templates (and by default uses SQL CE 4 for data storage).  Developers wishing to extend an Orchard site with custom functionality can open and edit it as a Visual Studio project – and add new ASP.NET MVC Controllers/Views to it.  WebMatrix 1.0 WebMatrix is a new, free, web development tool from Microsoft that provides a suite of technologies that make it easier to enable website development.  It enables a developer to start a new site by browsing and downloading an app template from an online gallery of web applications (which includes popular apps like Umbraco, DotNetNuke, Orchard, WordPress, Drupal and Joomla).  Alternatively it also enables developers to create and code web sites from scratch. WebMatrix is task focused and helps guide developers as they work on sites.  WebMatrix includes IIS Express, SQL CE 4, and ASP.NET - providing an integrated web-server, database and programming framework combination.  It also includes built-in web publishing support which makes it easy to find and deploy sites to web hosting providers. You can learn more about WebMatrix from my Introducing WebMatrix blog post this summer.  Visit http://microsoft.com/web to download and install it today. Summary I’m really excited about today’s releases – they provide a bunch of additional value that makes web development with ASP.NET, Visual Studio and the Microsoft Web Server a lot better.  A lot of folks worked hard to share this with you today. On behalf of my whole team – we hope you enjoy them! Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• VS 2010 SP1 and SQL CE

  - by ScottGu

  Last month we released the Beta of VS 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1).  You can learn more about the VS 2010 SP1 Beta from Jason Zander’s two blog posts about it, and from Scott Hanselman’s blog post that covers some of the new capabilities enabled with it.   You can download and install the VS 2010 SP1 Beta here. Last week I blogged about the new Visual Studio support for IIS Express that we are adding with VS 2010 SP1. In today’s post I’m going to talk about the new VS 2010 SP1 tooling support for SQL CE, and walkthrough some of the cool scenarios it enables.  SQL CE – What is it and why should you care? SQL CE is a free, embedded, database engine that enables easy database storage. No Database Installation Required SQL CE does not require you to run a setup or install a database server in order to use it.  You can simply copy the SQL CE binaries into the \bin directory of your ASP.NET application, and then your web application can use it as a database engine.  No setup or extra security permissions are required for it to run. You do not need to have an administrator account on the machine. Just copy your web application onto any server and it will work. This is true even of medium-trust applications running in a web hosting environment. SQL CE runs in-memory within your ASP.NET application and will start-up when you first access a SQL CE database, and will automatically shutdown when your application is unloaded.  SQL CE databases are stored as files that live within the \App_Data folder of your ASP.NET Applications. Works with Existing Data APIs SQL CE 4 works with existing .NET-based data APIs, and supports a SQL Server compatible query syntax.  This means you can use existing data APIs like ADO.NET, as well as use higher-level ORMs like Entity Framework and NHibernate with SQL CE.  This enables you to use the same data programming skills and data APIs you know today. Supports Development, Testing and Production Scenarios SQL CE can be used for development scenarios, testing scenarios, and light production usage scenarios.  With the SQL CE 4 release we’ve done the engineering work to ensure that SQL CE won’t crash or deadlock when used in a multi-threaded server scenario (like ASP.NET).  This is a big change from previous releases of SQL CE – which were designed for client-only scenarios and which explicitly blocked running in web-server environments.  Starting with SQL CE 4 you can use it in a web-server as well. There are no license restrictions with SQL CE.  It is also totally free. Easy Migration to SQL Server SQL CE is an embedded database – which makes it ideal for development, testing, and light-usage scenarios.  For high-volume sites and applications you’ll probably want to migrate your database to use SQL Server Express (which is free), SQL Server or SQL Azure.  These servers enable much better scalability, more development features (including features like Stored Procedures – which aren’t supported with SQL CE), as well as more advanced data management capabilities. We’ll ship migration tools that enable you to optionally take SQL CE databases and easily upgrade them to use SQL Server Express, SQL Server, or SQL Azure.  You will not need to change your code when upgrading a SQL CE database to SQL Server or SQL Azure.  Our goal is to enable you to be able to simply change the database connection string in your web.config file and have your application just work. New Tooling Support for SQL CE in VS 2010 SP1 VS 2010 SP1 includes much improved tooling support for SQL CE, and adds support for using SQL CE within ASP.NET projects for the first time.  With VS 2010 SP1 you can now: Create new SQL CE Databases Edit and Modify SQL CE Database Schema and Indexes Populate SQL CE Databases within Data Use the Entity Framework (EF) designer to create model layers against SQL CE databases Use EF Code First to define model layers in code, then create a SQL CE database from them, and optionally edit the DB with VS Deploy SQL CE databases to remote servers using Web Deploy and optionally convert them to full SQL Server databases You can take advantage of all of the above features from within both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC based projects. Download You can enable SQL CE tooling support within VS 2010 by first installing VS 2010 SP1 (beta). Once SP1 is installed, you’ll also then need to install the SQL CE Tools for Visual Studio download.  This is a separate download that enables the SQL CE tooling support for VS 2010 SP1. Walkthrough of Two Scenarios In this blog post I’m going to walkthrough how you can take advantage of SQL CE and VS 2010 SP1 using both an ASP.NET Web Forms and an ASP.NET MVC based application. Specifically, we’ll walkthrough: How to create a SQL CE database using VS 2010 SP1, then use the EF4 visual designers in Visual Studio to construct a model layer from it, and then display and edit the data using an ASP.NET GridView control. How to use an EF Code First approach to define a model layer using POCO classes and then have EF Code-First “auto-create” a SQL CE database for us based on our model classes.  We’ll then look at how we can use the new VS 2010 SP1 support for SQL CE to inspect the database that was created, populate it with data, and later make schema changes to it.  We’ll do all this within the context of an ASP.NET MVC based application. You can follow the two walkthroughs below on your own machine by installing VS 2010 SP1 (beta) and then installing the SQL CE Tools for Visual Studio download (which is a separate download that enables SQL CE tooling support for VS 2010 SP1). Walkthrough 1: Create a SQL CE Database, Create EF Model Classes, Edit the Data with a GridView This first walkthrough will demonstrate how to create and define a SQL CE database within an ASP.NET Web Form application.  We’ll then build an EF model layer for it and use that model layer to enable data editing scenarios with an <asp:GridView> control. Step 1: Create a new ASP.NET Web Forms Project We’ll begin by using the File->New Project menu command within Visual Studio to create a new ASP.NET Web Forms project.  We’ll use the “ASP.NET Web Application” project template option so that it has a default UI skin implemented: Step 2: Create a SQL CE Database Right click on the “App_Data” folder within the created project and choose the “Add->New Item” menu command: This will bring up the “Add Item” dialog box.  Select the “SQL Server Compact 4.0 Local Database” item (new in VS 2010 SP1) and name the database file to create “Store.sdf”: Note that SQL CE database files have a .sdf filename extension. Place them within the /App_Data folder of your ASP.NET application to enable easy deployment. When we clicked the “Add” button above a Store.sdf file was added to our project: Step 3: Adding a “Products” Table Double-clicking the “Store.sdf” database file will open it up within the Server Explorer tab.  Since it is a new database there are no tables within it: Right click on the “Tables” icon and choose the “Create Table” menu command to create a new database table.  We’ll name the new table “Products” and add 4 columns to it.  We’ll mark the first column as a primary key (and make it an identify column so that its value will automatically increment with each new row): When we click “ok” our new Products table will be created in the SQL CE database. Step 4: Populate with Data Once our Products table is created it will show up within the Server Explorer.  We can right-click it and choose the “Show Table Data” menu command to edit its data: Let’s add a few sample rows of data to it: Step 5: Create an EF Model Layer We have a SQL CE database with some data in it – let’s now create an EF Model Layer that will provide a way for us to easily query and update data within it. Let’s right-click on our project and choose the “Add->New Item” menu command.  This will bring up the “Add New Item” dialog – select the “ADO.NET Entity Data Model” item within it and name it “Store.edmx” This will add a new Store.edmx item to our solution explorer and launch a wizard that allows us to quickly create an EF model: Select the “Generate From Database” option above and click next.  Choose to use the Store.sdf SQL CE database we just created and then click next again.  The wizard will then ask you what database objects you want to import into your model.  Let’s choose to import the “Products” table we created earlier: When we click the “Finish” button Visual Studio will open up the EF designer.  It will have a Product entity already on it that maps to the “Products” table within our SQL CE database: The VS 2010 SP1 EF designer works exactly the same with SQL CE as it does already with SQL Server and SQL Express.  The Product entity above will be persisted as a class (called “Product”) that we can programmatically work against within our ASP.NET application. Step 6: Compile the Project Before using your model layer you’ll need to build your project.  Do a Ctrl+Shift+B to compile the project, or use the Build->Build Solution menu command. Step 7: Create a Page that Uses our EF Model Layer Let’s now create a simple ASP.NET Web Form that contains a GridView control that we can use to display and edit the our Products data (via the EF Model Layer we just created). Right-click on the project and choose the Add->New Item command.  Select the “Web Form from Master Page” item template, and name the page you create “Products.aspx”.  Base the master page on the “Site.Master” template that is in the root of the project. Add an <h2>Products</h2> heading the new Page, and add an <asp:gridview> control within it: Then click the “Design” tab to switch into design-view. Select the GridView control, and then click the top-right corner to display the GridView’s “Smart Tasks” UI: Choose the “New data source…” drop down option above.  This will bring up the below dialog which allows you to pick your Data Source type: Select the “Entity” data source option – which will allow us to easily connect our GridView to the EF model layer we created earlier.  This will bring up another dialog that allows us to pick our model layer: Select the “StoreEntities” option in the dropdown – which is the EF model layer we created earlier.  Then click next – which will allow us to pick which entity within it we want to bind to: Select the “Products” entity in the above dialog – which indicates that we want to bind against the “Product” entity class we defined earlier.  Then click the “Enable automatic updates” checkbox to ensure that we can both query and update Products.  When you click “Finish” VS will wire-up an <asp:EntityDataSource> to your <asp:GridView> control: The last two steps we’ll do will be to click the “Enable Editing” checkbox on the Grid (which will cause the Grid to display an “Edit” link on each row) and (optionally) use the Auto Format dialog to pick a UI template for the Grid. Step 8: Run the Application Let’s now run our application and browse to the /Products.aspx page that contains our GridView.  When we do so we’ll see a Grid UI of the Products within our SQL CE database. Clicking the “Edit” link for any of the rows will allow us to edit their values: When we click “Update” the GridView will post back the values, persist them through our EF Model Layer, and ultimately save them within our SQL CE database. Learn More about using EF with ASP.NET Web Forms Read this tutorial series on the http://asp.net site to learn more about how to use EF with ASP.NET Web Forms.  The tutorial series uses SQL Express as the database – but the nice thing is that all of the same steps/concepts can also now also be done with SQL CE.   Walkthrough 2: Using EF Code-First with SQL CE and ASP.NET MVC 3 We used a database-first approach with the sample above – where we first created the database, and then used the EF designer to create model classes from the database.  In addition to supporting a designer-based development workflow, EF also enables a more code-centric option which we call “code first development”.  Code-First Development enables a pretty sweet development workflow.  It enables you to: Define your model objects by simply writing “plain old classes” with no base classes or visual designer required Use a “convention over configuration” approach that enables database persistence without explicitly configuring anything Optionally override the convention-based persistence and use a fluent code API to fully customize the persistence mapping Optionally auto-create a database based on the model classes you define – allowing you to start from code first I’ve done several blog posts about EF Code First in the past – I really think it is great.  The good news is that it also works very well with SQL CE. The combination of SQL CE, EF Code First, and the new VS tooling support for SQL CE, enables a pretty nice workflow.  Below is a simple example of how you can use them to build a simple ASP.NET MVC 3 application. Step 1: Create a new ASP.NET MVC 3 Project We’ll begin by using the File->New Project menu command within Visual Studio to create a new ASP.NET MVC 3 project.  We’ll use the “Internet Project” template so that it has a default UI skin implemented: Step 2: Use NuGet to Install EFCodeFirst Next we’ll use the NuGet package manager (automatically installed by ASP.NET MVC 3) to add the EFCodeFirst library to our project.  We’ll use the Package Manager command shell to do this.  Bring up the package manager console within Visual Studio by selecting the View->Other Windows->Package Manager Console menu command.  Then type: install-package EFCodeFirst within the package manager console to download the EFCodeFirst library and have it be added to our project: When we enter the above command, the EFCodeFirst library will be downloaded and added to our application: Step 3: Build Some Model Classes Using a “code first” based development workflow, we will create our model classes first (even before we have a database).  We create these model classes by writing code. For this sample, we will right click on the “Models” folder of our project and add the below three classes to our project: The “Dinner” and “RSVP” model classes above are “plain old CLR objects” (aka POCO).  They do not need to derive from any base classes or implement any interfaces, and the properties they expose are standard .NET data-types.  No data persistence attributes or data code has been added to them.   The “NerdDinners” class derives from the DbContext class (which is supplied by EFCodeFirst) and handles the retrieval/persistence of our Dinner and RSVP instances from a database. Step 4: Listing Dinners We’ve written all of the code necessary to implement our model layer for this simple project.  Let’s now expose and implement the URL: /Dinners/Upcoming within our project.  We’ll use it to list upcoming dinners that happen in the future. We’ll do this by right-clicking on our “Controllers” folder and select the “Add->Controller” menu command.  We’ll name the Controller we want to create “DinnersController”.  We’ll then implement an “Upcoming” action method within it that lists upcoming dinners using our model layer above.  We will use a LINQ query to retrieve the data and pass it to a View to render with the code below: We’ll then right-click within our Upcoming method and choose the “Add-View” menu command to create an “Upcoming” view template that displays our dinners.  We’ll use the “empty” template option within the “Add View” dialog and write the below view template using Razor: Step 4: Configure our Project to use a SQL CE Database We have finished writing all of our code – our last step will be to configure a database connection-string to use. We will point our NerdDinners model class to a SQL CE database by adding the below <connectionString> to the web.config file at the top of our project: EF Code First uses a default convention where context classes will look for a connection-string that matches the DbContext class name.  Because we created a “NerdDinners” class earlier, we’ve also named our connectionstring “NerdDinners”.  Above we are configuring our connection-string to use SQL CE as the database, and telling it that our SQL CE database file will live within the \App_Data directory of our ASP.NET project. Step 5: Running our Application Now that we’ve built our application, let’s run it! We’ll browse to the /Dinners/Upcoming URL – doing so will display an empty list of upcoming dinners: You might ask – but where did it query to get the dinners from? We didn’t explicitly create a database?!? One of the cool features that EF Code-First supports is the ability to automatically create a database (based on the schema of our model classes) when the database we point it at doesn’t exist.  Above we configured  EF Code-First to point at a SQL CE database in the \App_Data\ directory of our project.  When we ran our application, EF Code-First saw that the SQL CE database didn’t exist and automatically created it for us. Step 6: Using VS 2010 SP1 to Explore our newly created SQL CE Database Click the “Show all Files” icon within the Solution Explorer and you’ll see the “NerdDinners.sdf” SQL CE database file that was automatically created for us by EF code-first within the \App_Data\ folder: We can optionally right-click on the file and “Include in Project" to add it to our solution: We can also double-click the file (regardless of whether it is added to the project) and VS 2010 SP1 will open it as a database we can edit within the “Server Explorer” tab of the IDE. Below is the view we get when we double-click our NerdDinners.sdf SQL CE file.  We can drill in to see the schema of the Dinners and RSVPs tables in the tree explorer.  Notice how two tables - Dinners and RSVPs – were automatically created for us within our SQL CE database.  This was done by EF Code First when we accessed the NerdDinners class by running our application above: We can right-click on a Table and use the “Show Table Data” command to enter some upcoming dinners in our database: We’ll use the built-in editor that VS 2010 SP1 supports to populate our table data below: And now when we hit “refresh” on the /Dinners/Upcoming URL within our browser we’ll see some upcoming dinners show up: Step 7: Changing our Model and Database Schema Let’s now modify the schema of our model layer and database, and walkthrough one way that the new VS 2010 SP1 Tooling support for SQL CE can make this easier.  With EF Code-First you typically start making database changes by modifying the model classes.  For example, let’s add an additional string property called “UrlLink” to our “Dinner” class.  We’ll use this to point to a link for more information about the event: Now when we re-run our project, and visit the /Dinners/Upcoming URL we’ll see an error thrown: We are seeing this error because EF Code-First automatically created our database, and by default when it does this it adds a table that helps tracks whether the schema of our database is in sync with our model classes.  EF Code-First helpfully throws an error when they become out of sync – making it easier to track down issues at development time that you might otherwise only find (via obscure errors) at runtime.  Note that if you do not want this feature you can turn it off by changing the default conventions of your DbContext class (in this case our NerdDinners class) to not track the schema version. Our model classes and database schema are out of sync in the above example – so how do we fix this?  There are two approaches you can use today: Delete the database and have EF Code First automatically re-create the database based on the new model class schema (losing the data within the existing DB) Modify the schema of the existing database to make it in sync with the model classes (keeping/migrating the data within the existing DB) There are a couple of ways you can do the second approach above.  Below I’m going to show how you can take advantage of the new VS 2010 SP1 Tooling support for SQL CE to use a database schema tool to modify our database structure.  We are also going to be supporting a “migrations” feature with EF in the future that will allow you to automate/script database schema migrations programmatically. Step 8: Modify our SQL CE Database Schema using VS 2010 SP1 The new SQL CE Tooling support within VS 2010 SP1 makes it easy to modify the schema of our existing SQL CE database.  To do this we’ll right-click on our “Dinners” table and choose the “Edit Table Schema” command: This will bring up the below “Edit Table” dialog.  We can rename, change or delete any of the existing columns in our table, or click at the bottom of the column listing and type to add a new column.  Below I’ve added a new “UrlLink” column of type “nvarchar” (since our property is a string): When we click ok our database will be updated to have the new column and our schema will now match our model classes. Because we are manually modifying our database schema, there is one additional step we need to take to let EF Code-First know that the database schema is in sync with our model classes.  As i mentioned earlier, when a database is automatically created by EF Code-First it adds a “EdmMetadata” table to the database to track schema versions (and hash our model classes against them to detect mismatches between our model classes and the database schema): Since we are manually updating and maintaining our database schema, we don’t need this table – and can just delete it: This will leave us with just the two tables that correspond to our model classes: And now when we re-run our /Dinners/Upcoming URL it will display the dinners correctly: One last touch we could do would be to update our view to check for the new UrlLink property and render a <a> link to it if an event has one: And now when we refresh our /Dinners/Upcoming we will see hyperlinks for the events that have a UrlLink stored in the database: Summary SQL CE provides a free, embedded, database engine that you can use to easily enable database storage.  With SQL CE 4 you can now take advantage of it within ASP.NET projects and applications (both Web Forms and MVC). VS 2010 SP1 provides tooling support that enables you to easily create, edit and modify SQL CE databases – as well as use the standard EF designer against them.  This allows you to re-use your existing skills and data knowledge while taking advantage of an embedded database option.  This is useful both for small applications (where you don’t need the scalability of a full SQL Server), as well as for development and testing scenarios – where you want to be able to rapidly develop/test your application without having a full database instance.  SQL CE makes it easy to later migrate your data to a full SQL Server or SQL Azure instance if you want to – without having to change any code in your application.  All we would need to change in the above two scenarios is the <connectionString> value within the web.config file in order to have our code run against a full SQL Server.  This provides the flexibility to scale up your application starting from a small embedded database solution as needed. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Top things web developers should know about the Visual Studio 2013 release

