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• How can I get an alert if my application is down?

  - by OtherMichael

  Is there a WinXP application/service that will monitor other applications for runtime? I've seen the MS uptime monitor, but that just seems to be for server uptime, not for individual apps. Haven't found anything searching in here, either. If this is a dupe, am I using the wrong search terms?

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• Introducing AutoVue Document Print Service

  - by celine.beck

  We recently announced the availability of our new AutoVue Document Print Service products. For more information, please read the article entitled Print Any Document Type with AutoVue Document Print Services that was posted on our blog. The AutoVue Document Print Service products help address a trivial, yet very common challenge: printing and batch printing documents. The AutoVue Document Print Service is a Web-Services based interface, which allows developers to complement their print server solutions by leveraging AutoVue's printing capabilities within broader enterprise applications like Asset Lifecycle Management, Product Lifecycle Management, Enterprise Content Management solutions, etc. This means that you can leverage the AutoVue Document Print Service products as part of your printing solution to automate the printing of virtually any document type required in any business process. Clients that consume AutoVue's Document Print Service can be written in any language (for example Java or .NET) as long as they understand Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and communicate using Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). The print solution consists of three main components, as described in the diagram below: a print server (not included in the AutoVue Document Print Service offering) that will interact with your application to identify the files that need to be printed, the printer to send each file, as well as the print options needed for each file (paper size, page orientation, etc), and collate the print job requests. The print server will also take care of calling the AutoVue Document Print Service to perform the actual printing. The AutoVue Document Print Services send files to a printer for printing. The AutoVue Document Print Service products leverage AutoVue's format- and platform agnostic technology to let you print/batch virtually any type of files, without requiring the authoring application installed on your machine. and Printers As shown above, you can trigger printing from your application either programmatically through automated business processes or manually through human interaction. If documents that need to be printed from your application are stored inside a content repository/Document Management System (DMS) such as Oracle Universal Content Management System (UCM), then the Print Server will need to identify the list of documents and pass the ID of each document to the AutoVue DPS to print. In this case, AutoVue DPS leverages the AutoVue VueLink integration (note: AutoVue VueLink integrations are pre-packaged AutoVue integrations with most common enterprise systems. Check our Website for more information on the subject) to fetch documents out of the document management system for printing. In lieu of the AutoVue VueLink integration, you can also leverage the AutoVue Integration Software Development Kit (iSDK) to build your own connector. If the documents you need to print from your application are not stored in a content management system, the Print Server will need to ensure that files are made available to the AutoVue Document Print Service. The Print Server could for example fetch the files out of your application or an extension to the application could be developed to fetch the files and make them available to the AutoVue DPS. More information on methods to pass on file information to the AutoVue Document Print Service products can be found in the AutoVue Document Print Service Overview documentation available on the Oracle Technology Network. Related article: Any Document Type with AutoVue Document Print Services

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• ASP.NET Frameworks and Raw Throughput Performance

  - by Rick Strahl

  A few days ago I had a curious thought: With all these different technologies that the ASP.NET stack has to offer, what's the most efficient technology overall to return data for a server request? When I started this it was mere curiosity rather than a real practical need or result. Different tools are used for different problems and so performance differences are to be expected. But still I was curious to see how the various technologies performed relative to each just for raw throughput of the request getting to the endpoint and back out to the client with as little processing in the actual endpoint logic as possible (aka Hello World!). I want to clarify that this is merely an informal test for my own curiosity and I'm sharing the results and process here because I thought it was interesting. It's been a long while since I've done any sort of perf testing on ASP.NET, mainly because I've not had extremely heavy load requirements and because overall ASP.NET performs very well even for fairly high loads so that often it's not that critical to test load performance. This post is not meant to make a point  or even come to a conclusion which tech is better, but just to act as a reference to help understand some of the differences in perf and give a starting point to play around with this yourself. I've included the code for this simple project, so you can play with it and maybe add a few additional tests for different things if you like. Source Code on GitHub I looked at this data for these technologies: ASP.NET Web API ASP.NET MVC WebForms ASP.NET WebPages ASMX AJAX Services  (couldn't get AJAX/JSON to run on IIS8 ) WCF Rest Raw ASP.NET HttpHandlers It's quite a mixed bag, of course and the technologies target different types of development. What started out as mere curiosity turned into a bit of a head scratcher as the results were sometimes surprising. What I describe here is more to satisfy my curiosity more than anything and I thought it interesting enough to discuss on the blog :-) First test: Raw Throughput The first thing I did is test raw throughput for the various technologies. This is the least practical test of course since you're unlikely to ever create the equivalent of a 'Hello World' request in a real life application. The idea here is to measure how much time a 'NOP' request takes to return data to the client. So for this request I create the simplest Hello World request that I could come up for each tech. Http Handler The first is the lowest level approach which is an HTTP handler. public class Handler : IHttpHandler { public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) { context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain"; context.Response.Write("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString()); } public bool IsReusable { get { return true; } } } WebForms Next I added a couple of ASPX pages - one using CodeBehind and one using only a markup page. The CodeBehind page simple does this in CodeBehind without any markup in the ASPX page: public partial class HelloWorld_CodeBehind : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { Response.Write("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString() ); Response.End(); } } while the Markup page only contains some static output via an expression:<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="false" CodeBehind="HelloWorld_Markup.aspx.cs" Inherits="AspNetFrameworksPerformance.HelloWorld_Markup" %> Hello World. Time is <%= DateTime.Now %> ASP.NET WebPages WebPages is the freestanding Razor implementation of ASP.NET. Here's the simple HelloWorld.cshtml page:Hello World @DateTime.Now WCF REST WCF REST was the token REST implementation for ASP.NET before WebAPI and the inbetween step from ASP.NET AJAX. I'd like to forget that this technology was ever considered for production use, but I'll include it here. Here's an OperationContract class: [ServiceContract(Namespace = "")] [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)] public class WcfService { [OperationContract] [WebGet] public Stream HelloWorld() { var data = Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes("Hello World" + DateTime.Now.ToString()); var ms = new MemoryStream(data); // Add your operation implementation here return ms; } } WCF REST can return arbitrary results by returning a Stream object and a content type. The code above turns the string result into a stream and returns that back to the client. ASP.NET AJAX (ASMX Services) I also wanted to test ASP.NET AJAX services because prior to WebAPI this is probably still the most widely used AJAX technology for the ASP.NET stack today. Unfortunately I was completely unable to get this running on my Windows 8 machine. Visual Studio 2012  removed adding of ASP.NET AJAX services, and when I tried to manually add the service and configure the script handler references it simply did not work - I always got a SOAP response for GET and POST operations. No matter what I tried I always ended up getting XML results even when explicitly adding the ScriptHandler. So, I didn't test this (but the code is there - you might be able to test this on a Windows 7 box). ASP.NET MVC Next up is probably the most popular ASP.NET technology at the moment: MVC. Here's the small controller: public class MvcPerformanceController : Controller { public ActionResult Index() { return View(); } public ActionResult HelloWorldCode() { return new ContentResult() { Content = "Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString() }; } } ASP.NET WebAPI Next up is WebAPI which looks kind of similar to MVC. Except here I have to use a StringContent result to return the response: public class WebApiPerformanceController : ApiController { [HttpGet] public HttpResponseMessage HelloWorldCode() { return new HttpResponseMessage() { Content = new StringContent("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(), Encoding.UTF8, "text/plain") }; } } Testing Take a minute to think about each of the technologies… and take a guess which you think is most efficient in raw throughput. The fastest should be pretty obvious, but the others - maybe not so much. The testing I did is pretty informal since it was mainly to satisfy my curiosity - here's how I did this: I used Apache Bench (ab.exe) from a full Apache HTTP installation to run and log the test results of hitting the server. ab.exe is a small executable that lets you hit a URL repeatedly and provides counter information about the number of requests, requests per second etc. ab.exe and the batch file are located in the \LoadTests folder of the project. An ab.exe command line  looks like this: ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorld which hits the specified URL 100,000 times with a load factor of 20 concurrent requests. This results in output like this:   It's a great way to get a quick and dirty performance summary. Run it a few times to make sure there's not a large amount of varience. You might also want to do an IISRESET to clear the Web Server. Just make sure you do a short test run to warm up the server first - otherwise your first run is likely to be skewed downwards. ab.exe also allows you to specify headers and provide POST data and many other things if you want to get a little more fancy. Here all tests are GET requests to keep it simple. I ran each test: 100,000 iterations Load factor of 20 concurrent connections IISReset before starting A short warm up run for API and MVC to make sure startup cost is mitigated Here is the batch file I used for the test: IISRESET REM make sure you add REM C:\Program Files (x86)\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\bin REM to your path so ab.exe can be found REM Warm up ab.exe -n100 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/MvcPerformance/HelloWorldJsonab.exe -n100 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorldJson ab.exe -n100 -c20 http://localhost/AspNetPerf/WcfService.svc/HelloWorld ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/handler.ashx > handler.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/HelloWorld_CodeBehind.aspx > AspxCodeBehind.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/HelloWorld_Markup.aspx > AspxMarkup.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/AspNetPerf/WcfService.svc/HelloWorld > Wcf.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/MvcPerformance/HelloWorldCode > Mvc.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorld > WebApi.txt I ran each of these tests 3 times and took the average score for Requests/second, with the machine otherwise idle. I did see a bit of variance when running many tests but the values used here are the medians. Part of this has to do with the fact I ran the tests on my local machine - result would probably more consistent running the load test on a separate machine hitting across the network. I ran these tests locally on my laptop which is a Dell XPS with quad core Sandibridge I7-2720QM @ 2.20ghz and a fast SSD drive on Windows 8. CPU load during tests ran to about 70% max across all 4 cores (IOW, it wasn't overloading the machine). Ideally you can try running these tests on a separate machine hitting the local machine. If I remember correctly IIS 7 and 8 on client OSs don't throttle so the performance here should be Results Ok, let's cut straight to the chase. Below are the results from the tests… It's not surprising that the handler was fastest. But it was a bit surprising to me that the next fastest was WebForms and especially Web Forms with markup over a CodeBehind page. WebPages also fared fairly well. MVC and WebAPI are a little slower and the slowest by far is WCF REST (which again I find surprising). As mentioned at the start the raw throughput tests are not overly practical as they don't test scripting performance for the HTML generation engines or serialization performances of the data engines. All it really does is give you an idea of the raw throughput for the technology from time of request to reaching the endpoint and returning minimal text data back to the client which indicates full round trip performance. But it's still interesting to see that Web Forms performs better in throughput than either MVC, WebAPI or WebPages. It'd be interesting to try this with a few pages that actually have some parsing logic on it, but that's beyond the scope of this throughput test. But what's also amazing about this test is the sheer amount of traffic that a laptop computer is handling. Even the slowest tech managed 5700 requests a second, which is one hell of a lot of requests if you extrapolate that out over a 24 hour period. Remember these are not static pages, but dynamic requests that are being served. Another test - JSON Data Service Results The second test I used a JSON result from several of the technologies. I didn't bother running WebForms and WebPages through this test since that doesn't make a ton of sense to return data from the them (OTOH, returning text from the APIs didn't make a ton of sense either :-) In these tests I have a small Person class that gets serialized and then returned to the client. The Person class looks like this: public class Person { public Person() { Id = 10; Name = "Rick"; Entered = DateTime.Now; } public int Id { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public DateTime Entered { get; set; } } Here are the updated handler classes that use Person: Handler public class Handler : IHttpHandler { public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) { var action = context.Request.QueryString["action"]; if (action == "json") JsonRequest(context); else TextRequest(context); } public void TextRequest(HttpContext context) { context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain"; context.Response.Write("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString()); } public void JsonRequest(HttpContext context) { var json = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(new Person(), Formatting.None); context.Response.ContentType = "application/json"; context.Response.Write(json); } public bool IsReusable { get { return true; } } } This code adds a little logic to check for a action query string and route the request to an optional JSON result method. To generate JSON, I'm using the same JSON.NET serializer (JsonConvert.SerializeObject) used in Web API to create the JSON response. WCF REST   [ServiceContract(Namespace = "")] [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)] public class WcfService { [OperationContract] [WebGet] public Stream HelloWorld() { var data = Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes("Hello World " + DateTime.Now.ToString()); var ms = new MemoryStream(data); // Add your operation implementation here return ms; } [OperationContract] [WebGet(ResponseFormat=WebMessageFormat.Json,BodyStyle=WebMessageBodyStyle.WrappedRequest)] public Person HelloWorldJson() { // Add your operation implementation here return new Person(); } } For WCF REST all I have to do is add a method with the Person result type.   ASP.NET MVC public class MvcPerformanceController : Controller { // // GET: /MvcPerformance/ public ActionResult Index() { return View(); } public ActionResult HelloWorldCode() { return new ContentResult() { Content = "Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString() }; } public JsonResult HelloWorldJson() { return Json(new Person(), JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet); } } For MVC all I have to do for a JSON response is return a JSON result. ASP.NET internally uses JavaScriptSerializer. ASP.NET WebAPI public class WebApiPerformanceController : ApiController { [HttpGet] public HttpResponseMessage HelloWorldCode() { return new HttpResponseMessage() { Content = new StringContent("Hello World. Time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString(), Encoding.UTF8, "text/plain") }; } [HttpGet] public Person HelloWorldJson() { return new Person(); } [HttpGet] public HttpResponseMessage HelloWorldJson2() { var response = new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.OK); response.Content = new ObjectContent<Person>(new Person(), GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.JsonFormatter); return response; } } Testing and Results To run these data requests I used the following ab.exe commands:REM JSON RESPONSES ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/Handler.ashx?action=json > HandlerJson.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/MvcPerformance/HelloWorldJson > MvcJson.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorldJson > WebApiJson.txt ab.exe -n100000 -c20 http://localhost/AspNetPerf/WcfService.svc/HelloWorldJson > WcfJson.txt The results from this test run are a bit interesting in that the WebAPI test improved performance significantly over returning plain string content. Here are the results:   The performance for each technology drops a little bit except for WebAPI which is up quite a bit! From this test it appears that WebAPI is actually significantly better performing returning a JSON response, rather than a plain string response. Snag with Apache Benchmark and 'Length Failures' I ran into a little snag with Apache Benchmark, which was reporting failures for my Web API requests when serializing. As the graph shows performance improved significantly from with JSON results from 5580 to 6530 or so which is a 15% improvement (while all others slowed down by 3-8%). However, I was skeptical at first because the WebAPI test reports showed a bunch of errors on about 10% of the requests. Check out this report: Notice the Failed Request count. What the hey? Is WebAPI failing on roughly 10% of requests when sending JSON? Turns out: No it's not! But it took some sleuthing to figure out why it reports these failures. At first I thought that Web API was failing, and so to make sure I re-ran the test with Fiddler attached and runiisning the ab.exe test by using the -X switch: ab.exe -n100 -c10 -X localhost:8888 http://localhost/aspnetperf/api/HelloWorldJson which showed that indeed all requests where returning proper HTTP 200 results with full content. However ab.exe was reporting the errors. After some closer inspection it turned out that the dates varying in size altered the response length in dynamic output. For example: these two results: {"Id":10,"Name":"Rick","Entered":"2012-09-04T10:57:24.841926-10:00"} {"Id":10,"Name":"Rick","Entered":"2012-09-04T10:57:24.8519262-10:00"} are different in length for the number which results in 68 and 69 bytes respectively. The same URL produces different result lengths which is what ab.exe reports. I didn't notice at first bit the same is happening when running the ASHX handler with JSON.NET result since it uses the same serializer that varies the milliseconds. Moral: You can typically ignore Length failures in Apache Benchmark and when in doubt check the actual output with Fiddler. Note that the other failure values are accurate though. Another interesting Side Note: Perf drops over Time As I was running these tests repeatedly I was finding that performance steadily dropped from a startup peak to a 10-15% lower stable level. IOW, with Web API I'd start out with around 6500 req/sec and in subsequent runs it keeps dropping until it would stabalize somewhere around 5900 req/sec occasionally jumping lower. For these tests this is why I did the IIS RESET and warm up for individual tests. This is a little puzzling. Looking at Process Monitor while the test are running memory very quickly levels out as do handles and threads, on the first test run. Subsequent runs everything stays stable, but the performance starts going downwards. This applies to all the technologies - Handlers, Web Forms, MVC, Web API - curious to see if others test this and see similar results. Doing an IISRESET then resets everything and performance starts off at peak again… Summary As I stated at the outset, these were informal to satiate my curiosity not to prove that any technology is better or even faster than another. While there clearly are differences in performance the differences (other than WCF REST which was by far the slowest and the raw handler which was by far the highest) are relatively minor, so there is no need to feel that any one technology is a runaway standout in raw performance. Choosing a technology is about more than pure performance but also about the adequateness for the job and the easy of implementation. The strengths of each technology will make for any minor performance difference we see in these tests. However, to me it's important to get an occasional reality check and compare where new technologies are heading. Often times old stuff that's been optimized and designed for a time of less horse power can utterly blow the doors off newer tech and simple checks like this let you compare. Luckily we're seeing that much of the new stuff performs well even in V1.0 which is great. To me it was very interesting to see Web API perform relatively badly with plain string content, which originally led me to think that Web API might not be properly optimized just yet. For those that caught my Tweets late last week regarding WebAPI's slow responses was with String content which is in fact considerably slower. Luckily where it counts with serialized JSON and XML WebAPI actually performs better. But I do wonder what would make generic string content slower than serialized code? This stresses another point: Don't take a single test as the final gospel and don't extrapolate out from a single set of tests. Certainly Twitter can make you feel like a fool when you post something immediate that hasn't been fleshed out a little more <blush>. Egg on my face. As a result I ended up screwing around with this for a few hours today to compare different scenarios. Well worth the time… I hope you found this useful, if not for the results, maybe for the process of quickly testing a few requests for performance and charting out a comparison. Now onwards with more serious stuff… Resources Source Code on GitHub Apache HTTP Server Project (ab.exe is part of the binary distribution)© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in ASP.NET  Web Api   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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• Getting Current with Visual Studio 2010 for Web Developers

