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• The Red Gate and .NET Reflector Debacle

  - by Rick Strahl

  About a month ago Red Gate – the company who owns the NET Reflector tool most .NET devs use at one point or another – decided to change their business model for Reflector and take the product from free to a fully paid for license model. As a bit of history: .NET Reflector was originally created by Lutz Roeder as a free community tool to inspect .NET assemblies. Using Reflector you can examine the types in an assembly, drill into type signatures and quickly disassemble code to see how a particular method works.  In case you’ve been living under a rock and you’ve never looked at Reflector, here’s what it looks like drilled into an assembly from disk with some disassembled source code showing: Note that you get tons of information about each element in the tree, and almost all related types and members are clickable both in the list and source view so it’s extremely easy to navigate and follow the code flow even in this static assembly only view. For many year’s Lutz kept the the tool up to date and added more features gradually improving an already amazing tool and making it better. Then about two and a half years ago Red Gate bought the tool from Lutz. A lot of ruckus and noise ensued in the community back then about what would happen with the tool and… for the most part very little did. Other than the incessant update notices with prominent Red Gate promo on them life with Reflector went on. The product didn’t die and and it didn’t go commercial or to a charge model. When .NET 4.0 came out it still continued to work mostly because the .NET feature set doesn’t drastically change how types behave.  Then a month back Red Gate started making noise about a new Version Version 7 which would be commercial. No more free version - and a shit storm broke out in the community. Now normally I’m not one to be critical of companies trying to make money from a product, much less for a product that’s as incredibly useful as Reflector. There isn’t day in .NET development that goes by for me where I don’t fire up Reflector. Whether it’s for examining the innards of the .NET Framework, checking out third party code, or verifying some of my own code and resources. Even more so recently I’ve been doing a lot of Interop work with a non-.NET application that needs to access .NET components and Reflector has been immensely valuable to me (and my clients) if figuring out exact type signatures required to calling .NET components in assemblies. In short Reflector is an invaluable tool to me. Ok, so what’s the problem? Why all the fuss? Certainly the $39 Red Gate is trying to charge isn’t going to kill any developer. If there’s any tool in .NET that’s worth $39 it’s Reflector, right? Right, but that’s not the problem here. The problem is how Red Gate went about moving the product to commercial which borders on the downright bizarre. It’s almost as if somebody in management wrote a slogan: “How can we piss off the .NET community in the most painful way we can?” And that it seems Red Gate has a utterly succeeded. People are rabid, and for once I think that this outrage isn’t exactly misplaced. Take a look at the message thread that Red Gate dedicated from a link off the download page. Not only is Version 7 going to be a paid commercial tool, but the older versions of Reflector won’t be available any longer. Not only that but older versions that are already in use also will continually try to update themselves to the new paid version – which when installed will then expire unless registered properly. There have also been reports of Version 6 installs shutting themselves down and failing to work if the update is refused (I haven’t seen that myself so not sure if that’s true). In other words Red Gate is trying to make damn sure they’re getting your money if you attempt to use Reflector. There’s a lot of temptation there. Think about the millions of .NET developers out there and all of them possibly upgrading – that’s a nice chunk of change that Red Gate’s sitting on. Even with all the community backlash these guys are probably making some bank right now just because people need to get life to move on. Red Gate also put up a Feedback link on the download page – which not surprisingly is chock full with hate mail condemning the move. Oddly there’s not a single response to any of those messages by the Red Gate folks except when it concerns license questions for the full version. It puzzles me what that link serves for other yet than another complete example of failure to understand how to handle customer relations. There’s no doubt that that all of this has caused some serious outrage in the community. The sad part though is that this could have been handled so much less arrogantly and without pissing off the entire community and causing so much ill-will. People are pissed off and I have no doubt that this negative publicity will show up in the sales numbers for their other products. I certainly hope so. Stupidity ought to be painful! Why do Companies do boneheaded stuff like this? Red Gate’s original decision to buy Reflector was hotly debated but at that the time most of what would happen was mostly speculation. But I thought it was a smart move for any company that is in need of spreading its marketing message and corporate image as a vendor in the .NET space. Where else do you get to flash your corporate logo to hordes of .NET developers on a regular basis?  Exploiting that marketing with some goodwill of providing a free tool breeds positive feedback that hopefully has a good effect on the company’s visibility and the products it sells. Instead Red Gate seems to have taken exactly the opposite tack of corporate bullying to try to make a quick buck – and in the process ruined any community goodwill that might have come from providing a service community for free while still getting valuable marketing. What’s so puzzling about this boneheaded escapade is that the company doesn’t need to resort to underhanded tactics like what they are trying with Reflector 7. The tools the company makes are very good. I personally use SQL Compare, Sql Data Compare and ANTS Profiler on a regular basis and all of these tools are essential in my toolbox. They certainly work much better than the tools that are in the box with Visual Studio. Chances are that if Reflector 7 added useful features I would have been more than happy to shell out my $39 to upgrade when the time is right. It’s Expensive to give away stuff for Free At the same time, this episode shows some of the big problems that come with ‘free’ tools. A lot of organizations are realizing that giving stuff away for free is actually quite expensive and the pay back is often very intangible if any at all. Those that rely on donations or other voluntary compensation find that they amount contributed is absolutely miniscule as to not matter at all. Yet at the same time I bet most of those clamouring the loudest on that Red Gate Reflector feedback page that Reflector won’t be free anymore probably have NEVER made a donation to any open source project or free tool ever. The expectation of Free these days is just too great – which is a shame I think. There’s a lot to be said for paid software and having somebody to hold to responsible to because you gave them some money. There’s an incentive –> payback –> responsibility model that seems to be missing from free software (not all of it, but a lot of it). While there certainly are plenty of bad apples in paid software as well, money tends to be a good motivator for people to continue working and improving products. Reasons for giving away stuff are many but often it’s a naïve desire to share things when things are simple. At first it might be no problem to volunteer time and effort but as products mature the fun goes out of it, and as the reality of product maintenance kicks in developers want to get something back for the time and effort they’re putting in doing non-glamorous work. It’s then when products die or languish and this is painful for all to watch. For Red Gate however, I think there was always a pretty good payback from the Reflector acquisition in terms of marketing: Visibility and possible positioning of their products although they seemed to have mostly ignored that option. On the other hand they started this off pretty badly even 2 and a half years back when they aquired Reflector from Lutz with the same arrogant attitude that is evident in the latest episode. You really gotta wonder what folks are thinking in management – the sad part is from advance emails that were circulating, they were fully aware of the shit storm they were inciting with this and I suspect they are banking on the sheer numbers of .NET developers to still make them a tidy chunk of change from upgrades… Alternatives are coming For me personally the single license isn’t a problem, but I actually have a tool that I sell (an interop Web Service proxy generation tool) to customers and one of the things I recommend to use with has been Reflector to view assembly information and to find which Interop classes to instantiate from the non-.NET environment. It’s been nice to use Reflector for this with its small footprint and zero-configuration installation. But now with V7 becoming a paid tool that option is not going to be available anymore. Luckily it looks like the .NET community is jumping to it and trying to fill the void. Amidst the Red Gate outrage a new library called ILSpy has sprung up and providing at least some of the core functionality of Reflector with an open source library. It looks promising going forward and I suspect there will be a lot more support and interest to support this project now that Reflector has gone over to the ‘dark side’…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011

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• Caveats with the runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests in IIS 7/8

  - by Rick Strahl

  One of the nice enhancements in IIS 7 (and now 8) is the ability to be able to intercept non-managed - ie. non ASP.NET served - requests from within ASP.NET managed modules. This opened up a ton of new functionality that could be applied across non-managed content using .NET code. I thought I had a pretty good handle on how IIS 7's Integrated mode pipeline works, but when I put together some samples last tonight I realized that the way that managed and unmanaged requests fire into the pipeline is downright confusing especially when it comes to the runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests attribute. There are a number of settings that can affect whether a managed module receives non-ASP.NET content requests such as static files or requests from other frameworks like PHP or ASP classic, and this is topic of this blog post. Native and Managed Modules The integrated mode IIS pipeline for IIS 7 and later - as the name suggests - allows for integration of ASP.NET pipeline events in the IIS request pipeline. Natively IIS runs unmanaged code and there are a host of native mode modules that handle the core behavior of IIS. If you set up a new IIS site or application without managed code support only the native modules are supported and fired without any interaction between native and managed code. If you use the Integrated pipeline with managed code enabled however things get a little more confusing as there both native modules and .NET managed modules can fire against the same IIS request. If you open up the IIS Modules dialog you see both managed and unmanaged modules. Unmanaged modules point at physical files on disk, while unmanaged modules point at .NET types and files referenced from the GAC or the current project's BIN folder. Both native and managed modules can co-exist and execute side by side and on the same request. When running in IIS 7 the IIS pipeline actually instantiates a the ASP.NET  runtime (via the System.Web.PipelineRuntime class) which unlike the core HttpRuntime classes in ASP.NET receives notification callbacks when IIS integrated mode events fire. The IIS pipeline is smart enough to detect whether managed handlers are attached and if they're none these notifications don't fire, improving performance. The good news about all of this for .NET devs is that ASP.NET style modules can be used for just about every kind of IIS request. All you need to do is create a new Web Application and enable ASP.NET on it, and then attach managed handlers. Handlers can look at ASP.NET content (ie. ASPX pages, MVC, WebAPI etc. requests) as well as non-ASP.NET content including static content like HTML files, images, javascript and css resources etc. It's very cool that this capability has been surfaced. However, with that functionality comes a lot of responsibility. Because every request passes through the ASP.NET pipeline if managed modules (or handlers) are attached there are possible performance implications that come with it. Running through the ASP.NET pipeline does add some overhead. ASP.NET and Your Own Modules When you create a new ASP.NET project typically the Visual Studio templates create the modules section like this: <system.webServer> <validation validateIntegratedModeConfiguration="false" /> <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true" > </modules> </system.webServer> Specifically the interesting thing about this is the runAllManagedModulesForAllRequest="true" flag, which seems to indicate that it controls whether any registered modules always run, even when the value is set to false. Realistically though this flag does not control whether managed code is fired for all requests or not. Rather it is an override for the preCondition flag on a particular handler. With the flag set to the default true setting, you can assume that pretty much every IIS request you receive ends up firing through your ASP.NET module pipeline and every module you have configured is accessed even by non-managed requests like static files. In other words, your module will have to handle all requests. Now so far so obvious. What's not quite so obvious is what happens when you set the runAllManagedModulesForAllRequest="false". You probably would expect that immediately the non-ASP.NET requests no longer get funnelled through the ASP.NET Module pipeline. But that's not what actually happens. For example, if I create a module like this:<add name="SharewareModule" type="HowAspNetWorks.SharewareMessageModule" /> by default it will fire against ALL requests regardless of the runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests flag. Even if the value runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="false", the module is fired. Not quite expected. So what is the runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests really good for? It's essentially an override for managedHandler preCondition. If I declare my handler in web.config like this:<add name="SharewareModule" type="HowAspNetWorks.SharewareMessageModule" preCondition="managedHandler" /> and the runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="false" my module only fires against managed requests. If I switch the flag to true, now my module ends up handling all IIS requests that are passed through from IIS. The moral of the story here is that if you intend to only look at ASP.NET content, you should always set the preCondition="managedHandler" attribute to ensure that only managed requests are fired on this module. But even if you do this, realize that runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true" can override this setting. runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests and Http Application Events Another place the runAllManagedModulesForAllRequest attribute affects is the Global Http Application object (typically in global.asax) and the Application_XXXX events that you can hook up there. So while the events there are dynamically hooked up to the application class, they basically behave as if they were set with the preCodition="managedHandler" configuration switch. The end result is that if you have runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true" you'll see every Http request passed through the Application_XXXX events, and you only see ASP.NET requests with the flag set to "false". What's all that mean? Configuring an application to handle requests for both ASP.NET and other content requests can be tricky especially if you need to mix modules that might require both. Couple of things are important to remember. If your module doesn't need to look at every request, by all means set a preCondition="managedHandler" on it. This will at least allow it to respond to the runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="false" flag and then only process ASP.NET requests. Look really carefully to see whether you actually need runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true" in your applications as set by the default new project templates in Visual Studio. Part of the reason, this is the default because it was required for the initial versions of IIS 7 and ASP.NET 2 in order to handle MVC extensionless URLs. However, if you are running IIS 7 or later and .NET 4.0 you can use the ExtensionlessUrlHandler instead to allow you MVC functionality without requiring runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true": <handlers> <remove name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-Integrated-4.0" /> <add name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-Integrated-4.0" path="*." verb="GET,HEAD,POST,DEBUG,PUT,DELETE,PATCH,OPTIONS" type="System.Web.Handlers.TransferRequestHandler" preCondition="integratedMode,runtimeVersionv4.0" /> </handlers> Oddly this is the default for Visual Studio 2012 MVC template apps, so I'm not sure why the default template still adds runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true" is - it should be enabled only if there's a specific need to access non ASP.NET requests. As a side note, it's interesting that when you access a static HTML resource, you can actually write into the Response object and get the output to show, which is trippy. I haven't looked closely to see how this works - whether ASP.NET just fires directly into the native output stream or whether the static requests are re-routed directly through the ASP.NET pipeline once a managed code module is detected. This doesn't work for all non ASP.NET resources - for example, I can't do the same with ASP classic requests, but it makes for an interesting demo when injecting HTML content into a static HTML page :-) Note that on the original Windows Server 2008 and Vista (IIS 7.0) you might need a HotFix in order for ExtensionLessUrlHandler to work properly for MVC projects. On my live server I needed it (about 6 months ago), but others have observed that the latest service updates have integrated this functionality and the hotfix is not required. On IIS 7.5 and later I've not needed any patches for things to just work. Plan for non-ASP.NET Requests It's important to remember that if you write a .NET Module to run on IIS 7, there's no way for you to prevent non-ASP.NET requests from hitting your module. So make sure you plan to support requests to extensionless URLs, to static resources like files. Luckily ASP.NET creates a full Request and full Response object for you for non ASP.NET content. So even for static files and even for ASP classic for example, you can look at Request.FilePath or Request.ContentType (in post handler pipeline events) to determine what content you are dealing with. As always with Module design make sure you check for the conditions in your code that make the module applicable and if a filter fails immediately exit - minimize the code that runs if your module doesn't need to process the request.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in IIS7   ASP.NET   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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• Unable to cast transparent proxy to type &lt;type&gt;