  - by Jon Galloway

  ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Release NotesASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Release NotesSummary for lazy readers: Visual Studio 2013 is now available for download on the Visual Studio site and on MSDN subscriber downloads) Visual Studio 2013 installs side by side with Visual Studio 2012 and supports round-tripping between Visual Studio versions, so you can try it out without committing to a switch Visual Studio 2013 ships with the new version of ASP.NET, which includes ASP.NET MVC 5, ASP.NET Web API 2, Razor 3, Entity Framework 6 and SignalR 2.0 The new releases ASP.NET focuses on One ASP.NET, so core features and web tools work the same across the platform (e.g. adding ASP.NET MVC controllers to a Web Forms application) New core features include new templates based on Bootstrap, a new scaffolding system, and a new identity system Visual Studio 2013 is an incredible editor for web files, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Markdown, LESS, Coffeescript, Handlebars, Angular, Ember, Knockdown, etc. Top links: Visual Studio 2013 content on the ASP.NET site are in the standard new releases area: http://www.asp.net/vnext ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Release Notes Short intro videos on the new Visual Studio web editor features from Scott Hanselman and Mads Kristensen Announcing release of ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 post on the official .NET Web Development and Tools Blog Scott Guthrie's post: Announcing the Release of Visual Studio 2013 and Great Improvements to ASP.NET and Entity Framework Okay, for those of you who are still with me, let's dig in a bit. Quick web dev notes on downloading and installing Visual Studio 2013 I found Visual Studio 2013 to be a pretty fast install. According to Brian Harry's release post, installing over pre-release versions of Visual Studio is supported.  I've installed the release version over pre-release versions, and it worked fine. If you're only going to be doing web development, you can speed up the install if you just select Web Developer tools. Of course, as a good Microsoft employee, I'll mention that you might also want to install some of those other features, like the Store apps for Windows 8 and the Windows Phone 8.0 SDK, but they do download and install a lot of other stuff (e.g. the Windows Phone SDK sets up Hyper-V and downloads several GB's of VM's). So if you're planning just to do web development for now, you can pick just the Web Developer Tools and install the other stuff later. If you've got a fast internet connection, I recommend using the web installer instead of downloading the ISO. The ISO includes all the features, whereas the web installer just downloads what you're installing. Visual Studio 2013 development settings and color theme When you start up Visual Studio, it'll prompt you to pick some defaults. These are totally up to you -whatever suits your development style - and you can change them later. As I said, these are completely up to you. I recommend either the Web Development or Web Development (Code Only) settings. The only real difference is that Code Only hides the toolbars, and you can switch between them using Tools / Import and Export Settings / Reset. Web Development settings Web Development (code only) settings Usually I've just gone with Web Development (code only) in the past because I just want to focus on the code, although the Standard toolbar does make it easier to switch default web browsers. More on that later. Color theme Sigh. Okay, everyone's got their favorite colors. I alternate between Light and Dark depending on my mood, and I personally like how the low contrast on the window chrome in those themes puts the emphasis on my code rather than the tabs and toolbars. I know some people got pretty worked up over that, though, and wanted the blue theme back. I personally don't like it - it reminds me of ancient versions of Visual Studio that I don't want to think about anymore. So here's the thing: if you install Visual Studio Ultimate, it defaults to Blue. The other versions default to Light. If you use Blue, I won't criticize you - out loud, that is. You can change themes really easily - either Tools / Options / Environment / General, or the smart way: ctrl+q for quick launch, then type Theme and hit enter. Signing in During the first run, you'll be prompted to sign in. You don't have to - you can click the "Not now, maybe later" link at the bottom of that dialog. I recommend signing in, though. It's not hooked in with licensing or tracking the kind of code you write to sell you components. It is doing good things, like  syncing your Visual Studio settings between computers. More about that here. So, you don't have to, but I sure do. Overview of shiny new things in ASP.NET land There are a lot of good new things in ASP.NET. I'll list some of my favorite here, but you can read more on the ASP.NET site. One ASP.NET You've heard us talk about this for a while. The idea is that options are good, but choice can be a burden. When you start a new ASP.NET project, why should you have to make a tough decision - with long-term consequences - about how your application will work? If you want to use ASP.NET Web Forms, but have the option of adding in ASP.NET MVC later, why should that be hard? It's all ASP.NET, right? Ideally, you'd just decide that you want to use ASP.NET to build sites and services, and you could use the appropriate tools (the green blocks below) as you needed them. So, here it is. When you create a new ASP.NET application, you just create an ASP.NET application. Next, you can pick from some templates to get you started... but these are different. They're not "painful decision" templates, they're just some starting pieces. And, most importantly, you can mix and match. I can pick a "mostly" Web Forms template, but include MVC and Web API folders and core references. If you've tried to mix and match in the past, you're probably aware that it was possible, but not pleasant. ASP.NET MVC project files contained special project type GUIDs, so you'd only get controller scaffolding support in a Web Forms project if you manually edited the csproj file. Features in one stack didn't work in others. Project templates were painful choices. That's no longer the case. Hooray! I just did a demo in a presentation last week where I created a new Web Forms + MVC + Web API site, built a model, scaffolded MVC and Web API controllers with EF Code First, add data in the MVC view, viewed it in Web API, then added a GridView to the Web Forms Default.aspx page and bound it to the Model. In about 5 minutes. Sure, it's a simple example, but it's great to be able to share code and features across the whole ASP.NET family. Authentication In the past, authentication was built into the templates. So, for instance, there was an ASP.NET MVC 4 Intranet Project template which created a new ASP.NET MVC 4 application that was preconfigured for Windows Authentication. All of that authentication stuff was built into each template, so they varied between the stacks, and you couldn't reuse them. You didn't see a lot of changes to the authentication options, since they required big changes to a bunch of project templates. Now, the new project dialog includes a common authentication experience. When you hit the Change Authentication button, you get some common options that work the same way regardless of the template or reference settings you've made. These options work on all ASP.NET frameworks, and all hosting environments (IIS, IIS Express, or OWIN for self-host) The default is Individual User Accounts: This is the standard "create a local account, using username / password or OAuth" thing; however, it's all built on the new Identity system. More on that in a second. The one setting that has some configuration to it is Organizational Accounts, which lets you configure authentication using Active Directory, Windows Azure Active Directory, or Office 365. Identity There's a new identity system. We've taken the best parts of the previous ASP.NET Membership and Simple Identity systems, rolled in a lot of feedback and made big enhancements to support important developer concerns like unit testing and extensiblity. I've written long posts about ASP.NET identity, and I'll do it again. Soon. This is not that post. The short version is that I think we've finally got just the right Identity system. Some of my favorite features: There are simple, sensible defaults that work well - you can File / New / Run / Register / Login, and everything works. It supports standard username / password as well as external authentication (OAuth, etc.). It's easy to customize without having to re-implement an entire provider. It's built using pluggable pieces, rather than one large monolithic system. It's built using interfaces like IUser and IRole that allow for unit testing, dependency injection, etc. You can easily add user profile data (e.g. URL, twitter handle, birthday). You just add properties to your ApplicationUser model and they'll automatically be persisted. Complete control over how the identity data is persisted. By default, everything works with Entity Framework Code First, but it's built to support changes from small (modify the schema) to big (use another ORM, store your data in a document database or in the cloud or in XML or in the EXIF data of your desktop background or whatever). It's configured via OWIN. More on OWIN and Katana later, but the fact that it's built using OWIN means it's portable. You can find out more in the Authentication and Identity section of the ASP.NET site (and lots more content will be going up there soon). New Bootstrap based project templates The new project templates are built using Bootstrap 3. Bootstrap (formerly Twitter Bootstrap) is a front-end framework that brings a lot of nice benefits: It's responsive, so your projects will automatically scale to device width using CSS media queries. For example, menus are full size on a desktop browser, but on narrower screens you automatically get a mobile-friendly menu. The built-in Bootstrap styles make your standard page elements (headers, footers, buttons, form inputs, tables etc.) look nice and modern. Bootstrap is themeable, so you can reskin your whole site by dropping in a new Bootstrap theme. Since Bootstrap is pretty popular across the web development community, this gives you a large and rapidly growing variety of templates (free and paid) to choose from. Bootstrap also includes a lot of very useful things: components (like progress bars and badges), useful glyphicons, and some jQuery plugins for tooltips, dropdowns, carousels, etc.). Here's a look at how the responsive part works. When the page is full screen, the menu and header are optimized for a wide screen display: When I shrink the page down (this is all based on page width, not useragent sniffing) the menu turns into a nice mobile-friendly dropdown: For a quick example, I grabbed a new free theme off bootswatch.com. For simple themes, you just need to download the boostrap.css file and replace the /content/bootstrap.css file in your project. Now when I refresh the page, I've got a new theme: Scaffolding The big change in scaffolding is that it's one system that works across ASP.NET. You can create a new Empty Web project or Web Forms project and you'll get the Scaffold context menus. For release, we've got MVC 5 and Web API 2 controllers. We had a preview of Web Forms scaffolding in the preview releases, but they weren't fully baked for RTM. Look for them in a future update, expected pretty soon. This scaffolding system wasn't just changed to work across the ASP.NET frameworks, it's also built to enable future extensibility. That's not in this release, but should also hopefully be out soon. Project Readme page This is a small thing, but I really like it. When you create a new project, you get a Project_Readme.html page that's added to the root of your project and opens in the Visual Studio built-in browser. I love it. A long time ago, when you created a new project we just dumped it on you and left you scratching your head about what to do next. Not ideal. Then we started adding a bunch of Getting Started information to the new project templates. That told you what to do next, but you had to delete all of that stuff out of your website. It doesn't belong there. Not ideal. This is a simple HTML file that's not integrated into your project code at all. You can delete it if you want. But, it shows a lot of helpful links that are current for the project you just created. In the future, if we add new wacky project types, they can create readme docs with specific information on how to do appropriately wacky things. Side note: I really like that they used the internal browser in Visual Studio to show this content rather than popping open an HTML page in the default browser. I hate that. It's annoying. If you're doing that, I hope you'll stop. What if some unnamed person has 40 or 90 tabs saved in their browser session? When you pop open your "Thanks for installing my Visual Studio extension!" page, all eleventy billion tabs start up and I wish I'd never installed your thing. Be like these guys and pop stuff Visual Studio specific HTML docs in the Visual Studio browser. ASP.NET MVC 5 The biggest change with ASP.NET MVC 5 is that it's no longer a separate project type. It integrates well with the rest of ASP.NET. In addition to that and the other common features we've already looked at (Bootstrap templates, Identity, authentication), here's what's new for ASP.NET MVC. Attribute routing ASP.NET MVC now supports attribute routing, thanks to a contribution by Tim McCall, the author of http://attributerouting.net. With attribute routing you can specify your routes by annotating your actions and controllers. This supports some pretty complex, customized routing scenarios, and it allows you to keep your route information right with your controller actions if you'd like. Here's a controller that includes an action whose method name is Hiding, but I've used AttributeRouting to configure it to /spaghetti/with-nesting/where-is-waldo public class SampleController : Controller { [Route("spaghetti/with-nesting/where-is-waldo")] public string Hiding() { return "You found me!"; } } I enable that in my RouteConfig.cs, and I can use that in conjunction with my other MVC routes like this: public class RouteConfig { public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes) { routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}"); routes.MapMvcAttributeRoutes(); routes.MapRoute( name: "Default", url: "{controller}/{action}/{id}", defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } ); } } You can read more about Attribute Routing in ASP.NET MVC 5 here. Filter enhancements There are two new additions to filters: Authentication Filters and Filter Overrides. Authentication filters are a new kind of filter in ASP.NET MVC that run prior to authorization filters in the ASP.NET MVC pipeline and allow you to specify authentication logic per-action, per-controller, or globally for all controllers. Authentication filters process credentials in the request and provide a corresponding principal. Authentication filters can also add authentication challenges in response to unauthorized requests. Override filters let you change which filters apply to a given action method or controller. Override filters specify a set of filter types that should not be run for a given scope (action or controller). This allows you to configure filters that apply globally but then exclude certain global filters from applying to specific actions or controllers. ASP.NET Web API 2 ASP.NET Web API 2 includes a lot of new features. Attribute Routing ASP.NET Web API supports the same attribute routing system that's in ASP.NET MVC 5. You can read more about the Attribute Routing features in Web API in this article. OAuth 2.0 ASP.NET Web API picks up OAuth 2.0 support, using security middleware running on OWIN (discussed below). This is great for features like authenticated Single Page Applications. OData Improvements ASP.NET Web API now has full OData support. That required adding in some of the most powerful operators: $select, $expand, $batch and $value. You can read more about OData operator support in this article by Mike Wasson. Lots more There's a huge list of other features, including CORS (cross-origin request sharing), IHttpActionResult, IHttpRequestContext, and more. I think the best overview is in the release notes. OWIN and Katana I've written about OWIN and Katana recently. I'm a big fan. OWIN is the Open Web Interfaces for .NET. It's a spec, like HTML or HTTP, so you can't install OWIN. The benefit of OWIN is that it's a community specification, so anyone who implements it can plug into the ASP.NET stack, either as middleware or as a host. Katana is the Microsoft implementation of OWIN. It leverages OWIN to wire up things like authentication, handlers, modules, IIS hosting, etc., so ASP.NET can host OWIN components and Katana components can run in someone else's OWIN implementation. Howard Dierking just wrote a cool article in MSDN magazine describing Katana in depth: Getting Started with the Katana Project. He had an interesting example showing an OWIN based pipeline which leveraged SignalR, ASP.NET Web API and NancyFx components in the same stack. If this kind of thing makes sense to you, that's great. If it doesn't, don't worry, but keep an eye on it. You're going to see some cool things happen as a result of ASP.NET becoming more and more pluggable. Visual Studio Web Tools Okay, this stuff's just crazy. Visual Studio has been adding some nice web dev features over the past few years, but they've really cranked it up for this release. Visual Studio is by far my favorite code editor for all web files: CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and lots of popular libraries. Stop thinking of Visual Studio as a big editor that you only use to write back-end code. Stop editing HTML and CSS in Notepad (or Sublime, Notepad++, etc.). Visual Studio starts up in under 2 seconds on a modern computer with an SSD. Misspelling HTML attributes or your CSS classes or jQuery or Angular syntax is stupid. It doesn't make you a better developer, it makes you a silly person who wastes time. Browser Link Browser Link is a real-time, two-way connection between Visual Studio and all connected browsers. It's only attached when you're running locally, in debug, but it applies to any and all connected browser, including emulators. You may have seen demos that showed the browsers refreshing based on changes in the editor, and I'll agree that's pretty cool. But it's really just the start. It's a two-way connection, and it's built for extensiblity. That means you can write extensions that push information from your running application (in IE, Chrome, a mobile emulator, etc.) back to Visual Studio. Mads and team have showed off some demonstrations where they enabled edit mode in the browser which updated the source HTML back on the browser. It's also possible to look at how the rendered HTML performs, check for compatibility issues, watch for unused CSS classes, the sky's the limit. New HTML editor The previous HTML editor had a lot of old code that didn't allow for improvements. The team rewrote the HTML editor to take advantage of the new(ish) extensibility features in Visual Studio, which then allowed them to add in all kinds of features - things like CSS Class and ID IntelliSense (so you type style="" and get a list of classes and ID's for your project), smart indent based on how your document is formatted, JavaScript reference auto-sync, etc. Here's a 3 minute tour from Mads Kristensen. The previous HTML editor had a lot of old code that didn't allow for improvements. The team rewrote the HTML editor to take advantage of the new(ish) extensibility features in Visual Studio, which then allowed them to add in all kinds of features - things like CSS Class and ID IntelliSense (so you type style="" and get a list of classes and ID's for your project), smart indent based on how your document is formatted, JavaScript reference auto-sync, etc. Lots more Visual Studio web dev features That's just a sampling - there's a ton of great features for JavaScript editing, CSS editing, publishing, and Page Inspector (which shows real-time rendering of your page inside Visual Studio). Here are some more short videos showing those features. Lots, lots more Okay, that's just a summary, and it's still quite a bit. Head on over to http://asp.net/vnext for more information, and download Visual Studio 2013 now to get started!