  - by plitwin

  I don't know about you, but I find it kind of crazy at times figuring out if I have the latest of everything there is for the Visual Studio 2010 developer from Microsoft. (This does not include any third-party components, just recommended updates from Microsoft.) And the be honest, the msn.microsoft.com and asp.net sites are not that helpful in figuring this out.In an effort to help, I have enumerated here what the latest VS 2010 setup should include, complete with download links. When you install everything here, you will be able to develop ASP.NET 4.0 Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC 3 applications and web sites in addition to the other stuff your version of Visual Studio supports (e.g., Silverlight, WPF, etc.). These downloads will also include NuGet and the Entity Framework 4.1, so there is no need to download this software separately.Visual Studio 2010. First of all, you need to purchase and install Visual Studio 2010 itself. For the free Express version, you can download it from Visual Web Developer 2010 ExpressVisual Studio Service Pack 1 (released Spring 2011).This is a must-have download that fixes a bunch of bugs and a number of enhancements too including preliminary support for HTML5 and CSS3. See #4 below for better support of these web technologies. Download and install from VS 2010 SP1 download page. You can find details on the features of the service pack here. ASP.NET MVC3 Tools Update (released Spring 2011)If you are using ASP.NET MVC 3, then you should also download install this update for Visual Studio from ASP.NET MVC3 Tools Update download page. This update improves Visual Studio's support for MVC 3, including better scaffolding, NuGet, Entity Framework 4.1, and more. A good overview of the updates can be found in Phil Haack's blog post.Web Standards Update for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 SP1 (released June 2011)This is an update to VS 2010 SP1 that "brings VS 2010 intellisense & validation as close to W3C specification as we could get via means of an extension". Download and install from Web Standards Update download page. A good description of the changes can be found in the Visual Web Developer Team blog post.Note: I don't control these download pages, so it is possible they will change. If so, I will do my best to update these links. This information was current as of June 24, 2011.

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• Deploying Socket.IO App to Windows Azure Web Site with Azure CLI

  - by shiju

  In this blog post, I will demonstrate how to deploy Socket.IO app to Windows Azure Website using Windows Azure Cross-Platform Command-Line Interface, which leverages the Windows Azure Website’s new support for Web Sockets. Recently Windows Azure has announced lot of enhancements including the support for Web Sockets in Windows Azure Websites, which lets the Node.js developers deploy Socket.IO apps to Windows Azure Websites. In this blog post, I am using  Windows Azure CLI for create and deploy Windows Azure Website. Install  Windows Azure CLI The Windows Azure CLI available as a NPM module so that you can install Windows Azure CLI using  NPM as shown in the below command. After installing the azure-cli, just enter the command “azure” which will show the useful commands provided by Azure CLI. Import Windows Azure Subscription Account In order to import our Azure subscription account, we need to download the Windows Azure subscription profile. The Azure CLI command “account download” lets you download the  Windows Azure subscription profile as shown in the below command. The command redirect you login to Windows Azure portal and allow you to download the Windows Azure publish settings file. The account import command lets you import the downloaded publish settings file so that you can create and manage Websites, Cloud Services, Virtual Machines and Mobile Services in Windows Azure. Create Windows Azure Website and Enable Web Sockets In this post, we are going to deploy Socket.IO app to Windows Azure Website by using the Web Socket support provided by Windows Azure. Let’s create a Website named “socketiochatapp” using the Azure CLI. The above command will create a Windows Azure Website that will also initialize a Git repository with a remote named Azure. We can see the newly created Website from Azure portal. By default, the Web Sockets will be disabled. So let’s enable it by navigating to the Configure tab of the Website, and select “ON” in Web Sockets option and save the configuration changes. Deploy a Node.js Socket.IO App to Windows Azure Now, our Windows Azure Website supports Web Sockets so that we can easily deploy Socket.IO app to Windows Azure Website. Let’s add Node.js chat app which leverages Socket.IO module. Please note that you have to add npm module dependencies in the package.json file so that Windows Azure can install the dependencies when deploying the app. Let’s add the Node.js app and add the files to git repository. Let’s commit the changes to git repository. We have committed the changes to git local repository. Let’s push the changes to Windows Azure production environment. The successful deployment can see from the Windows Azure portal by navigating to the deployments tab of the selected Windows Azure Website. The screen shot below shows that our chat app is running successfully.   You can follow me on Twitter @shijucv