  - by Rick Strahl

  This is not the first time I've run into this wonderful error while creating new AppDomains in .NET and then trying to load types and access them across App Domains. In almost all cases the problem I've run into with this error the problem comes from the two AppDomains involved loading different copies of the same type. Unless the types match exactly and come exactly from the same assembly the typecast will fail. The most common scenario is that the types are loaded from different assemblies - as unlikely as that sounds. An Example of Failure To give some context, I'm working on some old code in Html Help Builder that creates a new AppDomain in order to parse assembly information for documentation purposes. I create a new AppDomain in order to load up an assembly process it and then immediately unload it along with the AppDomain. The AppDomain allows for unloading that otherwise wouldn't be possible as well as isolating my code from the assembly that's being loaded. The process to accomplish this is fairly established and I use it for lots of applications that use add-in like functionality - basically anywhere where code needs to be isolated and have the ability to be unloaded. My pattern for this is: Create a new AppDomain Load a Factory Class into the AppDomain Use the Factory Class to load additional types from the remote domain Here's the relevant code from my TypeParserFactory that creates a domain and then loads a specific type - TypeParser - that is accessed cross-AppDomain in the parent domain:public class TypeParserFactory : System.MarshalByRefObject,IDisposable { …/// <summary> /// TypeParser Factory method that loads the TypeParser /// object into a new AppDomain so it can be unloaded. /// Creates AppDomain and creates type. /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public TypeParser CreateTypeParser() { if (!CreateAppDomain(null)) return null; /// Create the instance inside of the new AppDomain /// Note: remote domain uses local EXE's AppBasePath!!! TypeParser parser = null; try { Assembly assembly = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly(); string assemblyPath = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location; parser = (TypeParser) this.LocalAppDomain.CreateInstanceFrom(assemblyPath, typeof(TypeParser).FullName).Unwrap(); } catch (Exception ex) { this.ErrorMessage = ex.GetBaseException().Message; return null; } return parser; } private bool CreateAppDomain(string lcAppDomain) { if (lcAppDomain == null) lcAppDomain = "wwReflection" + Guid.NewGuid().ToString().GetHashCode().ToString("x"); AppDomainSetup setup = new AppDomainSetup(); // *** Point at current directory setup.ApplicationBase = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory; //setup.PrivateBinPath = Path.Combine(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory, "bin"); this.LocalAppDomain = AppDomain.CreateDomain(lcAppDomain,null,setup); // Need a custom resolver so we can load assembly from non current path AppDomain.CurrentDomain.AssemblyResolve += new ResolveEventHandler(CurrentDomain_AssemblyResolve); return true; } …} Note that the classes must be either [Serializable] (by value) or inherit from MarshalByRefObject in order to be accessible remotely. Here I need to call methods on the remote object so all classes are MarshalByRefObject. The specific problem code is the loading up a new type which points at an assembly that visible both in the current domain and the remote domain and then instantiates a type from it. This is the code in question:Assembly assembly = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly(); string assemblyPath = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location; parser = (TypeParser) this.LocalAppDomain.CreateInstanceFrom(assemblyPath, typeof(TypeParser).FullName).Unwrap(); The last line of code is what blows up with the Unable to cast transparent proxy to type <type> error. Without the cast the code actually returns a TransparentProxy instance, but the cast is what blows up. In other words I AM in fact getting a TypeParser instance back but it can't be cast to the TypeParser type that is loaded in the current AppDomain. Finding the Problem To see what's going on I tried using the .NET 4.0 dynamic type on the result and lo and behold it worked with dynamic - the value returned is actually a TypeParser instance: Assembly assembly = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly(); string assemblyPath = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location; object objparser = this.LocalAppDomain.CreateInstanceFrom(assemblyPath, typeof(TypeParser).FullName).Unwrap(); // dynamic works dynamic dynParser = objparser; string info = dynParser.GetVersionInfo(); // method call works // casting fails parser = (TypeParser)objparser; So clearly a TypeParser type is coming back, but nevertheless it's not the right one. Hmmm… mysterious.Another couple of tries reveal the problem however:// works dynamic dynParser = objparser; string info = dynParser.GetVersionInfo(); // method call works // c:\wwapps\wwhelp\wwReflection20.dll (Current Execution Folder) string info3 = typeof(TypeParser).Assembly.CodeBase; // c:\program files\vfp9\wwReflection20.dll (my COM client EXE's folder) string info4 = dynParser.GetType().Assembly.CodeBase; // fails parser = (TypeParser)objparser; As you can see the second value is coming from a totally different assembly. Note that this is even though I EXPLICITLY SPECIFIED an assembly path to load the assembly from! Instead .NET decided to load the assembly from the original ApplicationBase folder. Ouch! How I actually tracked this down was a little more tedious: I added a method like this to both the factory and the instance types and then compared notes:public string GetVersionInfo() { return ".NET Version: " + Environment.Version.ToString() + "\r\n" + "wwReflection Assembly: " + typeof(TypeParserFactory).Assembly.CodeBase.Replace("file:///", "").Replace("/", "\\") + "\r\n" + "Assembly Cur Dir: " + Directory.GetCurrentDirectory() + "\r\n" + "ApplicationBase: " + AppDomain.CurrentDomain.SetupInformation.ApplicationBase + "\r\n" + "App Domain: " + AppDomain.CurrentDomain.FriendlyName + "\r\n"; } For the factory I got: .NET Version: 4.0.30319.239wwReflection Assembly: c:\wwapps\wwhelp\bin\wwreflection20.dllAssembly Cur Dir: c:\wwapps\wwhelpApplicationBase: C:\Programs\vfp9\App Domain: wwReflection534cfa1f For the instance type I got: .NET Version: 4.0.30319.239wwReflection Assembly: C:\\Programs\\vfp9\wwreflection20.dllAssembly Cur Dir: c:\\wwapps\\wwhelpApplicationBase: C:\\Programs\\vfp9\App Domain: wwDotNetBridge_56006605 which clearly shows the problem. You can see that both are loading from different appDomains but the each is loading the assembly from a different location. Probably a better solution yet (for ANY kind of assembly loading problem) is to use the .NET Fusion Log Viewer to trace assembly loads.The Fusion viewer will show a load trace for each assembly loaded and where it's looking to find it. Here's what the viewer looks like: The last trace above that I found for the second wwReflection20 load (the one that is wonky) looks like this:*** Assembly Binder Log Entry (1/13/2012 @ 3:06:49 AM) *** The operation was successful. Bind result: hr = 0x0. The operation completed successfully. Assembly manager loaded from: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\V4.0.30319\clr.dll Running under executable c:\programs\vfp9\vfp9.exe --- A detailed error log follows. === Pre-bind state information === LOG: User = Ras\ricks LOG: DisplayName = wwReflection20, Version=4.61.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null (Fully-specified) LOG: Appbase = file:///C:/Programs/vfp9/ LOG: Initial PrivatePath = NULL LOG: Dynamic Base = NULL LOG: Cache Base = NULL LOG: AppName = vfp9.exe Calling assembly : (Unknown). === LOG: This bind starts in default load context. LOG: Using application configuration file: C:\Programs\vfp9\vfp9.exe.Config LOG: Using host configuration file: LOG: Using machine configuration file from C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\V4.0.30319\config\machine.config. LOG: Policy not being applied to reference at this time (private, custom, partial, or location-based assembly bind). LOG: Attempting download of new URL file:///C:/Programs/vfp9/wwReflection20.DLL. LOG: Assembly download was successful. Attempting setup of file: C:\Programs\vfp9\wwReflection20.dll LOG: Entering run-from-source setup phase. LOG: Assembly Name is: wwReflection20, Version=4.61.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null LOG: Binding succeeds. Returns assembly from C:\Programs\vfp9\wwReflection20.dll. LOG: Assembly is loaded in default load context. WRN: The same assembly was loaded into multiple contexts of an application domain: WRN: Context: Default | Domain ID: 2 | Assembly Name: wwReflection20, Version=4.61.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null WRN: Context: LoadFrom | Domain ID: 2 | Assembly Name: wwReflection20, Version=4.61.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null WRN: This might lead to runtime failures. WRN: It is recommended to inspect your application on whether this is intentional or not. WRN: See whitepaper http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=109270 for more information and common solutions to this issue. Notice that the fusion log clearly shows that the .NET loader makes no attempt to even load the assembly from the path I explicitly specified. Remember your Assembly Locations As mentioned earlier all failures I've seen like this ultimately resulted from different versions of the same type being available in the two AppDomains. At first sight that seems ridiculous - how could the types be different and why would you have multiple assemblies - but there are actually a number of scenarios where it's quite possible to have multiple copies of the same assembly floating around in multiple places. If you're hosting different environments (like hosting the Razor Engine, or ASP.NET Runtime for example) it's common to create a private BIN folder and it's important to make sure that there's no overlap of assemblies. In my case of Html Help Builder the problem started because I'm using COM interop to access the .NET assembly and the above code. COM Interop has very specific requirements on where assemblies can be found and because I was mucking around with the loader code today, I ended up moving assemblies around to a new location for explicit loading. The explicit load works in the main AppDomain, but failed in the remote domain as I showed. The solution here was simple enough: Delete the extraneous assembly which was left around by accident. Not a common problem, but one that when it bites is pretty nasty to figure out because it seems so unlikely that types wouldn't match. I know I've run into this a few times and writing this down hopefully will make me remember in the future rather than poking around again for an hour trying to debug the issue as I did today. Hopefully it'll save some of you some time as well in the future.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in .NET  COM   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• jQuery CSS Property Monitoring Plug-in updated

  - by Rick Strahl

  A few weeks back I had talked about the need to watch properties of an object and be able to take action when certain values changed. The need for this arose out of wanting to build generic components that could 'attach' themselves to other objects. One example is a drop shadow - if I add a shadow behavior to an object I want the shadow to be pinned to that object so when that object moves I also want the shadow to move with it, or when the panel is hidden the shadow should hide with it - automatically without having to explicitly hook up monitoring code to the panel. For example, in my shadow plug-in I can now do something like this (where el is the element that has the shadow attached and sh is the shadow): if (!exists) // if shadow was created el.watch("left,top,width,height,display", function() { if (el.is(":visible")) $(this).shadow(opt); // redraw else sh.hide(); }, 100, "_shadowMove"); The code now monitors several properties and if any of them change the provided function is called. So when the target object is moved or hidden or resized the watcher function is called and the shadow can be redrawn or hidden in the case of visibility going away. So if you run any of the following code: $("#box") .shadow() .draggable({ handle: ".blockheader" }); // drag around the box - shadow should follow // hide the box - shadow should disappear with box setTimeout(function() { $("#box").hide(); }, 4000); // show the box - shadow should come back too setTimeout(function() { $("#box").show(); }, 8000); This can be very handy functionality when you're dealing with objects or operations that you need to track generically and there are no native events for them. For example, with a generic shadow object that attaches itself to any another element there's no way that I know of to track whether the object has been moved or hidden either via some UI operation (like dragging) or via code. While some UI operations like jQuery.ui.draggable would allow events to fire when the mouse is moved nothing of the sort exists if you modify locations in code. Even tracking the object in drag mode this is hardly generic behavior - a generic shadow implementation can't know when dragging is hooked up. So the watcher provides an alternative that basically gives an Observer like pattern that notifies you when something you're interested in changes. In the watcher hookup code (in the shadow() plugin) above  a check is made if the object is visible and if it is the shadow is redrawn. Otherwise the shadow is hidden. The first parameter is a list of CSS properties to be monitored followed by the function that is called. The function called receives this as the element that's been changed and receives two parameters: The array of watched objects with their current values, plus an index to the object that caused the change function to fire. How does it work When I wrote it about this last time I started out with a simple timer that would poll for changes at a fixed interval with setInterval(). A few folks commented that there are is a DOM API - DOMAttrmodified in Mozilla and propertychange in IE that allow notification whenever any property changes which is much more efficient and smooth than the setInterval approach I used previously. On browser that support these events (FireFox and IE basically - WebKit has the DOMAttrModified event but it doesn't appear to work) the shadow effect is instant - no 'drag behind' of the shadow. Running on a browser that doesn't support still uses setInterval() and the shadow movement is slightly delayed which looks sloppy. There are a few additional changes to this code - it also supports monitoring multiple CSS properties now so a single object can monitor a host of CSS properties rather than one object per property which is easier to work with. For display purposes position, bounds and visibility will be common properties that are to be watched. Here's what the new version looks like: $.fn.watch = function (props, func, interval, id) { /// <summary> /// Allows you to monitor changes in a specific /// CSS property of an element by polling the value. /// when the value changes a function is called. /// The function called is called in the context /// of the selected element (ie. this) /// </summary> /// <param name="prop" type="String">CSS Properties to watch sep. by commas</param> /// <param name="func" type="Function"> /// Function called when the value has changed. /// </param> /// <param name="interval" type="Number"> /// Optional interval for browsers that don't support DOMAttrModified or propertychange events. /// Determines the interval used for setInterval calls. /// </param> /// <param name="id" type="String">A unique ID that identifies this watch instance on this element</param> /// <returns type="jQuery" /> if (!interval) interval = 200; if (!id) id = "_watcher"; return this.each(function () { var _t = this; var el$ = $(this); var fnc = function () { __watcher.call(_t, id) }; var itId = null; var data = { id: id, props: props.split(","), func: func, vals: [props.split(",").length], fnc: fnc, origProps: props, interval: interval }; $.each(data.props, function (i) { data.vals[i] = el$.css(data.props[i]); }); el$.data(id, data); hookChange(el$, id, data.fnc); }); function hookChange(el$, id, fnc) { el$.each(function () { var el = $(this); if (typeof (el.get(0).onpropertychange) == "object") el.bind("propertychange." + id, fnc); else if ($.browser.mozilla) el.bind("DOMAttrModified." + id, fnc); else itId = setInterval(fnc, interval); }); } function __watcher(id) { var el$ = $(this); var w = el$.data(id); if (!w) return; var _t = this; if (!w.func) return; // must unbind or else unwanted recursion may occur el$.unwatch(id); var changed = false; var i = 0; for (i; i < w.props.length; i++) { var newVal = el$.css(w.props[i]); if (w.vals[i] != newVal) { w.vals[i] = newVal; changed = true; break; } } if (changed) w.func.call(_t, w, i); // rebind event hookChange(el$, id, w.fnc); } } $.fn.unwatch = function (id) { this.each(function () { var el = $(this); var fnc = el.data(id).fnc; try { if (typeof (this.onpropertychange) == "object") el.unbind("propertychange." + id, fnc); else if ($.browser.mozilla) el.unbind("DOMAttrModified." + id, fnc); else clearInterval(id); } // ignore if element was already unbound catch (e) { } }); return this; } There are basically two jQuery functions - watch and unwatch. jQuery.fn.watch(props,func,interval,id) Starts watching an element for changes in the properties specified. props The CSS properties that are to be watched for changes. If any of the specified properties changes the function specified in the second parameter is fired. func (watchData,index) The function fired in response to a changed property. Receives this as the element changed and object that represents the watched properties and their respective values. The first parameter is passed in this structure:    { id: itId, props: [], func: func, vals: [] }; A second parameter is the index of the changed property so data.props[i] or data.vals[i] gets the property value that has changed. interval The interval for setInterval() for those browsers that don't support property watching in the DOM. In milliseconds. id An optional id that identifies this watcher. Required only if multiple watchers might be hooked up to the same element. The default is _watcher if not specified. jQuery.fn.unwatch(id) Unhooks watching of the element by disconnecting the event handlers. id Optional watcher id that was specified in the call to watch. This value can be omitted to use the default value of _watcher. You can also grab the latest version of the  code for this plug-in as well as the shadow in the full library at: http://www.west-wind.com:8080/svn/jquery/trunk/jQueryControls/Resources/ww.jquery.js watcher has no other dependencies although it lives in this larger library. The shadow plug-in depends on watcher.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011

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• Filtering List Data with a jQuery-searchFilter Plugin