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• Rendering ASP.NET MVC Views to String

  - by Rick Strahl

  It's not uncommon in my applications that I require longish text output that does not have to be rendered into the HTTP output stream. The most common scenario I have for 'template driven' non-Web text is for emails of all sorts. Logon confirmations and verifications, email confirmations for things like orders, status updates or scheduler notifications - all of which require merged text output both within and sometimes outside of Web applications. On other occasions I also need to capture the output from certain views for logging purposes. Rather than creating text output in code, it's much nicer to use the rendering mechanism that ASP.NET MVC already provides by way of it's ViewEngines - using Razor or WebForms views - to render output to a string. This is nice because it uses the same familiar rendering mechanism that I already use for my HTTP output and it also solves the problem of where to store the templates for rendering this content in nothing more than perhaps a separate view folder. The good news is that ASP.NET MVC's rendering engine is much more modular than the full ASP.NET runtime engine which was a real pain in the butt to coerce into rendering output to string. With MVC the rendering engine has been separated out from core ASP.NET runtime, so it's actually a lot easier to get View output into a string. Getting View Output from within an MVC Application If you need to generate string output from an MVC and pass some model data to it, the process to capture this output is fairly straight forward and involves only a handful of lines of code. The catch is that this particular approach requires that you have an active ControllerContext that can be passed to the view. This means that the following approach is limited to access from within Controller methods. Here's a class that wraps the process and provides both instance and static methods to handle the rendering:/// <summary> /// Class that renders MVC views to a string using the /// standard MVC View Engine to render the view. /// /// Note: This class can only be used within MVC /// applications that have an active ControllerContext. /// </summary> public class ViewRenderer { /// <summary> /// Required Controller Context /// </summary> protected ControllerContext Context { get; set; } public ViewRenderer(ControllerContext controllerContext) { Context = controllerContext; } /// <summary> /// Renders a full MVC view to a string. Will render with the full MVC /// View engine including running _ViewStart and merging into _Layout /// </summary> /// <param name="viewPath"> /// The path to the view to render. Either in same controller, shared by /// name or as fully qualified ~/ path including extension /// </param> /// <param name="model">The model to render the view with</param> /// <returns>String of the rendered view or null on error</returns> public string RenderView(string viewPath, object model) { return RenderViewToStringInternal(viewPath, model, false); } /// <summary> /// Renders a partial MVC view to string. Use this method to render /// a partial view that doesn't merge with _Layout and doesn't fire /// _ViewStart. /// </summary> /// <param name="viewPath"> /// The path to the view to render. Either in same controller, shared by /// name or as fully qualified ~/ path including extension /// </param> /// <param name="model">The model to pass to the viewRenderer</param> /// <returns>String of the rendered view or null on error</returns> public string RenderPartialView(string viewPath, object model) { return RenderViewToStringInternal(viewPath, model, true); } public static string RenderView(string viewPath, object model, ControllerContext controllerContext) { ViewRenderer renderer = new ViewRenderer(controllerContext); return renderer.RenderView(viewPath, model); } public static string RenderPartialView(string viewPath, object model, ControllerContext controllerContext) { ViewRenderer renderer = new ViewRenderer(controllerContext); return renderer.RenderPartialView(viewPath, model); } protected string RenderViewToStringInternal(string viewPath, object model, bool partial = false) { // first find the ViewEngine for this view ViewEngineResult viewEngineResult = null; if (partial) viewEngineResult = ViewEngines.Engines.FindPartialView(Context, viewPath); else viewEngineResult = ViewEngines.Engines.FindView(Context, viewPath, null); if (viewEngineResult == null) throw new FileNotFoundException(Properties.Resources.ViewCouldNotBeFound); // get the view and attach the model to view data var view = viewEngineResult.View; Context.Controller.ViewData.Model = model; string result = null; using (var sw = new StringWriter()) { var ctx = new ViewContext(Context, view, Context.Controller.ViewData, Context.Controller.TempData, sw); view.Render(ctx, sw); result = sw.ToString(); } return result; } } The key is the RenderViewToStringInternal method. The method first tries to find the view to render based on its path which can either be in the current controller's view path or the shared view path using its simple name (PasswordRecovery) or alternately by its full virtual path (~/Views/Templates/PasswordRecovery.cshtml). This code should work both for Razor and WebForms views although I've only tried it with Razor Views. Note that WebForms Views might actually be better for plain text as Razor adds all sorts of white space into its output when there are code blocks in the template. The Web Forms engine provides more accurate rendering for raw text scenarios. Once a view engine is found the view to render can be retrieved. Views in MVC render based on data that comes off the controller like the ViewData which contains the model along with the actual ViewData and ViewBag. From the View and some of the Context data a ViewContext is created which is then used to render the view with. The View picks up the Model and other data from the ViewContext internally and processes the View the same it would be processed if it were to send its output into the HTTP output stream. The difference is that we can override the ViewContext's output stream which we provide and capture into a StringWriter(). After rendering completes the result holds the output string. If an error occurs the error behavior is similar what you see with regular MVC errors - you get a full yellow screen of death including the view error information with the line of error highlighted. It's your responsibility to handle the error - or let it bubble up to your regular Controller Error filter if you have one. To use the simple class you only need a single line of code if you call the static methods. Here's an example of some Controller code that is used to send a user notification to a customer via email in one of my applications:[HttpPost] public ActionResult ContactSeller(ContactSellerViewModel model) { InitializeViewModel(model); var entryBus = new busEntry(); var entry = entryBus.LoadByDisplayId(model.EntryId); if ( string.IsNullOrEmpty(model.Email) ) entryBus.ValidationErrors.Add("Email address can't be empty.","Email"); if ( string.IsNullOrEmpty(model.Message)) entryBus.ValidationErrors.Add("Message can't be empty.","Message"); model.EntryId = entry.DisplayId; model.EntryTitle = entry.Title; if (entryBus.ValidationErrors.Count > 0) { ErrorDisplay.AddMessages(entryBus.ValidationErrors); ErrorDisplay.ShowError("Please correct the following:"); } else { string message = ViewRenderer.RenderView("~/views/template/ContactSellerEmail.cshtml",model, ControllerContext); string title = entry.Title + " (" + entry.DisplayId + ") - " + App.Configuration.ApplicationName; AppUtils.SendEmail(title, message, model.Email, entry.User.Email, false, false)) } return View(model); } Simple! The view in this case is just a plain MVC view and in this case it's a very simple plain text email message (edited for brevity here) that is created and sent off:@model ContactSellerViewModel @{ Layout = null; }re: @Model.EntryTitle @Model.ListingUrl @Model.Message ** SECURITY ADVISORY - AVOID SCAMS ** Avoid: wiring money, cross-border deals, work-at-home ** Beware: cashier checks, money orders, escrow, shipping ** More Info: @(App.Configuration.ApplicationBaseUrl)scams.html Obviously this is a very simple view (I edited out more from this page to keep it brief) -  but other template views are much more complex HTML documents or long messages that are occasionally updated and they are a perfect fit for Razor rendering. It even works with nested partial views and _layout pages. Partial Rendering Notice that I'm rendering a full View here. In the view I explicitly set the Layout=null to avoid pulling in _layout.cshtml for this view. This can also be controlled externally by calling the RenderPartial method instead: string message = ViewRenderer.RenderPartialView("~/views/template/ContactSellerEmail.cshtml",model, ControllerContext); with this line of code no layout page (or _viewstart) will be loaded, so the output generated is just what's in the view. I find myself using Partials most of the time when rendering templates, since the target of templates usually tend to be emails or other HTML fragment like output, so the RenderPartialView() method is definitely useful to me. Rendering without a ControllerContext The preceding class is great when you're need template rendering from within MVC controller actions or anywhere where you have access to the request Controller. But if you don't have a controller context handy - maybe inside a utility function that is static, a non-Web application, or an operation that runs asynchronously in ASP.NET - which makes using the above code impossible. I haven't found a way to manually create a Controller context to provide the ViewContext() what it needs from outside of the MVC infrastructure. However, there are ways to accomplish this,  but they are a bit more complex. It's possible to host the RazorEngine on your own, which side steps all of the MVC framework and HTTP and just deals with the raw rendering engine. I wrote about this process in Hosting the Razor Engine in Non-Web Applications a long while back. It's quite a process to create a custom Razor engine and runtime, but it allows for all sorts of flexibility. There's also a RazorEngine CodePlex project that does something similar. I've been meaning to check out the latter but haven't gotten around to it since I have my own code to do this. The trick to hosting the RazorEngine to have it behave properly inside of an ASP.NET application and properly cache content so templates aren't constantly rebuild and reparsed. Anyway, in the same app as above I have one scenario where no ControllerContext is available: I have a background scheduler running inside of the app that fires on timed intervals. This process could be external but because it's lightweight we decided to fire it right inside of the ASP.NET app on a separate thread. In my app the code that renders these templates does something like this:var model = new SearchNotificationViewModel() { Entries = entries, Notification = notification, User = user }; // TODO: Need logging for errors sending string razorError = null; var result = AppUtils.RenderRazorTemplate("~/views/template/SearchNotificationTemplate.cshtml", model, razorError); which references a couple of helper functions that set up my RazorFolderHostContainer class:public static string RenderRazorTemplate(string virtualPath, object model,string errorMessage = null) { var razor = AppUtils.CreateRazorHost(); var path = virtualPath.Replace("~/", "").Replace("~", "").Replace("/", "\\"); var merged = razor.RenderTemplateToString(path, model); if (merged == null) errorMessage = razor.ErrorMessage; return merged; } /// <summary> /// Creates a RazorStringHostContainer and starts it /// Call .Stop() when you're done with it. /// /// This is a static instance /// </summary> /// <param name="virtualPath"></param> /// <param name="binBasePath"></param> /// <param name="forceLoad"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static RazorFolderHostContainer CreateRazorHost(string binBasePath = null, bool forceLoad = false) { if (binBasePath == null) { if (HttpContext.Current != null) binBasePath = HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("~/"); else binBasePath = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory; } if (_RazorHost == null || forceLoad) { if (!binBasePath.EndsWith("\\")) binBasePath += "\\"; //var razor = new RazorStringHostContainer(); var razor = new RazorFolderHostContainer(); razor.TemplatePath = binBasePath; binBasePath += "bin\\"; razor.BaseBinaryFolder = binBasePath; razor.UseAppDomain = false; razor.ReferencedAssemblies.Add(binBasePath + "ClassifiedsBusiness.dll"); razor.ReferencedAssemblies.Add(binBasePath + "ClassifiedsWeb.dll"); razor.ReferencedAssemblies.Add(binBasePath + "Westwind.Utilities.dll"); razor.ReferencedAssemblies.Add(binBasePath + "Westwind.Web.dll"); razor.ReferencedAssemblies.Add(binBasePath + "Westwind.Web.Mvc.dll"); razor.ReferencedAssemblies.Add("System.Web.dll"); razor.ReferencedNamespaces.Add("System.Web"); razor.ReferencedNamespaces.Add("ClassifiedsBusiness"); razor.ReferencedNamespaces.Add("ClassifiedsWeb"); razor.ReferencedNamespaces.Add("Westwind.Web"); razor.ReferencedNamespaces.Add("Westwind.Utilities"); _RazorHost = razor; _RazorHost.Start(); //_RazorHost.Engine.Configuration.CompileToMemory = false; } return _RazorHost; } The RazorFolderHostContainer essentially is a full runtime that mimics a folder structure like a typical Web app does including caching semantics and compiling code only if code changes on disk. It maps a folder hierarchy to views using the ~/ path syntax. The host is then configured to add assemblies and namespaces. Unfortunately the engine is not exactly like MVC's Razor - the expression expansion and code execution are the same, but some of the support methods like sections, helpers etc. are not all there so templates have to be a bit simpler. There are other folder hosts provided as well to directly execute templates from strings (using RazorStringHostContainer). The following is an example of an HTML email template @inherits RazorHosting.RazorTemplateFolderHost <ClassifiedsWeb.SearchNotificationViewModel> <html> <head> <title>Search Notifications</title> <style> body { margin: 5px;font-family: Verdana, Arial; font-size: 10pt;} h3 { color: SteelBlue; } .entry-item { border-bottom: 1px solid grey; padding: 8px; margin-bottom: 5px; } </style> </head> <body> Hello @Model.User.Name,<br /> <p>Below are your Search Results for the search phrase:</p> <h3>@Model.Notification.SearchPhrase</h3> <small>since @TimeUtils.ShortDateString(Model.Notification.LastSearch)</small> <hr /> You can see that the syntax is a little different. Instead of the familiar @model header the raw Razor  @inherits tag is used to specify the template base class (which you can extend). I took a quick look through the feature set of RazorEngine on CodePlex (now Github I guess) and the template implementation they use is closer to MVC's razor but there are other differences. In the end don't expect exact behavior like MVC templates if you use an external Razor rendering engine. This is not what I would consider an ideal solution, but it works well enough for this project. My biggest concern is the overhead of hosting a second razor engine in a Web app and the fact that here the differences in template rendering between 'real' MVC Razor views and another RazorEngine really are noticeable. You win some, you lose some It's extremely nice to see that if you have a ControllerContext handy (which probably addresses 99% of Web app scenarios) rendering a view to string using the native MVC Razor engine is pretty simple. Kudos on making that happen - as it solves a problem I see in just about every Web application I work on. But it is a bummer that a ControllerContext is required to make this simple code work. It'd be really sweet if there was a way to render views without being so closely coupled to the ASP.NET or MVC infrastructure that requires a ControllerContext. Alternately it'd be nice to have a way for an MVC based application to create a minimal ControllerContext from scratch - maybe somebody's been down that path. I tried for a few hours to come up with a way to make that work but gave up in the soup of nested contexts (MVC/Controller/View/Http). I suspect going down this path would be similar to hosting the ASP.NET runtime requiring a WorkerRequest. Brrr…. The sad part is that it seems to me that a View should really not require much 'context' of any kind to render output to string. Yes there are a few things that clearly are required like paths to the virtual and possibly the disk paths to the root of the app, but beyond that view rendering should not require much. But, no such luck. For now custom RazorHosting seems to be the only way to make Razor rendering go outside of the MVC context… Resources Full ViewRenderer.cs source code from Westwind.Web.Mvc library Hosting the Razor Engine for Non-Web Applications RazorEngine on GitHub© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in ASP.NET   ASP.NET  MVC   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• View Maps and Get Directions in Google Chrome