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• Oracle SOA Security for OUAF Web Services

  - by Anthony Shorten

  With the ability to use Oracle SOA Suite 11g with the Oracle Utilities Application Framework based products, an additional consideration needs to be configured to ensure correct integration. That additional consideration is security. By default, SOA Suite propagates any credentials from the calling application through to the interfacing applications. In most cases, this behavior is not appropriate as the calling application may use different credential stores and also some interfaces are “disconnected” from a calling application (for example, a file based load using the File Adapter). These situations require that the Web Service calls to the Oracle Utilities Application Framework based products have their own valid credentials. To do this the credentials must be attached at design time or at run time to provide the necessary credentials for the call. There are a number of techniques that can be used to do this: At design time, when integrating a Web Service from an Oracle Utilities Application Framework based product you can attach the security policy “oracle/wss_username_token_client_policy” in the composite.xml view. In this view select the Web Service you want to attach the policy to and right click to display the context menu and select “Configure WS Policies” and select the above policy from the list. If you are using SSL then you can use “oracle/wss_username_token_over_ssl_client_policy” instead. At design time, you can also specify the credential key (csf-key) associated with the above policy by selecting the policy and clicking “Edit Config Override Properties”. You name the key appropriately. Everytime the SOA components are deployed the credential configuration is also sent. You can also do this after deployment, or what I call at “runtime”, by specifying the policy and credential key in the Fusion Middleware Control. Refer to the Fusion Middleware Control documentation on how to do this. To complete the configuration you need to add a map and the key specified earlier to the credential store in the Oracle WebLogic instance used for Oracle SOA Suite. From Fusion Middleware Control, you do this by selecting the domain the SOA Suite is installed in a select “Credentials” from the context menu. You now need to add the credentials by adding the map “oracle.wsm.security” (the name is IMPORTANT) and creating a key with the necessary valid credentials. The example below added a key called “mdm.key”. The name I used is for example only. You can name the key anything you like as long as it corresponds to the key you specified in the design time component. Note: I used SYSUSER as an example credentials in the example, in real life you would use another credential as SYSUSER is not appropriate for production use. This key can be reused for other Oracle Utilities Application Framework Web Service integrations or you can use other keys for individual Web Service calls. Once the key is created and the SOA Suite components deployed the transactions should be able to be called as necessary. If you need to change the password for the credentials it can be done using the Fusion Middleware Control functionality.

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• What is a resonable workflow for designing webapps?

  - by Evan Plaice

  It has been a while since I have done any substantial web development and I'd like to take advantage of the latest practices but I'm struggling to visualize the workflow to incorporate everything. Here's what I'm looking to use: CakePHP framework jsmin (JavaScript Minify) SASS (Synctactically Awesome StyleSheets) Git CakePHP: Pretty self explanatory, make modifications and update the source. jsmin: When you modify a script, do you manually run jsmin to output the new minified code, or would it be better to run a pre-commit hook that automatically generates jsmin outputs of javascript files that have changed. Assume that I have no knowledge of implementing commit hooks. SASS: I really like what SASS has to offer but I'm also aware that SASS code isn't supported by browsers by default so, at some point, the SASS code needs to be transformed to normal CSS. At what point in the workflow is this done. Git I'm terrified to admit it but, the last time I did any substantial web development, I didn't use SCM source control (IE, I did use source control but it consisted of a very detailed change log with backups). I have since had plenty of experience using Git (as well as mercurial and SVN) for desktop development but I'm wondering how to best implement it for web development). Is it common practice to implement a remote repository on the web host so I can push the changes directly to the production server, or is there some cross platform (windows/linux) tool that makes it easy to upload only changed files to the production server. Are there web hosting companies that make it eas to implement a remote repository, do I need SSH access, etc... I know how to accomplish this on my own testing server with a remote repository with a separate remote tracking branch already but I've never done it on a remote production web hosting server before so I'm not aware of the options yet. Extra: I was considering implementing a javascript framework where separate javascript files used on a page are compiled into a single file for each page on the production server to limit the number of file downloads needed per page. Does something like this already exist? Is there already an open source project out in the wild that implements something similar that I could use and contribute to? Considering how paranoid web devs are about performance (and the fact that the number of file requests on a website is a big hit to performance) I'm guessing that there is some wizard hacker on the net who has already addressed this issue.

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• Oracle Application in DMZ (Demilitarized Zone)

  - by PRajkumar

   Business Needs Large Organizations want to expose their Oracle Application services outside their private network (HTTP/HTTPS and SSL). Usually these exposures must exist to promote external communication. So they want to separate an external network from directly referencing an internal network   Business Challenges ·         Business does not want to compromise with security information ·         Business cannot expose internal domain or internal URL information   Business Solution DMZ is the solution of this problem. In Oracle application we can achieve this by following way –   ·         Oracle Application consists of fleet nodes (FND_NODES) so first decide which node have to expose to public ·         To expose the node to public use the profile “Node Trust Level” ·         Set node to Public/Private (Normal -> private, External -> public) ·         Set "Responsibility Trust Level" profile to decide whether to expose Application Responsibility to inside or outside firewall         Solution Features   ·         Exposed web services can be accessed by both internal and external users ·         Configurable and can be very easily rolled out ·         Internal network and business data is secured from outside traffic ·         Unauthorized access to internal network from outside is prohibited ·         No need for VPN and Secure FTP server   Benefits  ·       Large Organizations having Oracle Application can expose their web services like (HTTP/HTTPS and SSL) to the internet without compromise with security information and without exposing their internal domain   Possible Week Points  ·         If external firewall is compromised, then external application server is also compromised, exposing an attack on E-Business Suite database ·         There’s nothing to prevent internal users from attacking internal application server, also exposing an attack on E-Business Suite database   Reference Links  ·         https://blogs.oracle.com/manojmadhusoodanan/tags/dmz

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• Trying to install datastax opscenter - Failed to load application: cannot import name _parse

  - by gansbrest

  I'm not familiar with python, maybe someone could explain what's going on here? ec2-user@prod-opscenter-01:~ % java -version java version "1.7.0_45" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_45-b18) Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 24.45-b08, mixed mode) ec2-user@prod-opscenter-01:~ % python -V Python 2.6.8 ec2-user@prod-opscenter-01:~ % openssl version OpenSSL 1.0.1e-fips 11 Feb 2013 And now the error ec2-user@prod-opscenter-01:~ % sudo /etc/init.d/opscenterd start Starting Cassandra cluster manager opscenterd Starting opscenterdUnhandled Error Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/lib64/python2.6/site-packages/twisted/application/app.py", line 652, in run runApp(config) File "/usr/lib64/python2.6/site-packages/twisted/scripts/twistd.py", line 23, in runApp _SomeApplicationRunner(config).run() File "/usr/lib64/python2.6/site-packages/twisted/application/app.py", line 386, in run self.application = self.createOrGetApplication() File "/usr/lib64/python2.6/site-packages/twisted/application/app.py", line 451, in createOrGetApplication application = getApplication(self.config, passphrase) --- <exception caught here> --- File "/usr/lib64/python2.6/site-packages/twisted/application/app.py", line 462, in getApplication application = service.loadApplication(filename, style, passphrase) File "/usr/lib64/python2.6/site-packages/twisted/application/service.py", line 405, in loadApplication application = sob.loadValueFromFile(filename, 'application', passphrase) File "/usr/lib64/python2.6/site-packages/twisted/persisted/sob.py", line 210, in loadValueFromFile exec fileObj in d, d File "bin/start_opscenter.py", line 1, in <module> from opscenterd import opscenterd_tap File "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/opscenterd/opscenterd_tap.py", line 37, in <module> File "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/opscenterd/OpsCenterdService.py", line 13, in <module> File "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/opscenterd/ClusterServices.py", line 22, in <module> File "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/opscenterd/WebServer.py", line 40, in <module> File "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/opscenterd/Agents.py", line 18, in <module> exceptions.ImportError: cannot import name _parse Failed to load application: cannot import name _parse Maybe there are open source alternatives to monitoring cassandra I should look at? Thanks a lot

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• Sharepoint web part fails intermittently

  - by pringly

  I have a MOSS 2007 environment, 2 web servers and a DB server, load balanced between the two web servers. I deployed a web part recently, which worked fine for a while, but failed on web server 2 after a day. When it fails, it gets the error message: 'A Web Part or Web Form Control on this Page cannot be displayed or imported. The type could not be found or it is not registered as safe’ Once it has failed, it will stay that way until an IIS reset is done. The other web server never fails, I tried to force the second web server to fail to recreate the issue and have been unable to do it. I tried placing it under heavy http traffic and it handled it fine. Put it back in the pool and it failed again after about 7 hours. So, if i remove the .dll for the webpart from the affected web server, the webpart doesnt stop working. Is this normal behavior? I checked the bin directory for the site and the global assembly and it there is no other copy of the .dll anywhere else on the server. Also, when checking the web part gallery, if the web part has failed it will appear in the gallery, but by trying to add a new webpart, the .dll wont be listed. I have no idea how to continue troubleshooting from here or even fix it, any ideas?

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• JMX Based Monitoring - Part Three - Web App Server Monitoring

  - by Anthony Shorten

  In the last blog entry I showed a technique for integrating a JMX console with Oracle WebLogic which is a standard feature of Oracle WebLogic 11g. Customers on other Web Application servers and other versions of Oracle WebLogic can refer to the documentation provided with the server to do a similar thing. In this blog entry I am going to discuss a new feature that is only present in Oracle Utilities Application Framework 4 and above that allows JMX to be used for management and monitoring the Oracle Utilities Web Applications. In this case JMX can be used to perform monitoring as well as provide the management of the cache. In Oracle Utilities Application Framework you can enable Web Application Server JMX monitoring that is unique to the framework by specifying a JMX port number in RMI Port number for JMX Web setting and initial credentials in the JMX Enablement System User ID and JMX Enablement System Password configuration options. These options are available using the configureEnv[.sh] -a utility. Once this is information is supplied a number of configuration files are built (by the initialSetup[.sh] utility) to configure the facility: spl.properties - contains the JMX URL, the security configuration and the mbeans that are enabled. For example, on my demonstration machine: spl.runtime.management.rmi.port=6740 spl.runtime.management.connector.url.default=service:jmx:rmi:///jndi/rmi://localhost:6740/oracle/ouaf/webAppConnector jmx.remote.x.password.file=scripts/ouaf.jmx.password.file jmx.remote.x.access.file=scripts/ouaf.jmx.access.file ouaf.jmx.com.splwg.base.support.management.mbean.JVMInfo=enabled ouaf.jmx.com.splwg.base.web.mbeans.FlushBean=enabled ouaf.jmx.* files - contain the userid and password. The default setup uses the JMX default security configuration. You can use additional security features by altering the spl.properties file manually or using a custom template. For more security options see the JMX Site. Once it has been configured and the changes reflected in the product using the initialSetup[.sh] utility the JMX facility can be used. For illustrative purposes, I will use jconsole but any JSR160 complaint browser or client can be used (with the appropriate configuration). Once you start jconsole (ensure that splenviron[.sh] is executed prior to execution to set the environment variables or for remote connection, ensure java is in your path and jconsole.jar in your classpath) you specify the URL in the spl.management.connnector.url.default entry and the credentials you specified in the jmx.remote.x.* files. Remember these are encrypted by default so if you try and view the file you may be able to decipher it visually. For example: There are three Mbeans available to you: flushBean - This is a JMX replacement for the jsp versions of the flush utilities provided in previous releases of the Oracle Utilities Application Framework. You can manage the cache using the provided operations from JMX. The jsp versions of the flush utilities are still provided, for backward compatibility, but now are authorization controlled. JVMInfo - This is a JMX replacement for the jsp version of the JVMInfo screen used by support to get a handle on JVM information. This information is environmental not operational and is used for support purposes. The jsp versions of the JVMInfo utilities are still provided, for backward compatibility, but now is also authorization controlled. JVMSystem - This is an implementation of the Java system MXBeans for use in monitoring. We provide our own implementation of the base Mbeans to save on creating another JMX configuration for internal monitoring and to provide a consistent interface across platforms for the MXBeans. This Mbean is disabled by default and can be enabled using the enableJVMSystemBeans operation. This Mbean allows for the monitoring of the ClassLoading, Memory, OperatingSystem, Runtime and the Thread MX beans. Refer to the Server Administration Guides provided with your product and the Technical Best Practices Whitepaper for information about individual statistics. The Web Application Server JMX monitoring allows greater visibility for monitoring and management of the Oracle Utilities Application Framework application from jconsole or any JSR160 compliant JMX browser or JMX console.