  - by Rick Strahl

  When dealing with list based data on HTML forms, filtering that data down based on a search text expression is an extremely useful feature. We’re used to search boxes on just about anything these days and HTML forms should be no different. In this post I’ll describe how you can easily filter a list down to just the elements that match text typed into a search box. It’s a pretty simple task and it’s super easy to do, but I get a surprising number of comments from developers I work with who are surprised how easy it is to hook up this sort of behavior, that I thought it’s worth a blog post. But Angular does that out of the Box, right? These days it seems everybody is raving about Angular and the rich SPA features it provides. One of the cool features of Angular is the ability to do drop dead simple filters where you can specify a filter expression as part of a looping construct and automatically have that filter applied so that only items that match the filter show. I think Angular has single handedly elevated search filters to first rate, front-row status because it’s so easy. I love using Angular myself, but Angular is not a generic solution to problems like this. For one thing, using Angular requires you to render the list data with Angular – if you have data that is server rendered or static, then Angular doesn’t work. Not all applications are client side rendered SPAs – not by a long shot, and nor do all applications need to become SPAs. Long story short, it’s pretty easy to achieve text filtering effects using jQuery (or plain JavaScript for that matter) with just a little bit of work. Let’s take a look at an example. Why Filter? Client side filtering is a very useful tool that can make it drastically easier to sift through data displayed in client side lists. In my applications I like to display scrollable lists that contain a reasonably large amount of data, rather than the classic paging style displays which tend to be painful to use. So I often display 50 or so items per ‘page’ and it’s extremely useful to be able to filter this list down. Here’s an example in my Time Trakker application where I can quickly glance at various common views of my time entries. I can see Recent Entries, Unbilled Entries, Open Entries etc and filter those down by individual customers and so forth. Each of these lists results tends to be a few pages worth of scrollable content. The following screen shot shows a filtered view of Recent Entries that match the search keyword of CellPage: As you can see in this animated GIF, the filter is applied as you type, displaying only entries that match the text anywhere inside of the text of each of the list items. This is an immediately useful feature for just about any list display and adds significant value. A few lines of jQuery The good news is that this is trivially simple using jQuery. To get an idea what this looks like, here’s the relevant page layout showing only the search box and the list layout:<div id="divItemWrapper"> <div class="time-entry"> <div class="time-entry-right"> May 11, 2014 - 7:20pm<br /> <span style='color:steelblue'>0h:40min</span><br /> <a id="btnDeleteButton" href="#" class="hoverbutton" data-id="16825"> <img src="images/remove.gif" /> </a> </div> <div class="punchedoutimg"></div> <b><a href='/TimeTrakkerWeb/punchout/16825'>Project Housekeeping</a></b><br /> <small><i>Sawgrass</i></small> </div> ... more items here </div> So we have a searchbox txtSearchPage and a bunch of DIV elements with a .time-entry CSS class attached that makes up the list of items displayed. To hook up the search filter with jQuery is merely a matter of a few lines of jQuery code hooked to the .keyup() event handler: <script type="text/javascript"> $("#txtSearchPage").keyup(function() { var search = $(this).val(); $(".time-entry").show(); if (search) $(".time-entry").not(":contains(" + search + ")").hide(); }); </script> The idea here is pretty simple: You capture the keystroke in the search box and capture the search text. Using that search text you first make all items visible and then hide all the items that don’t match. Since DOM changes are applied after a method finishes execution in JavaScript, the show and hide operations are effectively batched up and so the view changes only to the final list rather than flashing the whole list and then removing items on a slow machine. You get the desired effect of the list showing the items in question. Case Insensitive Filtering But there is one problem with the solution above: The jQuery :contains filter is case sensitive, so your search text has to match expressions explicitly which is a bit cumbersome when typing. In the screen capture above I actually cheated – I used a custom filter that provides case insensitive contains behavior. jQuery makes it really easy to create custom query filters, and so I created one called containsNoCase. Here’s the implementation of this custom filter:$.expr[":"].containsNoCase = function(el, i, m) { var search = m[3]; if (!search) return false; return new RegExp(search, "i").test($(el).text()); }; This filter can be added anywhere where page level JavaScript runs – in page script or a seperately loaded .js file.  The filter basically extends jQuery with a : expression. Filters get passed a tokenized array that contains the expression. In this case the m[3] contains the search text from inside of the brackets. A filter basically looks at the active element that is passed in and then can return true or false to determine whether the item should be matched. Here I check a regular expression that looks for the search text in the element’s text. So the code for the filter now changes to:$(".time-entry").not(":containsNoCase(" + search + ")").hide(); And voila – you now have a case insensitive search.You can play around with another simpler example using this Plunkr:http://plnkr.co/edit/hDprZ3IlC6uzwFJtgHJh?p=preview Wrapping it up in a jQuery Plug-in To make this even easier to use and so that you can more easily remember how to use this search type filter, we can wrap this logic into a small jQuery plug-in:(function($, undefined) { $.expr[":"].containsNoCase = function(el, i, m) { var search = m[3]; if (!search) return false; return new RegExp(search, "i").test($(el).text()); }; $.fn.searchFilter = function(options) { var opt = $.extend({ // target selector targetSelector: "", // number of characters before search is applied charCount: 1 }, options); return this.each(function() { var $el = $(this); $el.keyup(function() { var search = $(this).val(); var $target = $(opt.targetSelector); $target.show(); if (search && search.length >= opt.charCount) $target.not(":containsNoCase(" + search + ")").hide(); }); }); }; })(jQuery); To use this plug-in now becomes a one liner:$("#txtSearchPagePlugin").searchFilter({ targetSelector: ".time-entry", charCount: 2}) You attach the .searchFilter() plug-in to the text box you are searching and specify a targetSelector that is to be filtered. Optionally you can specify a character count at which the filter kicks in since it’s kind of useless to filter at a single character typically. Summary This is s a very easy solution to a cool user interface feature your users will thank you for. Search filtering is a simple but highly effective user interface feature, and as you’ve seen in this post it’s very simple to create this behavior with just a few lines of jQuery code. While all the cool kids are doing Angular these days, jQuery is still useful in many applications that don’t embrace the ‘everything generated in JavaScript’ paradigm. I hope this jQuery plug-in or just the raw jQuery will be useful to some of you… Resources Example on Plunker© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in jQuery  HTML5  JavaScript   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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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, February 26, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, February 26, 2011Popular ReleasesDirectQ: Release 1.8.7 Beta 2: Beta 2 release to fix some early reported problems with the original 1.8.7 Beta.Chiave File Encryption: Chiave 0.9.2: Release Notes Application for file encryption and decryption using 512 Bit rijndael encyrption algorithm with simple to use UI. Its written in C# and compiled in .Net version 3.5. It incorporates features of Windows 7 like Jumplists, Taskbar progress and Aero Glass. Now with added support to Windows XP! Change Log from 0.9.1 to 0.9.2: ==================== Added: > Now it displays number of files added in the wizard to the Window Title bar. > Added support to Windows XP. > Minor UI tweaks. I...Claims Based Identity & Access Control Guide: Drop 1 - Claims Identity Guide V2: Highlights of drop #1 This is the first drop of the new "Claims Identity Guide" edition. In this release you will find: All previous samples updated and enhanced. All code upgraded to .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010. Extensive cleanup. Refactored Simulated Issuers: each solution now gets its own issuers. This results in much cleaner and simpler to understand code. Added Single Sign Out support. Added first sample using ACS ("ACS as a Federation Provider"). This sample extends the ori...HFR7 - Forum Hardware.fr pour Windows Phone 7: HFR7 - v1.1.1: NOUVELLES FONCTIONS : - Aucune. AMÉLIORATIONS : - La page "Catégories" est désormais intégrée au pivot "Bienvenue". - Apparition de boutons de changement de page en bas du sujet en consultation. - Les en-têtes sur les sujets sont désormais de la même couleur que la couleur d'accentuation de votre téléphone. BUGFIXES : - Les catégories s'affichent correctement. - Cliquer sur le bouton "drapeau" alors qu'on est dans la liste des topics d'une page n'amenait pas directement au dernier post non ...Simple Notify: Simple Notify Beta 2011-02-25: Feature: host the service with a single click in console Feature: host the service as a windows service Feature: notification cient application Feature: push client application Feature: push notifications from your powershell script Feature: C# wrapper libraries for your applicationsMono.Addins: Mono.Addins 0.6: The 0.6 release of Mono.Addins includes many improvements, bug fixes and new features: Add-in engine Add-in name and description can now be localized. There are new custom attributes for defining them, and can also be specified as xml elements in an add-in manifest instead of attributes. Support for custom add-in properties. It is now possible to specify arbitrary properties in add-ins, which can be queried at install time (using the Mono.Addins.Setup API) or at run-time. Custom extensio...patterns & practices: Project Silk: Project Silk Community Drop 3 - 25 Feb 2011: IntroductionWelcome to the third community drop of Project Silk. For this drop we are requesting feedback on overall application architecture, code review of the JavaScript Conductor and Widgets, and general direction of the application. Project Silk provides guidance and sample implementations that describe and illustrate recommended practices for building modern web applications using technologies such as HTML5, jQuery, CSS3 and Internet Explorer 9. This guidance is intended for experien...PhoneyTools: Initial Release (0.1): This is the 0.1 version for preview of the features.Minemapper: Minemapper v0.1.5: Now supports new Minecraft beta v1.3 map format, thanks to updated mcmap. Disabled biomes, until Minecraft Biome Extractor supports new format.Smartkernel: Smartkernel: ????，??????Coding4Fun Tools: Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.2: New control, Toast Prompt! Removed progress bar since Silverlight Toolkit Feb 2010 has it.Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.7: Service release fixing 31 issues. A full changelog will be available with the final stable release of 4.7 Important when upgradingUpgrade as if it was a patch release (update /bin, /umbraco and /umbraco_client). For general upgrade information follow the guide found at http://our.umbraco.org/wiki/install-and-setup/upgrading-an-umbraco-installation 4.7 requires the .NET 4.0 framework Web.Config changes Update the web web.config to include the 4 changes found in (they're clearly marked in...HubbleDotNet - Open source full-text search engine: V1.1.0.0: Add Sqlite3 DBAdapter Add App Report when Query Cache is Collecting. Improve the performance of index through Synchronize. Add top 0 feature so that we can only get count of the result. Improve the score calculating algorithm of match. Let the score of the record that match all items large then others. Add MySql DBAdapter Improve performance for multi-fields sort . Using hash table to access the Payload data. The version before used bin search. Using heap sort instead of qui...Silverlight????[???]: silverlight????[???]2.0: ???????，?????，????????silverlight??????。DBSourceTools: DBSourceTools_1.3.0.0: Release 1.3.0.0 Changed editors from FireEdit to ICSharpCode.TextEditor. Complete re-vamp of Intellisense ( further testing needed). Hightlight Field and Table Names in sql scripts. Added field dropdown on all tables and views in DBExplorer. Added data option for viewing data in Tables. Fixed comment / uncomment bug as reported by tareq. Included Synonyms in scripting engine ( nickt_ch ).IronPython: 2.7 Release Candidate 1: We are pleased to announce the first Release Candidate for IronPython 2.7. This release contains over two dozen bugs fixed in preparation for 2.7 Final. See the release notes for 60193 for details and what has already been fixed in the earlier 2.7 prereleases. - IronPython TeamCaliburn Micro: A Micro-Framework for WPF, Silverlight and WP7: Caliburn.Micro 1.0 RC: This is the official Release Candicate for Caliburn.Micro 1.0. The download contains the binaries, samples and VS templates. VS Templates The templates included are designed for situations where the Caliburn.Micro source needs to be embedded within a single project solution. This was targeted at government and other organizations that expressed specific requirements around using an open source project like this. NuGet This release does not have a corresponding NuGet package. The NuGet pack...Caliburn: A Client Framework for WPF and Silverlight: Caliburn 2.0 RC: This is the official Release Candidate for Caliburn 2.0. It contains all binaries, samples and generated code docs.Rawr: Rawr 4.0.20 Beta: Rawr is now web-based. The link to use Rawr4 is: http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.phpThis is the Cataclysm Beta Release. More details can be found at the following link http://rawr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=237262 As of the 4.0.16 release, you can now also begin using the new Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!This is a pre-alpha release of the WPF version, there are likely to be a lot of issues. If you have a problem, please follow the Posting Guidelines and put it into the Issue Trac...Windows Phone 7 Isolated Storage Explorer: WP7 Isolated Storage Explorer v1.0 Beta: Current release features:WPF desktop explorer client Visual Studio integrated tool window explorer client (Visual Studio 2010 Professional and above) Supported operations: Refresh (isolated storage information), Add Folder, Add Existing Item, Download File, Delete Folder, Delete File Explorer supports operations running on multiple remote applications at the same time Explorer detects application disconnect (1-2 second delay) Explorer confirms operation completed status Explorer d...New Projectsconvert digit to word upto thousand: convert digit to word upto thousandCustom XSLT with recursive loop in Biztalk 2009: Custom XSLT with recursive loop in Biztalk 2009ECO contrib: ECO ist a excellent framework for domain driven design developed by CapableObjects AB. Share your additional features in this contrib project.euler21: euler 21euler22: euler 22 problemflowless: Some workflow thingHFR7 - Forum Hardware.fr pour Windows Phone 7: HFR7 vous permet de surfer sur le forum de Hardware.fr via votre Windows Phone. Il est développé sous Silverlight (C#/XAML).ISP.NET: ISP.NET is a code level verification tool for MPI programs. It includes a Visual Studio 2010 extension that allows for push button verification of user programs that are written in C, C++ and C#. ISP checks for deadlocks, assertion violations, and other MPI program issues. IVY Frameworks: Ivy Frameworks is an architectural framework to create multi-tire application in a consistent way. We are creating specific application blocks. When completed it will help to create a software development pattern, to mass produce .Net applications in a software factory model. Jobeet: Just another Symfony Tutorial I'm following.Lurity: Project Codename "Lurity".Metro Toolkit: Metro ToolkitMySchoolManager: MySchoolManager es un programa de fines didácticos, de código fuente abierto y documentado en español, que simula un sistema de administración del personal de una escuela. NewRapp: Project at KTH in course DD2388NHibernateCMS: NHibernateCMSParametero - Yet Another Console Arguments Parsing Library: Parametero - Yet Another Console Arguments Parsing LibraryRasifiel's test: Test projectSilverlight Gantt Chart: Don't waste time creating your own Gantt Chart. We've already done it!SKWebSite: This is my first ASP.NET MVC3 projectTechChat: TechChat is a ASP.net AJAX based stylish chat room. It demonstrates the use of database and use of AJAX. It is developed in VB.netUDK Development Kit Addons: UDK Development Kit Addons makes it easier for UDK users to develop and debug UDK scripts. It's developed in C# with using Visual Studio Shell.UltraLight.mvvm Windows Phone 7 MVVM Framework: A lightweight (< 300 lines, < 25KB) framework for developing MVVM Silverlight applications with support for tombstoning on the Windows Phone 7.Website Panel: Website PanelxMS (eXtensible Management System): The xMS is a simple console that can be extended using plugins. Those plugins can be written by developers using a simple interface. It's a good starting for who want to develop a plugin based application.Xna Midi Project: A project that will allow midi functionality using only the compact framework for windows and Xbox solutions.

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• .NET HTML Sanitation for rich HTML Input

  - by Rick Strahl

  Recently I was working on updating a legacy application to MVC 4 that included free form text input. When I set up the new site my initial approach was to not allow any rich HTML input, only simple text formatting that would respect a few simple HTML commands for bold, lists etc. and automatically handles line break processing for new lines and paragraphs. This is typical for what I do with most multi-line text input in my apps and it works very well with very little development effort involved. Then the client sprung another note: Oh by the way we have a bunch of customers (real estate agents) who need to post complete HTML documents. Oh uh! There goes the simple theory. After some discussion and pleading on my part (<snicker>) to try and avoid this type of raw HTML input because of potential XSS issues, the client decided to go ahead and allow raw HTML input anyway. There has been lots of discussions on this subject on StackOverFlow (and here and here) but to after reading through some of the solutions I didn't really find anything that would work even closely for what I needed. Specifically we need to be able to allow just about any HTML markup, with the exception of script code. Remote CSS and Images need to be loaded, links need to work and so. While the 'legit' HTML posted by these agents is basic in nature it does span most of the full gamut of HTML (4). Most of the solutions XSS prevention/sanitizer solutions I found were way to aggressive and rendered the posted output unusable mostly because they tend to strip any externally loaded content. In short I needed a custom solution. I thought the best solution to this would be to use an HTML parser - in this case the Html Agility Pack - and then to run through all the HTML markup provided and remove any of the blacklisted tags and a number of attributes that are prone to JavaScript injection. There's much discussion on whether to use blacklists vs. whitelists in the discussions mentioned above, but I found that whitelists can make sense in simple scenarios where you might allow manual HTML input, but when you need to allow a larger array of HTML functionality a blacklist is probably easier to manage as the vast majority of elements and attributes could be allowed. Also white listing gets a bit more complex with HTML5 and the new proliferation of new HTML tags and most new tags generally don't affect XSS issues directly. Pure whitelisting based on elements and attributes also doesn't capture many edge cases (see some of the XSS cheat sheets listed below) so even with a white list, custom logic is still required to handle many of those edge cases. The Microsoft Web Protection Library (AntiXSS) My first thought was to check out the Microsoft AntiXSS library. Microsoft has an HTML Encoding and Sanitation library in the Microsoft Web Protection Library (formerly AntiXSS Library) on CodePlex, which provides stricter functions for whitelist encoding and sanitation. Initially I thought the Sanitation class and its static members would do the trick for me,but I found that this library is way too restrictive for my needs. Specifically the Sanitation class strips out images and links which rendered the full HTML from our real estate clients completely useless. I didn't spend much time with it, but apparently I'm not alone if feeling this library is not really useful without some way to configure operation. To give you an example of what didn't work for me with the library here's a small and simple HTML fragment that includes script, img and anchor tags. I would expect the script to be stripped and everything else to be left intact. Here's the original HTML:var value = "<b>Here</b> <script>alert('hello')</script> we go. Visit the " + "<a href='http://west-wind.com'>West Wind</a> site. " + "<img src='http://west-wind.com/images/new.gif' /> " ; and the code to sanitize it with the AntiXSS Sanitize class:@Html.Raw(Microsoft.Security.Application.Sanitizer.GetSafeHtmlFragment(value)) This produced a not so useful sanitized string: Here we go. Visit the <a>West Wind</a> site. While it removed the <script> tag (good) it also removed the href from the link and the image tag altogether (bad). In some situations this might be useful, but for most tasks I doubt this is the desired behavior. While links can contain javascript: references and images can 'broadcast' information to a server, without configuration to tell the library what to restrict this becomes useless to me. I couldn't find any way to customize the white list, nor is there code available in this 'open source' library on CodePlex. Using Html Agility Pack for HTML Parsing The WPL library wasn't going to cut it. After doing a bit of research I decided the best approach for a custom solution would be to use an HTML parser and inspect the HTML fragment/document I'm trying to import. I've used the HTML Agility Pack before for a number of apps where I needed an HTML parser without requiring an instance of a full browser like the Internet Explorer Application object which is inadequate in Web apps. In case you haven't checked out the Html Agility Pack before, it's a powerful HTML parser library that you can use from your .NET code. It provides a simple, parsable HTML DOM model to full HTML documents or HTML fragments that let you walk through each of the elements in your document. If you've used the HTML or XML DOM in a browser before you'll feel right at home with the Agility Pack. Blacklist based HTML Parsing to strip XSS Code For my purposes of HTML sanitation, the process involved is to walk the HTML document one element at a time and then check each element and attribute against a blacklist. There's quite a bit of argument of what's better: A whitelist of allowed items or a blacklist of denied items. While whitelists tend to be more secure, they also require a lot more configuration. In the case of HTML5 a whitelist could be very extensive. For what I need, I only want to ensure that no JavaScript is executed, so a blacklist includes the obvious <script> tag plus any tag that allows loading of external content including <iframe>, <object>, <embed> and <link> etc. <form>  is also excluded to avoid posting content to a different location. I also disallow <head> and <meta> tags in particular for my case, since I'm only allowing posting of HTML fragments. There is also some internal logic to exclude some attributes or attributes that include references to JavaScript or CSS expressions. The default tag blacklist reflects my use case, but is customizable and can be added to. Here's my HtmlSanitizer implementation:using System.Collections.Generic; using System.IO; using System.Xml; using HtmlAgilityPack; namespace Westwind.Web.Utilities { public class HtmlSanitizer { public HashSet<string> BlackList = new HashSet<string>() { { "script" }, { "iframe" }, { "form" }, { "object" }, { "embed" }, { "link" }, { "head" }, { "meta" } }; /// <summary> /// Cleans up an HTML string and removes HTML tags in blacklist /// </summary> /// <param name="html"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static string SanitizeHtml(string html, params string[] blackList) { var sanitizer = new HtmlSanitizer(); if (blackList != null && blackList.Length > 0) { sanitizer.BlackList.Clear(); foreach (string item in blackList) sanitizer.BlackList.Add(item); } return sanitizer.Sanitize(html); } /// <summary> /// Cleans up an HTML string by removing elements /// on the blacklist and all elements that start /// with onXXX . /// </summary> /// <param name="html"></param> /// <returns></returns> public string Sanitize(string html) { var doc = new HtmlDocument(); doc.LoadHtml(html); SanitizeHtmlNode(doc.DocumentNode); //return doc.DocumentNode.WriteTo(); string output = null; // Use an XmlTextWriter to create self-closing tags using (StringWriter sw = new StringWriter()) { XmlWriter writer = new XmlTextWriter(sw); doc.DocumentNode.WriteTo(writer); output = sw.ToString(); // strip off XML doc header if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(output)) { int at = output.IndexOf("?>"); output = output.Substring(at + 2); } writer.Close(); } doc = null; return output; } private void SanitizeHtmlNode(HtmlNode node) { if (node.NodeType == HtmlNodeType.Element) { // check for blacklist items and remove if (BlackList.Contains(node.Name)) { node.Remove(); return; } // remove CSS Expressions and embedded script links if (node.Name == "style") { if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(node.InnerText)) { if (node.InnerHtml.Contains("expression") || node.InnerHtml.Contains("javascript:")) node.ParentNode.RemoveChild(node); } } // remove script attributes if (node.HasAttributes) { for (int i = node.Attributes.Count - 1; i >= 0; i--) { HtmlAttribute currentAttribute = node.Attributes[i]; var attr = currentAttribute.Name.ToLower(); var val = currentAttribute.Value.ToLower(); span style="background: white; color: green">// remove event handlers if (attr.StartsWith("on")) node.Attributes.Remove(currentAttribute); // remove script links else if ( //(attr == "href" || attr== "src" || attr == "dynsrc" || attr == "lowsrc") && val != null && val.Contains("javascript:")) node.Attributes.Remove(currentAttribute); // Remove CSS Expressions else if (attr == "style" && val != null && val.Contains("expression") || val.Contains("javascript:") || val.Contains("vbscript:")) node.Attributes.Remove(currentAttribute); } } } // Look through child nodes recursively if (node.HasChildNodes) { for (int i = node.ChildNodes.Count - 1; i >= 0; i--) { SanitizeHtmlNode(node.ChildNodes[i]); } } } } } Please note: Use this as a starting point only for your own parsing and review the code for your specific use case! If your needs are less lenient than mine were you can you can make this much stricter by not allowing src and href attributes or CSS links if your HTML doesn't allow it. You can also check links for external URLs and disallow those - lots of options.  The code is simple enough to make it easy to extend to fit your use cases more specifically. It's also quite easy to make this code work using a WhiteList approach if you want to go that route. The code above is semi-generic for allowing full featured HTML fragments that only disallow script related content. The Sanitize method walks through each node of the document and then recursively drills into all of its children until the entire document has been traversed. Note that the code here uses an XmlTextWriter to write output - this is done to preserve XHTML style self-closing tags which are otherwise left as non-self-closing tags. The sanitizer code scans for blacklist elements and removes those elements not allowed. Note that the blacklist is configurable either in the instance class as a property or in the static method via the string parameter list. Additionally the code goes through each element's attributes and looks for a host of rules gleaned from some of the XSS cheat sheets listed at the end of the post. Clearly there are a lot more XSS vulnerabilities, but a lot of them apply to ancient browsers (IE6 and versions of Netscape) - many of these glaring holes (like CSS expressions - WTF IE?) have been removed in modern browsers. What a Pain To be honest this is NOT a piece of code that I wanted to write. I think building anything related to XSS is better left to people who have far more knowledge of the topic than I do. Unfortunately, I was unable to find a tool that worked even closely for me, or even provided a working base. For the project I was working on I had no choice and I'm sharing the code here merely as a base line to start with and potentially expand on for specific needs. It's sad that Microsoft Web Protection Library is currently such a train wreck - this is really something that should come from Microsoft as the systems vendor or possibly a third party that provides security tools. Luckily for my application we are dealing with a authenticated and validated users so the user base is fairly well known, and relatively small - this is not a wide open Internet application that's directly public facing. As I mentioned earlier in the post, if I had my way I would simply not allow this type of raw HTML input in the first place, and instead rely on a more controlled HTML input mechanism like MarkDown or even a good HTML Edit control that can provide some limits on what types of input are allowed. Alas in this case I was overridden and we had to go forward and allow *any* raw HTML posted. Sometimes I really feel sad that it's come this far - how many good applications and tools have been thwarted by fear of XSS (or worse) attacks? So many things that could be done *if* we had a more secure browser experience and didn't have to deal with every little script twerp trying to hack into Web pages and obscure browser bugs. So much time wasted building secure apps, so much time wasted by others trying to hack apps… We're a funny species - no other species manages to waste as much time, effort and resources as we humans do :-) Resources Code on GitHub Html Agility Pack XSS Cheat Sheet XSS Prevention Cheat Sheet Microsoft Web Protection Library (AntiXss) StackOverflow Links: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/341872/html-sanitizer-for-net http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/06/safe-html-and-xss/ http://code.google.com/p/subsonicforums/source/browse/trunk/SubSonic.Forums.Data/HtmlScrubber.cs?r=61© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Security  HTML  ASP.NET  JavaScript   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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• Where does ASP.NET Web API Fit?