  - by Asian Angel

  Every so often we all need to look at a map for reference purposes or to get directions. If you are looking for a great quick reference app then join us as we look at the Mini Google Maps extension for Google Chrome. Mini Google Maps in Action While this may look like a rather basic map extension there is more to it than meets the eye at first glance. Here is the default view when you open Mini Google Maps for the first time. Things that we really liked about this extension were: Three different aerial views available (Map, Satellite, & Terrain) Three different viewing sizes available (and the extension remembers your chosen size) The ability to get directions in combination with a map We decided to try each of the viewing sizes available…here you can see the “Medium Setting”. Notice that the scale stays the same but you get more territory included to view. Then the “Large Setting”…which we infinitely preferred to the others. Once again look at the amount of territory included by default…very nice. Switching over to the “Satellite View”… Followed by the “Terrain View”. For our first example we decided to peek at Vancouver, British Columbia. After zooming out a little bit we had a very nice looking map. For the next test we asked for directions from Vancouver to Toronto. Both the directions and map turned out very well. And just for fun we looked up Paris, France with the “Satellite View”. Conclusion If you find yourself needing to view a map or get directions often then the Mini Google Maps extension will be a very useful tool for you. Links Download the Mini Google Maps extension (Google Chrome Extensions) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Get Maps and Directions to Your Contacts in Outlook 2007Stupid Geek Tricks: Browse the Web from OutlookView the Time & Date in Chrome When Hiding Your TaskbarHow to Make Google Chrome Your Default BrowserAccess Google Chrome’s Special Pages the Easy Way TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Make your Joomla & Drupal Sites Mobile with OSMOBI Integrate Twitter and Delicious and Make Life Easier Design Your Web Pages Using the Golden Ratio Worldwide Growth of the Internet How to Find Your Mac Address Use My TextTools to Edit and Organize Text

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• SQL SERVER – Copy Data from One Table to Another Table – SQL in Sixty Seconds #031 – Video

  - by pinaldave

  Copy data from one table to another table is one of the most requested questions on forums, Facebook and Twitter. The question has come in many formats and there are places I have seen developers are using cursor instead of this direct method. Earlier I have written the similar article a few years ago - SQL SERVER – Insert Data From One Table to Another Table – INSERT INTO SELECT – SELECT INTO TABLE. The article has been very popular and I have received many interesting and constructive comments. However there were two specific comments keep on ending up on my mailbox. 1) SQL Server AdventureWorks Samples Database does not have table I used in the example 2) If there is a video tutorial of the same example. After carefully thinking I decided to build a new set of the scripts for the example which are very similar to the old one as well video tutorial of the same. There was no better place than our SQL in Sixty Second Series to cover this interesting small concept. Let me know what you think of this video. Here is the updated script. -- Method 1 : INSERT INTO SELECT USE AdventureWorks2012 GO ----Create TestTable CREATE TABLE TestTable (FirstName VARCHAR(100), LastName VARCHAR(100)) ----INSERT INTO TestTable using SELECT INSERT INTO TestTable (FirstName, LastName) SELECT FirstName, LastName FROM Person.Person WHERE EmailPromotion = 2 ----Verify that Data in TestTable SELECT FirstName, LastName FROM TestTable ----Clean Up Database DROP TABLE TestTable GO --------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------- -- Method 2 : SELECT INTO USE AdventureWorks2012 GO ----Create new table and insert into table using SELECT INSERT SELECT FirstName, LastName INTO TestTable FROM Person.Person WHERE EmailPromotion = 2 ----Verify that Data in TestTable SELECT FirstName, LastName FROM TestTable ----Clean Up Database DROP TABLE TestTable GO Related Tips in SQL in Sixty Seconds: SQL SERVER – Insert Data From One Table to Another Table – INSERT INTO SELECT – SELECT INTO TABLE Powershell – Importing CSV File Into Database – Video SQL SERVER – 2005 – Export Data From SQL Server 2005 to Microsoft Excel Datasheet SQL SERVER – Import CSV File into Database Table Using SSIS SQL SERVER – Import CSV File Into SQL Server Using Bulk Insert – Load Comma Delimited File Into SQL Server SQL SERVER – 2005 – Generate Script with Data from Database – Database Publishing Wizard What would you like to see in the next SQL in Sixty Seconds video? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)   Filed under: Database, Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL in Sixty Seconds, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology, Video Tagged: Excel

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• Creating STA COM compatible ASP.NET Applications