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• PHP Web Services - Nice try

  Thanks to the membership in the O'Reilly User Group Programme the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (short: MSCC) recently received a welcome package with several book titles. Among them is the latest publication of Lorna Jane Mitchell - 'PHP Web Services: APIs for the Modern Web'. Following is the book review I put on Amazon: Nice try! Initially, I was astonished that a small book like 'PHP Web Services' would be able to cover all the interesting topics about APIs and Web Services, independently whether they are written in PHP or not. And unfortunately, the title isn't able to stand up to the readers (or at least my) expectations. Maybe as a light defense, there is no usual paragraph about the intended audience of that book, but still I have to admit that the first half (chapters 1 to 8) are well written and Lorna has her points on the various technologies. Also, the code samples in PHP are clean and easy to understand. With chapter 'Debugging Web Services' the book started to change my mind about the clarity of advice and the instructions on designing and developing good APIs. Eventually, this might be related to the fact that I'm used to other tools since years, like Telerik Fiddler as HTTP proxy in order to trace and inspect any kind of request/response handling. Including localhost monitoring, SSL certification acceptance, and the ability to debug mobile devices, especially iOS-based ones. Compared to Charles, Fiddler is available for free. What really got me off the hook is the following statement in chapter 10 about Service Type Decisions: "For users who have larger systems using technology stacks such as Java, C++, or .NET, it may be easier for them to integrate with a SOAP service." WHAT? A couple of pages earlier the author recommends to stay away from 'old-fashioned' API styles like SOAP (if possible). And on top of that I wonder why there are tons of documentation towards development of RESTful Web Services based on WebAPI. The ASP.NET stack clearly moves away from SOAP to JSON and REST since years! Honestly, as a software developer on the .NET stack this leaves a mixed feeling after all. As for the remaining chapters I simply consider them as 'blah blah' without any real value and lots of theoretical advice. Related to the chapter 13 about 'Documentation', I just had the 'pleasure' to write a C#-based client against a Java-based SOAP Web Service. Personally, I take the WSDL as the master reference in the first place and Visual Studio generates all the stub types involved in the communication. During the implementation and testing I came across a 'java.lang.NullPointerException' in various methods and for various method parameters. The WSDL and the generated types were declared as Nullable, so nothing to worry about, or? Well, I logged in a support ticket, and guess what was the response to that scenario? "The service definition in the WSDL is wrong, please refer to the documentation in order to use the methods and parameters correctly" - No comment! Lorna's title is a quick read and in some areas she has good advice on designing and implementing Web Services and APIs. But roughly 100 pages aren't enough to cover a vast topic like that. After all, nice try and I'm looking forward to an improved second edition. Honestly, I never thought that I would come across a poor review. In general, it's a good book but it clearly has a lack of depth, the PHP code samples are incomplete (closing tags missing), and there are too many assumptions and theoretical statements.

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• Migrating SQL Server Compact Edition (SQL CE) database to SQL Server using Web Matrix

  - by Harish Ranganathan

  One of the things that is keeping us busy is the Web Camps we are delivering across 5 cities.  If you are a reader of this blog, and also attended one of these web camps, there is a good chance that you have seen me since I was there in all the places, so far.  The topics that we cover include Visual Studio 2010 SP1, SQL CE, ASP.NET MVC & HTML5.  Whenever I talk about SQL CE, the immediate response is that, people are wow that Microsoft has shipped a FREE compact edition database, which is an embedded database that can be x-copy deployed.  If you think, well didn’t Microsoft ship SQL Express which is FREE?  The difference is that, SQL Express runs as a service in the machine (if you open SQL Configuration Manager, you can notice that SQL Express is running as a service along with your SQL Server Engine (if you have installed ).  This makes it that, even if you are willing to use SQL Express when you deploy your application, it needs to be installed on the production machine (hosting provider) and it needs to run as a service.  Many hosters don’t allow such services to run on their space. SQL CE comes as a x-Copy deploy-able database with just a few DLLs required to run it on the machine and they don’t even need to be installed in GAC on the production machine.  In fact, if you have Visual Studio 2010 SP1 installed, you can use the “Add Deployable Dependencies” option in Project-Properties and it would detect that SQL CE is something you would probably want to add as a deploy-able dependency for your project.  With that, it bundles the required DLLs as a part of the “_bin_deployableAssemblies” folder.  So your project can be x-Copy deployed and just works fine. However, SQL CE has the limit of 4GB storage space.  Real world applications often require more than just 4GB of data storage and it often turns out that people would like to use SQL CE for development/ramp up stages but would like to migrate to full fledged SQL Server after a while.  So, its only natural that the question arises “How do I move my SQL CE database to SQL Server”  And honestly, it doesn’t come across as a straight forward support.  I was talking to Ambrish Mishra (PM in SQL CE Team, Hyderabad) since I got this question in almost all the places where we talked about SQL CE.   He was kind enough to demonstrate how this can be accomplished using Web Matrix.  Open Web Matrix (Web Matrix can be installed for free from www.microsoft.com/web) and click on “Site from Template” Click on the “Bakery” template (since by default it uses a SQL CE database and has all the required sample data) and click “Ok”. In the project, you can navigate to the Database tab and will be able to find that the Bakery site uses a SQL CE database “bakery.sdf” Select the “bakery.sdf” and you will be able to see the “Migrate” button on the top right Once you click on the “Migrate” button, you will notice that the popup wizard opens up and by default is configured for SQL Express.  You can edit the same to point to your local SQL Server instance, or a remote server. Upon filling in the Server Name, Username and Password, when you click “Ok”, couple of things happen.  1. The database is migrated to SQL Server (local or remote – subject to permissions on remote server).   You can open up SQL Server Management Studio and connect to the server to verify that the “bakery” database exists under “Databases” node. 2. You can also notice that in Web Matrix, when you navigate to the “Files” tab and open up the web.config file, connection string now points to the SQL Server instance (yes, the Migrate button was smart enough to make this change too ) And there it is, your SQL Server Compact Edition database, now migrated to SQL Server!! In a future post, I would explain the steps involved when using Visual Studio. Cheers !!!

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• Security in OBIEE 11g, Part 2

  - by Rob Reynolds

  Continuing the series on OBIEE 11g, our guest blogger this week is Pravin Janardanam. Here is Part 2 of his overview of Security in OBIEE 11g. OBIEE 11g Security Overview, Part 2 by Pravin Janardanam In my previous blog on Security, I discussed the OBIEE 11g changes regarding Authentication mechanism, RPD protection and encryption. This blog will include a discussion about OBIEE 11g Authorization and other Security aspects. Authorization: Authorization in 10g was achieved using a combination of Users, Groups and association of privileges and object permissions to users and Groups. Two keys changes to Authorization in OBIEE 11g are: Application Roles Policies / Permission Groups Application Roles are introduced in OBIEE 11g. An application role is specific to the application. They can be mapped to other application roles defined in the same application scope and also to enterprise users or groups, and they are used in authorization decisions. Application roles in 11g take the place of Groups in 10g within OBIEE application. In OBIEE 10g, any changes to corporate LDAP groups require a corresponding change to Groups and their permission assignment. In OBIEE 11g, Application roles provide insulation between permission definitions and corporate LDAP Groups. Permissions are defined at Application Role level and changes to LDAP groups just require a reassignment of the Group to the Application Roles. Permissions and privileges are assigned to Application Roles and users in OBIEE 11g compared to Groups and Users in 10g. The diagram below shows the relationship between users, groups and application roles. Note that the Groups shown in the diagram refer to LDAP Groups (WebLogic Groups by default) and not OBIEE application Groups. The following screenshot compares the permission windows from Admin tool in 10g vs 11g. Note that the Groups in the OBIEE 10g are replaced with Application Roles in OBIEE 11g. The same is applicable to OBIEE web catalog objects.    The default Application Roles available after OBIEE 11g installation are BIAdministrator, BISystem, BIConsumer and BIAuthor. Application policies are the authorization policies that an application relies upon for controlling access to its resources. An Application Role is defined by the Application Policy. The following screenshot shows the policies defined for BIAdministrator and BISystem Roles. Note that the permission for impersonation is granted to BISystem Role. In OBIEE 10g, the permission to manage repositories and Impersonation were assigned to “Administrators” group with no control to separate these permissions in the Administrators group. Hence user “Administrator” also had the permission to impersonate. In OBI11g, BIAdministrator does not have the permission to impersonate. This gives more flexibility to have multiple users perform different administrative functions. Application Roles, Policies, association of Policies to application roles and association of users and groups to application roles are managed using Fusion Middleware Enterprise Manager (FMW EM). They reside in the policy store, identified by the system-jazn-data.xml file. The screenshots below show where they are created and managed in FMW EM. The following screenshot shows the assignment of WebLogic Groups to Application Roles. The following screenshot shows the assignment of Permissions to Application Roles (Application Policies). Note: Object level permission association to Applications Roles resides in the RPD for repository objects. Permissions and Privilege for web catalog objects resides in the OBIEE Web Catalog. Wherever Groups were used in the web catalog and RPD has been replaced with Application roles in OBIEE 11g. Following are the tools used in OBIEE 11g Security Administration: ·       Users and Groups are managed in Oracle WebLogic Administration console (by default). If WebLogic is integrated with other LDAP products, then Users and Groups needs to managed using the interface provide by the respective LDAP vendor – New in OBIEE 11g ·       Application Roles and Application Policies are managed in Oracle Enterprise Manager - Fusion Middleware Control – New in OBIEE 11g ·       Repository object permissions are managed in OBIEE Administration tool – Same as 10g but the assignment is to Application Roles instead of Groups ·       Presentation Services Catalog Permissions and Privileges are managed in OBI Application administration page - Same as 10g but the assignment is to Application Roles instead of Groups Credential Store: Credential Store is a single consolidated service provider to store and manage the application credentials securely. The credential store contains credentials that either user supplied or system generated. Credential store in OBIEE 10g is file based and is managed using cryptotools utility. In 11g, Credential store can be managed directly from the FMW Enterprise Manager and is stored in cwallet.sso file. By default, the Credential Store stores password for deployed RPDs, BI Publisher data sources and BISystem user. In addition, Credential store can be LDAP based but only Oracle Internet Directory is supported right now. As you can see OBIEE security is integrated with Oracle Fusion Middleware security architecture. This provides a common security framework for all components of Business Intelligence and Fusion Middleware applications.