  - by Rick Strahl

  With the pending release of ASP.NET MVC 4 and the new ASP.NET Web API, there has been a lot of discussion of where the new Web API technology fits in the ASP.NET Web stack. There are a lot of choices to build HTTP based applications available now on the stack - we've come a long way from when WebForms and Http Handlers/Modules where the only real options. Today we have WebForms, MVC, ASP.NET Web Pages, ASP.NET AJAX, WCF REST and now Web API as well as the core ASP.NET runtime to choose to build HTTP content with. Web API definitely squarely addresses the 'API' aspect - building consumable services - rather than HTML content, but even to that end there are a lot of choices you have today. So where does Web API fit, and when doesn't it? But before we get into that discussion, let's talk about what a Web API is and why we should care. What's a Web API? HTTP 'APIs' (Microsoft's new terminology for a service I guess)  are becoming increasingly more important with the rise of the many devices in use today. Most mobile devices like phones and tablets run Apps that are using data retrieved from the Web over HTTP. Desktop applications are also moving in this direction with more and more online content and synching moving into even traditional desktop applications. The pending Windows 8 release promises an app like platform for both the desktop and other devices, that also emphasizes consuming data from the Cloud. Likewise many Web browser hosted applications these days are relying on rich client functionality to create and manipulate the browser user interface, using AJAX rather than server generated HTML data to load up the user interface with data. These mobile or rich Web applications use their HTTP connection to return data rather than HTML markup in the form of JSON or XML typically. But an API can also serve other kinds of data, like images or other binary files, or even text data and HTML (although that's less common). A Web API is what feeds rich applications with data. ASP.NET Web API aims to service this particular segment of Web development by providing easy semantics to route and handle incoming requests and an easy to use platform to serve HTTP data in just about any content format you choose to create and serve from the server. But .NET already has various HTTP Platforms The .NET stack already includes a number of technologies that provide the ability to create HTTP service back ends, and it has done so since the very beginnings of the .NET platform. From raw HTTP Handlers and Modules in the core ASP.NET runtime, to high level platforms like ASP.NET MVC, Web Forms, ASP.NET AJAX and the WCF REST engine (which technically is not ASP.NET, but can integrate with it), you've always been able to handle just about any kind of HTTP request and response with ASP.NET. The beauty of the raw ASP.NET platform is that it provides you everything you need to build just about any type of HTTP application you can dream up from low level APIs/custom engines to high level HTML generation engine. ASP.NET as a core platform clearly has stood the test of time 10+ years later and all other frameworks like Web API are built on top of this ASP.NET core. However, although it's possible to create Web APIs / Services using any of the existing out of box .NET technologies, none of them have been a really nice fit for building arbitrary HTTP based APIs. Sure, you can use an HttpHandler to create just about anything, but you have to build a lot of plumbing to build something more complex like a comprehensive API that serves a variety of requests, handles multiple output formats and can easily pass data up to the server in a variety of ways. Likewise you can use ASP.NET MVC to handle routing and creating content in various formats fairly easily, but it doesn't provide a great way to automatically negotiate content types and serve various content formats directly (it's possible to do with some plumbing code of your own but not built in). Prior to Web API, Microsoft's main push for HTTP services has been WCF REST, which was always an awkward technology that had a severe personality conflict, not being clear on whether it wanted to be part of WCF or purely a separate technology. In the end it didn't do either WCF compatibility or WCF agnostic pure HTTP operation very well, which made for a very developer-unfriendly environment. Personally I didn't like any of the implementations at the time, so much so that I ended up building my own HTTP service engine (as part of the West Wind Web Toolkit), as have a few other third party tools that provided much better integration and ease of use. With the release of Web API for the first time I feel that I can finally use the tools in the box and not have to worry about creating and maintaining my own toolkit as Web API addresses just about all the features I implemented on my own and much more. ASP.NET Web API provides a better HTTP Experience ASP.NET Web API differentiates itself from the previous Microsoft in-box HTTP service solutions in that it was built from the ground up around the HTTP protocol and its messaging semantics. Unlike WCF REST or ASP.NET AJAX with ASMX, it’s a brand new platform rather than bolted on technology that is supposed to work in the context of an existing framework. The strength of the new ASP.NET Web API is that it combines the best features of the platforms that came before it, to provide a comprehensive and very usable HTTP platform. Because it's based on ASP.NET and borrows a lot of concepts from ASP.NET MVC, Web API should be immediately familiar and comfortable to most ASP.NET developers. Here are some of the features that Web API provides that I like: Strong Support for URL Routing to produce clean URLs using familiar MVC style routing semantics Content Negotiation based on Accept headers for request and response serialization Support for a host of supported output formats including JSON, XML, ATOM Strong default support for REST semantics but they are optional Easily extensible Formatter support to add new input/output types Deep support for more advanced HTTP features via HttpResponseMessage and HttpRequestMessage classes and strongly typed Enums to describe many HTTP operations Convention based design that drives you into doing the right thing for HTTP Services Very extensible, based on MVC like extensibility model of Formatters and Filters Self-hostable in non-Web applications  Testable using testing concepts similar to MVC Web API is meant to handle any kind of HTTP input and produce output and status codes using the full spectrum of HTTP functionality available in a straight forward and flexible manner. Looking at the list above you can see that a lot of functionality is very similar to ASP.NET MVC, so many ASP.NET developers should feel quite comfortable with the concepts of Web API. The Routing and core infrastructure of Web API are very similar to how MVC works providing many of the benefits of MVC, but with focus on HTTP access and manipulation in Controller methods rather than HTML generation in MVC. There’s much improved support for content negotiation based on HTTP Accept headers with the framework capable of detecting automatically what content the client is sending and requesting and serving the appropriate data format in return. This seems like such a little and obvious thing, but it's really important. Today's service backends often are used by multiple clients/applications and being able to choose the right data format for what fits best for the client is very important. While previous solutions were able to accomplish this using a variety of mixed features of WCF and ASP.NET, Web API combines all this functionality into a single robust server side HTTP framework that intrinsically understands the HTTP semantics and subtly drives you in the right direction for most operations. And when you need to customize or do something that is not built in, there are lots of hooks and overrides for most behaviors, and even many low level hook points that allow you to plug in custom functionality with relatively little effort. No Brainers for Web API There are a few scenarios that are a slam dunk for Web API. If your primary focus of an application or even a part of an application is some sort of API then Web API makes great sense. HTTP ServicesIf you're building a comprehensive HTTP API that is to be consumed over the Web, Web API is a perfect fit. You can isolate the logic in Web API and build your application as a service breaking out the logic into controllers as needed. Because the primary interface is the service there's no confusion of what should go where (MVC or API). Perfect fit. Primary AJAX BackendsIf you're building rich client Web applications that are relying heavily on AJAX callbacks to serve its data, Web API is also a slam dunk. Again because much if not most of the business logic will probably end up in your Web API service logic, there's no confusion over where logic should go and there's no duplication. In Single Page Applications (SPA), typically there's very little HTML based logic served other than bringing up a shell UI and then filling the data from the server with AJAX which means the business logic required for data retrieval and data acceptance and validation too lives in the Web API. Perfect fit. Generic HTTP EndpointsAnother good fit are generic HTTP endpoints that to serve data or handle 'utility' type functionality in typical Web applications. If you need to implement an image server, or an upload handler in the past I'd implement that as an HTTP handler. With Web API you now have a well defined place where you can implement these types of generic 'services' in a location that can easily add endpoints (via Controller methods) or separated out as more full featured APIs. Granted this could be done with MVC as well, but Web API seems a clearer and more well defined place to store generic application services. This is one thing I used to do a lot of in my own libraries and Web API addresses this nicely. Great fit. Mixed HTML and AJAX Applications: Not a clear Choice  For all the commonality that Web API and MVC share they are fundamentally different platforms that are independent of each other. A lot of people have asked when does it make sense to use MVC vs. Web API when you're dealing with typical Web application that creates HTML and also uses AJAX functionality for rich functionality. While it's easy to say that all 'service'/AJAX logic should go into a Web API and all HTML related generation into MVC, that can often result in a lot of code duplication. Also MVC supports JSON and XML result data fairly easily as well so there's some confusion where that 'trigger point' is of when you should switch to Web API vs. just implementing functionality as part of MVC controllers. Ultimately there's a tradeoff between isolation of functionality and duplication. A good rule of thumb I think works is that if a large chunk of the application's functionality serves data Web API is a good choice, but if you have a couple of small AJAX requests to serve data to a grid or autocomplete box it'd be overkill to separate out that logic into a separate Web API controller. Web API does add overhead to your application (it's yet another framework that sits on top of core ASP.NET) so it should be worth it .Keep in mind that MVC can generate HTML and JSON/XML and just about any other content easily and that functionality is not going away, so just because you Web API is there it doesn't mean you have to use it. Web API is not a full replacement for MVC obviously either since there's not the same level of support to feed HTML from Web API controllers (although you can host a RazorEngine easily enough if you really want to go that route) so if you're HTML is part of your API or application in general MVC is still a better choice either alone or in combination with Web API. I suspect (and hope) that in the future Web API's functionality will merge even closer with MVC so that you might even be able to mix functionality of both into single Controllers so that you don't have to make any trade offs, but at the moment that's not the case. Some Issues To think about Web API is similar to MVC but not the Same Although Web API looks a lot like MVC it's not the same and some common functionality of MVC behaves differently in Web API. For example, the way single POST variables are handled is different than MVC and doesn't lend itself particularly well to some AJAX scenarios with POST data. Code Duplication I already touched on this in the Mixed HTML and Web API section, but if you build an MVC application that also exposes a Web API it's quite likely that you end up duplicating a bunch of code and - potentially - infrastructure. You may have to create authentication logic both for an HTML application and for the Web API which might need something different altogether. More often than not though the same logic is used, and there's no easy way to share. If you implement an MVC ActionFilter and you want that same functionality in your Web API you'll end up creating the filter twice. AJAX Data or AJAX HTML On a recent post's comments, David made some really good points regarding the commonality of MVC and Web API's and its place. One comment that caught my eye was a little more generic, regarding data services vs. HTML services. David says: I see a lot of merit in the combination of Knockout.js, client side templates and view models, calling Web API for a responsive UI, but sometimes late at night that still leaves me wondering why I would no longer be using some of the nice tooling and features that have evolved in MVC ;-) You know what - I can totally relate to that. On the last Web based mobile app I worked on, we decided to serve HTML partials to the client via AJAX for many (but not all!) things, rather than sending down raw data to inject into the DOM on the client via templating or direct manipulation. While there are definitely more bytes on the wire, with this, the overhead ended up being actually fairly small if you keep the 'data' requests small and atomic. Performance was often made up by the lack of client side rendering of HTML. Server rendered HTML for AJAX templating gives so much better infrastructure support without having to screw around with 20 mismatched client libraries. Especially with MVC and partials it's pretty easy to break out your HTML logic into very small, atomic chunks, so it's actually easy to create small rendering islands that can be used via composition on the server, or via AJAX calls to small, tight partials that return HTML to the client. Although this is often frowned upon as to 'heavy', it worked really well in terms of developer effort as well as providing surprisingly good performance on devices. There's still plenty of jQuery and AJAX logic happening on the client but it's more manageable in small doses rather than trying to do the entire UI composition with JavaScript and/or 'not-quite-there-yet' template engines that are very difficult to debug. This is not an issue directly related to Web API of course, but something to think about especially for AJAX or SPA style applications. Summary Web API is a great new addition to the ASP.NET platform and it addresses a serious need for consolidation of a lot of half-baked HTTP service API technologies that came before it. Web API feels 'right', and hits the right combination of usability and flexibility at least for me and it's a good fit for true API scenarios. However, just because a new platform is available it doesn't meant that other tools or tech that came before it should be discarded or even upgraded to the new platform. There's nothing wrong with continuing to use MVC controller methods to handle API tasks if that's what your app is running now - there's very little to be gained by upgrading to Web API just because. But going forward Web API clearly is the way to go, when building HTTP data interfaces and it's good to see that Microsoft got this one right - it was sorely needed! Resources ASP.NET Web API AspConf Ask the Experts Session (first 5 minutes) © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in 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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• Use IIS Application Initialization for keeping ASP.NET Apps alive