  - by Rick Strahl

  When building ASP.NET applications that interface with old school COM objects like those created with VB6 or Visual FoxPro (MTDLL), it's extremely important that the threads that are serving requests use Single Threaded Apartment Threading. STA is a COM built-in technology that allows essentially single threaded components to operate reliably in a multi-threaded environment. STA's guarantee that COM objects instantiated on a specific thread stay on that specific thread and any access to a COM object from another thread automatically marshals that thread to the STA thread. The end effect is that you can have multiple threads, but a COM object instance lives on a fixed never changing thread. ASP.NET by default uses MTA (multi-threaded apartment) threads which are truly free spinning threads that pay no heed to COM object marshaling. This is vastly more efficient than STA threading which has a bit of overhead in determining whether it's OK to run code on a given thread or whether some sort of thread/COM marshaling needs to occur. MTA COM components can be very efficient, but STA COM components in a multi-threaded environment always tend to have a fair amount of overhead. It's amazing how much COM Interop I still see today so while it seems really old school to be talking about this topic, it's actually quite apropos for me as I have many customers using legacy COM systems that need to interface with other .NET applications. In this post I'm consolidating some of the hacks I've used to integrate with various ASP.NET technologies when using STA COM Components. STA in ASP.NET Support for STA threading in the ASP.NET framework is fairly limited. Specifically only the original ASP.NET WebForms technology supports STA threading directly via its STA Page Handler implementation or what you might know as ASPCOMPAT mode. For WebForms running STA components is as easy as specifying the ASPCOMPAT attribute in the @Page tag:<%@ Page Language="C#" AspCompat="true" %> which runs the page in STA mode. Removing it runs in MTA mode. Simple. Unfortunately all other ASP.NET technologies built on top of the core ASP.NET engine do not support STA natively. So if you want to use STA COM components in MVC or with class ASMX Web Services, there's no automatic way like the ASPCOMPAT keyword available. So what happens when you run an STA COM component in an MTA application? In low volume environments - nothing much will happen. The COM objects will appear to work just fine as there are no simultaneous thread interactions and the COM component will happily run on a single thread or multiple single threads one at a time. So for testing running components in MTA environments may appear to work just fine. However as load increases and threads get re-used by ASP.NET COM objects will end up getting created on multiple different threads. This can result in crashes or hangs, or data corruption in the STA components which store their state in thread local storage on the STA thread. If threads overlap this global store can easily get corrupted which in turn causes problems. STA ensures that any COM object instance loaded always stays on the same thread it was instantiated on. What about COM+? COM+ is supposed to address the problem of STA in MTA applications by providing an abstraction with it's own thread pool manager for COM objects. It steps in to the COM instantiation pipeline and hands out COM instances from its own internally maintained STA Thread pool. This guarantees that the COM instantiation threads are STA threads if using STA components. COM+ works, but in my experience the technology is very, very slow for STA components. It adds a ton of overhead and reduces COM performance noticably in load tests in IIS. COM+ can make sense in some situations but for Web apps with STA components it falls short. In addition there's also the need to ensure that COM+ is set up and configured on the target machine and the fact that components have to be registered in COM+. COM+ also keeps components up at all times, so if a component needs to be replaced the COM+ package needs to be unloaded (same is true for IIS hosted components but it's more common to manage that). COM+ is an option for well established components, but native STA support tends to provide better performance and more consistent usability, IMHO. STA for non supporting ASP.NET Technologies As mentioned above only WebForms supports STA natively. However, by utilizing the WebForms ASP.NET Page handler internally it's actually possible to trick various other ASP.NET technologies and let them work with STA components. This is ugly but I've used each of these in various applications and I've had minimal problems making them work with FoxPro STA COM components which is about as dififcult as it gets for COM Interop in .NET. In this post I summarize several STA workarounds that enable you to use STA threading with these ASP.NET Technologies: ASMX Web Services ASP.NET MVC WCF Web Services ASP.NET Web API ASMX Web Services I start with classic ASP.NET ASMX Web Services because it's the easiest mechanism that allows for STA modification. It also clearly demonstrates how the WebForms STA Page Handler is the key technology to enable the various other solutions to create STA components. Essentially the way this works is to override the WebForms Page class and hijack it's init functionality for processing requests. Here's what this looks like for Web Services:namespace FoxProAspNet { public class WebServiceStaHandler : System.Web.UI.Page, IHttpAsyncHandler { protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e) { IHttpHandler handler = new WebServiceHandlerFactory().GetHandler( this.Context, this.Context.Request.HttpMethod, this.Context.Request.FilePath, this.Context.Request.PhysicalPath); handler.ProcessRequest(this.Context); this.Context.ApplicationInstance.CompleteRequest(); } public IAsyncResult BeginProcessRequest( HttpContext context, AsyncCallback cb, object extraData) { return this.AspCompatBeginProcessRequest(context, cb, extraData); } public void EndProcessRequest(IAsyncResult result) { this.AspCompatEndProcessRequest(result); } } public class AspCompatWebServiceStaHandlerWithSessionState : WebServiceStaHandler, IRequiresSessionState { } } This class overrides the ASP.NET WebForms Page class which has a little known AspCompatBeginProcessRequest() and AspCompatEndProcessRequest() method that is responsible for providing the WebForms ASPCOMPAT functionality. These methods handle routing requests to STA threads. Note there are two classes - one that includes session state and one that does not. If you plan on using ASP.NET Session state use the latter class, otherwise stick to the former. This maps to the EnableSessionState page setting in WebForms. This class simply hooks into this functionality by overriding the BeginProcessRequest and EndProcessRequest methods and always forcing it into the AspCompat methods. The way this works is that BeginProcessRequest() fires first to set up the threads and starts intializing the handler. As part of that process the OnInit() method is fired which is now already running on an STA thread. The code then creates an instance of the actual WebService handler factory and calls its ProcessRequest method to start executing which generates the Web Service result. Immediately after ProcessRequest the request is stopped with Application.CompletRequest() which ensures that the rest of the Page handler logic doesn't fire. This means that even though the fairly heavy Page class is overridden here, it doesn't end up executing any of its internal processing which makes this code fairly efficient. In a nutshell, we're highjacking the Page HttpHandler and forcing it to process the WebService process handler in the context of the AspCompat handler behavior. Hooking up the Handler Because the above is an HttpHandler implementation you need to hook up the custom handler and replace the standard ASMX handler. To do this you need to modify the web.config file (here for IIS 7 and IIS Express): <configuration> <system.webServer> <handlers> <remove name="WebServiceHandlerFactory-Integrated-4.0" /> <add name="Asmx STA Web Service Handler" path="*.asmx" verb="*" type="FoxProAspNet.WebServiceStaHandler" precondition="integrated"/> </handlers> </system.webServer> </configuration> (Note: The name for the WebServiceHandlerFactory-Integrated-4.0 might be slightly different depending on your server version. Check the IIS Handler configuration in the IIS Management Console for the exact name or simply remove the handler from the list there which will propagate to your web.config). For IIS 5 & 6 (Windows XP/2003) or the Visual Studio Web Server use:<configuration> <system.web> <httpHandlers> <remove path="*.asmx" verb="*" /> <add path="*.asmx" verb="*" type="FoxProAspNet.WebServiceStaHandler" /> </httpHandlers> </system.web></configuration> To test, create a new ASMX Web Service and create a method like this: [WebService(Namespace = "http://foxaspnet.org/")] [WebServiceBinding(ConformsTo = WsiProfiles.BasicProfile1_1)] public class FoxWebService : System.Web.Services.WebService { [WebMethod] public string HelloWorld() { return "Hello World. Threading mode is: " + System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.GetApartmentState(); } } Run this before you put in the web.config configuration changes and you should get: Hello World. Threading mode is: MTA Then put the handler mapping into Web.config and you should see: Hello World. Threading mode is: STA And you're on your way to using STA COM components. It's a hack but it works well! I've used this with several high volume Web Service installations with various customers and it's been fast and reliable. ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET MVC has quickly become the most popular ASP.NET technology, replacing WebForms for creating HTML output. MVC is more complex to get started with, but once you understand the basic structure of how requests flow through the MVC pipeline it's easy to use and amazingly flexible in manipulating HTML requests. In addition, MVC has great support for non-HTML output sources like JSON and XML, making it an excellent choice for AJAX requests without any additional tools. Unlike WebForms ASP.NET MVC doesn't support STA threads natively and so some trickery is needed to make it work with STA threads as well. MVC gets its handler implementation through custom route handlers using ASP.NET's built in routing semantics. To work in an STA handler requires working in the Page Handler as part of the Route Handler implementation. As with the Web Service handler the first step is to create a custom HttpHandler that can instantiate an MVC request pipeline properly:public class MvcStaThreadHttpAsyncHandler : Page, IHttpAsyncHandler, IRequiresSessionState { private RequestContext _requestContext; public MvcStaThreadHttpAsyncHandler(RequestContext requestContext) { if (requestContext == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("requestContext"); _requestContext = requestContext; } public IAsyncResult BeginProcessRequest(HttpContext context, AsyncCallback cb, object extraData) { return this.AspCompatBeginProcessRequest(context, cb, extraData); } protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e) { var controllerName = _requestContext.RouteData.GetRequiredString("controller"); var controllerFactory = ControllerBuilder.Current.GetControllerFactory(); var controller = controllerFactory.CreateController(_requestContext, controllerName); if (controller == null) throw new InvalidOperationException("Could not find controller: " + controllerName); try { controller.Execute(_requestContext); } finally { controllerFactory.ReleaseController(controller); } this.Context.ApplicationInstance.CompleteRequest(); } public void EndProcessRequest(IAsyncResult result) { this.AspCompatEndProcessRequest(result); } public override void ProcessRequest(HttpContext httpContext) { throw new NotSupportedException("STAThreadRouteHandler does not support ProcessRequest called (only BeginProcessRequest)"); } } This handler code figures out which controller to load and then executes the controller. MVC internally provides the information needed to route to the appropriate method and pass the right parameters. Like the Web Service handler the logic occurs in the OnInit() and performs all the processing in that part of the request. Next, we need a RouteHandler that can actually pick up this handler. Unlike the Web Service handler where we simply registered the handler, MVC requires a RouteHandler to pick up the handler. RouteHandlers look at the URL's path and based on that decide on what handler to invoke. The route handler is pretty simple - all it does is load our custom handler: public class MvcStaThreadRouteHandler : IRouteHandler { public IHttpHandler GetHttpHandler(RequestContext requestContext) { if (requestContext == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("requestContext"); return new MvcStaThreadHttpAsyncHandler(requestContext); } } At this point you can instantiate this route handler and force STA requests to MVC by specifying a route. The following sets up the ASP.NET Default Route:Route mvcRoute = new Route("{controller}/{action}/{id}", new RouteValueDictionary( new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }), new MvcStaThreadRouteHandler()); RouteTable.Routes.Add(mvcRoute);   To make this code a little easier to work with and mimic the behavior of the routes.MapRoute() functionality extension method that MVC provides, here is an extension method for MapMvcStaRoute(): public static class RouteCollectionExtensions { public static void MapMvcStaRoute(this RouteCollection routeTable, string name, string url, object defaults = null) { Route mvcRoute = new Route(url, new RouteValueDictionary(defaults), new MvcStaThreadRouteHandler()); RouteTable.Routes.Add(mvcRoute); } } With this the syntax to add  route becomes a little easier and matches the MapRoute() method:RouteTable.Routes.MapMvcStaRoute( name: "Default", url: "{controller}/{action}/{id}", defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } ); The nice thing about this route handler, STA Handler and extension method is that it's fully self contained. You can put all three into a single class file and stick it into your Web app, and then simply call MapMvcStaRoute() and it just works. Easy! To see whether this works create an MVC controller like this: public class ThreadTestController : Controller { public string ThreadingMode() { return Thread.CurrentThread.GetApartmentState().ToString(); } } Try this test both with only the MapRoute() hookup in the RouteConfiguration in which case you should get MTA as the value. Then change the MapRoute() call to MapMvcStaRoute() leaving all the parameters the same and re-run the request. You now should see STA as the result. You're on your way using STA COM components reliably in ASP.NET MVC. WCF Web Services running through IIS WCF Web Services provide a more robust and wider range of services for Web Services. You can use WCF over HTTP, TCP, and Pipes, and WCF services support WS* secure services. There are many features in WCF that go way beyond what ASMX can do. But it's also a bit more complex than ASMX. As a basic rule if you need to serve straight SOAP Services over HTTP I 'd recommend sticking with the simpler ASMX services especially if COM is involved. If you need WS* support or want to serve data over non-HTTP protocols then WCF makes more sense. WCF is not my forte but I found a solution from Scott Seely on his blog that describes the progress and that seems to work well. I'm copying his code below so this STA information is all in one place and quickly explain. Scott's code basically works by creating a custom OperationBehavior which can be specified via an [STAOperation] attribute on every method. Using his attribute you end up with a class (or Interface if you separate the contract and class) that looks like this: [ServiceContract] public class WcfService { [OperationContract] public string HelloWorldMta() { return Thread.CurrentThread.GetApartmentState().ToString(); } // Make sure you use this custom STAOperationBehavior // attribute to force STA operation of service methods [STAOperationBehavior] [OperationContract] public string HelloWorldSta() { return Thread.CurrentThread.GetApartmentState().ToString(); } } Pretty straight forward. The latter method returns STA while the former returns MTA. To make STA work every method needs to be marked up. The implementation consists of the attribute and OperationInvoker implementation. Here are the two classes required to make this work from Scott's post:public class STAOperationBehaviorAttribute : Attribute, IOperationBehavior { public void AddBindingParameters(OperationDescription operationDescription, System.ServiceModel.Channels.BindingParameterCollection bindingParameters) { } public void ApplyClientBehavior(OperationDescription operationDescription, System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ClientOperation clientOperation) { // If this is applied on the client, well, it just doesn’t make sense. // Don’t throw in case this attribute was applied on the contract // instead of the implementation. } public void ApplyDispatchBehavior(OperationDescription operationDescription, System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.DispatchOperation dispatchOperation) { // Change the IOperationInvoker for this operation. dispatchOperation.Invoker = new STAOperationInvoker(dispatchOperation.Invoker); } public void Validate(OperationDescription operationDescription) { if (operationDescription.SyncMethod == null) { throw new InvalidOperationException("The STAOperationBehaviorAttribute " + "only works for synchronous method invocations."); } } } public class STAOperationInvoker : IOperationInvoker { IOperationInvoker _innerInvoker; public STAOperationInvoker(IOperationInvoker invoker) { _innerInvoker = invoker; } public object[] AllocateInputs() { return _innerInvoker.AllocateInputs(); } public object Invoke(object instance, object[] inputs, out object[] outputs) { // Create a new, STA thread object[] staOutputs = null; object retval = null; Thread thread = new Thread( delegate() { retval = _innerInvoker.Invoke(instance, inputs, out staOutputs); }); thread.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA); thread.Start(); thread.Join(); outputs = staOutputs; return retval; } public IAsyncResult InvokeBegin(object instance, object[] inputs, AsyncCallback callback, object state) { // We don’t handle async… throw new NotImplementedException(); } public object InvokeEnd(object instance, out object[] outputs, IAsyncResult result) { // We don’t handle async… throw new NotImplementedException(); } public bool IsSynchronous { get { return true; } } } The key in this setup is the Invoker and the Invoke method which creates a new thread and then fires the request on this new thread. Because this approach creates a new thread for every request it's not super efficient. There's a bunch of overhead involved in creating the thread and throwing it away after each thread, but it'll work for low volume requests and insure each thread runs in STA mode. If better performance is required it would be useful to create a custom thread manager that can pool a number of STA threads and hand off threads as needed rather than creating new threads on every request. If your Web Service needs are simple and you need only to serve standard SOAP 1.x requests, I would recommend sticking with ASMX services. It's easier to set up and work with and for STA component use it'll be significantly better performing since ASP.NET manages the STA thread pool for you rather than firing new threads for each request. One nice thing about Scotts code is though that it works in any WCF environment including self hosting. It has no dependency on ASP.NET or WebForms for that matter. STA - If you must STA components are a  pain in the ass and thankfully there isn't too much stuff out there anymore that requires it. But when you need it and you need to access STA functionality from .NET at least there are a few options available to make it happen. Each of these solutions is a bit hacky, but they work - I've used all of them in production with good results with FoxPro components. I hope compiling all of these in one place here makes it STA consumption a little bit easier. I feel your pain :-) Resources Download STA Handler Code Examples Scott Seely's original STA WCF OperationBehavior Article© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in FoxPro   ASP.NET  .NET  COM   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Windows Azure: Backup Services Release, Hyper-V Recovery Manager, VM Enhancements, Enhanced Enterprise Management Support