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• Using Durandal to Create Single Page Apps

  - by Stephen.Walther

  A few days ago, I gave a talk on building Single Page Apps on the Microsoft Stack. In that talk, I recommended that people use Knockout, Sammy, and RequireJS to build their presentation layer and use the ASP.NET Web API to expose data from their server. After I gave the talk, several people contacted me and suggested that I investigate a new open-source JavaScript library named Durandal. Durandal stitches together Knockout, Sammy, and RequireJS to make it easier to use these technologies together. In this blog entry, I want to provide a brief walkthrough of using Durandal to create a simple Single Page App. I am going to demonstrate how you can create a simple Movies App which contains (virtual) pages for viewing a list of movies, adding new movies, and viewing movie details. The goal of this blog entry is to give you a sense of what it is like to build apps with Durandal. Installing Durandal First things first. How do you get Durandal? The GitHub project for Durandal is located here: https://github.com/BlueSpire/Durandal The Wiki — located at the GitHub project — contains all of the current documentation for Durandal. Currently, the documentation is a little sparse, but it is enough to get you started. Instead of downloading the Durandal source from GitHub, a better option for getting started with Durandal is to install one of the Durandal NuGet packages. I built the Movies App described in this blog entry by first creating a new ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Application with the Basic Template. Next, I executed the following command from the Package Manager Console: Install-Package Durandal.StarterKit As you can see from the screenshot of the Package Manager Console above, the Durandal Starter Kit package has several dependencies including: · jQuery · Knockout · Sammy · Twitter Bootstrap The Durandal Starter Kit package includes a sample Durandal application. You can get to the Starter Kit app by navigating to the Durandal controller. Unfortunately, when I first tried to run the Starter Kit app, I got an error because the Starter Kit is hard-coded to use a particular version of jQuery which is already out of date. You can fix this issue by modifying the App_Start\DurandalBundleConfig.cs file so it is jQuery version agnostic like this: bundles.Add( new ScriptBundle("~/scripts/vendor") .Include("~/Scripts/jquery-{version}.js") .Include("~/Scripts/knockout-{version}.js") .Include("~/Scripts/sammy-{version}.js") // .Include("~/Scripts/jquery-1.9.0.min.js") // .Include("~/Scripts/knockout-2.2.1.js") // .Include("~/Scripts/sammy-0.7.4.min.js") .Include("~/Scripts/bootstrap.min.js") ); The recommendation is that you create a Durandal app in a folder off your project root named App. The App folder in the Starter Kit contains the following subfolders and files: · durandal – This folder contains the actual durandal JavaScript library. · viewmodels – This folder contains all of your application’s view models. · views – This folder contains all of your application’s views. · main.js — This file contains all of the JavaScript startup code for your app including the client-side routing configuration. · main-built.js – This file contains an optimized version of your application. You need to build this file by using the RequireJS optimizer (unfortunately, before you can run the optimizer, you must first install NodeJS). For the purpose of this blog entry, I wanted to start from scratch when building the Movies app, so I deleted all of these files and folders except for the durandal folder which contains the durandal library. Creating the ASP.NET MVC Controller and View A Durandal app is built using a single server-side ASP.NET MVC controller and ASP.NET MVC view. A Durandal app is a Single Page App. When you navigate between pages, you are not navigating to new pages on the server. Instead, you are loading new virtual pages into the one-and-only-one server-side view. For the Movies app, I created the following ASP.NET MVC Home controller: public class HomeController : Controller { public ActionResult Index() { return View(); } } There is nothing special about the Home controller – it is as basic as it gets. Next, I created the following server-side ASP.NET view. This is the one-and-only server-side view used by the Movies app: @{ Layout = null; } <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Index</title> </head> <body> <div id="applicationHost"> Loading app.... </div> @Scripts.Render("~/scripts/vendor") <script type="text/javascript" src="~/App/durandal/amd/require.js" data-main="/App/main"></script> </body> </html> Notice that I set the Layout property for the view to the value null. If you neglect to do this, then the default ASP.NET MVC layout will be applied to the view and you will get the <!DOCTYPE> and opening and closing <html> tags twice. Next, notice that the view contains a DIV element with the Id applicationHost. This marks the area where virtual pages are loaded. When you navigate from page to page in a Durandal app, HTML page fragments are retrieved from the server and stuck in the applicationHost DIV element. Inside the applicationHost element, you can place any content which you want to display when a Durandal app is starting up. For example, you can create a fancy splash screen. I opted for simply displaying the text “Loading app…”: Next, notice the view above includes a call to the Scripts.Render() helper. This helper renders out all of the JavaScript files required by the Durandal library such as jQuery and Knockout. Remember to fix the App_Start\DurandalBundleConfig.cs as described above or Durandal will attempt to load an old version of jQuery and throw a JavaScript exception and stop working. Your application JavaScript code is not included in the scripts rendered by the Scripts.Render helper. Your application code is loaded dynamically by RequireJS with the help of the following SCRIPT element located at the bottom of the view: <script type="text/javascript" src="~/App/durandal/amd/require.js" data-main="/App/main"></script> The data-main attribute on the SCRIPT element causes RequireJS to load your /app/main.js JavaScript file to kick-off your Durandal app. Creating the Durandal Main.js File The Durandal Main.js JavaScript file, located in your App folder, contains all of the code required to configure the behavior of Durandal. Here’s what the Main.js file looks like in the case of the Movies app: require.config({ paths: { 'text': 'durandal/amd/text' } }); define(function (require) { var app = require('durandal/app'), viewLocator = require('durandal/viewLocator'), system = require('durandal/system'), router = require('durandal/plugins/router'); //>>excludeStart("build", true); system.debug(true); //>>excludeEnd("build"); app.start().then(function () { //Replace 'viewmodels' in the moduleId with 'views' to locate the view. //Look for partial views in a 'views' folder in the root. viewLocator.useConvention(); //configure routing router.useConvention(); router.mapNav("movies/show"); router.mapNav("movies/add"); router.mapNav("movies/details/:id"); app.adaptToDevice(); //Show the app by setting the root view model for our application with a transition. app.setRoot('viewmodels/shell', 'entrance'); }); }); There are three important things to notice about the main.js file above. First, notice that it contains a section which enables debugging which looks like this: //>>excludeStart(“build”, true); system.debug(true); //>>excludeEnd(“build”); This code enables debugging for your Durandal app which is very useful when things go wrong. When you call system.debug(true), Durandal writes out debugging information to your browser JavaScript console. For example, you can use the debugging information to diagnose issues with your client-side routes: (The funny looking //> symbols around the system.debug() call are RequireJS optimizer pragmas). The main.js file is also the place where you configure your client-side routes. In the case of the Movies app, the main.js file is used to configure routes for three page: the movies show, add, and details pages. //configure routing router.useConvention(); router.mapNav("movies/show"); router.mapNav("movies/add"); router.mapNav("movies/details/:id");   The route for movie details includes a route parameter named id. Later, we will use the id parameter to lookup and display the details for the right movie. Finally, the main.js file above contains the following line of code: //Show the app by setting the root view model for our application with a transition. app.setRoot('viewmodels/shell', 'entrance'); This line of code causes Durandal to load up a JavaScript file named shell.js and an HTML fragment named shell.html. I’ll discuss the shell in the next section. Creating the Durandal Shell You can think of the Durandal shell as the layout or master page for a Durandal app. The shell is where you put all of the content which you want to remain constant as a user navigates from virtual page to virtual page. For example, the shell is a great place to put your website logo and navigation links. The Durandal shell is composed from two parts: a JavaScript file and an HTML file. Here’s what the HTML file looks like for the Movies app: <h1>Movies App</h1> <div class="container-fluid page-host"> <!--ko compose: { model: router.activeItem, //wiring the router afterCompose: router.afterCompose, //wiring the router transition:'entrance', //use the 'entrance' transition when switching views cacheViews:true //telling composition to keep views in the dom, and reuse them (only a good idea with singleton view models) }--><!--/ko--> </div> And here is what the JavaScript file looks like: define(function (require) { var router = require('durandal/plugins/router'); return { router: router, activate: function () { return router.activate('movies/show'); } }; }); The JavaScript file contains the view model for the shell. This view model returns the Durandal router so you can access the list of configured routes from your shell. Notice that the JavaScript file includes a function named activate(). This function loads the movies/show page as the first page in the Movies app. If you want to create a different default Durandal page, then pass the name of a different age to the router.activate() method. Creating the Movies Show Page Durandal pages are created out of a view model and a view. The view model contains all of the data and view logic required for the view. The view contains all of the HTML markup for rendering the view model. Let’s start with the movies show page. The movies show page displays a list of movies. The view model for the show page looks like this: define(function (require) { var moviesRepository = require("repositories/moviesRepository"); return { movies: ko.observable(), activate: function() { this.movies(moviesRepository.listMovies()); } }; }); You create a view model by defining a new RequireJS module (see http://requirejs.org). You create a RequireJS module by placing all of your JavaScript code into an anonymous function passed to the RequireJS define() method. A RequireJS module has two parts. You retrieve all of the modules which your module requires at the top of your module. The code above depends on another RequireJS module named repositories/moviesRepository. Next, you return the implementation of your module. The code above returns a JavaScript object which contains a property named movies and a method named activate. The activate() method is a magic method which Durandal calls whenever it activates your view model. Your view model is activated whenever you navigate to a page which uses it. In the code above, the activate() method is used to get the list of movies from the movies repository and assign the list to the view model movies property. The HTML for the movies show page looks like this: <table> <thead> <tr> <th>Title</th><th>Director</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody data-bind="foreach:movies"> <tr> <td data-bind="text:title"></td> <td data-bind="text:director"></td> <td><a data-bind="attr:{href:'#/movies/details/'+id}">Details</a></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <a href="#/movies/add">Add Movie</a> Notice that this is an HTML fragment. This fragment will be stuffed into the page-host DIV element in the shell.html file which is stuffed, in turn, into the applicationHost DIV element in the server-side MVC view. The HTML markup above contains data-bind attributes used by Knockout to display the list of movies (To learn more about Knockout, visit http://knockoutjs.com). The list of movies from the view model is displayed in an HTML table. Notice that the page includes a link to a page for adding a new movie. The link uses the following URL which starts with a hash: #/movies/add. Because the link starts with a hash, clicking the link does not cause a request back to the server. Instead, you navigate to the movies/add page virtually. Creating the Movies Add Page The movies add page also consists of a view model and view. The add page enables you to add a new movie to the movie database. Here’s the view model for the add page: define(function (require) { var app = require('durandal/app'); var router = require('durandal/plugins/router'); var moviesRepository = require("repositories/moviesRepository"); return { movieToAdd: { title: ko.observable(), director: ko.observable() }, activate: function () { this.movieToAdd.title(""); this.movieToAdd.director(""); this._movieAdded = false; }, canDeactivate: function () { if (this._movieAdded == false) { return app.showMessage('Are you sure you want to leave this page?', 'Navigate', ['Yes', 'No']); } else { return true; } }, addMovie: function () { // Add movie to db moviesRepository.addMovie(ko.toJS(this.movieToAdd)); // flag new movie this._movieAdded = true; // return to list of movies router.navigateTo("#/movies/show"); } }; }); The view model contains one property named movieToAdd which is bound to the add movie form. The view model also has the following three methods: 1. activate() – This method is called by Durandal when you navigate to the add movie page. The activate() method resets the add movie form by clearing out the movie title and director properties. 2. canDeactivate() – This method is called by Durandal when you attempt to navigate away from the add movie page. If you return false then navigation is cancelled. 3. addMovie() – This method executes when the add movie form is submitted. This code adds the new movie to the movie repository. I really like the Durandal canDeactivate() method. In the code above, I use the canDeactivate() method to show a warning to a user if they navigate away from the add movie page – either by clicking the Cancel button or by hitting the browser back button – before submitting the add movie form: The view for the add movie page looks like this: <form data-bind="submit:addMovie"> <fieldset> <legend>Add Movie</legend> <div> <label> Title: <input data-bind="value:movieToAdd.title" required /> </label> </div> <div> <label> Director: <input data-bind="value:movieToAdd.director" required /> </label> </div> <div> <input type="submit" value="Add" /> <a href="#/movies/show">Cancel</a> </div> </fieldset> </form> I am using Knockout to bind the movieToAdd property from the view model to the INPUT elements of the HTML form. Notice that the FORM element includes a data-bind attribute which invokes the addMovie() method from the view model when the HTML form is submitted. Creating the Movies Details Page You navigate to the movies details Page by clicking the Details link which appears next to each movie in the movies show page: The Details links pass the movie ids to the details page: #/movies/details/0 #/movies/details/1 #/movies/details/2 Here’s what the view model for the movies details page looks like: define(function (require) { var router = require('durandal/plugins/router'); var moviesRepository = require("repositories/moviesRepository"); return { movieToShow: { title: ko.observable(), director: ko.observable() }, activate: function (context) { // Grab movie from repository var movie = moviesRepository.getMovie(context.id); // Add to view model this.movieToShow.title(movie.title); this.movieToShow.director(movie.director); } }; }); Notice that the view model activate() method accepts a parameter named context. You can take advantage of the context parameter to retrieve route parameters such as the movie Id. In the code above, the context.id property is used to retrieve the correct movie from the movie repository and the movie is assigned to a property named movieToShow exposed by the view model. The movie details view displays the movieToShow property by taking advantage of Knockout bindings: <div> <h2 data-bind="text:movieToShow.title"></h2> directed by <span data-bind="text:movieToShow.director"></span> </div> Summary The goal of this blog entry was to walkthrough building a simple Single Page App using Durandal and to get a feel for what it is like to use this library. I really like how Durandal stitches together Knockout, Sammy, and RequireJS and establishes patterns for using these libraries to build Single Page Apps. Having a standard pattern which developers on a team can use to build new pages is super valuable. Once you get the hang of it, using Durandal to create new virtual pages is dead simple. Just define a new route, view model, and view and you are done. I also appreciate the fact that Durandal did not attempt to re-invent the wheel and that Durandal leverages existing JavaScript libraries such as Knockout, RequireJS, and Sammy. These existing libraries are powerful libraries and I have already invested a considerable amount of time in learning how to use them. Durandal makes it easier to use these libraries together without losing any of their power. Durandal has some additional interesting features which I have not had a chance to play with yet. For example, you can use the RequireJS optimizer to combine and minify all of a Durandal app’s code. Also, Durandal supports a way to create custom widgets (client-side controls) by composing widgets from a controller and view. You can download the code for the Movies app by clicking the following link (this is a Visual Studio 2012 project): Durandal Movie App