  - by Rick Strahl

  I've been working quite a bit with Windows Services in the recent months, and well, it turns out that Windows Services are quite a bear to debug, deploy, update and maintain. The process of getting services set up,  debugged and updated is a major chore that has to be extensively documented and or automated specifically. On most projects when a service is built, people end up scrambling for the right 'process' to use for administration. Web app deployment and maintenance on the other hand are common and well understood today, as we are constantly dealing with Web apps. There's plenty of infrastructure and tooling built into Web Tools like Visual Studio to facilitate the process. By comparison Windows Services or anything self-hosted for that matter seems convoluted.In fact, in a recent blog post I mentioned that on a recent project I'd been using self-hosting for SignalR inside of a Windows service, because the application is in fact a 'service' that also needs to send out lots of messages via SignalR. But the reality is that it could just as well be an IIS application with a service component that runs in the background. Either way you look at it, it's either a Windows Service with a built in Web Server, or an IIS application running a Service application, neither of which follows the standard Service or Web App template.Personally I much prefer Web applications. Running inside of IIS I get all the benefits of the IIS platform including service lifetime management (crash and restart), controlled shutdowns, the whole security infrastructure including easy certificate support, hot-swapping of code and the the ability to publish directly to IIS from within Visual Studio with ease.Because of these benefits we set out to move from the self hosted service into an ASP.NET Web app instead.The Missing Link for ASP.NET as a Service: Auto-LoadingI've had moments in the past where I wanted to run a 'service like' application in ASP.NET because when you think about it, it's so much easier to control a Web application remotely. Services are locked into start/stop operations, but if you host inside of a Web app you can write your own ticket and control it from anywhere. In fact nearly 10 years ago I built a background scheduling application that ran inside of ASP.NET and it worked great and it's still running doing its job today.The tricky part for running an app as a service inside of IIS then and now, is how to get IIS and ASP.NET launched so your 'service' stays alive even after an Application Pool reset. 7 years ago I faked it by using a web monitor (my own West Wind Web Monitor app) I was running anyway to monitor my various web sites for uptime, and having the monitor ping my 'service' every 20 seconds to effectively keep ASP.NET alive or fire it back up after a reload. I used a simple scheduler class that also includes some logic for 'self-reloading'. Hacky for sure, but it worked reliably.Luckily today it's much easier and more integrated to get IIS to launch ASP.NET as soon as an Application Pool is started by using the Application Initialization Module. The Application Initialization Module basically allows you to turn on Preloading on the Application Pool and the Site/IIS App, which essentially fires a request through the IIS pipeline as soon as the Application Pool has been launched. This means that effectively your ASP.NET app becomes active immediately, Application_Start is fired making sure your app stays up and running at all times. All the other features like Application Pool recycling and auto-shutdown after idle time still work, but IIS will then always immediately re-launch the application.Getting started with Application InitializationAs of IIS 8 Application Initialization is part of the IIS feature set. For IIS 7 and 7.5 there's a separate download available via Web Platform Installer. Using IIS 8 Application Initialization is an optional install component in Windows or the Windows Server Role Manager: This is an optional component so make sure you explicitly select it.IIS Configuration for Application InitializationInitialization needs to be applied on the Application Pool as well as the IIS Application level. As of IIS 8 these settings can be made through the IIS Administration console.Start with the Application Pool:Here you need to set both the Start Automatically which is always set, and the StartMode which should be set to AlwaysRunning. Both have to be set - the Start Automatically flag is set true by default and controls the starting of the application pool itself while Always Running flag is required in order to launch the application. Without the latter flag set the site settings have no effect.Now on the Site/Application level you can specify whether the site should pre load: Set the Preload Enabled flag to true.At this point ASP.NET apps should auto-load. This is all that's needed to pre-load the site if all you want is to get your site launched automatically.If you want a little more control over the load process you can add a few more settings to your web.config file that allow you to show a static page while the App is starting up. This can be useful if startup is really slow, so rather than displaying blank screen while the user is fiddling their thumbs you can display a static HTML page instead: <system.webServer> <applicationInitialization remapManagedRequestsTo="Startup.htm" skipManagedModules="true"> <add initializationPage="ping.ashx" /> </applicationInitialization> </system.webServer>This allows you to specify a page to execute in a dry run. IIS basically fakes request and pushes it directly into the IIS pipeline without hitting the network. You specify a page and IIS will fake a request to that page in this case ping.ashx which just returns a simple OK string - ie. a fast pipeline request. This request is run immediately after Application Pool restart, and while this request is running and your app is warming up, IIS can display an alternate static page - Startup.htm above. So instead of showing users an empty loading page when clicking a link on your site you can optionally show some sort of static status page that says, "we'll be right back".  I'm not sure if that's such a brilliant idea since this can be pretty disruptive in some cases. Personally I think I prefer letting people wait, but at least get the response they were supposed to get back rather than a random page. But it's there if you need it.Note that the web.config stuff is optional. If you don't provide it IIS hits the default site link (/) and even if there's no matching request at the end of that request it'll still fire the request through the IIS pipeline. Ideally though you want to make sure that an ASP.NET endpoint is hit either with your default page, or by specify the initializationPage to ensure ASP.NET actually gets hit since it's possible for IIS fire unmanaged requests only for static pages (depending how your pipeline is configured).What about AppDomain Restarts?In addition to full Worker Process recycles at the IIS level, ASP.NET also has to deal with AppDomain shutdowns which can occur for a variety of reasons:Files are updated in the BIN folderWeb Deploy to your siteweb.config is changedHard application crashThese operations don't cause the worker process to restart, but they do cause ASP.NET to unload the current AppDomain and start up a new one. Because the features above only apply to Application Pool restarts, AppDomain restarts could also cause your 'ASP.NET service' to stop processing in the background.In order to keep the app running on AppDomain recycles, you can resort to a simple ping in the Application_End event:protected void Application_End() { var client = new WebClient(); var url = App.AdminConfiguration.MonitorHostUrl + "ping.aspx"; client.DownloadString(url); Trace.WriteLine("Application Shut Down Ping: " + url); }which fires any ASP.NET url to the current site at the very end of the pipeline shutdown which in turn ensures that the site immediately starts back up.Manual Configuration in ApplicationHost.configThe above UI corresponds to the following ApplicationHost.config settings. If you're using IIS 7, there's no UI for these flags so you'll have to manually edit them.When you install the Application Initialization component into IIS it should auto-configure the module into ApplicationHost.config. Unfortunately for me, with Mr. Murphy in his best form for me, the module registration did not occur and I had to manually add it.<globalModules> <add name="ApplicationInitializationModule" image="%windir%\System32\inetsrv\warmup.dll" /> </globalModules>Most likely you won't need ever need to add this, but if things are not working it's worth to check if the module is actually registered.Next you need to configure the ApplicationPool and the Web site. The following are the two relevant entries in ApplicationHost.config.<system.applicationHost> <applicationPools> <add name="West Wind West Wind Web Connection" autoStart="true" startMode="AlwaysRunning" managedRuntimeVersion="v4.0" managedPipelineMode="Integrated"> <processModel identityType="LocalSystem" setProfileEnvironment="true" /> </add> </applicationPools> <sites> <site name="Default Web Site" id="1"> <application path="/MPress.Workflow.WebQueueMessageManager" applicationPool="West Wind West Wind Web Connection" preloadEnabled="true"> <virtualDirectory path="/" physicalPath="C:\Clients\…" /> </application> </site> </sites> </system.applicationHost>On the Application Pool make sure to set the autoStart and startMode flags to true and AlwaysRunning respectively. On the site make sure to set the preloadEnabled flag to true.And that's all you should need. You can still set the web.config settings described above as well.ASP.NET as a Service?In the particular application I'm working on currently, we have a queue manager that runs as standalone service that polls a database queue and picks out jobs and processes them on several threads. The service can spin up any number of threads and keep these threads alive in the background while IIS is running doing its own thing. These threads are newly created threads, so they sit completely outside of the IIS thread pool. In order for this service to work all it needs is a long running reference that keeps it alive for the life time of the application.In this particular app there are two components that run in the background on their own threads: A scheduler that runs various scheduled tasks and handles things like picking up emails to send out outside of IIS's scope and the QueueManager. Here's what this looks like in global.asax:public class Global : System.Web.HttpApplication { private static ApplicationScheduler scheduler; private static ServiceLauncher launcher; protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Pings the service and ensures it stays alive scheduler = new ApplicationScheduler() { CheckFrequency = 600000 }; scheduler.Start(); launcher = new ServiceLauncher(); launcher.Start(); // register so shutdown is controlled HostingEnvironment.RegisterObject(launcher); }}By keeping these objects around as static instances that are set only once on startup, they survive the lifetime of the application. The code in these classes is essentially unchanged from the Windows Service code except that I could remove the various overrides required for the Windows Service interface (OnStart,OnStop,OnResume etc.). Otherwise the behavior and operation is very similar.In this application ASP.NET serves two purposes: It acts as the host for SignalR and provides the administration interface which allows remote management of the 'service'. I can start and stop the service remotely by shutting down the ApplicationScheduler very easily. I can also very easily feed stats from the queue out directly via a couple of Web requests or (as we do now) through the SignalR service.Registering a Background Object with ASP.NETNotice also the use of the HostingEnvironment.RegisterObject(). This function registers an object with ASP.NET to let it know that it's a background task that should be notified if the AppDomain shuts down. RegisterObject() requires an interface with a Stop() method that's fired and allows your code to respond to a shutdown request. Here's what the IRegisteredObject::Stop() method looks like on the launcher:public void Stop(bool immediate = false) { LogManager.Current.LogInfo("QueueManager Controller Stopped."); Controller.StopProcessing(); Controller.Dispose(); Thread.Sleep(1500); // give background threads some time HostingEnvironment.UnregisterObject(this); }Implementing IRegisterObject should help with reliability on AppDomain shutdowns. Thanks to Justin Van Patten for pointing this out to me on Twitter.RegisterObject() is not required but I would highly recommend implementing it on whatever object controls your background processing to all clean shutdowns when the AppDomain shuts down.Testing it outI'm still in the testing phase with this particular service to see if there are any side effects. But so far it doesn't look like it. With about 50 lines of code I was able to replace the Windows service startup to Web start up - everything else just worked as is. An honorable mention goes to SignalR 2.0's oWin hosting, because with the new oWin based hosting no code changes at all were required, merely a couple of configuration file settings and an assembly directive needed, to point at the SignalR startup class. Sweet!It also seems like SignalR is noticeably faster running inside of IIS compared to self-host. Startup feels faster because of the preload.Starting and Stopping the 'Service'Because the application is running as a Web Server, it's easy to have a Web interface for starting and stopping the services running inside of the service. For our queue manager the SignalR service and front monitoring app has a play and stop button for toggling the queue.If you want more administrative control and have it work more like a Windows Service you can also stop the application pool explicitly from the command line which would be equivalent to stopping and restarting a service.To start and stop from the command line you can use the IIS appCmd tool. To stop:> %windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd stop apppool /apppool.name:"Weblog"and to start> %windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd start apppool /apppool.name:"Weblog"Note that when you explicitly force the AppPool to stop running either in the UI (on the ApplicationPools page use Start/Stop) or via command line tools, the application pool will not auto-restart immediately. You have to manually start it back up.What's not to like?There are certainly a lot of benefits to running a background service in IIS, but… ASP.NET applications do have more overhead in terms of memory footprint and startup time is a little slower, but generally for server applications this is not a big deal. If the application is stable the service should fire up and stay running indefinitely. A lot of times this kind of service interface can simply be attached to an existing Web application, or if scalability requires be offloaded to its own Web server.Easier to work withBut the ultimate benefit here is that it's much easier to work with a Web app as opposed to a service. While developing I can simply turn off the auto-launch features and launch the service on demand through IIS simply by hitting a page on the site. If I want to shut down an IISRESET -stop will shut down the service easily enough. I can then attach a debugger anywhere I want and this works like any other ASP.NET application. Yes you end up on a background thread for debugging but Visual Studio handles that just fine and if you stay on a single thread this is no different than debugging any other code.SummaryUsing ASP.NET to run background service operations is probably not a super common scenario, but it probably should be something that is considered carefully when building services. Many applications have service like features and with the auto-start functionality of the Application Initialization module, it's easy to build this functionality into ASP.NET. Especially when combined with the notification features of SignalR it becomes very, very easy to create rich services that can also communicate their status easily to the outside world.Whether it's existing applications that need some background processing for scheduling related tasks, or whether you just create a separate site altogether just to host your service it's easy to do and you can leverage the same tool chain you're already using for other Web projects. If you have lots of service projects it's worth considering… give it some thought…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in ASP.NET  SignalR  IIS   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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• What’s new in ASP.NET 4.0: Core Features