  - by ScottGu

  This morning we released a huge set of updates to Windows Azure.  These new capabilities include: Backup Services: General Availability of Windows Azure Backup Services Hyper-V Recovery Manager: Public preview of Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager Virtual Machines: Delete Attached Disks, Availability Set Warnings, SQL AlwaysOn Configuration Active Directory: Securely manage hundreds of SaaS applications Enterprise Management: Use Active Directory to Better Manage Windows Azure Windows Azure SDK 2.2: A massive update of our SDK + Visual Studio tooling support All of these improvements are now available to use immediately.  Below are more details about them. Backup Service: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Backup Today we are releasing Windows Azure Backup Service as a general availability service.  This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production scenarios. Windows Azure Backup is a cloud based backup solution for Windows Server which allows files and folders to be backed up and recovered from the cloud, and provides off-site protection against data loss. The service provides IT administrators and developers with the option to back up and protect critical data in an easily recoverable way from any location with no upfront hardware cost. Windows Azure Backup is built on the Windows Azure platform and uses Windows Azure blob storage for storing customer data. Windows Server uses the downloadable Windows Azure Backup Agent to transfer file and folder data securely and efficiently to the Windows Azure Backup Service. Along with providing cloud backup for Windows Server, Windows Azure Backup Service also provides capability to backup data from System Center Data Protection Manager and Windows Server Essentials, to the cloud. All data is encrypted onsite before it is sent to the cloud, and customers retain and manage the encryption key (meaning the data is stored entirely secured and can’t be decrypted by anyone but yourself). Getting Started To get started with the Windows Azure Backup Service, create a new Backup Vault within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Click New->Data Services->Recovery Services->Backup Vault to do this: Once the backup vault is created you’ll be presented with a simple tutorial that will help guide you on how to register your Windows Servers with it: Once the servers you want to backup are registered, you can use the appropriate local management interface (such as the Microsoft Management Console snap-in, System Center Data Protection Manager Console, or Windows Server Essentials Dashboard) to configure the scheduled backups and to optionally initiate recoveries. You can follow these tutorials to learn more about how to do this: Tutorial: Schedule Backups Using the Windows Azure Backup Agent This tutorial helps you with setting up a backup schedule for your registered Windows Servers. Additionally, it also explains how to use Windows PowerShell cmdlets to set up a custom backup schedule. Tutorial: Recover Files and Folders Using the Windows Azure Backup Agent This tutorial helps you with recovering data from a backup. Additionally, it also explains how to use Windows PowerShell cmdlets to do the same tasks. Below are some of the key benefits the Windows Azure Backup Service provides: Simple configuration and management. Windows Azure Backup Service integrates with the familiar Windows Server Backup utility in Windows Server, the Data Protection Manager component in System Center and Windows Server Essentials, in order to provide a seamless backup and recovery experience to a local disk, or to the cloud. Block level incremental backups. The Windows Azure Backup Agent performs incremental backups by tracking file and block level changes and only transferring the changed blocks, hence reducing the storage and bandwidth utilization. Different point-in-time versions of the backups use storage efficiently by only storing the changes blocks between these versions. Data compression, encryption and throttling. The Windows Azure Backup Agent ensures that data is compressed and encrypted on the server before being sent to the Windows Azure Backup Service over the network. As a result, the Windows Azure Backup Service only stores encrypted data in the cloud storage. The encryption key is not available to the Windows Azure Backup Service, and as a result the data is never decrypted in the service. Also, users can setup throttling and configure how the Windows Azure Backup service utilizes the network bandwidth when backing up or restoring information. Data integrity is verified in the cloud. In addition to the secure backups, the backed up data is also automatically checked for integrity once the backup is done. As a result, any corruptions which may arise due to data transfer can be easily identified and are fixed automatically. Configurable retention policies for storing data in the cloud. The Windows Azure Backup Service accepts and implements retention policies to recycle backups that exceed the desired retention range, thereby meeting business policies and managing backup costs. Hyper-V Recovery Manager: Now Available in Public Preview I’m excited to also announce the public preview of a new Windows Azure Service – the Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager (HRM). Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager helps protect your business critical services by coordinating the replication and recovery of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2 private clouds at a secondary location. With automated protection, asynchronous ongoing replication, and orderly recovery, the Hyper-V Recovery Manager service can help you implement Disaster Recovery and restore important services accurately, consistently, and with minimal downtime. Application data in an Hyper-V Recovery Manager scenarios always travels on your on-premise replication channel. Only metadata (such as names of logical clouds, virtual machines, networks etc.) that is needed for orchestration is sent to Azure. All traffic sent to/from Azure is encrypted. You can begin using Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery today by clicking New->Data Services->Recovery Services->Hyper-V Recovery Manager within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can read more about Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager in Brad Anderson’s 9-part series, Transform the datacenter. To learn more about setting up Hyper-V Recovery Manager follow our detailed step-by-step guide. Virtual Machines: Delete Attached Disks, Availability Set Warnings, SQL AlwaysOn Today’s Windows Azure release includes a number of nice updates to Windows Azure Virtual Machines.  These improvements include: Ability to Delete both VM Instances + Attached Disks in One Operation Prior to today’s release, when you deleted VMs within Windows Azure we would delete the VM instance – but not delete the drives attached to the VM.  You had to manually delete these yourself from the storage account.  With today’s update we’ve added a convenience option that now allows you to either retain or delete the attached disks when you delete the VM:   We’ve also added the ability to delete a cloud service, its deployments, and its role instances with a single action. This can either be a cloud service that has production and staging deployments with web and worker roles, or a cloud service that contains virtual machines.  To do this, simply select the Cloud Service within the Windows Azure Management Portal and click the “Delete” button: Warnings on Availability Sets with Only One Virtual Machine In Them One of the nice features that Windows Azure Virtual Machines supports is the concept of “Availability Sets”.  An “availability set” allows you to define a tier/role (e.g. webfrontends, databaseservers, etc) that you can map Virtual Machines into – and when you do this Windows Azure separates them across fault domains and ensures that at least one of them is always available during servicing operations.  This enables you to deploy applications in a high availability way. One issue we’ve seen some customers run into is where they define an availability set, but then forget to map more than one VM into it (which defeats the purpose of having an availability set).  With today’s release we now display a warning in the Windows Azure Management Portal if you have only one virtual machine deployed in an availability set to help highlight this: You can learn more about configuring the availability of your virtual machines here. Configuring SQL Server Always On SQL Server Always On is a great feature that you can use with Windows Azure to enable high availability and DR scenarios with SQL Server. Today’s Windows Azure release makes it even easier to configure SQL Server Always On by enabling “Direct Server Return” endpoints to be configured and managed within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Previously, setting this up required using PowerShell to complete the endpoint configuration.  Starting today you can enable this simply by checking the “Direct Server Return” checkbox: You can learn more about how to use direct server return for SQL Server AlwaysOn availability groups here. Active Directory: Application Access Enhancements This summer we released our initial preview of our Application Access Enhancements for Windows Azure Active Directory.  This service enables you to securely implement single-sign-on (SSO) support against SaaS applications (including Office 365, SalesForce, Workday, Box, Google Apps, GitHub, etc) as well as LOB based applications (including ones built with the new Windows Azure AD support we shipped last week with ASP.NET and VS 2013). Since the initial preview we’ve enhanced our SAML federation capabilities, integrated our new password vaulting system, and shipped multi-factor authentication support. We've also turned on our outbound identity provisioning system and have it working with hundreds of additional SaaS Applications: Earlier this month we published an update on dates and pricing for when the service will be released in general availability form.  In this blog post we announced our intention to release the service in general availability form by the end of the year.  We also announced that the below features would be available in a free tier with it: SSO to every SaaS app we integrate with – Users can Single Sign On to any app we are integrated with at no charge. This includes all the top SAAS Apps and every app in our application gallery whether they use federation or password vaulting. Application access assignment and removal – IT Admins can assign access privileges to web applications to the users in their active directory assuring that every employee has access to the SAAS Apps they need. And when a user leaves the company or changes jobs, the admin can just as easily remove their access privileges assuring data security and minimizing IP loss User provisioning (and de-provisioning) – IT admins will be able to automatically provision users in 3rd party SaaS applications like Box, Salesforce.com, GoToMeeting, DropBox and others. We are working with key partners in the ecosystem to establish these connections, meaning you no longer have to continually update user records in multiple systems. Security and auditing reports – Security is a key priority for us. With the free version of these enhancements you'll get access to our standard set of access reports giving you visibility into which users are using which applications, when they were using them and where they are using them from. In addition, we'll alert you to un-usual usage patterns for instance when a user logs in from multiple locations at the same time. Our Application Access Panel – Users are logging in from every type of devices including Windows, iOS, & Android. Not all of these devices handle authentication in the same manner but the user doesn't care. They need to access their apps from the devices they love. Our Application Access Panel will support the ability for users to access access and launch their apps from any device and anywhere. You can learn more about our plans for application management with Windows Azure Active Directory here.  Try out the preview and start using it today. Enterprise Management: Use Active Directory to Better Manage Windows Azure Windows Azure Active Directory provides the ability to manage your organization in a directory which is hosted entirely in the cloud, or alternatively kept in sync with an on-premises Windows Server Active Directory solution (allowing you to seamlessly integrate with the directory you already have).  With today’s Windows Azure release we are integrating Windows Azure Active Directory even more within the core Windows Azure management experience, and enabling an even richer enterprise security offering.  Specifically: 1) All Windows Azure accounts now have a default Windows Azure Active Directory created for them.  You can create and map any users you want into this directory, and grant administrative rights to manage resources in Windows Azure to these users. 2) You can keep this directory entirely hosted in the cloud – or optionally sync it with your on-premises Windows Server Active Directory.  Both options are free.  The later approach is ideal for companies that wish to use their corporate user identities to sign-in and manage Windows Azure resources.  It also ensures that if an employee leaves an organization, his or her access control rights to the company’s Windows Azure resources are immediately revoked. 3) The Windows Azure Service Management APIs have been updated to support using Windows Azure Active Directory credentials to sign-in and perform management operations.  Prior to today’s release customers had to download and use management certificates (which were not scoped to individual users) to perform management operations.  We still support this management certificate approach (don’t worry – nothing will stop working).  But we think the new Windows Azure Active Directory authentication support enables an even easier and more secure way for customers to manage resources going forward.  4) The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 release (which is also shipping today) includes built-in support for the new Service Management APIs that authenticate with Windows Azure Active Directory, and now allow you to create and manage Windows Azure applications and resources directly within Visual Studio using your Active Directory credentials.  This, combined with updated PowerShell scripts that also support Active Directory, enables an end-to-end enterprise authentication story with Windows Azure. Below are some details on how all of this works: Subscriptions within a Directory As part of today’s update, we have associated all existing Window Azure accounts with a Windows Azure Active Directory (and created one for you if you don’t already have one). When you login to the Windows Azure Management Portal you’ll now see the directory name in the URI of the browser.  For example, in the screen-shot below you can see that I have a “scottgu” directory that my subscriptions are hosted within: Note that you can continue to use Microsoft Accounts (formerly known as Microsoft Live IDs) to sign-into Windows Azure.  These map just fine to a Windows Azure Active Directory – so there is no need to create new usernames that are specific to a directory if you don’t want to.  In the scenario above I’m actually logged in using my @hotmail.com based Microsoft ID which is now mapped to a “scottgu” active directory that was created for me.  By default everything will continue to work just like you used to before. Manage your Directory You can manage an Active Directory (including the one we now create for you by default) by clicking the “Active Directory” tab in the left-hand side of the portal.  This will list all of the directories in your account.  Clicking one the first time will display a getting started page that provides documentation and links to perform common tasks with it: You can use the built-in directory management support within the Windows Azure Management Portal to add/remove/manage users within the directory, enable multi-factor authentication, associate a custom domain (e.g. mycompanyname.com) with the directory, and/or rename the directory to whatever friendly name you want (just click the configure tab to do this).  You can also setup the directory to automatically sync with an on-premises Active Directory using the “Directory Integration” tab. Note that users within a directory by default do not have admin rights to login or manage Windows Azure based resources.  You still need to explicitly grant them co-admin permissions on a subscription for them to login or manage resources in Windows Azure.  You can do this by clicking the Settings tab on the left-hand side of the portal and then by clicking the administrators tab within it. Sign-In Integration within Visual Studio If you install the new Windows Azure SDK 2.2 release, you can now connect to Windows Azure from directly inside Visual Studio without having to download any management certificates.  You can now just right-click on the “Windows Azure” icon within the Server Explorer and choose the “Connect to Windows Azure” context menu option to do so: Doing this will prompt you to enter the email address of the username you wish to sign-in with (make sure this account is a user in your directory with co-admin rights on a subscription): You can use either a Microsoft Account (e.g. Windows Live ID) or an Active Directory based Organizational account as the email.  The dialog will update with an appropriate login prompt depending on which type of email address you enter: Once you sign-in you’ll see the Windows Azure resources that you have permissions to manage show up automatically within the Visual Studio server explorer and be available to start using: No downloading of management certificates required.  All of the authentication was handled using your Windows Azure Active Directory! Manage Subscriptions across Multiple Directories If you have already have multiple directories and multiple subscriptions within your Windows Azure account, we have done our best to create a good default mapping of your subscriptions->directories as part of today’s update.  If you don’t like the default subscription-to-directory mapping we have done you can click the Settings tab in the left-hand navigation of the Windows Azure Management Portal and browse to the Subscriptions tab within it: If you want to map a subscription under a different directory in your account, simply select the subscription from the list, and then click the “Edit Directory” button to choose which directory to map it to.  Mapping a subscription to a different directory takes only seconds and will not cause any of the resources within the subscription to recycle or stop working.  We’ve made the directory->subscription mapping process self-service so that you always have complete control and can map things however you want. Filtering By Directory and Subscription Within the Windows Azure Management Portal you can filter resources in the portal by subscription (allowing you to show/hide different subscriptions).  If you have subscriptions mapped to multiple directory tenants, we also now have a filter drop-down that allows you to filter the subscription list by directory tenant.  This filter is only available if you have multiple subscriptions mapped to multiple directories within your Windows Azure Account:   Windows Azure SDK 2.2 Today we are also releasing a major update of our Windows Azure SDK.  The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 release adds some great new features including: Visual Studio 2013 Support Integrated Windows Azure Sign-In support within Visual Studio Remote Debugging Cloud Services with Visual Studio Firewall Management support within Visual Studio for SQL Databases Visual Studio 2013 RTM VM Images for MSDN Subscribers Windows Azure Management Libraries for .NET Updated Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets and ScriptCenter I’ll post a follow-up blog shortly with more details about all of the above. Additional Updates In addition to the above enhancements, today’s release also includes a number of additional improvements: AutoScale: Richer time and date based scheduling support (set different rules on different dates) AutoScale: Ability to Scale to Zero Virtual Machines (very useful for Dev/Test scenarios) AutoScale: Support for time-based scheduling of Mobile Service AutoScale rules Operation Logs: Auditing support for Service Bus management operations Today we also shipped a major update to the Windows Azure SDK – Windows Azure SDK 2.2.  It has so much goodness in it that I have a whole second blog post coming shortly on it! :-) Summary Today’s Windows Azure release enables a bunch of great new scenarios, and enables a much richer enterprise authentication offering. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• [MINI HOW-TO] Change the Default Color Scheme in Office 2010

  - by Mysticgeek

  Like in Office 2007 the default color scheme for 2010 is blue. If you are not a fan of it, here we show you how to change it to silver or black. In this example we are using Microsoft Word, but it works the same way in Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint as well. Once you change the color scheme in one Office application, it will change it for all of the other apps in the suite. Change Color Scheme To change the color scheme click on the File tab to access Backstage View and click on Options. In Word Options the General section should open by default…use the dropdown menu next to Color Scheme to change it to Silver, Blue, or Black then click OK. Here is what Black looks like…who knows why Microsoft decided to leave the blue around the edges. This is the default Blue color scheme… And finally we take a look at the Silver color scheme in Excel… That is all there is to it! It would be nice if they would incorporate other color schemes to Office 2010, as some of you may not be happy with only three choices. If you’re using Office 2007 check out our article on how to change the color scheme in it. Also, The Geek has a cool article on how to set the Color Scheme of Office 2007 with a quick registry hack. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Set the Office 2007 Color Scheme With a Quick Registry HackChange The Default Color Scheme In Office 2007Maximize Space by "Auto-Hiding" the Ribbon in Office 2007How To Personalize the Windows Command PromptOrganize & Group Your Tabs in Firefox the Easy Way TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 2010 World Cup Schedule Boot Snooze – Reboot and then Standby or Hibernate Customize Everything Related to Dates, Times, Currency and Measurement in Windows 7 Google Earth replacement Icon (Icons we like) Build Great Charts in Excel with Chart Advisor tinysong gives a shortened URL for you to post on Twitter (or anywhere)

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• Best Practices for Building a Virtualized SPARC Computing Environment

  - by Scott Elvington

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Oracle just published Best Practices for Building a Virtualized SPARC Computing Environment, a white paper that provides guidance on the complete hardware and software stack for deploying and managing your physical and virtual SPARC infrastructure. The solution is based on Oracle SPARC T4 servers, Oracle Solaris 11 with Oracle VM for SPARC 2.2, Sun ZFS storage appliances, Sun 10GbE 72 port switches and Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c. The paper emphasizes the value and importance of planning the resources (compute, network and storage) that will comprise the virtualized environment to achieve the desired capacity, performance and availability characteristics. The document also details numerous operational best practices that will help you deliver on those characteristics with unique capabilities provided by Enterprise Manager Ops Center including policy-based guest placement, pool resource balancing and automated guest recovery in the event of server failure. Plenty of references to supplementary documentation are included to help point you to additional resources. Whether you’re building the first stages of your private cloud or a general-purpose virtualized SPARC computing environment, these documented best practices will help ensure success. Please join Phil Bullinger and Steve Wilson from Oracle to learn more about breakthrough efficiency in private cloud infrastructure and how SPARC based virtualization can help you get started on your cloud journey. Stay Connected: Twitter |  Face book |  You Tube |  Linked in |  Newsletter

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• Mark Messages As Read in the Outlook 2010 Reading Pane

  - by Matthew Guay

  Do you ever feel annoyed that Outlook 2010 doesn’t mark messages as Read as soon as you click and view them in the Reading Pane?  Here we show you how to make Outlook mark them as read as soon as they’re opened. Mark as Read By default, Outlook will not mark a message as read until you select another message.  This can be annoying, because if you read a message and immediately click Delete, it will show up as an unread message in our Deleted Items folder. Let’s change this to make Outlook mark messages as read as soon as we view them in the Reading Pane.  Open Outlook and click File to open Backstage View, and select Options. In Options select Mail on the left menu, and under Outlook panes click on the Reading Pane button. Check the box Mark items as read when viewed in the Reading Pane to make Outlook mark your messages as read when you view them in the Reading Pane.  By default, Outlook will only mark a message read after you’ve been reading it for 5 seconds, though you can change this.  We set it to 0 seconds so our messages would be marked as read as soon as we select them. Click OK in both dialogs, and now your messages will be marked as read as soon as you select them in the reading pane, or soon after, depending on your settings. Conclusion Outlook 2010 is a great email client, but like most programs it has its quirks.  This quick tip can help you get rid of one of Outlook’s annoying features, and make it work like you want it to. And, if you’re still using Outlook 2007, check out our article on how to Mark Messages as Read When Viewed in Outlook 2007. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Make Outlook 2007 Mark Items as Read When Viewed in Reading PaneMake Mail.app’s Reading Pane More Like OutlookIntegrate Twitter With Microsoft OutlookSort Your Emails by Conversation in Outlook 2010Find Emails With Attachments with Outlook 2007’s Instant Search TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 VMware Workstation 7 OpenDNS Guide Google TV The iPod Revolution Ultimate Boot CD can help when disaster strikes Windows Firewall with Advanced Security – How To Guides Sculptris 1.0, 3D Drawing app