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• Windows Azure: General Availability of Web Sites + Mobile Services, New AutoScale + Alerts Support, No Credit Card Needed for MSDN

  - by ScottGu

  This morning we released a major set of updates to Windows Azure.  These updates included: Web Sites: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Web Sites with SLA Mobile Services: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Mobile Services with SLA Auto-Scale: New automatic scaling support for Web Sites, Cloud Services and Virtual Machines Alerts/Notifications: New email alerting support for all Compute Services (Web Sites, Mobile Services, Cloud Services, and Virtual Machines) MSDN: No more credit card requirement for sign-up All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note: some are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Web Sites: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Web Sites I’m incredibly excited to announce the General Availability release of Windows Azure Web Sites. The Windows Azure Web Sites service is perfect for hosting a web presence, building customer engagement solutions, and delivering business web apps.  Today’s General Availability release means we are taking off the “preview” tag from the Free and Standard (formerly called reserved) tiers of Windows Azure Web Sites.  This means we are providing: A 99.9% monthly SLA (Service Level Agreement) for the Standard tier Microsoft Support available on a 24x7 basis (with plans that range from developer plans to enterprise Premier support) The Free tier runs in a shared compute environment and supports up to 10 web sites. While the Free tier does not come with an SLA, it works great for rapid development and testing and enables you to quickly spike out ideas at no cost. The Standard tier, which was called “Reserved” during the preview, runs using dedicated per-customer VM instances for great performance, isolation and scalability, and enables you to host up to 500 different Web sites within them.  You can easily scale your Standard instances on-demand using the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can adjust VM instance sizes from a Small instance size (1 core, 1.75GB of RAM), up to a Medium instance size (2 core, 3.5GB of RAM), or Large instance (4 cores and 7 GB RAM).  You can choose to run between 1 and 10 Standard instances, enabling you to easily scale up your web backend to 40 cores of CPU and 70GB of RAM: Today’s release also includes general availability support for custom domain SSL certificate bindings for web sites running using the Standard tier. Customers will be able to utilize certificates they purchase for their custom domains and use either SNI or IP based SSL encryption. SNI encryption is available for all modern browsers and does not require an IP address.  SSL certificates can be used for individual sites or wild-card mapped across multiple sites (we charge extra for the use of a SSL cert – but the fee is per-cert and not per site which means you pay once for it regardless of how many sites you use it with).  Today’s release also includes the following new features: Auto-Scale support Today’s Windows Azure release adds preview support for Auto-Scaling web sites.  This enables you to setup automatic scale rules based on the activity of your instances – allowing you to automatically scale down (and save money) when they are below a CPU threshold you define, and automatically scale up quickly when traffic increases.  See below for more details. 64-bit and 32-bit mode support You can now choose to run your standard tier instances in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode (previously they only ran in 32-bit mode).  This enables you to address even more memory within individual web applications. Memory dumps Memory dumps can be very useful for diagnosing issues and debugging apps. Using a REST API, you can now get a memory dump of your sites, which you can then use for investigating issues in Visual Studio Debugger, WinDbg, and other tools. Scaling Sites Independently Prior to today’s release, all sites scaled up/down together whenever you scaled any site in a sub-region. So you may have had to keep your proof-of-concept or testing sites in a separate sub-region if you wanted to keep them in the Free tier. This will no longer be necessary.  Windows Azure Web Sites can now mix different tier levels in the same geographic sub-region. This allows you, for example, to selectively move some of your sites in the West US sub-region up to Standard tier when they require the features, scalability, and SLA of the Standard tier. Full pricing details on Windows Azure Web Sites can be found here.  Note that the “Shared Tier” of Windows Azure Web Sites remains in preview mode (and continues to have discounted preview pricing).  Mobile Services: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Mobile Services I’m incredibly excited to announce the General Availability release of Windows Azure Mobile Services.  Mobile Services is perfect for building scalable cloud back-ends for Windows 8.x, Windows Phone, Apple iOS, Android, and HTML/JavaScript applications.  Customers We’ve seen tremendous adoption of Windows Azure Mobile Services since we first previewed it last September, and more than 20,000 customers are now running mobile back-ends in production using it.  These customers range from startups like Yatterbox, to university students using Mobile Services to complete apps like Sly Fox in their spare time, to media giants like Verdens Gang finding new ways to deliver content, and telcos like TalkTalk Business delivering the up-to-the-minute information their customers require.  In today’s Build keynote, we demonstrated how TalkTalk Business is using Windows Azure Mobile Services to deliver service, outage and billing information to its customers, wherever they might be. Partners When we unveiled the source control and Custom API features I blogged about two weeks ago, we enabled a range of new scenarios, one of which is a more flexible way to work with third party services.  The following blogs, samples and tutorials from our partners cover great ways you can extend Mobile Services to help you build rich modern apps: New Relic allows developers to monitor and manage the end-to-end performance of iOS and Android applications connected to Mobile Services. SendGrid eliminates the complexity of sending email from Mobile Services, saving time and money, while providing reliable delivery to the inbox. Twilio provides a telephony infrastructure web service in the cloud that you can use with Mobile Services to integrate phone calls, text messages and IP voice communications into your mobile apps. Xamarin provides a Mobile Services add on to make it easy building cross-platform connected mobile aps. Pusher allows quickly and securely add scalable real-time messaging functionality to Mobile Services-based web and mobile apps. Visual Studio 2013 and Windows 8.1 This week during //build/ keynote, we demonstrated how Visual Studio 2013, Mobile Services and Windows 8.1 make building connected apps easier than ever. Developers building Windows 8 applications in Visual Studio can now connect them to Windows Azure Mobile Services by simply right clicking then choosing Add Connected Service. You can either create a new Mobile Service or choose existing Mobile Service in the Add Connected Service dialog. Once completed, Visual Studio adds a reference to Mobile Services SDK to your project and generates a Mobile Services client initialization snippet automatically. Add Push Notifications Push Notifications and Live Tiles are a key to building engaging experiences. Visual Studio 2013 and Mobile Services make it super easy to add push notifications to your Windows 8.1 app, by clicking Add a Push Notification item: The Add Push Notification wizard will then guide you through the registration with the Windows Store as well as connecting your app to a new or existing mobile service. Upon completion of the wizard, Visual Studio will configure your mobile service with the WNS credentials, as well as add sample logic to your client project and your mobile service that demonstrates how to send push notifications to your app. Server Explorer Integration In Visual Studio 2013 you can also now view your Mobile Services in the the Server Explorer. You can add tables, edit, and save server side scripts without ever leaving Visual Studio, as shown on the image below: Pricing With today’s general availability release we are announcing that we will be offering Mobile Services in three tiers – Free, Standard, and Premium.  Each tier is metered using a simple pricing model based on the # of API calls (bandwidth is included at no extra charge), and the Standard and Premium tiers are backed by 99.9% monthly SLAs.  You can elastically scale up or down the number of instances you have of each tier to increase the # of API requests your service can support – allowing you to efficiently scale as your business grows. The following table summarizes the new pricing model (full pricing details here):   You can find the full details of the new pricing model here. Build Conference Talks The //BUILD/ conference will be packed with sessions covering every aspect of developing connected applications with Mobile Services. The best part is that, even if you can’t be with us in San Francisco, every session is being streamed live. Be sure not to miss these talks: Mobile Services – Soup to Nuts — Josh Twist Building Cross-Platform Apps with Windows Azure Mobile Services — Chris Risner Connected Windows Phone Apps made Easy with Mobile Services — Yavor Georgiev Build Connected Windows 8.1 Apps with Mobile Services — Nick Harris Who’s that user? Identity in Mobile Apps — Dinesh Kulkarni Building REST Services with JavaScript — Nathan Totten Going Live and Beyond with Windows Azure Mobile Services — Kirill Gavrylyuk , Paul Batum Protips for Windows Azure Mobile Services — Chris Risner AutoScale: Dynamically scale up/down your app based on real-world usage One of the key benefits of Windows Azure is that you can dynamically scale your application in response to changing demand. In the past, though, you have had to either manually change the scale of your application, or use additional tooling (such as WASABi or MetricsHub) to automatically scale your application. Today, we’re announcing that AutoScale will be built-into Windows Azure directly.  With today’s release it is now enabled for Cloud Services, Virtual Machines and Web Sites (Mobile Services support will come soon). Auto-scale enables you to configure Windows Azure to automatically scale your application dynamically on your behalf (without any manual intervention) so you can achieve the ideal performance and cost balance. Once configured it will regularly adjust the number of instances running in response to the load in your application. Currently, we support two different load metrics: CPU percentage Storage queue depth (Cloud Services and Virtual Machines only) We’ll enable automatic scaling on even more scale metrics in future updates. When to use Auto-Scale The following are good criteria for services/apps that will benefit from the use of auto-scale: The service/app can scale horizontally (e.g. it can be duplicated to multiple instances) The service/app load changes over time If your app meets these criteria, then you should look to leverage auto-scale. How to Enable Auto-Scale To enable auto-scale, simply navigate to the Scale tab in the Windows Azure Management Portal for the app/service you wish to enable.  Within the scale tab turn the Auto-Scale setting on to either CPU or Queue (for Cloud Services and VMs) to enable Auto-Scale.  Then change the instance count and target CPU settings to configure the Auto-Scale ranges you want to maintain. The image below demonstrates how to enable Auto-Scale on a Windows Azure Web-Site.  I’ve configured the web-site so that it will run using between 1 and 5 VM instances.  The exact # used will depend on the aggregate CPU of the VMs using the 40-70% range I’ve configured below.  If the aggregate CPU goes above 70%, then Windows Azure will automatically add new VMs to the pool (up to the maximum of 5 instances I’ve configured it to use).  If the aggregate CPU drops below 40% then Windows Azure will automatically start shutting down VMs to save me money: Once you’ve turned auto-scale on, you can return to the Scale tab at any point and select Off to manually set the number of instances. Using the Auto-Scale Preview With today’s update you can now, in just a few minutes, have Windows Azure automatically adjust the number of instances you have running  in your apps to keep your service performant at an even better cost. Auto-scale is being released today as a preview feature, and will be free until General Availability. During preview, each subscription is limited to 10 separate auto-scale rules across all of the resources they have (Web sites, Cloud services or Virtual Machines). If you hit the 10 limit, you can disable auto-scale for any resource to enable it for another. Alerts and Notifications Starting today we are now providing the ability to configure threshold based alerts on monitoring metrics. This feature is available for compute services (cloud services, VM, websites and mobiles services). Alerts provide you the ability to get proactively notified of active or impending issues within your application.  You can define alert rules for: Virtual machine monitoring metrics that are collected from the host operating system (CPU percentage, network in/out, disk read bytes/sec and disk write bytes/sec) and on monitoring metrics from monitoring web endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. Cloud service monitoring metrics that are collected from the host operating system (same as VM), monitoring metrics from the guest VM (from performance counters within the VM) and on monitoring metrics from monitoring web endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. For Web Sites and Mobile Services, alerting rules can be configured on monitoring metrics from monitoring endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. Creating Alert Rules You can add an alert rule for a monitoring metric by navigating to the Setting -> Alerts tab in the Windows Azure Management Portal. Click on the Add Rule button to create an alert rule. Give the alert rule a name and optionally add a description. Then pick the service which you want to define the alert rule on: The next step in the alert creation wizard will then filter the monitoring metrics based on the service you selected:   Once created the rule will show up in your alerts list within the settings tab: The rule above is defined as “not activated” since it hasn’t tripped over the CPU threshold we set.  If the CPU on the above machine goes over the limit, though, I’ll get an email notifying me from an Windows Azure Alerts email address ([email protected]). And when I log into the portal and revisit the alerts tab I’ll see it highlighted in red.  Clicking it will then enable me to see what is causing it to fail, as well as view the history of when it has happened in the past. Alert Notifications With today’s initial preview you can now easily create alerting rules based on monitoring metrics and get notified on active or impending issues within your application that require attention. During preview, each subscription is limited to 10 alert rules across all of the services that support alert rules. No More Credit Card Requirement for MSDN Subscribers Earlier this month (during TechEd 2013), Windows Azure announced that MSDN users will get Windows Azure Credits every month that they can use for any Windows Azure services they want. You can read details about this in my previous Dev/Test blog post. Today we are making further updates to enable an easier Windows Azure signup for MSDN users. MSDN users will now not be required to provide payment information (e.g. no credit card) during sign-up, so long as they use the service within the included monetary credit for the billing period. For usage beyond the monetary credit, they can enable overages by providing the payment information and remove the spending limit. This enables a super easy, one page sign-up experience for MSDN users.  Simply sign-up for your Windows Azure trial using the same Microsoft ID that you use to manage your MSDN account, then complete the one page sign-up form below and you will be able to spend your free monthly MSDN credits (up to $150 each month) on any Windows Azure resource for dev/test:   This makes it trivially easy for every MDSN customer to start using Windows Azure today.  If you haven’t signed up yet, I definitely recommend checking it out. Summary Today’s release includes a ton of great features that enable you to build even better cloud solutions.  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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• Integrate BING API for Search inside ASP.Net web application