  - by Rick Strahl

  Microsoft released the .NET Runtime 4.0 and with it comes a brand spanking new version of ASP.NET – version 4.0 – which provides an incremental set of improvements to an already powerful platform. .NET 4.0 is a full release of the .NET Framework, unlike version 3.5, which was merely a set of library updates on top of the .NET Framework version 2.0. Because of this full framework revision, there has been a welcome bit of consolidation of assemblies and configuration settings. The full runtime version change to 4.0 also means that you have to explicitly pick version 4.0 of the runtime when you create a new Application Pool in IIS, unlike .NET 3.5, which actually requires version 2.0 of the runtime. In this first of two parts I'll take a look at some of the changes in the core ASP.NET runtime. In the next edition I'll go over improvements in Web Forms and Visual Studio. Core Engine Features Most of the high profile improvements in ASP.NET have to do with Web Forms, but there are a few gems in the core runtime that should make life easier for ASP.NET developers. The following list describes some of the things I've found useful among the new features. Clean web.config Files Are Back! If you've been using ASP.NET 3.5, you probably have noticed that the web.config file has turned into quite a mess of configuration settings between all the custom handler and module mappings for the various web server versions. Part of the reason for this mess is that .NET 3.5 is a collection of add-on components running on top of the .NET Runtime 2.0 and so almost all of the new features of .NET 3.5 where essentially introduced as custom modules and handlers that had to be explicitly configured in the config file. Because the core runtime didn't rev with 3.5, all those configuration options couldn't be moved up to other configuration files in the system chain. With version 4.0 a consolidation was possible, and the result is a much simpler web.config file by default. A default empty ASP.NET 4.0 Web Forms project looks like this: <?xml version="1.0"?> <configuration> <system.web> <compilation debug="true" targetFramework="4.0" /> </system.web> </configuration> Need I say more? Configuration Transformation Files to Manage Configurations and Application Packaging ASP.NET 4.0 introduces the ability to create multi-target configuration files. This means it's possible to create a single configuration file that can be transformed based on relatively simple replacement rules using a Visual Studio and WebDeploy provided XSLT syntax. The idea is that you can create a 'master' configuration file and then create customized versions of this master configuration file by applying some relatively simplistic search and replace, add or remove logic to specific elements and attributes in the original file. To give you an idea, here's the example code that Visual Studio creates for a default web.Release.config file, which replaces a connection string, removes the debug attribute and replaces the CustomErrors section: <?xml version="1.0"?> <configuration xmlns:xdt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/XML-Document-Transform"> <connectionStrings> <add name="MyDB" connectionString="Data Source=ReleaseSQLServer;Initial Catalog=MyReleaseDB;Integrated Security=True" xdt:Transform="SetAttributes" xdt:Locator="Match(name)"/> </connectionStrings> <system.web> <compilation xdt:Transform="RemoveAttributes(debug)" /> <customErrors defaultRedirect="GenericError.htm" mode="RemoteOnly" xdt:Transform="Replace"> <error statusCode="500" redirect="InternalError.htm"/> </customErrors> </system.web> </configuration> You can see the XSL transform syntax that drives this functionality. Basically, only the elements listed in the override file are matched and updated – all the rest of the original web.config file stays intact. Visual Studio 2010 supports this functionality directly in the project system so it's easy to create and maintain these customized configurations in the project tree. Once you're ready to publish your application, you can then use the Publish <yourWebApplication> option on the Build menu which allows publishing to disk, via FTP or to a Web Server using Web Deploy. You can also create a deployment package as a .zip file which can be used by the WebDeploy tool to configure and install the application. You can manually run the Web Deploy tool or use the IIS Manager to install the package on the server or other machine. You can find out more about WebDeploy and Packaging here: http://tinyurl.com/2anxcje. Improved Routing Routing provides a relatively simple way to create clean URLs with ASP.NET by associating a template URL path and routing it to a specific ASP.NET HttpHandler. Microsoft first introduced routing with ASP.NET MVC and then they integrated routing with a basic implementation in the core ASP.NET engine via a separate ASP.NET routing assembly. In ASP.NET 4.0, the process of using routing functionality gets a bit easier. First, routing is now rolled directly into System.Web, so no extra assembly reference is required in your projects to use routing. The RouteCollection class now includes a MapPageRoute() method that makes it easy to route to any ASP.NET Page requests without first having to implement an IRouteHandler implementation. It would have been nice if this could have been extended to serve *any* handler implementation, but unfortunately for anything but a Page derived handlers you still will have to implement a custom IRouteHandler implementation. ASP.NET Pages now include a RouteData collection that will contain route information. Retrieving route data is now a lot easier by simply using this.RouteData.Values["routeKey"] where the routeKey is the value specified in the route template (i.e., "users/{userId}" would use Values["userId"]). The Page class also has a GetRouteUrl() method that you can use to create URLs with route data values rather than hardcoding the URL: <%= this.GetRouteUrl("users",new { userId="ricks" }) %> You can also use the new Expression syntax using <%$RouteUrl %> to accomplish something similar, which can be easier to embed into Page or MVC View code: <a runat="server" href='<%$RouteUrl:RouteName=user, id=ricks %>'>Visit User</a> Finally, the Response object also includes a new RedirectToRoute() method to build a route url for redirection without hardcoding the URL. Response.RedirectToRoute("users", new { userId = "ricks" }); All of these routines are helpers that have been integrated into the core ASP.NET engine to make it easier to create routes and retrieve route data, which hopefully will result in more people taking advantage of routing in ASP.NET. To find out more about the routing improvements you can check out Dan Maharry's blog which has a couple of nice blog entries on this subject: http://tinyurl.com/37trutj and http://tinyurl.com/39tt5w5. Session State Improvements Session state is an often used and abused feature in ASP.NET and version 4.0 introduces a few enhancements geared towards making session state more efficient and to minimize at least some of the ill effects of overuse. The first improvement affects out of process session state, which is typically used in web farm environments or for sites that store application sensitive data that must survive AppDomain restarts (which in my opinion is just about any application). When using OutOfProc session state, ASP.NET serializes all the data in the session statebag into a blob that gets carried over the network and stored either in the State server or SQL Server via the Session provider. Version 4.0 provides some improvement in this serialization of the session data by offering an enableCompression option on the web.Config <Session> section, which forces the serialized session state to be compressed. Depending on the type of data that is being serialized, this compression can reduce the size of the data travelling over the wire by as much as a third. It works best on string data, but can also reduce the size of binary data. In addition, ASP.NET 4.0 now offers a way to programmatically turn session state on or off as part of the request processing queue. In prior versions, the only way to specify whether session state is available is by implementing a marker interface on the HTTP handler implementation. In ASP.NET 4.0, you can now turn session state on and off programmatically via HttpContext.Current.SetSessionStateBehavior() as part of the ASP.NET module pipeline processing as long as it occurs before the AquireRequestState pipeline event. Output Cache Provider Output caching in ASP.NET has been a very useful but potentially memory intensive feature. The default OutputCache mechanism works through in-memory storage that persists generated output based on various lifetime related parameters. While this works well enough for many intended scenarios, it also can quickly cause runaway memory consumption as the cache fills up and serves many variations of pages on your site. ASP.NET 4.0 introduces a provider model for the OutputCache module so it becomes possible to plug-in custom storage strategies for cached pages. One of the goals also appears to be to consolidate some of the different cache storage mechanisms used in .NET in general to a generic Windows AppFabric framework in the future, so various different mechanisms like OutputCache, the non-Page specific ASP.NET cache and possibly even session state eventually can use the same caching engine for storage of persisted data both in memory and out of process scenarios. For developers, the OutputCache provider feature means that you can now extend caching on your own by implementing a custom Cache provider based on the System.Web.Caching.OutputCacheProvider class. You can find more info on creating an Output Cache provider in Gunnar Peipman's blog at: http://tinyurl.com/2vt6g7l. Response.RedirectPermanent ASP.NET 4.0 includes features to issue a permanent redirect that issues as an HTTP 301 Moved Permanently response rather than the standard 302 Redirect respond. In pre-4.0 versions you had to manually create your permanent redirect by setting the Status and Status code properties – Response.RedirectPermanent() makes this operation more obvious and discoverable. There's also a Response.RedirectToRoutePermanent() which provides permanent redirection of route Urls. Preloading of Applications ASP.NET 4.0 provides a new feature to preload ASP.NET applications on startup, which is meant to provide a more consistent startup experience. If your application has a lengthy startup cycle it can appear very slow to serve data to clients while the application is warming up and loading initial resources. So rather than serve these startup requests slowly in ASP.NET 4.0, you can force the application to initialize itself first before even accepting requests for processing. This feature works only on IIS 7.5 (Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2) and works in combination with IIS. You can set up a worker process in IIS 7.5 to always be running, which starts the Application Pool worker process immediately. ASP.NET 4.0 then allows you to specify site-specific settings by setting the serverAutoStartEnabled on a particular site along with an optional serviceAutoStartProvider class that can be used to receive "startup events" when the application starts up. This event in turn can be used to configure the application and optionally pre-load cache data and other information required by the app on startup.  The configuration settings need to be made in applicationhost.config: <sites> <site name="WebApplication2" id="1"> <application path="/" serviceAutoStartEnabled="true" serviceAutoStartProvider="PreWarmup" /> </site> </sites> <serviceAutoStartProviders> <add name="PreWarmup" type="PreWarmupProvider,MyAssembly" /> </serviceAutoStartProviders> Hooking up a warm up provider is optional so you can omit the provider definition and reference. If you do define it here's what it looks like: public class PreWarmupProvider System.Web.Hosting.IProcessHostPreloadClient { public void Preload(string[] parameters) { // initialization for app } } This code fires and while it's running, ASP.NET/IIS will hold requests from hitting the pipeline. So until this code completes the application will not start taking requests. The idea is that you can perform any pre-loading of resources and cache values so that the first request will be ready to perform at optimal performance level without lag. Runtime Performance Improvements According to Microsoft, there have also been a number of invisible performance improvements in the internals of the ASP.NET runtime that should make ASP.NET 4.0 applications run more efficiently and use less resources. These features come without any change requirements in applications and are virtually transparent, except that you get the benefits by updating to ASP.NET 4.0. Summary The core feature set changes are minimal which continues a tradition of small incremental changes to the ASP.NET runtime. ASP.NET has been proven as a solid platform and I'm actually rather happy to see that most of the effort in this release went into stability, performance and usability improvements rather than a massive amount of new features. The new functionality added in 4.0 is minimal but very useful. A lot of people are still running pure .NET 2.0 applications these days and have stayed off of .NET 3.5 for some time now. I think that version 4.0 with its full .NET runtime rev and assembly and configuration consolidation will make an attractive platform for developers to update to. If you're a Web Forms developer in particular, ASP.NET 4.0 includes a host of new features in the Web Forms engine that are significant enough to warrant a quick move to .NET 4.0. I'll cover those changes in my next column. Until then, I suggest you give ASP.NET 4.0 a spin and see for yourself how the new features can help you out. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 01, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 01, 2012Popular ReleasesMetodología General Ajustada - MGA: 01.09.08: Cambios John: Cambios en el MDI: Habilitación del menú e ícono de Imprimir. Deshabilitación de menú Ayuda y opciones de Importar y Exportar del menú Proyectos temporalmente. Integración con código de Crystal Report. Validaciones con Try-Catch al generar los reportes, personalización de los formularios en estilos y botones y validación de selección de tipo de reporte. Creación de instalador con TODOS los cambios y la creación de las carpetas asociadas a los RPT.WatchersNET CKEditor™ Provider for DotNetNuke®: CKEditor Provider 1.14.01: Whats NewAdded New Plugin "Ventrian News Articles Link Selector" to select an Article Link from the News Article Module (This Plugin is not visible by default in your Toolbar, you need to manually add the 'newsarticleslinks' to your toolbarset) http://www.watchersnet.de/Portals/0/screenshots/dnn/CKEditorNewsArticlesLinks.png File-Browser: Added Paging to the Files List. You can define the Page Size in the Options (Default Value: 20) http://www.watchersnet.de/Portals/0/screenshots/dnn/CKEdito...MyRouter (Virtual WiFi Router): MyRouter 1.0 (Beta): A friendlier User Interface. A logger file to catch exceptions so you may send it to use to improve and fix any bugs that may occur. A feedback form because we always love hearing what you guy's think of MyRouter. Check for update menu item for you to stay up to date will the latest changes. Facebook fan page so you may spread the word and share MyRouter with friends and family And Many other exciting features were sure your going to love!WPF Sound Visualization Library: WPF SVL 0.3 (Source, Binaries, Examples, Help): Version 0.3 of WPFSVL. This includes three new controls: an equalizer, a digital clock, and a time editor.Thai Flood Watch: Thai Flood Watch - Source: non commercial use only ** This project supported by Department of Computer Science KhonKaen University Thailand.ZXing.Net: ZXing.Net 0.4.0.0: sync with rev. 2196 of the java version important fix for RGBLuminanceSource generating barcode bitmaps Windows Phone demo client (only tested with emulator, because I don't have a Windows Phone) Barcode generation support for Windows Forms demo client Webcam support for Windows Forms demo clientOrchard Project: Orchard 1.4: Please read our release notes for Orchard 1.4: http://docs.orchardproject.net/Documentation/Orchard-1-4-Release-Notes.NET Assembly Information: Assembly Information 2.1.0.1: - Fixed the issue in which AnyCPU binaries were shown as 32bit - Added support to show the errors in-case if some dlls failed to load.FluentData -Micro ORM with a fluent API that makes it simple to query a database: FluentData version 1.2: New features: - QueryValues method - Added support for automapping to enumerations (both int and string are supported). Fixed 2 reported issues.NetSqlAzMan - .NET SQL Authorization Manager: 3.6.0.15: 3.6.0.15 28-Feb-2012 • Fix: The communication object, System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannel, cannot be used for communication because it is in the Faulted state. Work Item 10435: http://netsqlazman.codeplex.com/workitem/10435 • Fix: Made StorageCache thread safe. Thanks to tangrl. • Fix: Members property of SqlAzManApplicationGroup is not functioning. Thanks to tangrl. Work Item 10267: http://netsqlazman.codeplex.com/workitem/10267 • Fix: Indexer are making database calls. Thanks to t...SCCM Client Actions Tool: Client Actions Tool v1.1: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.1 is the latest version. It comes with following changes since last version: Added stop button to stop the ongoing process. Added action "Query update status". Added option "saveOnlineComputers" in config.ini to enable saving list of online computers from last session. Default value for "LatestClientVersion" set to SP2 R3 (4.00.6487.2157). Wuauserv service manual startup mode is considered healthy on Windows 7. Errors are now suppressed in checkReleases...Kinect PowerPoint Control: Kinect PowerPoint Control v1.1: Updated for Kinect SDK 1.0.SharpCompress - a fully native C# library for RAR, 7Zip, Zip, Tar, GZip, BZip2: SharpCompress 0.8: API Updates: SOLID Extract Method for Archives (7Zip and RAR). ExtractAllEntries method on Archive classes will extract archives as a streaming file. This can offer better 7Zip extraction performance if any of the entries are solid. The IsSolid method on 7Zip archives will return true if any are solid. Removed IExtractionListener was removed in favor of events. Unit tests show example. Bug fixes: PPMd passes tests plus other fixes (Thanks Pavel) Zip used to always write a Post Descri...Social Network Importer for NodeXL: SocialNetImporter(v.1.3): This new version includes: - Download new networks for Facebook fan pages. - New options for downloading more posts - Bug fixes To use the new graph data provider, do the following: Unzip the Zip file into the "PlugIns" folder that can be found in the NodeXL installation folder (i.e "C:\Program Files\Social Media Research Foundation\NodeXL Excel Template\PlugIns") Open NodeXL template and you can access the new importer from the "Import" menuASP.NET REST Services Framework: Release 1.1 - Standard version: Beginning from v1.1 the REST-services Framework is compatible with ASP.NET Routing model as well with CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) principle. These two are often important when building REST API functionality within your application. It also includes ability to apply Filters to a class to target all WebRest methods, as well as some performance enhancements. New version includes Metadata Explorer providing ability exploring the existing services that becomes essential as the number ...SQL Live Monitor: SQL Live Monitor 1.31: A quick fix to make it this version work with SQL 2012. Version 2 already has 2012 working, but am still developing the UI in version 2, so this is just an interim fix to allow user to monitor SQL 2012.Content Slider Module for DotNetNuke: 01.02.00: This release has the following updates and new features: Feature: One-Click Enabling of Pager Setting Feature: Cache Sliders for Performance Feature: Configurable Cache Setting Enhancement: Transitions can be Selected Bug: Secure Folder Images not Viewable Bug: Sliders Disappear on Postback Bug: Remote Images Cause Error Bug: Deleted Images Cause Error System Requirements DotNetNuke v06.00.00 or newer .Net Framework v3.5 SP1 or newer SQL Server 2005 or newerImage Resizer for Windows: Image Resizer 3 Preview 3: Here is yet another iteration toward what will eventually become Image Resizer 3. This release is stable. However, I'm calling it a preview since there are still many features I'd still like to add before calling it complete. Updated on February 28 to fix an issue with installing on multi-user machines. As usual, here is my progress report. Done Preview 3 Fix: 3206 3076 3077 5688 Fix: 7420 Fix: 7527 Fix: 7576 7612 Preview 2 6308 6309 Fix: 7339 Fix: 7357 Preview 1 UI...Finestra Virtual Desktops: 2.5.4500: This is a bug fix release for version 2.5. It fixes several things and adds a couple of minor features. See the 2.5 release notes for more information on the major new features in that version. Important - If Finestra crashes on startup for you, you must install the Visual C++ 2010 runtime from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=5555. Fixes a bug with window animations not refreshing the screen on XP and with DWM off Fixes a bug with with crashing on XP due to a bug in t...Media Companion: MC 3.432b Release: General Now remembers window location. Catching a few more exceptions when an image is blank TV A couple of UI tweaks Movies Fixed the actor name displaying HTML Fixed crash when using Save files as "movie.nfo", "movie.tbn", & "fanart.jpg" New CSV template for HTML output function Added <createdate> tag for HTML output A couple of UI tweaks Known Issues Multiepisodes are not handled correctly in MC. The created nfo is valid, but they are not displayed in MC correctly & saving the...New Projectsabac: abac cn websiteAION Launcher: simple aion launcher...just edit the background image of your choosing inside the code and other things such as the links for the buttons and the ip adress and port of the serverAXTFSTool: Dynamics AX tool that connects to your project's TFS and lists the objects your colleagues have changed. Written in C#, still under development and improvements. Useful for team leaders, deployment managers, etc.cookieTopo: Topo map viewerCrmFetchKit.js: Simple Library at allows the execution of fetchxml queries via JavaScript for Dynamics CRM 2011 (using the new WCF endpoints). Like the CrmRestKit this framework uses the promise/A capacities of jQuery. The code and the idea for this framework bases on the CrmServiceToolkit (http://crmtoolkit.codeplex.com/) developed by Daniel Cai. cy univerX engine: ????????DNSAPI.NET: A common API for managing DNS servers on Windows. This project is based on the work I started back in 2002 when I needed to create a web front-end for Windows' DNS server using the .Net framework. The plan is to expand on the project and include support for the BIND server on Windows too. ego.net: ego.netfdTFS: Team Foundation Server Source Control Plugin for FlashDevelopGeoWPS: GeoWPS is an implementation of the OGC WPS. It will be developed in C#. IThink: A new project.King Garden: Boy King's .net practical projects.King Garret: Boy King's .net learning projects.LottoCheck: Follow LottoNot-Terraria: This is a like terraria game but NOT terrariaPassword Protector: Password Protector SharePoint 2010 BlobCache Manager: Manage your web application's blobcache settings directly in the central administration.SharePoint 2010 SilverLight Multiple File Uploader: SharePoint 2010 SilverLight Multiple File Uploader for Documents Libraries with MetaData.Sharepoint Tool Collection: I want to Integrate Various Utilities of Sharepoint at one place. It is for easy working of user or developer. Ex-1. A utility which takes some params & csv file and upload 100s of items on the sharepoint list easily. Ex-2 A utility to upload documents in a library. etc.SQLCLR Cmd Exec Framework Example: For users of MS SQL Server, xp_cmdshell is a utility that we usually want to have disabled. However there are still cases where calling a command line is needed. This project provides an framework/example to make command line calls. It is not meant as an xp_cmdshell replacement but as a workaround.Symmetric Designs Python 3.2: Symmetric Designs for Python 3.2 helps graphical artists to design and develop their own designs freestyle. It uses the pygame module for Python 3.2. It can also be analysed in order to get a grasp of graphics programming in Python.Terminsoft open CLR libraries: Terminsoft open CLR libraries. The first is Terminsoft.Intervals, intended for modeling the sets of intervals with elements, the comparison operation is defined for. The second is Terminsoft.Syntax, intended for text parsing and transformation and built upon regular expressions.Thai Flood Watch: Thai Flood Watch provides useful information, up-to-date and visual access to the major canal in Bangkok, Thailand using data from department of drainage and sewerage. Easily monitor river and canal flow information in Bangkok area, right from your hand.TheNerd: Sample video game source code. Using Sunburn.Unity.WebAPI: A library that allows simple Integration of Microsoft's Unity IoC container with ASP.NET's WebAPI. This project includes a bespoke DependencyResolver that creates a child container per HTTP request and disposes of all registered IDisposable instances at the end of the request.Wholemy.RemoteTouch: The project is a remote touch-sensitive keyboard with a customizable interface which allows to supplement control of another computer, regardless of the wires. For example, if you have not so fast Tablet PC - a client and a fast desktop computer - the server using the network.WindowPlace: WindowPlace makes it possible to save Window positions and sizes to a profile. Switching between profiles will effortlessly move and resize your windows. Help improve productivity - especially for multi-monitor systems. Developed in C# using WPF and a few Windows API calls in the background. WP Error Manager (Devv.Core.WPErrorManager): Library to log, handle and report errors on Windows Phone 7 apps. Fully customizable and extremely easy to implement. Works with any WP7 app. Tested with the emulator, Nokia Lumia 800 and Samsung Focus Flash.WPMatic: Windows Phone7 App to manage Homematic (eQ-3) Devices. The App is like the Homematic Central Configuration Unit (CCU) in German.www.Nabaza.com Freeware and Ebooks: www.Nabaza.com Freeware and Ebooks by William R. NabazaZap: Zap is a light weight .NET communication framework. It is designed for programs running in local area network. Zap provides code generation tool that enables user to call remote methods, add/remote event listener to remote objects, while hides the lower details.

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• Built-in GZip/Deflate Compression on IIS 7.x

  - by Rick Strahl

  IIS 7 improves internal compression functionality dramatically making it much easier than previous versions to take advantage of compression that’s built-in to the Web server. IIS 7 also supports dynamic compression which allows automatic compression of content created in your own applications (ASP.NET or otherwise!). The scheme is based on content-type sniffing and so it works with any kind of Web application framework. While static compression on IIS 7 is super easy to set up and turned on by default for most text content (text/*, which includes HTML and CSS, as well as for JavaScript, Atom, XAML, XML), setting up dynamic compression is a bit more involved, mostly because the various default compression settings are set in multiple places down the IIS –> ASP.NET hierarchy. Let’s take a look at each of the two approaches available: Static Compression Compresses static content from the hard disk. IIS can cache this content by compressing the file once and storing the compressed file on disk and serving the compressed alias whenever static content is requested and it hasn’t changed. The overhead for this is minimal and should be aggressively enabled. Dynamic Compression Works against application generated output from applications like your ASP.NET apps. Unlike static content, dynamic content must be compressed every time a page that requests it regenerates its content. As such dynamic compression has a much bigger impact than static caching. How Compression is configured Compression in IIS 7.x  is configured with two .config file elements in the <system.WebServer> space. The elements can be set anywhere in the IIS/ASP.NET configuration pipeline all the way from ApplicationHost.config down to the local web.config file. The following is from the the default setting in ApplicationHost.config (in the %windir%\System32\inetsrv\config forlder) on IIS 7.5 with a couple of small adjustments (added json output and enabled dynamic compression): <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <configuration> <system.webServer> <httpCompression directory="%SystemDrive%\inetpub\temp\IIS Temporary Compressed Files"> <scheme name="gzip" dll="%Windir%\system32\inetsrv\gzip.dll" staticCompressionLevel="9" /> <dynamicTypes> <add mimeType="text/*" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="message/*" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="application/x-javascript" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="application/json" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="*/*" enabled="false" /> </dynamicTypes> <staticTypes> <add mimeType="text/*" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="message/*" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="application/x-javascript" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="application/atom+xml" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="application/xaml+xml" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="*/*" enabled="false" /> </staticTypes> </httpCompression> <urlCompression doStaticCompression="true" doDynamicCompression="true" /> </system.webServer> </configuration> You can find documentation on the httpCompression and urlCompression keys here respectively: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms690689%28v=vs.90%29.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa347437%28v=vs.90%29.aspx The httpCompression Element – What and How to compress Basically httpCompression configures what types to compress and how to compress them. It specifies the DLL that handles gzip encoding and the types of documents that are to be compressed. Types are set up based on mime-types which looks at returned Content-Type headers in HTTP responses. For example, I added the application/json to mime type to my dynamic compression types above to allow that content to be compressed as well since I have quite a bit of AJAX content that gets sent to the client. The UrlCompression Element – Enables and Disables Compression The urlCompression element is a quick way to turn compression on and off. By default static compression is enabled server wide, and dynamic compression is disabled server wide. This might be a bit confusing because the httpCompression element also has a doDynamicCompression attribute which is set to true by default, but the urlCompression attribute by the same name actually overrides it. The urlCompression element only has three attributes: doStaticCompression, doDynamicCompression and dynamicCompressionBeforeCache. The doCompression attributes are the final determining factor whether compression is enabled, so it’s a good idea to be explcit! The default for doDynamicCompression='false”, but doStaticCompression="true"! Static Compression is enabled by Default, Dynamic Compression is not Because static compression is very efficient in IIS 7 it’s enabled by default server wide and there probably is no reason to ever change that setting. Dynamic compression however, since it’s more resource intensive, is turned off by default. If you want to enable dynamic compression there are a few quirks you have to deal with, namely that enabling it in ApplicationHost.config doesn’t work. Setting: <urlCompression doDynamicCompression="true" /> in applicationhost.config appears to have no effect and I had to move this element into my local web.config to make dynamic compression work. This is actually a smart choice because you’re not likely to want dynamic compression in every application on a server. Rather dynamic compression should be applied selectively where it makes sense. However, nowhere is it documented that the setting in applicationhost.config doesn’t work (or more likely is overridden somewhere and disabled lower in the configuration hierarchy). So: remember to set doDynamicCompression=”true” in web.config!!! How Static Compression works Static compression works against static content loaded from files on disk. Because this content is static and not bound to change frequently – such as .js, .css and static HTML content – it’s fairly easy for IIS to compress and then cache the compressed content. The way this works is that IIS compresses the files into a special folder on the server’s hard disk and then reads the content from this location if already compressed content is requested and the underlying file resource has not changed. The semantics of serving an already compressed file are very efficient – IIS still checks for file changes, but otherwise just serves the already compressed file from the compression folder. The compression folder is located at: %windir%\inetpub\temp\IIS Temporary Compressed Files\ApplicationPool\ If you look into the subfolders you’ll find compressed files: These files are pre-compressed and IIS serves them directly to the client until the underlying files are changed. As I mentioned before – static compression is on by default and there’s very little reason to turn that functionality off as it is efficient and just works out of the box. The one tweak you might want to do is to set the compression level to maximum. Since IIS only compresses content very infrequently it would make sense to apply maximum compression. You can do this with the staticCompressionLevel setting on the scheme element: <scheme name="gzip" dll="%Windir%\system32\inetsrv\gzip.dll" staticCompressionLevel="9" /> Other than that the default settings are probably just fine. Dynamic Compression – not so fast! By default dynamic compression is disabled and that’s actually quite sensible – you should use dynamic compression very carefully and think about what content you want to compress. In most applications it wouldn’t make sense to compress *all* generated content as it would generate a significant amount of overhead. Scott Fortsyth has a great post that details some of the performance numbers and how much impact dynamic compression has. Depending on how busy your server is you can play around with compression and see what impact it has on your server’s performance. There are also a few settings you can tweak to minimize the overhead of dynamic compression. Specifically the httpCompression key has a couple of CPU related keys that can help minimize the impact of Dynamic Compression on a busy server: dynamicCompressionDisableCpuUsage dynamicCompressionEnableCpuUsage By default these are set to 90 and 50 which means that when the CPU hits 90% compression will be disabled until CPU utilization drops back down to 50%. Again this is actually quite sensible as it utilizes CPU power from compression when available and falling off when the threshold has been hit. It’s a good way some of that extra CPU power on your big servers to use when utilization is low. Again these settings are something you likely have to play with. I would probably set the upper limit a little lower than 90% maybe around 70% to make this a feature that kicks in only if there’s lots of power to spare. I’m not really sure how accurate these CPU readings that IIS uses are as Cpu usage on Web Servers can spike drastically even during low loads. Don’t trust settings – do some load testing or monitor your server in a live environment to see what values make sense for your environment. Finally for dynamic compression I tend to add one Mime type for JSON data, since a lot of my applications send large chunks of JSON data over the wire. You can do that with the application/json content type: <add mimeType="application/json" enabled="true" /> What about Deflate Compression? The default compression is GZip. The documentation hints that you can use a different compression scheme and mentions Deflate compression. And sure enough you can change the compression settings to: <scheme name="deflate" dll="%Windir%\system32\inetsrv\gzip.dll" staticCompressionLevel="9" /> to get deflate style compression. The deflate algorithm produces slightly more compact output so I tend to prefer it over GZip but more HTTP clients (other than browsers) support GZip than Deflate so be careful with this option if you build Web APIs. I also had some issues with the above value actually being applied right away. Changing the scheme in applicationhost.config didn’t show up on the site  right away. It required me to do a full IISReset to get that change to show up before I saw the change over to deflate compressed content. Content was slightly more compressed with deflate – not sure if it’s worth the slightly less common compression type, but the option at least is available. IIS 7 finally makes GZip Easy In summary IIS 7 makes GZip easy finally, even if the configuration settings are a bit obtuse and the documentation is seriously lacking. But once you know the basic settings I’ve described here and the fact that you can override all of this in your local web.config it’s pretty straight forward to configure GZip support and tweak it exactly to your needs. Static compression is a total no brainer as it adds very little overhead compared to direct static file serving and provides solid compression. Dynamic Compression is a little more tricky as it does add some overhead to servers, so it probably will require some tweaking to get the right balance of CPU load vs. compression ratios. Looking at large sites like Amazon, Yahoo, NewEgg etc. – they all use Related Content Code based ASP.NET GZip Caveats HttpWebRequest and GZip Responses © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in IIS7   ASP.NET  