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• The broken Promise of the Mobile Web

  - by Rick Strahl

  High end mobile devices have been with us now for almost 7 years and they have utterly transformed the way we access information. Mobile phones and smartphones that have access to the Internet and host smart applications are in the hands of a large percentage of the population of the world. In many places even very remote, cell phones and even smart phones are a common sight. I’ll never forget when I was in India in 2011 I was up in the Southern Indian mountains riding an elephant out of a tiny local village, with an elephant herder in front riding atop of the elephant in front of us. He was dressed in traditional garb with the loin wrap and head cloth/turban as did quite a few of the locals in this small out of the way and not so touristy village. So we’re slowly trundling along in the forest and he’s lazily using his stick to guide the elephant and… 10 minutes in he pulls out his cell phone from his sash and starts texting. In the middle of texting a huge pig jumps out from the side of the trail and he takes a picture running across our path in the jungle! So yeah, mobile technology is very pervasive and it’s reached into even very buried and unexpected parts of this world. Apps are still King Apps currently rule the roost when it comes to mobile devices and the applications that run on them. If there’s something that you need on your mobile device your first step usually is to look for an app, not use your browser. But native app development remains a pain in the butt, with the requirement to have to support 2 or 3 completely separate platforms. There are solutions that try to bridge that gap. Xamarin is on a tear at the moment, providing their cross-device toolkit to build applications using C#. While Xamarin tools are impressive – and also *very* expensive – they only address part of the development madness that is app development. There are still specific device integration isssues, dealing with the different developer programs, security and certificate setups and all that other noise that surrounds app development. There’s also PhoneGap/Cordova which provides a hybrid solution that involves creating local HTML/CSS/JavaScript based applications, and then packaging them to run in a specialized App container that can run on most mobile device platforms using a WebView interface. This allows for using of HTML technology, but it also still requires all the set up, configuration of APIs, security keys and certification and submission and deployment process just like native applications – you actually lose many of the benefits that  Web based apps bring. The big selling point of Cordova is that you get to use HTML have the ability to build your UI once for all platforms and run across all of them – but the rest of the app process remains in place. Apps can be a big pain to create and manage especially when we are talking about specialized or vertical business applications that aren’t geared at the mainstream market and that don’t fit the ‘store’ model. If you’re building a small intra department application you don’t want to deal with multiple device platforms and certification etc. for various public or corporate app stores. That model is simply not a good fit both from the development and deployment perspective. Even for commercial, big ticket apps, HTML as a UI platform offers many advantages over native, from write-once run-anywhere, to remote maintenance, single point of management and failure to having full control over the application as opposed to have the app store overloads censor you. In a lot of ways Web based HTML/CSS/JavaScript applications have so much potential for building better solutions based on existing Web technologies for the very same reasons a lot of content years ago moved off the desktop to the Web. To me the Web as a mobile platform makes perfect sense, but the reality of today’s Mobile Web unfortunately looks a little different… Where’s the Love for the Mobile Web? Yet here we are in the middle of 2014, nearly 7 years after the first iPhone was released and brought the promise of rich interactive information at your fingertips, and yet we still don’t really have a solid mobile Web platform. I know what you’re thinking: “But we have lots of HTML/JavaScript/CSS features that allows us to build nice mobile interfaces”. I agree to a point – it’s actually quite possible to build nice looking, rich and capable Web UI today. We have media queries to deal with varied display sizes, CSS transforms for smooth animations and transitions, tons of CSS improvements in CSS 3 that facilitate rich layout, a host of APIs geared towards mobile device features and lately even a number of JavaScript framework choices that facilitate development of multi-screen apps in a consistent manner. Personally I’ve been working a lot with AngularJs and heavily modified Bootstrap themes to build mobile first UIs and that’s been working very well to provide highly usable and attractive UI for typical mobile business applications. From the pure UI perspective things actually look very good. Not just about the UI But it’s not just about the UI - it’s also about integration with the mobile device. When it comes to putting all those pieces together into what amounts to a consolidated platform to build mobile Web applications, I think we still have a ways to go… there are a lot of missing pieces to make it all work together and integrate with the device more smoothly, and more importantly to make it work uniformly across the majority of devices. I think there are a number of reasons for this. Slow Standards Adoption HTML standards implementations and ratification has been dreadfully slow, and browser vendors all seem to pick and choose different pieces of the technology they implement. The end result is that we have a capable UI platform that’s missing some of the infrastructure pieces to make it whole on mobile devices. There’s lots of potential but what is lacking that final 10% to build truly compelling mobile applications that can compete favorably with native applications. Some of it is the fragmentation of browsers and the slow evolution of the mobile specific HTML APIs. A host of mobile standards exist but many of the standards are in the early review stage and they have been there stuck for long periods of time and seem to move at a glacial pace. Browser vendors seem even slower to implement them, and for good reason – non-ratified standards mean that implementations may change and vendor implementations tend to be experimental and  likely have to be changed later. Neither Vendors or developers are not keen on changing standards. This is the typical chicken and egg scenario, but without some forward momentum from some party we end up stuck in the mud. It seems that either the standards bodies or the vendors need to carry the torch forward and that doesn’t seem to be happening quickly enough. Mobile Device Integration just isn’t good enough Current standards are not far reaching enough to address a number of the use case scenarios necessary for many mobile applications. While not every application needs to have access to all mobile device features, almost every mobile application could benefit from some integration with other parts of the mobile device platform. Integration with GPS, phone, media, messaging, notifications, linking and contacts system are benefits that are unique to mobile applications and could be widely used, but are mostly (with the exception of GPS) inaccessible for Web based applications today. Unfortunately trying to do most of this today only with a mobile Web browser is a losing battle. Aside from PhoneGap/Cordova’s app centric model with its own custom API accessing mobile device features and the token exception of the GeoLocation API, most device integration features are not widely supported by the current crop of mobile browsers. For example there’s no usable messaging API that allows access to SMS or contacts from HTML. Even obvious components like the Media Capture API are only implemented partially by mobile devices. There are alternatives and workarounds for some of these interfaces by using browser specific code, but that’s might ugly and something that I thought we were trying to leave behind with newer browser standards. But it’s not quite working out that way. It’s utterly perplexing to me that mobile standards like Media Capture and Streams, Media Gallery Access, Responsive Images, Messaging API, Contacts Manager API have only minimal or no traction at all today. Keep in mind we’ve had mobile browsers for nearly 7 years now, and yet we still have to think about how to get access to an image from the image gallery or the camera on some devices? Heck Windows Phone IE Mobile just gained the ability to upload images recently in the Windows 8.1 Update – that’s feature that HTML has had for 20 years! These are simple concepts and common problems that should have been solved a long time ago. It’s extremely frustrating to see build 90% of a mobile Web app with relative ease and then hit a brick wall for the remaining 10%, which often can be show stoppers. The remaining 10% have to do with platform integration, browser differences and working around the limitations that browsers and ‘pinned’ applications impose on HTML applications. The maddening part is that these limitations seem arbitrary as they could easily work on all mobile platforms. For example, SMS has a URL Moniker interface that sort of works on Android, works badly with iOS (only works if the address is already in the contact list) and not at all on Windows Phone. There’s no reason this shouldn’t work universally using the same interface – after all all phones have supported SMS since before the year 2000! But, it doesn’t have to be this way Change can happen very quickly. Take the GeoLocation API for example. Geolocation has taken off at the very beginning of the mobile device era and today it works well, provides the necessary security (a big concern for many mobile APIs), and is supported by just about all major mobile and even desktop browsers today. It handles security concerns via prompts to avoid unwanted access which is a model that would work for most other device APIs in a similar fashion. One time approval and occasional re-approval if code changes or caches expire. Simple and only slightly intrusive. It all works well, even though GeoLocation actually has some physical limitations, such as representing the current location when no GPS device is present. Yet this is a solved problem, where other APIs that are conceptually much simpler to implement have failed to gain any traction at all. Technically none of these APIs should be a problem to implement, but it appears that the momentum is just not there. Inadequate Web Application Linking and Activation Another important piece of the puzzle missing is the integration of HTML based Web applications. Today HTML based applications are not first class citizens on mobile operating systems. When talking about HTML based content there’s a big difference between content and applications. Content is great for search engine discovery and plain browser usage. Content is usually accessed intermittently and permanent linking is not so critical for this type of content.  But applications have different needs. Applications need to be started up quickly and must be easily switchable to support a multi-tasking user workflow. Therefore, it’s pretty crucial that mobile Web apps are integrated into the underlying mobile OS and work with the standard task management features. Unfortunately this integration is not as smooth as it should be. It starts with actually trying to find mobile Web applications, to ‘installing’ them onto a phone in an easily accessible manner in a prominent position. The experience of discovering a Mobile Web ‘App’ and making it sticky is by no means as easy or satisfying. Today the way you’d go about this is: Open the browser Search for a Web Site in the browser with your search engine of choice Hope that you find the right site Hope that you actually find a site that works for your mobile device Click on the link and run the app in a fully chrome’d browser instance (read tiny surface area) Pin the app to the home screen (with all the limitations outline above) Hope you pointed at the right URL when you pinned Even for you and me as developers, there are a few steps in there that are painful and annoying, but think about the average user. First figuring out how to search for a specific site or URL? And then pinning the app and hopefully from the right location? You’ve probably lost more than half of your audience at that point. This experience sucks. For developers too this process is painful since app developers can’t control the shortcut creation directly. This problem often gets solved by crazy coding schemes, with annoying pop-ups that try to get people to create shortcuts via fancy animations that are both annoying and add overhead to each and every application that implements this sort of thing differently. And that’s not the end of it - getting the link onto the home screen with an application icon varies quite a bit between browsers. Apple’s non-standard meta tags are prominent and they work with iOS and Android (only more recent versions), but not on Windows Phone. Windows Phone instead requires you to create an actual screen or rather a partial screen be captured for a shortcut in the tile manager. Who had that brilliant idea I wonder? Surprisingly Chrome on recent Android versions seems to actually get it right – icons use pngs, pinning is easy and pinned applications properly behave like standalone apps and retain the browser’s active page state and content. Each of the platforms has a different way to specify icons (WP doesn’t allow you to use an icon image at all), and the most widely used interface in use today is a bunch of Apple specific meta tags that other browsers choose to support. The question is: Why is there no standard implementation for installing shortcuts across mobile platforms using an official format rather than a proprietary one? Then there’s iOS and the crazy way it treats home screen linked URLs using a crazy hybrid format that is neither as capable as a Web app running in Safari nor a WebView hosted application. Moving off the Web ‘app’ link when switching to another app actually causes the browser and preview it to ‘blank out’ the Web application in the Task View (see screenshot on the right). Then, when the ‘app’ is reactivated it ends up completely restarting the browser with the original link. This is crazy behavior that you can’t easily work around. In some situations you might be able to store the application state and restore it using LocalStorage, but for many scenarios that involve complex data sources (like say Google Maps) that’s not a possibility. The only reason for this screwed up behavior I can think of is that it is deliberate to make Web apps a pain in the butt to use and forcing users trough the App Store/PhoneGap/Cordova route. App linking and management is a very basic problem – something that we essentially have solved in every desktop browser – yet on mobile devices where it arguably matters a lot more to have easy access to web content we have to jump through hoops to have even a remotely decent linking/activation experience across browsers. Where’s the Money? It’s not surprising that device home screen integration and Mobile Web support in general is in such dismal shape – the mobile OS vendors benefit financially from App store sales and have little to gain from Web based applications that bypass the App store and the cash cow that it presents. On top of that, platform specific vendor lock-in of both end users and developers who have invested in hardware, apps and consumables is something that mobile platform vendors actually aspire to. Web based interfaces that are cross-platform are the anti-thesis of that and so again it’s no surprise that the mobile Web is on a struggling path. But – that may be changing. More and more we’re seeing operations shifting to services that are subscription based or otherwise collect money for usage, and that may drive more progress into the Web direction in the end . Nothing like the almighty dollar to drive innovation forward. Do we need a Mobile Web App Store? As much as I dislike moderated experiences in today’s massive App Stores, they do at least provide one single place to look for apps for your device. I think we could really use some sort of registry, that could provide something akin to an app store for mobile Web apps, to make it easier to actually find mobile applications. This could take the form of a specialized search engine, or maybe a more formal store/registry like structure. Something like apt-get/chocolatey for Web apps. It could be curated and provide at least some feedback and reviews that might help with the integrity of applications. Coupled to that could be a native application on each platform that would allow searching and browsing of the registry and then also handle installation in the form of providing the home screen linking, plus maybe an initial security configuration that determines what features are allowed access to for the app. I’m not holding my breath. In order for this sort of thing to take off and gain widespread appeal, a lot of coordination would be required. And in order to get enough traction it would have to come from a well known entity – a mobile Web app store from a no name source is unlikely to gain high enough usage numbers to make a difference. In a way this would eliminate some of the freedom of the Web, but of course this would also be an optional search path in addition to the standard open Web search mechanisms to find and access content today. Security Security is a big deal, and one of the perceived reasons why so many IT professionals appear to be willing to go back to the walled garden of deployed apps is that Apps are perceived as safe due to the official review and curation of the App stores. Curated stores are supposed to protect you from malware, illegal and misleading content. It doesn’t always work out that way and all the major vendors have had issues with security and the review process at some time or another. Security is critical, but I also think that Web applications in general pose less of a security threat than native applications, by nature of the sandboxed browser and JavaScript environments. Web applications run externally completely and in the HTML and JavaScript sandboxes, with only a very few controlled APIs allowing access to device specific features. And as discussed earlier – security for any device interaction can be granted the same for mobile applications through a Web browser, as they can for native applications either via explicit policies loaded from the Web, or via prompting as GeoLocation does today. Security is important, but it’s certainly solvable problem for Web applications even those that need to access device hardware. Security shouldn’t be a reason for Web apps to be an equal player in mobile applications. Apps are winning, but haven’t we been here before? So now we’re finding ourselves back in an era of installed app, rather than Web based and managed apps. Only it’s even worse today than with Desktop applications, in that the apps are going through a gatekeeper that charges a toll and censors what you can and can’t do in your apps. Frankly it’s a mystery to me why anybody would buy into this model and why it’s lasted this long when we’ve already been through this process. It’s crazy… It’s really a shame that this regression is happening. We have the technology to make mobile Web apps much more prominent, but yet we’re basically held back by what seems little more than bureaucracy, partisan bickering and self interest of the major parties involved. Back in the day of the desktop it was Internet Explorer’s 98+%  market shareholding back the Web from improvements for many years – now it’s the combined mobile OS market in control of the mobile browsers. If mobile Web apps were allowed to be treated the same as native apps with simple ways to install and run them consistently and persistently, that would go a long way to making mobile applications much more usable and seriously viable alternatives to native apps. But as it is mobile apps have a severe disadvantage in placement and operation. There are a few bright spots in all of this. Mozilla’s FireFoxOs is embracing the Web for it’s mobile OS by essentially building every app out of HTML and JavaScript based content. It supports both packaged and certified package modes (that can be put into the app store), and Open Web apps that are loaded and run completely off the Web and can also cache locally for offline operation using a manifest. Open Web apps are treated as full class citizens in FireFoxOS and run using the same mechanism as installed apps. Unfortunately FireFoxOs is getting a slow start with minimal device support and specifically targeting the low end market. We can hope that this approach will change and catch on with other vendors, but that’s also an uphill battle given the conflict of interest with platform lock in that it represents. Recent versions of Android also seem to be working reasonably well with mobile application integration onto the desktop and activation out of the box. Although it still uses the Apple meta tags to find icons and behavior settings, everything at least works as you would expect – icons to the desktop on pinning, WebView based full screen activation, and reliable application persistence as the browser/app is treated like a real application. Hopefully iOS will at some point provide this same level of rudimentary Web app support. What’s also interesting to me is that Microsoft hasn’t picked up on the obvious need for a solid Web App platform. Being a distant third in the mobile OS war, Microsoft certainly has nothing to lose and everything to gain by using fresh ideas and expanding into areas that the other major vendors are neglecting. But instead Microsoft is trying to beat the market leaders at their own game, fighting on their adversary’s terms instead of taking a new tack. Providing a kick ass mobile Web platform that takes the lead on some of the proposed mobile APIs would be something positive that Microsoft could do to improve its miserable position in the mobile device market. Where are we at with Mobile Web? It sure sounds like I’m really down on the Mobile Web, right? I’ve built a number of mobile apps in the last year and while overall result and response has been very positive to what we were able to accomplish in terms of UI, getting that final 10% that required device integration dialed was an absolute nightmare on every single one of them. Big compromises had to be made and some features were left out or had to be modified for some devices. In two cases we opted to go the Cordova route in order to get the integration we needed, along with the extra pain involved in that process. Unless you’re not integrating with device features and you don’t care deeply about a smooth integration with the mobile desktop, mobile Web development is fraught with frustration. So, yes I’m frustrated! But it’s not for lack of wanting the mobile Web to succeed. I am still a firm believer that we will eventually arrive a much more functional mobile Web platform that allows access to the most common device features in a sensible way. It wouldn't be difficult for device platform vendors to make Web based applications first class citizens on mobile devices. But unfortunately it looks like it will still be some time before this happens. So, what’s your experience building mobile Web apps? Are you finding similar issues? Just giving up on raw Web applications and building PhoneGap apps instead? Completely skipping the Web and going native? Leave a comment for discussion. Resources Rick Strahl on DotNet Rocks talking about Mobile Web© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in HTML5  Mobile   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Post-Purchase Social Media