  - by sreejukg

  As you might already know, Bing is the Microsoft Search engine and is getting popular day by day. Bing offers APIs that can be integrated into your website to increase your website functionality. At this moment, there are two important APIs available. They are Bing Search API Bing Maps The Search API enables you to build applications that utilize Bing’s technology. The API allows you to search multiple source types such as web; images, video etc. and supports various output prototypes such as JSON, XML, and SOAP. Also you will be able to customize the search results as you wish for your public facing website. Bing Maps API allows you to build robust applications that use Bing Maps. In this article I am going to describe, how you can integrate Bing search into your website. In order to start using Bing, First you need to sign in to http://www.bing.com/toolbox/bingdeveloper/ using your windows live credentials. Click on the Sign in button, you will be asked to enter your windows live credentials. Once signed in you will be redirected to the Developer page. Here you can create applications and get AppID for each application. Since I am a first time user, I don’t have any applications added. Click on the Add button to add a new application. You will be asked to enter certain details about your application. The fields are straight forward, only thing you need to note is the website field, here you need to enter the website address from where you are going to use this application, and this field is optional too. Of course you need to agree on the terms and conditions and then click Save. Once you click on save, the application will be created and application ID will be available for your use. Now we got the APP Id. Basically Bing supports three protocols. They are JSON, XML and SOAP. JSON is useful if you want to call the search requests directly from the browser and use JavaScript to parse the results, thus JSON is the favorite choice for AJAX application. XML is the alternative for applications that does not support SOAP, e.g. flash/ Silverlight etc. SOAP is ideal for strongly typed languages and gives a request/response object model. In this article I am going to demonstrate how to search BING API using SOAP protocol from an ASP.Net application. For the purpose of this demonstration, I am going to create an ASP.Net project and implement the search functionality in an aspx page. Open Visual Studio, navigate to File-> New Project, select ASP.Net empty web application, I named the project as “BingSearchSample”. Add a Search.aspx page to the project, once added the solution explorer will looks similar to the following. Now you need to add a web reference to the SOAP service available from Bing. To do this, from the solution explorer, right click your project, select Add Service Reference. Now the new service reference dialog will appear. In the left bottom of the dialog, you can find advanced button, click on it. Now the service reference settings dialog will appear. In the bottom left, you can find Add Web Reference button, click on it. The add web reference dialog will appear now. Enter the URL as http://api.bing.net/search.wsdl?AppID=<YourAppIDHere>&version=2.2 (replace <yourAppIDHere> with the appID you have generated previously) and click on the button next to it. This will find the web service methods available. You can change the namespace suggested by Bing, but for the purpose of this demonstration I have accepted all the default settings. Click on the Add reference button once you are done. Now the web reference to Search service will be added your project. You can find this under solution explorer of your project. Now in the Search.aspx, that you previously created, place one textbox, button and a grid view. For the purpose of this demonstration, I have given the identifiers (ID) as txtSearch, btnSearch, gvSearch respectively. The idea is to search the text entered in the text box using Bing service and show the results in the grid view. In the design view, the search.aspx looks as follows. In the search.aspx.cs page, add a using statement that points to net.bing.api. I have added the following code for button click event handler. The code is very straight forward. It just calls the service with your AppID, a query to search and a source for searching. Let us run this page and see the output when I enter Microsoft in my textbox. If you want to search a specific site, you can include the site name in the query parameter. For e.g. the following query will search the word Microsoft from www.microsoft.com website. searchRequest.Query = “site:www.microsoft.com Microsoft”; The output of this query is as follows. Integrating BING search API to your website is easy and there is no limit on the customization of the interface you can do. There is no Bing branding required so I believe this is a great option for web developers when they plan for site search.

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• How repair/uninstall Visual Web Developer 2010 Beta 2?

  - by Sprinter

  I cannot uninstall Visual Web Developer 2010 Beta 2. When I was trying to uninstall the first time, the power went off to my machine and screwed up the Beta 2 installation. I cannot find a Visual Web Developer 2010 Beta 2 download on the Microsoft website any longer to repair the Beta 2 installation. How can I get VWD 2010 Beta 2 off of my system so I can install the new release?