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• Building a jQuery Plug-in to make an HTML Table scrollable

  - by Rick Strahl

  Today I got a call from a customer and we were looking over an older application that uses a lot of tables to display financial and other assorted data. The application is mostly meta-data driven with lots of layout formatting automatically driven through meta data rather than through explicit hand coded HTML layouts. One of the problems in this apps are tables that display a non-fixed amount of data. The users of this app don't want to use paging to see more data, but instead want to display overflow data using a scrollbar. Many of the forms are very densely populated, often with multiple data tables that display a few rows of data in the UI at the most. This sort of layout does not lend itself well to paging, but works much better with scrollable data. Unfortunately scrollable tables are not easily created. HTML Tables are mangy beasts as anybody who's done any sort of Web development knows. Tables are finicky when it comes to styling and layout, and they have many funky quirks, especially when it comes to scrolling both of the table rows themselves or even the child columns. There's no built-in way to make tables scroll and to lock headers while you do, and while you can embed a table (or anything really) into a scrolling div with something like this: <div style="position:relative; overflow: hidden; overflow-y: scroll; height: 200px; width: 400px;"> <table id="table" style="width: 100%" class="blackborder" > <thead> <tr class="gridheader"> <th>Column 1</th> <th>Column 2</th> <th>Column 3</th> <th >Column 4</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>Column 1 Content</td> <td>Column 2 Content</td> <td>Column 3 Content</td> <td>Column 4 Content</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Column 1 Content</td> <td>Column 2 Content</td> <td>Column 3 Content</td> <td>Column 4 Content</td> </tr> … </tbody> </table> </div> </div> that won't give a very satisfying visual experience: Both the header and body scroll which looks odd. You lose context as soon as the header scrolls off the top and when you reach the bottom of the list the bottom outline of the table shows which also looks off. The the side bar shows all the way down the length of the table yet another visual miscue. In a pinch this will work, but it's ugly. What's out there? Before we go further here you should know that there are a few capable grid plug-ins out there already. Among them: Flexigrid (can work of any table as well as with AJAX data) jQuery Scrollable Table Plug-in (feature similar to what I need but not quite) jqGrid (mostly an Ajax Grid which is very powerful and works very well) But in the end none of them fit the bill of what I needed in this situation. All of these require custom CSS and some of them are fairly complex to restyle. Others are AJAX only or work better with AJAX loaded data. However, I need to actually try (as much as possible) to maintain the original styling of the tables without requiring extensive re-styling. Building the makeTableScrollable() Plug-in To make a table scrollable requires rearranging the table a bit. In the plug-in I built I create two <div> tags and split the table into two: one for the table header and one for the table body. The bottom <div> tag then contains only the table's row data and can be scrolled while the header stays fixed. Using jQuery the basic idea is pretty simple: You create the divs, copy the original table into the bottom, then clone the table, clear all content append the <thead> section, into new table and then copy that table into the second header <div>. Easy as pie, right? Unfortunately it's a bit more complicated than that as it's tricky to get the width of the table right to account for the scrollbar (by adding a small column) and making sure the borders properly line up for the two tables. A lot of style settings have to be made to ensure the table is a fixed size, to remove and reattach borders, to add extra space to allow for the scrollbar and so forth. The end result of my plug-in is a table with a scrollbar. Using the same table I used earlier the result looks like this: To create it, I use the following jQuery plug-in logic to select my table and run the makeTableScrollable() plug-in against the selector: $("#table").makeTableScrollable( { cssClass:"blackborder"} ); Without much further ado, here's the short code for the plug-in: (function ($) { $.fn.makeTableScrollable = function (options) { return this.each(function () { var $table = $(this); var opt = { // height of the table height: "250px", // right padding added to support the scrollbar rightPadding: "10px", // cssclass used for the wrapper div cssClass: "" } $.extend(opt, options); var $thead = $table.find("thead"); var $ths = $thead.find("th"); var id = $table.attr("id"); var cssClass = $table.attr("class"); if (!id) id = "_table_" + new Date().getMilliseconds().ToString(); $table.width("+=" + opt.rightPadding); $table.css("border-width", 0); // add a column to all rows of the table var first = true; $table.find("tr").each(function () { var row = $(this); if (first) { row.append($("<th>").width(opt.rightPadding)); first = false; } else row.append($("<td>").width(opt.rightPadding)); }); // force full sizing on each of the th elemnts $ths.each(function () { var $th = $(this); $th.css("width", $th.width()); }); // Create the table wrapper div var $tblDiv = $("<div>").css({ position: "relative", overflow: "hidden", overflowY: "scroll" }) .addClass(opt.cssClass); var width = $table.width(); $tblDiv.width(width).height(opt.height) .attr("id", id + "_wrapper") .css("border-top", "none"); // Insert before $tblDiv $tblDiv.insertBefore($table); // then move the table into it $table.appendTo($tblDiv); // Clone the div for header var $hdDiv = $tblDiv.clone(); $hdDiv.empty(); var width = $table.width(); $hdDiv.attr("style", "") .css("border-bottom", "none") .width(width) .attr("id", id + "_wrapper_header"); // create a copy of the table and remove all children var $newTable = $($table).clone(); $newTable.empty() .attr("id", $table.attr("id") + "_header"); $thead.appendTo($newTable); $hdDiv.insertBefore($tblDiv); $newTable.appendTo($hdDiv); $table.css("border-width", 0); }); } })(jQuery); Oh sweet spaghetti code :-) The code starts out by dealing the parameters that can be passed in the options object map: height The height of the full table/structure. The height of the outside wrapper container. Defaults to 200px. rightPadding The padding that is added to the right of the table to account for the scrollbar. Creates a column of this width and injects it into the table. If too small the rightmost column might get truncated. if too large the empty column might show. cssClass The CSS class of the wrapping container that appears to wrap the table. If you want a border around your table this class should probably provide it since the plug-in removes the table border. The rest of the code is obtuse, but pretty straight forward. It starts by creating a new column in the table to accommodate the width of the scrollbar and avoid clipping of text in the rightmost column. The width of the columns is explicitly set in the header elements to force the size of the table to be fixed and to provide the same sizing when the THEAD section is moved to a new copied table later. The table wrapper div is created, formatted and the table is moved into it. The new wrapper div is cloned for the header wrapper and configured. Finally the actual table is cloned and cleared of all elements. The original table's THEAD section is then moved into the new table. At last the new table is added to the header <div>, and the header <div> is inserted before the table wrapper <div>. I'm always amazed how easy jQuery makes it to do this sort of re-arranging, and given of what's happening the amount of code is rather small. Disclaimer: Your mileage may vary A word of warning: I make no guarantees about the code above. It's a first cut and I provided this here mainly to demonstrate the concepts of decomposing and reassembling an HTML layout :-) which jQuery makes so nice and easy. I tested this component against the typical scenarios we plan on using it for which are tables that use a few well known styles (or no styling at all). I suspect if you have complex styling on your <table> tag that things might not go so well. If you plan on using this plug-in you might want to minimize your styling of the table tag and defer any border formatting using the class passed in via the cssClass parameter, which ends up on the two wrapper div's that wrap the header and body rows. There's also no explicit support for footers. I rarely if ever use footers (when not using paging that is), so I didn't feel the need to add footer support. However, if you need that it's not difficult to add - the logic is the same as adding the header. The plug-in relies on a well-formatted table that has THEAD and TBODY sections along with TH tags in the header. Note that ASP.NET WebForm DataGrids and GridViews by default do not generate well-formatted table HTML. You can look at my Adding proper THEAD sections to a GridView post for more info on how to get a GridView to render properly. The plug-in has no dependencies other than jQuery. Even with the limitations in mind I hope this might be useful to some of you. I know I've already identified a number of places in my own existing applications where I will be plugging this in almost immediately. Resources Download Sample and Plug-in code Latest version in the West Wind Web & AJAX Toolkit Repository © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in jQuery  HTML  ASP.NET  

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• AngularJs ng-cloak Problems on large Pages

  - by Rick Strahl

  I’ve been working on a rather complex and large Angular page. Unlike a typical AngularJs SPA style ‘application’ this particular page is just that: a single page with a large amount of data on it that has to be visible all at once. The problem is that when this large page loads it flickers and displays template markup briefly before kicking into its actual content rendering. This is is what the Angular ng-cloak is supposed to address, but in this case I had no luck getting it to work properly. This application is a shop floor app where workers need to see all related information in one big screen view, so some of the benefits of Angular’s routing and view swapping features couldn’t be applied. Instead, we decided to have one very big view but lots of ng-controllers and directives to break out the logic for code separation. For code separation this works great – there are a number of small controllers that deal with their own individual and isolated application concerns. For HTML separation we used partial ASP.NET MVC Razor Views which made breaking out the HTML into manageable pieces super easy and made migration of this page from a previous server side Razor page much easier. We were also able to leverage most of our server side localization without a lot of  changes as a bonus. But as a result of this choice the initial HTML document that loads is rather large – even without any data loaded into it, resulting in a fairly large DOM tree that Angular must manage. Large Page and Angular Startup The problem on this particular page is that there’s quite a bit of markup – 35k’s worth of markup without any data loaded, in fact. It’s a large HTML page with a complex DOM tree. There are quite a lot of Angular {{ }} markup expressions in the document. Angular provides the ng-cloak directive to try and hide the element it cloaks so that you don’t see the flash of these markup expressions when the page initially loads before Angular has a chance to render the data into the markup expressions.<div id="mainContainer" class="mainContainer boxshadow" ng-app="app" ng-cloak> Note the ng-cloak attribute on this element, which here is an outer wrapper element of the most of this large page’s content. ng-cloak is supposed to prevent displaying the content below it, until Angular has taken control and is ready to render the data into the templates. Alas, with this large page the end result unfortunately is a brief flicker of un-rendered markup which looks like this: It’s brief, but plenty ugly – right?  And depending on the speed of the machine this flash gets more noticeable with slow machines that take longer to process the initial HTML DOM. ng-cloak Styles ng-cloak works by temporarily hiding the marked up element and it does this by essentially applying a style that does this:[ng\:cloak], [ng-cloak], [data-ng-cloak], [x-ng-cloak], .ng-cloak, .x-ng-cloak { display: none !important; } This style is inlined as part of AngularJs itself. If you looking at the angular.js source file you’ll find this at the very end of the file:!angular.$$csp() && angular.element(document) .find('head') .prepend('<style type="text/css">@charset "UTF-8";[ng\\:cloak],[ng-cloak],' + '[data-ng-cloak],[x-ng-cloak],.ng-cloak,.x-ng-cloak,' + '.ng-hide{display:none !important;}ng\\:form{display:block;}' '.ng-animate-block-transitions{transition:0s all!important;-webkit-transition:0s all!important;}' + '</style>'); This is is meant to initially hide any elements that contain the ng-cloak attribute or one of the other Angular directive permutation markup. Unfortunately on this particular web page ng-cloak had no effect – I still see the flicker. Why doesn’t ng-cloak work? The problem is of course – timing. The problem is that Angular actually needs to get control of the page before it ever starts doing anything like process even the ng-cloak attribute (or style etc). Because this page is rather large (about 35k of non-data HTML) it takes a while for the DOM to actually plow through the HTML. With the Angular <script> tag defined at the bottom of the page after the HTML DOM content there’s a slight delay which causes the flicker. For smaller pages the initial DOM load/parse cycle is so fast that the markup never shows, but with larger content pages it may show and become an annoying problem. Workarounds There a number of simple ways around this issue and some of them are hinted on in the Angular documentation. Load Angular Sooner One obvious thing that would help with this is to load Angular at the top of the page  BEFORE the DOM loads and that would give it much earlier control. The old ng-cloak documentation actually recommended putting the Angular.js script into the header of the page (apparently this was recently removed), but generally it’s not a good practice to load scripts in the header for page load performance. This is especially true if you load other libraries like jQuery which should be loaded prior to loading Angular so it can use jQuery rather than its own jqLite subset. This is not something I normally would like to do and also something that I’d likely forget in the future and end up right back here :-). Use ng-include for Child Content Angular supports nesting of child templates via the ng-include directive which essentially delay loads HTML content. This helps by removing a lot of the template content out of the main page and so getting control to Angular a lot sooner in order to hide the markup template content. In the application in question, I realize that in hindsight it might have been smarter to break this page out with client side ng-include directives instead of MVC Razor partial views we used to break up the page sections. Razor partial views give that nice separation as well, but in the end Razor puts humpty dumpty (ie. the HTML) back together into a whole single and rather large HTML document. Razor provides the logical separation, but still results in a large physical result document. But Razor also ended up being helpful to have a few security related blocks handled via server side template logic that simply excludes certain parts of the UI the user is not allowed to see – something that you can’t really do with client side exclusion like ng-hide/ng-show – client side content is always there whereas on the server side you can simply not send it to the client. Another reason I’m not a huge fan of ng-include is that it adds another HTTP hit to a request as templates are loaded from the server dynamically as needed. Given that this page was already heavy with resources adding another 10 separate ng-include directives wouldn’t be beneficial :-) ng-include is a valid option if you start from scratch and partition your logic. Of course if you don’t have complex pages, having completely separate views that are swapped in as they are accessed are even better, but we didn’t have this option due to the information having to be on screen all at once. Avoid using {{ }}  Expressions The biggest issue that ng-cloak attempts to address isn’t so much displaying the original content – it’s displaying empty {{ }} markup expression tags that get embedded into content. It gives you the dreaded “now you see it, now you don’t” effect where you sometimes see three separate rendering states: Markup junk, empty views, then views filled with data. If we can remove {{ }} expressions from the page you remove most of the perceived double draw effect as you would effectively start with a blank form and go straight to a filled form. To do this you can forego {{ }}  expressions and replace them with ng-bind directives on DOM elements. For example you can turn:<div class="list-item-name listViewOrderNo"> <a href='#'>{{lineItem.MpsOrderNo}}</a> </div>into:<div class="list-item-name listViewOrderNo"> <a href="#" ng-bind="lineItem.MpsOrderNo"></a> </div> to get identical results but because the {{ }}  expression has been removed there’s no double draw effect for this element. Again, not a great solution. The {{ }} syntax sure reads cleaner and is more fluent to type IMHO. In some cases you may also not have an outer element to attach ng-bind to which then requires you to artificially inject DOM elements into the page. This is especially painful if you have several consecutive values like {{Firstname}} {{Lastname}} for example. It’s an option though especially if you think of this issue up front and you don’t have a ton of expressions to deal with. Add the ng-cloak Styles manually You can also explicitly define the .css styles that Angular injects via code manually in your application’s style sheet. By doing so the styles become immediately available and so are applied right when the page loads – no flicker. I use the minimal:[ng-cloak] { display: none !important; } which works for:<div id="mainContainer" class="mainContainer dialog boxshadow" ng-app="app" ng-cloak> If you use one of the other combinations add the other CSS selectors as well or use the full style shown earlier. Angular will still load its version of the ng-cloak styling but it overrides those settings later, but this will do the trick of hiding the content before that CSS is injected into the page. Adding the CSS in your own style sheet works well, and is IMHO by far the best option. The nuclear option: Hiding the Content manually Using the explicit CSS is the best choice, so the following shouldn’t ever be necessary. But I’ll mention it here as it gives some insight how you can hide/show content manually on load for other frameworks or in your own markup based templates. Before I figured out that I could explicitly embed the CSS style into the page, I had tried to figure out why ng-cloak wasn’t doing its job. After wasting an hour getting nowhere I finally decided to just manually hide and show the container. The idea is simple – initially hide the container, then show it once Angular has done its initial processing and removal of the template markup from the page. You can manually hide the content and make it visible after Angular has gotten control. To do this I used:<div id="mainContainer" class="mainContainer boxshadow" ng-app="app" style="display:none"> Notice the display: none style that explicitly hides the element initially on the page. Then once Angular has run its initialization and effectively processed the template markup on the page you can show the content. For Angular this ‘ready’ event is the app.run() function:app.run( function ($rootScope, $location, cellService) { $("#mainContainer").show(); … }); This effectively removes the display:none style and the content displays. By the time app.run() fires the DOM is ready to displayed with filled data or at least empty data – Angular has gotten control. Edge Case Clearly this is an edge case. In general the initial HTML pages tend to be reasonably sized and the load time for the HTML and Angular are fast enough that there’s no flicker between the rendering times. This only becomes an issue as the initial pages get rather large. Regardless – if you have an Angular application it’s probably a good idea to add the CSS style into your application’s CSS (or a common shared one) just to make sure that content is always hidden. You never know how slow of a browser somebody might be running and while your super fast dev machine might not show any flicker, grandma’s old XP box very well might…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in Angular  JavaScript  CSS  HTML   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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• A jQuery Plug-in to monitor Html Element CSS Changes