  - by David Dorf

  When you make a particularly good purchase, the natural tendency is to share the experience with friends. You show them your cool new toy or garment, then explain how you discovered such a great deal, all the while implying you are the world's most savvy shopper. My wife does it with clothes, housewares, and books, and I do it with wiz-bang techie stuff. Post-purchase euphoria or Buyer's remorse are associated with most purchases beyond day-to-day needs. So now let's add social media to the mix. Haul videos are a YouTube phenomenon where a shopper describes their latest haul on video. Blair Fowler, aka juicystar07, is an excellent example. She and her older sister's haul videos have been viewed 75,000,000 times, at times causing particular items to sell out after being showcased. If you're not already on this bandwagon, checkout Blair's haul video from her trip to Forever21. There are a couple good articles on this trend from ABC's GMA, Slate, and NPR. Some retailers are already sending free products to these fashionistas in the hopes they'll be reviewed on camera. For those less willing to exert themselves, there's Blippy, a service that automatically tweets your purchases. Similar to Twitter, your purchases are tweeted so your friends can see what you've purchased and your network can make comments. In the example to the right, co-founder Philip Kaplan purchased a gift for his wife from the store Does Your Mother Know, proving the point that the need for privacy is overblown. Blippy has partnerships with selected merchants like Apple, Amazon, and Netflix and can also get purchases from the credit cards you've registered. When you register, you can configure whether to automatically tweet each purchase, or approve them first. No sense in broadcasting my need for Rogaine, right? This is a good thing for retailers, as it helps spread the word about purchases and gives other people ideas. Rick just bought an ooma from Amazon. What the heck is ooma? Oh, its like Vonage but no monthly bills. I'm there.

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• Resolving IIS7 HTTP Error 500.19 - Internal Server Error

  - by fatherjack

  LiveJournal Tags: RedGate Tools,SQL Server,Tips and Tricks How To The requested page cannot be accessed because the related configuration data for the page is invalid. As part of my work recently I was moving SQL Monitor from the bespoke XSP web server to be hosted on IIS instead. This didn't go smoothly. I was lucky to be helped by Red Gate's support team (http://twitter.com/kickasssupport). I had SQL Monitor installed and working fine on the XSP site but wanted to move to IIS so I reinstalled the software and chose the IIS option. This wasn't possible as IIS wasn't installed on the server. I went to Control Panel, Windows features and installed IIS and then returned to the SQL Monitor installer. Everything went as planned but when I browsed the site I got a huge error with the message "HTTP Error 500.19 - Internal Server Error The requested page cannot be accessed because the related configuration data for the page is invalid." All links that I could find suggested it was a permissions issue, based on the directory where the config file was stored. I changed this any number of times and also tried the altering its location. Nothing resolved the error. It was only when I was trying the installation again that I read through the details from Red Gate and noted that they referred to ASP settings that I didn't have. Essentially I was seeing this. I had installed IIS using the default settings and that DOESN'T include ASP. When this dawned on me I went back through the windows components installation process and ticked the ASP service within the IIS role. Completing this and going back to the IIS management console I saw something like this; so many more options! When I clicked on the Authentication icon this time I got the option to not only enable Anonymous Authentication but also ASP.NET Impersonation (which is disabled by default). Once I had enabled this the SQL Monitor website worked without error. I think the HTTP Error 500.19 is misleading in this case and at the very least should be able to recognise if the ASP service is installed or not and then to include a hint that it should be. I hope this helps some people and avoids wasting as much of your time as it did mine. Let me know if it helps you.

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• How To Disconnect Non-Mapped UNC Path “Drives” in Windows

  - by The Geek

  Have you ever browsed over to another PC on your network using “network neighborhood”, and then connected to one of the file shares? Without a drive letter, how do you disconnect yourself once you’ve done so? Really confused as to what I’m talking about? Let’s walk through the process. First, imagine that you browse through and connect to a share, entering your username and password to gain access. The problem is that you stay connected, and there’s no visible way to disconnect yourself. If you try and shut down the other PC, you’ll receive a message that users are still connected. So let’s disconnect! Open up a command prompt, and then type in the following: net use This will give you a list of the connected drives, including the ones that aren’t actually mapped to a drive letter. To disconnect one of the connections, you can use the following command: net use /delete \\server\sharename For example, in this instance we’d disconnect like so: net use /delete \\192.168.1.205\root$ Now when you run the “net use” command again, you’ll see that you’ve been properly disconnected. If you wanted to actually connect to a share without mapping a drive letter, you can do the following: net use /user:Username \\server\sharename Password You could then just pop \\server\sharename into a Windows Explorer window and browse the files that way. Note that this technique should work exactly the same in any version of windows. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Remove "Map Network Drive" Menu Item from Windows Vista or XPDisable the Annoying "This page has an unspecified potential security risk" When Using Files on a Network ShareCopy Path of a File to the Clipboard in Windows 7 or VistaMap a Network Drive from XP to Windows 7Defrag Multiple Hard Drives At Once In Windows TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Enable DreamScene in Windows 7 Microsoft’s “How Do I ?” Videos Home Networks – How do they look like & the problems they cause Check Your IMAP Mail Offline In Thunderbird Follow Finder Finds You Twitter Users To Follow Combine MP3 Files Easily

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• SOA &amp; E2.0 Partner Community Forum XIII registration is open

  - by Jürgen Kress

  INVITATION TO THE ORACLE SOA AND E2.0 PARTNER COMMUNITY FORUM Do you want to learn about how to sell the value of Fusion Middleware by combining SOA and E2.0 Solutions? We would like to invite you to become updated and trained at our SOA and E2.0 Partner Community Forum March on 15th and 16th 2011 in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Keynote: Andrew Sutherland and Andrew Gilboy The Oracle SOA and E2.0 Partner Community Forum is a wonderful opportunity to: learn how to sell the value of Fusion Middleware bij combining SOA and E2.0 solutions meet with Oracle SOA and E2.0 Product management exchange knowledge learn from successful SOA, BPM, WebCenter and UCM implementations understand Oracle's Fusion Applications Strategy network within the Oracle SOA Partner Community and the Oracle E2.0 Partner Community During this highly informative event you can learn about partner success stories, participate in an array of break out sessions, exchange information with other partners and enjoy a vibrant panel discussion. Additionally to the SOA and E2.0 Partner Community Forum, you can participate in technical hands on workshops on March 17th and 18th. The goal of these workshops is to prepare you for customer implementations. Places are limited, so don't delay and register now by clicking here. Registration takes a few minutes and is free of charge, except in case of cancellation or no show (cancellation fee € 150). For more information, please visit our website. Best regards Jürgen Kress & Hans Blaas SOA & E2.0 Partner Adoption EMEA Agenda March 15th 2011 Welcome & Introduction Keynote Oracle Middleware Strategy and information on Application Grid and Exalogic Andrew Sutherland, SVP Middleware Sales EMEA, Oracle Keynote Managing Online Customer, Partner and Employee Engagement with Oracle E2.0 Solutions Andrew Gilboy, VP E2.0 Sales EMEA, Oracle Partner SOA/BPM Reference Case Partner WebCenter/UCM Reference Case SOA Suite PS3 David Shaffer, VP Product Management, Oracle Why Specialization is important for Partners Nick Kritikos, Hans Blaas & Jürgen Kress, Alliances & Channels, Oracle   Agenda March 16th 2011 Welcome & Introduction Day II Breakout round 1 - SOA Suite 11g PS3 & OSB - Importance of ADF & JDeveloper - SOA Security IDM - WebCenter PS3, Whats new - E2.0 Sales Plays Breakout round 2 - WebCenter PS3, Whats new - Application Management Enterprise manager and Amberpoint - ADF/WebCenter 11g integration with BPM Suite 11g - Importance of ADF & JDeveloper - JCAPS & OC4J migration opportunities for service business Breakout round 3 - BPM 11g: Whats new - Universal Content management 11g - SOA Security Management - E2.0 Surrounding Products: ATG, Documaker, Primavera - Middleware Industry Value Propositions & Sales Play Fusion Application SOA & E2.0 Summary & Closing For registration and additional information, please visit our website. For more information on SOA Specialization and the SOA Partner Community please feel free to register at www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Website Technorati Tags: SOA Community,SOA,SOA Partner Community Forum,SOA Community Forum,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Now It’s Personal (Although It Should Always Be): Campus Recruitment

  - by user769227

  One of the things that I think is important and I want our Campus Recruitment Team here at Oracle to be known for is outstanding customer service. When I say customer service, I mean both students and hiring managers should feel they have had a great experience in our campus hiring process. I think one of the keys to providing outstanding customer service is being able to provide as best as we can a personalised experience where the students who are interviewing with us feel like individuals in our process and not just part a ‘campus drive’. In the campus world this can be challenging at times especially in countries where there is high volume hiring. It can be tricky to create a personal experience when you are hiring for a large number of open graduate roles at one time. I think Campus Recruitment is one of the areas in the recruitment industry that is just waiting for a change. We have all seen the proliferation of Social Media in Recruitment over the past 4-6 years. Every Recruiter has a LinkedIn account or uses Twitter or G+ or FB, etc… and some individuals and organisations do it really well. Even in Campus Hiring there is great Social Media initiatives where companies reach out to students and talk to them. However one thing that has not really changed (and this is a generalisation) is the campus hiring interview process. Do these words inspire enthusiasm to you: “Group Interview, Assessment Centre, On-Campus Drive, Off-Campus Drive, etc...” I don’t know about you but to me these words don’t really sound very personal or individual to students. It almost conjures up images of a factory production line or those long queues you see where the person behind the counter says ‘take a number’. Campus Recruitment has come a long way don’t get me wrong – companies can share data with and talk to students in so many different ways now it really has become a much more transparent and open process. There are some times such as at IIT’s in India where it really is a bit old school in terms of interviewing with students running from company to company interviewing on campus over the course of a few days but I want students talking to Oracle to have as great an experience as possible (the outcome of getting a job or not is separate to the customer experience). As students, what are your thoughts? Do you feel like ‘just a number’ when you are interviewing or is there ways that companies can make the process more personalised. Let us know your thoughts. If you are interviewing with Oracle and have questions, want to talk to us or want to know what it is like working here – email us and we will help where we can. If you can’t reach your local Recruiter in your region email me at [email protected] and I will put you in touch with the appropriate person.

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• SOA’s People Problem by Bob Rhubart

  - by JuergenKress

  Are reluctant passengers slowing down your SOA train? Based on my conversations with various experts in service-oriented architecture (SOA), the consensus is that SOA tools and technology have achieved a high level of maturity. Some even use the term industrialization to describe the current state of SOA. Given that scenario, one might assume that SOA has been wildly successful for every organization that has adopted its principles. Obviously SOA could not have achieved its current level of maturity and industrialization without having reached a tipping point in the volume of success stories to drive continued adoption. But some organizations continue to struggle with SOA. The problem, according to some experts, has little to do with tools or technologies. “One of the greatest challenges to implementing SOA has nothing to do with the intrinsic complexity behind a SOA technology platform,” says Oracle ACE Luis Augusto Weir, senior Oracle solution director at HCL AXON. “The real difficulty lies in dealing with people and processes from different parts of the business and aligning them to deliver enterprisewide solutions.” What can an organization do to meet that challenge? “Staff the right people,” says Weir. “For example, the role of a SOA architect should be as much about integrating people as it is about integrating systems. Dealing with people from different departments, backgrounds, and agendas is a huge challenge. The SOA architect role requires someone that not only has a sound architectural and technological background but also has charisma and human skills, and can communicate equally well to the business and technical teams.” The SOA architect’s communication skills are instrumental in establishing service orientation as the guiding principle across the organization. “A consistent architecture comprising both business services and IT services can comprehensively redefine the role of IT at the process level,” says Danilo Schmiedel, solution architect at Opitz Consulting. That helps to shift the focus from siloes to services and get SOA on track. To that end, Oracle ACE Director Lonneke Dikmans, a managing partner at Vennster, stresses the importance of replacing individual, uncoordinated projects with a focused program that promotes communication, cooperation, and service reuse. “Having support among lead developers and architects helps, as does having sponsors that see the business case and understand the strategic value,” she says. Read the complete article here. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Technorati Tags: Bob Rhubard,OTN,Lonneke Dikmans,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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