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• Integrate Microsoft Translator into your ASP.Net application

  - by sreejukg

  In this article I am going to explain how easily you can integrate the Microsoft translator API to your ASP.Net application. Why we need a translation API? Once you published a website, you are opening a channel to the global audience. So making the web content available only in one language doesn’t cover all your audience. Especially when you are offering products/services it is important to provide contents in multiple languages. Users will be more comfortable when they see the content in their native language. How to achieve this, hiring translators and translate the content to all your user’s languages will cost you lot of money, and it is not a one time job, you need to translate the contents on the go. What is the alternative, we need to look for machine translation. Thankfully there are some translator engines available that gives you API level access, so that automatically you can translate the content and display to the user. Microsoft Translator API is an excellent set of web service APIs that allows developers to use the machine translation technology in their own applications. The Microsoft Translator API is offered through Windows Azure market place. In order to access the data services published in Windows Azure market place, you need to have an account. The registration process is simple, and it is common for all the services offered through the market place. Last year I had written an article about Bing Search API, where I covered the registration process. You can refer the article here. http://weblogs.asp.net/sreejukg/archive/2012/07/04/integrate-bing-search-api-to-asp-net-application.aspx Once you registered with Windows market place, you will get your APP ID. Now you can visit the Microsoft Translator page and click on the sign up button. http://datamarket.azure.com/dataset/bing/microsofttranslator As you can see, there are several options available for you to subscribe. There is a free version available, great. Click on the sign up button under the package that suits you. Clicking on the sign up button will bring the sign up form, where you need to agree on the terms and conditions and go ahead. You need to have a windows live account in order to sign up for any service available in Windows Azure market place. Once you signed up successfully, you will receive the thank you page. You can download the C# class library from here so that the integration can be made without writing much code. The C# file name is TranslatorContainer.cs. At any point of time, you can visit https://datamarket.azure.com/account/datasets to see the applications you are subscribed to. Click on the Use link next to each service will give you the details of the application. You need to not the primary account key and URL of the service to use in your application. Now let us start our ASP.Net project. I have created an empty ASP.Net web application using Visual Studio 2010 and named it Translator Sample, any name could work. By default, the web application in solution explorer looks as follows. Now right click the project and select Add -> Existing Item and then browse to the TranslatorContainer.cs. Now let us create a page where user enter some data and perform the translation. I have added a new web form to the project with name Translate.aspx. I have placed one textbox control for user to type the text to translate, the dropdown list to select the target language, a label to display the translated text and a button to perform the translation. For the dropdown list I have selected some languages supported by Microsoft translator. You can get all the supported languages with their codes from the below link. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh456380.aspx The form looks as below in the design surface of Visual Studio. All the class libraries in the windows market place requires reference to System.Data.Services.Client, let us add the reference. You can find the documentation of how to use the downloaded class library from the below link. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg312154.aspx Let us evaluate the translatorContainer.cs file. You can refer the code and it is self-explanatory. Note the namespace name used (Microsoft), you need to add the namespace reference to your page. I have added the following event for the translate button. The code is self-explanatory. You are creating an object of TranslatorContainer class by passing the translation service URL. Now you need to set credentials for your Translator container object, which will be your account key. The TranslatorContainer support a method that accept a text input, source language and destination language and returns DataServiceQuery<Translation>. Let us see this working, I just ran the application and entered Good Morning in the Textbox. Selected target language and see the output as follows. It is easy to build great translator applications using Microsoft translator API, and there is a reasonable amount of translation you can perform in your application for free. For enterprises, you can subscribe to the appropriate package and make your application multi-lingual.

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• Is it possible to set these IIS7 settings in a web.config file?

  - by Pure.Krome

  Hi folks, with my IIS7 site, i manually set the bindings for my site. Here's an example screenshot. Is it possible to set these bindings in the (local) web.config file? Not a machine or app config file ... but the web.config file? Cheers :)

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• iPack -The iOS Application Packager

  - by user13277780

  iOS applications are distributed in .ipa archive files. These files are regular zip files which contain application resources and executable-s. To protect them from unauthorized modifications and to provide identification of their sources, the content of the archives is signed. The signature is included in the application executable of an.ipa archive and protects the executable file itself and the associated resource files. Apple provides native Mac OS tools for signing iOS executable-s (which are actually generic Mach-O code signing tools), but these tools are not generally available on other platforms. To provide a multi-platform development environment for JavaFX based iOS applications, we ported iOS signing and packaging to Java and created a dedicated ipack tool for it. The iPack tool can be used as a last step of creating .ipa package on various operating systems. Prototype has been tested by creating a final distributable for JavaFX application that runs on iPad, all done on Windows 7. Source Code The source code of iPac tool is in OpenJFX project repository. You can find it in: <openjfx root>/rt/tools/ios/Maven/ipack To build the iPack tool use: rt/tools/ios/Maven/ipack$ mvn package After building, you can run the tool: java -jar <path to ipack.jar> <arguments>  Signing keystore The tool uses a java key store to read the signing certificate and the associated private key. To prepare such keystore users can use keytool from JDK. One possible scenario is to import an existing private key and the certificate from a key store used on Mac OS: To list the content of an existing key store and identify the source alias: keytool -list -keystore <src keystore>.p12 -storetype pkcs12 -storepass <src keystore password> To create Java key store and import the private key with its certificate to the keys store: keytool -importkeystore \ -destkeystore <dst keystore> -deststorepass <dst keystore password> \ -srckeystore <src keystore>.p12 -srcstorepass <src keystore password> -srcstoretype pkcs12 \ -srcalias <src alias> -destalias <dst alias> -destkeypass <dst key password> Another scenario would be to generate a private / public key pair directly in a Java key store and create a certificate request from it. After sending the request to Apple one can then import the certificate response back to the Java key store and complete the signing certificate entry. In both scenarios the resulting alias in the Java key store will contain only a single (leaf) certificate. This can be verified with the following command: keytool -list -v -keystore <ipack keystore> -storepass <keystore password> When looking at the Certificate chain length entry, the number next to it is 1. When an executable file is signed on Mac OS, the resulting signature (in CMS format) includes the whole certificate chain up to the Apple Root CA. The ipack tool includes only the chain which is stored under the alias specified on the command line. So to have the whole chain in the signature we need to replace the single certificate entry under the alias with the corresponding full certificate chain. To do that we need first to create the chain in a separate file. It is easy to create such chain when working with certificates in Base-64 encoded PEM format. A certificate chain can be created by concatenating PEM certificates, which should form the chain, into a single file. For iOS signing we need the following certificates in our chain: Apple Root CA Apple Worldwide Developer Relations CA Our signing leaf certificate To convert a certificate from the binary DER format (.der, .cer) to PEM format: keytool -importcert -noprompt -keystore temp.ks -storepass temppwd -alias tempcert -file <certificate>.cer keytool -exportcert -keystore temp.ks -storepass temppwd -alias tempcert -rfc -file <certificate>.pem To export the signing certificate into PEM format: keytool -exportcert -keystore <ipack keystore> -storepass <keystore password> -alias <signing alias> -rfc -file SigningCert.pem After constructing a chain from AppleIncRootCertificate.pem, AppleWWDRCA.pem andSigningCert.pem, it can be imported back into the keystore with: keytool -importcert -noprompt -keystore <ipack keystore> -storepass <keystore password> -alias <signing alias> -keypass <key password> -file SigningCertChain.pem To summarize, the following example shows the full certificate chain replacement process: keytool -importcert -noprompt -keystore temp.ks -storepass temppwd -alias tempcert1 -file AppleIncRootCertificate.cer keytool -exportcert -keystore temp.ks -storepass temppwd -alias tempcert1 -rfc -file AppleIncRootCertificate.pem keytool -importcert -noprompt -keystore temp.ks -storepass temppwd -alias tempcert2 -file AppleWWDRCA.cer keytool -exportcert -keystore temp.ks -storepass temppwd -alias tempcert2 -rfc -file AppleWWDRCA.pem keytool -exportcert -keystore ipack.ks -storepass keystorepwd -alias mycert -rfc -file SigningCert.pem cat SigningCert.pem AppleWWDRCA.pem AppleIncRootCertificate.pem >SigningCertChain.pem keytool -importcert -noprompt -keystore ipack.ks -storepass keystorepwd -alias mycert -keypass keypwd -file SigningCertChain.pem keytool -list -v -keystore ipack.ks -storepass keystorepwd Usage When the ipack tool is started with no arguments it prints the following usage information: -appname MyApplication -appid com.myorg.MyApplication     Usage: ipack <archive> <signing opts> <application opts> [ <application opts> ... ] Signing options: -keystore <keystore> keystore to use for signing -storepass <password> keystore password -alias <alias> alias for the signing certificate chain and the associated private key -keypass <password> password for the private key Application options: -basedir <directory> base directory from which to derive relative paths -appdir <directory> directory with the application executable and resources -appname <file> name of the application executable -appid <id> application identifier Example: ipack MyApplication.ipa -keystore ipack.ks -storepass keystorepwd -alias mycert -keypass keypwd -basedir mysources/MyApplication/dist -appdir Payload/MyApplication.app -appname MyApplication -appid com.myorg.MyApplication    

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• Advantages of Client/Server Architecture over Mainframe Architecture

  Originally mainframe architectures relied on a centralized host server that processed data and returned it to be displayed on a dummy terminal. These dummy terminals did not have my processing power and could only display data that was sent from the mainframe. Application architecture completely changed with the advent of N-Tier architecture. The N-Tier architecture replaced the dummy terminals with standard PCs that could think and/or process for themselves. This allowed for applications to be decentralized. Further, this type of architecture also breaks up the roles found within a mainframe by extracting Web Interfaces, Application Logic and Data access in to 3 separate parts so that it can be extended and distributed as the demands of an application increases.

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• how does a web application cope with thousands of requests?

  - by netrox

  I went to a few websites and noticed that they all use AJAX technology for many tasks such as chat, messages, and so forth. They use a lot of httprequests obviously. My question is if you build a simple website using AJAX and you expected only few people per hour and then you start to have like 1,000 members logged per hour - can a single web application handle more requests per hour if you just upgrade to faster bigger servers or do you have to rewrite the code? Exactly how do you "scale" the web application?

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• Can I have a .desktop Launcher for both Python2 and Python3 depending on version installed?

  - by Takkat

  After very few issues only I moved my application from Python2 to Python3 making sure it will still run with Python 2.7, and hence has python = 2.7 as dependency only. This was mainly done because Python3, and some dependencies are not installed in a default 12.04 LTS, and I do not want my users to have to install all Python3 only to run my script. When I create an appname.desktop launcher I now need to decide if it starts my application using Python2, or Python3 like EXEC=python /path/app.py EXEC=python3 /path/app.py But what I would like it to do is to Launch the application with the Python3 interpreter if Python3 is installed. Otherwise use Python2 if Python3 is not installed. How can this be done? Do I need to tell it in my package installation script, or can I have a launcher which can handle both (in case people install Python3 after they had installed my script)?

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• Ask The Readers: How Do You Organize Your Apps?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Application organization and launching has improved significantly over the years but there’s always room for improvement and customization. This week we’re interested in hearing about your tips, tricks, and tools for efficiently organizing and launching your apps. Do you stick with the OS defaults? Do you use third-party app launchers to streamline your workflow? Whether you’ve done some minor tweaking to the Start Menu or installed a brand new application dock, we want to hear all about it. Sound off in the comments with your tips and tricks for avoiding time wasted searching for application shortcuts–check back in on Friday for the What You Said roundup to see how your fellow readers are wrangling their applications. The HTG Guide to Hiding Your Data in a TrueCrypt Hidden Volume Make Your Own Windows 8 Start Button with Zero Memory Usage Reader Request: How To Repair Blurry Photos

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