  - by Rick Strahl

  Here's a scenario I've run into on a few occasions: I need to be able to monitor certain CSS properties on an HTML element and know when that CSS element changes. The need for this arose out of wanting to build generic components that could 'attach' themselves to other objects and monitor changes on the ‘parent’ object so the dependent object can adjust itself accordingly. What I wanted to create is a jQuery plug-in that allows me to specify a list of CSS properties to monitor and have a function fire in response to any change to any of those CSS properties. The result are the .watch() and .unwatch() jQuery plug-ins. Here’s a simple example page of this plug-in that demonstrates tracking changes to an element being moved with draggable and closable behavior: http://www.west-wind.com/WestWindWebToolkit/samples/Ajax/jQueryPluginSamples/WatcherPlugin.htm Try it with different browsers – IE and FireFox use the DOM event handlers and Chrome, Safari and Opera use setInterval handlers to manage this behavior. It should work in all of them but all but IE and FireFox will show a bit of lag between the changes in the main element and the shadow. The relevant HTML for this example is this fragment of a main <div> (#notebox) and an element that is to mimic a shadow (#shadow). <div class="containercontent"> <div id="notebox" style="width: 200px; height: 150px;position: absolute; z-index: 20; padding: 20px; background-color: lightsteelblue;"> Go ahead drag me around and close me! </div> <div id="shadow" style="background-color: Gray; z-index: 19;position:absolute;display: none;"> </div> </div> The watcher plug in is then applied to the main <div> and shadow in sync with the following plug-in code: <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function () { var counter = 0; $("#notebox").watch("top,left,height,width,display,opacity", function (data, i) { var el = $(this); var sh = $("#shadow"); var propChanged = data.props[i]; var valChanged = data.vals[i]; counter++; showStatus("Prop: " + propChanged + " value: " + valChanged + " " + counter); var pos = el.position(); var w = el.outerWidth(); var h = el.outerHeight(); sh.css({ width: w, height: h, left: pos.left + 5, top: pos.top + 5, display: el.css("display"), opacity: el.css("opacity") }); }) .draggable() .closable() .css("left", 10); }); </script> When you run this page as you drag the #notebox element the #shadow element will maintain and stay pinned underneath the #notebox element effectively keeping the shadow attached to the main element. Likewise, if you hide or fadeOut() the #notebox element the shadow will also go away – show the #notebox element and the shadow also re-appears because we are assigning the display property from the parent on the shadow. Note we’re attaching the .watch() plug-in to the #notebox element and have it fire whenever top,left,height,width,opacity or display CSS properties are changed. The passed data element contains a props[] and vals[] array that holds the properties monitored and their current values. An index passed as the second parm tells you which property has changed and what its current value is (propChanged/valChanged in the code above). The rest of the watcher handler code then deals with figuring out the main element’s position and recalculating and setting the shadow’s position using the jQuery .css() function. Note that this is just an example to demonstrate the watch() behavior here – this is not the best way to create a shadow. If you’re interested in a more efficient and cleaner way to handle shadows with a plug-in check out the .shadow() plug-in in ww.jquery.js (code search for fn.shadow) which uses native CSS features when available but falls back to a tracked shadow element on browsers that don’t support it, which is how this watch() plug-in came about in the first place :-) How does it work? The plug-in works by letting the user specify a list of properties to monitor as a comma delimited string and a handler function: el.watch("top,left,height,width,display,opacity", function (data, i) {}, 100, id) You can also specify an interval (if no DOM event monitoring isn’t available in the browser) and an ID that identifies the event handler uniquely. The watch plug-in works by hooking up to DOMAttrModified in FireFox, to onPropertyChanged in Internet Explorer, or by using a timer with setInterval to handle the detection of changes for other browsers. Unfortunately WebKit doesn’t support DOMAttrModified consistently at the moment so Safari and Chrome currently have to use the slower setInterval mechanism. In response to a changed property (or a setInterval timer hit) a JavaScript handler is fired which then runs through all the properties monitored and determines if and which one has changed. The DOM events fire on all property/style changes so the intermediate plug-in handler filters only those hits we’re interested in. If one of our monitored properties has changed the specified event handler function is called along with a data object and an index that identifies the property that’s changed in the data.props/data.vals arrays. The jQuery plugin to implement this functionality looks like this: (function($){ $.fn.watch = function (props, func, interval, id) { /// <summary> /// Allows you to monitor changes in a specific /// CSS property of an element by polling the value. /// when the value changes a function is called. /// The function called is called in the context /// of the selected element (ie. this) /// </summary> /// <param name="prop" type="String">CSS Properties to watch sep. by commas</param> /// <param name="func" type="Function"> /// Function called when the value has changed. /// </param> /// <param name="interval" type="Number"> /// Optional interval for browsers that don't support DOMAttrModified or propertychange events. /// Determines the interval used for setInterval calls. /// </param> /// <param name="id" type="String">A unique ID that identifies this watch instance on this element</param> /// <returns type="jQuery" /> if (!interval) interval = 100; if (!id) id = "_watcher"; return this.each(function () { var _t = this; var el$ = $(this); var fnc = function () { __watcher.call(_t, id) }; var data = { id: id, props: props.split(","), vals: [props.split(",").length], func: func, fnc: fnc, origProps: props, interval: interval, intervalId: null }; // store initial props and values $.each(data.props, function (i) { data.vals[i] = el$.css(data.props[i]); }); el$.data(id, data); hookChange(el$, id, data); }); function hookChange(el$, id, data) { el$.each(function () { var el = $(this); if (typeof (el.get(0).onpropertychange) == "object") el.bind("propertychange." + id, data.fnc); else if ($.browser.mozilla) el.bind("DOMAttrModified." + id, data.fnc); else data.intervalId = setInterval(data.fnc, interval); }); } function __watcher(id) { var el$ = $(this); var w = el$.data(id); if (!w) return; var _t = this; if (!w.func) return; // must unbind or else unwanted recursion may occur el$.unwatch(id); var changed = false; var i = 0; for (i; i < w.props.length; i++) { var newVal = el$.css(w.props[i]); if (w.vals[i] != newVal) { w.vals[i] = newVal; changed = true; break; } } if (changed) w.func.call(_t, w, i); // rebind event hookChange(el$, id, w); } } $.fn.unwatch = function (id) { this.each(function () { var el = $(this); var data = el.data(id); try { if (typeof (this.onpropertychange) == "object") el.unbind("propertychange." + id, data.fnc); else if ($.browser.mozilla) el.unbind("DOMAttrModified." + id, data.fnc); else clearInterval(data.intervalId); } // ignore if element was already unbound catch (e) { } }); return this; } })(jQuery); Note that there’s a corresponding .unwatch() plug-in that can be used to stop monitoring properties. The ID parameter is optional both on watch() and unwatch() – a standard name is used if you don’t specify one, but it’s a good idea to use unique names for each element watched to avoid overlap in event ids especially if you’re monitoring many elements. The syntax is: $.fn.watch = function(props, func, interval, id) props A comma delimited list of CSS style properties that are to be watched for changes. If any of the specified properties changes the function specified in the second parameter is fired. func The function fired in response to a changed styles. Receives this as the element changed and an object parameter that represents the watched properties and their respective values. The first parameter is passed in this structure: { id: watcherId, props: [], vals: [], func: thisFunc, fnc: internalHandler, origProps: strPropertyListOnWatcher }; A second parameter is the index of the changed property so data.props[i] or data.vals[i] gets the property and changed value. interval The interval for setInterval() for those browsers that don't support property watching in the DOM. In milliseconds. id An optional id that identifies this watcher. Required only if multiple watchers might be hooked up to the same element. The default is _watcher if not specified. It’s been a Journey I started building this plug-in about two years ago and had to make many modifications to it in response to changes in jQuery and also in browser behaviors. I think the latest round of changes made should make this plug-in fairly future proof going forward (although I hope there will be better cross-browser change event notifications in the future). One of the big problems I ran into had to do with recursive change notifications – it looks like starting with jQuery 1.44 and later, jQuery internally modifies element properties on some calls to some .css()  property retrievals and things like outerHeight/Width(). In IE this would cause nasty lock up issues at times. In response to this I changed the code to unbind the events when the handler function is called and then rebind when it exits. This also makes user code less prone to stack overflow recursion as you can actually change properties on the base element. It also means though that if you change one of the monitors properties in the handler the watch() handler won’t fire in response – you need to resort to a setTimeout() call instead to force the code to run outside of the handler: $("#notebox") el.watch("top,left,height,width,display,opacity", function (data, i) { var el = $(this); … // this makes el changes work setTimeout(function () { el.css("top", 10) },10); }) Since I’ve built this component I’ve had a lot of good uses for it. The .shadow() fallback functionality is one of them. Resources The watch() plug-in is part of ww.jquery.js and the West Wind West Wind Web Toolkit. You’re free to use this code here or the code from the toolkit. West Wind Web Toolkit Latest version of ww.jquery.js (search for fn.watch) watch plug-in documentation © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in ASP.NET  JavaScript  jQuery  

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• DevConnections Session Slides, Samples and Links

  - by Rick Strahl

  Finally coming up for air this week, after catching up with being on the road for the better part of three weeks. Here are my slides, samples and links for my four DevConnections Session two weeks ago in Vegas. I ended up doing one extra un-prepared for session on WebAPI and AJAX, as some of the speakers were either delayed or unable to make it at all to Vegas due to Sandy's mayhem. It was pretty hectic in the speaker room as Erik (our event coordinator extrodinaire) was scrambling to fill session slots with speakers :-). Surprisingly it didn't feel like the storm affected attendance drastically though, but I guess it's hard to tell without actual numbers. The conference was a lot of fun - it's been a while since I've been speaking at one of these larger conferences. I'd been taking a hiatus, and I forgot how much I enjoy actually giving talks. Preparing - well not  quite so much, especially since I ended up essentially preparing or completely rewriting for all three of these talks and I was stressing out a bit as I was sick the week before the conference and didn't get as much time to prepare as I wanted to. But - as always seems to be the case - it all worked out, but I guess those that attended have to be the judge of that… It was great to catch up with my speaker friends as well - man I feel out of touch. I got to spend a bunch of time with Dan Wahlin, Ward Bell, Julie Lerman and for about 10 minutes even got to catch up with the ever so busy Michele Bustamante. Lots of great technical discussions including a fun and heated REST controversy with Ward and Howard Dierking. There were also a number of great discussions with attendees, describing how they're using the technologies touched in my talks in live applications. I got some great ideas from some of these and I wish there would have been more opportunities for these kinds of discussions. One thing I miss at these Vegas events though is some sort of coherent event where attendees and speakers get to mingle. These Vegas conferences are just like "go to sessions, then go out and PARTY on the town" - it's Vegas after all! But I think that it's always nice to have at least one evening event where everybody gets to hang out together and trade stories and geek talk. Overall there didn't seem to be much opportunity for that beyond lunch or the small and short exhibit hall events which it seemed not many people actually went to. Anyways, a good time was had. I hope those of you that came to my sessions learned something useful. There were lots of great questions and discussions after the sessions - always appreciate hearing the real life scenarios that people deal with in relation to the abstracted scenarios in sessions. Here are the Session abstracts, a few comments and the links for downloading slides and  samples. It's not quite like being there, but I hope this stuff turns out to be useful to some of you. I'll be following up a couple of these sessions with white papers in the following weeks. Enjoy. ASP.NET Architecture: How ASP.NET Works at the Low Level Abstract:Interested in how ASP.NET works at a low level? ASP.NET is extremely powerful and flexible technology, but it's easy to forget about the core framework that underlies the higher level technologies like ASP.NET MVC, WebForms, WebPages, Web Services that we deal with on a day to day basis. The ASP.NET core drives all the higher level handlers and frameworks layered on top of it and with the core power comes some complexity in the form of a very rich object model that controls the flow of a request through the ASP.NET pipeline from Windows HTTP services down to the application level. To take full advantage of it, it helps to understand the underlying architecture and model. This session discusses the architecture of ASP.NET along with a number of useful tidbits that you can use for building and debugging your ASP.NET applications more efficiently. We look at overall architecture, how requests flow from the IIS (7 and later) Web Server to the ASP.NET runtime into HTTP handlers, modules and filters and finally into high-level handlers like MVC, Web Forms or Web API. Focus of this session is on the low-level aspects on the ASP.NET runtime, with examples that demonstrate the bootstrapping of ASP.NET, threading models, how Application Domains are used, startup bootstrapping, how configuration files are applied and how all of this relates to the applications you write either using low-level tools like HTTP handlers and modules or high-level pages or services sitting at the top of the ASP.NET runtime processing chain. Comments:I was surprised to see so many people show up for this session - especially since it was the last session on the last day and a short 1 hour session to boot. The room was packed and it was to see so many people interested the abstracts of architecture of ASP.NET beyond the immediate high level application needs. Lots of great questions in this talk as well - I only wish this session would have been the full hour 15 minutes as we just a little short of getting through the main material (didn't make it to Filters and Error handling). I haven't done this session in a long time and I had to pretty much re-figure all the system internals having to do with the ASP.NET bootstrapping in light for the changes that came with IIS 7 and later. The last time I did this talk was with IIS6, I guess it's been a while. I love doing this session, mainly because in my mind the core of ASP.NET overall is so cleanly designed to provide maximum flexibility without compromising performance that has clearly stood the test of time in the 10 years or so that .NET has been around. While there are a lot of moving parts, the technology is easy to manage once you understand the core components and the core model hasn't changed much even while the underlying architecture that drives has been almost completely revamped especially with the introduction of IIS 7 and later. Download Samples and Slides   Introduction to using jQuery with ASP.NET Abstract:In this session you'll learn how to take advantage of jQuery in your ASP.NET applications. Starting with an overview of jQuery client features via many short and fun examples, you'll find out about core features like the power of selectors for document element selection, manipulating these elements with jQuery's wrapped set methods in a browser independent way, how to hook up and handle events easily and generally apply concepts of unobtrusive JavaScript principles to client scripting. The second half of the session then delves into jQuery's AJAX features and several different ways how you can interact with ASP.NET on the server. You'll see examples of using ASP.NET MVC for serving HTML and JSON AJAX content, as well as using the new ASP.NET Web API to serve JSON and hypermedia content. You'll also see examples of client side templating/databinding with Handlebars and Knockout. Comments:This session was in a monster of a room and to my surprise it was nearly packed, given that this was a 100 level session. I can see that it's a good idea to continue to do intro sessions to jQuery as there appeared to be quite a number of folks who had not worked much with jQuery yet and who most likely could greatly benefit from using it. Seemed seemed to me the session got more than a few people excited to going if they hadn't yet :-).  Anyway I just love doing this session because it's mostly live coding and highly interactive - not many sessions that I can build things up from scratch and iterate on in an hour. jQuery makes that easy though. Resources: Slides and Code Samples Introduction to jQuery White Paper Introduction to ASP.NET Web API   Hosting the Razor Scripting Engine in Your Own Applications Abstract:The Razor Engine used in ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web Pages is a free-standing scripting engine that can be disassociated from these Web-specific implementations and can be used in your own applications. Razor allows for a powerful mix of code and text rendering that makes it a wonderful tool for any sort of text generation, from creating HTML output in non-Web applications, to rendering mail merge-like functionality, to code generation for developer tools and even as a plug-in scripting engine. In this session, we'll look at the components that make up the Razor engine and how you can bootstrap it in your own applications to hook up templating. You'll find out how to create custom templates and manage Razor requests that can be pre-compiled, detecting page changes and act in ways similar to a full runtime. We look at ways that you can pass data into the engine and retrieve both the rendered output as well as result values in a package that makes it easy to plug Razor into your own applications. Comments:That this session was picked was a bit of a surprise to me, since it's a bit of a niche topic. Even more of a surprise was that during the session quite a few people who attended had actually used Razor externally and were there to find out more about how the process works and how to extend it. In the session I talk a bit about a custom Razor hosting implementation (Westwind.RazorHosting) and drilled into the various components required to build a custom Razor Hosting engine and a runtime around it. This sessions was a bit of a chore to prepare for as there are lots of technical implementation details that needed to be dealt with and squeezing that into an hour 15 is a bit tight (and that aren't addressed even by some of the wrapper libraries that exist). Found out though that there's quite a bit of interest in using a templating engine outside of web applications, or often side by side with the HTML output generated by frameworks like MVC or WebForms. An extra fun part of this session was that this was my first session and when I went to set up I realized I forgot my mini-DVI to VGA adapter cable to plug into the projector in my room - 6 minutes before the session was about to start. So I ended up sprinting the half a mile + back to my room - and back at a full sprint. I managed to be back only a couple of minutes late, but when I started I was out of breath for the first 10 minutes or so, while trying to talk. Musta sounded a bit funny as I was trying to not gasp too much :-) Resources: Slides and Code Samples Westwind.RazorHosting GitHub Project Original RazorHosting Blog Post   Introduction to ASP.NET Web API for AJAX Applications Abstract:WebAPI provides a new framework for creating REST based APIs, but it can also act as a backend to typical AJAX operations. This session covers the core features of Web API as it relates to typical AJAX application development. We’ll cover content-negotiation, routing and a variety of output generation options as well as managing data updates from the client in the context of a small Single Page Application style Web app. Finally we’ll look at some of the extensibility features in WebAPI to customize and extend Web API in a number and useful useful ways. Comments:This session was a fill in for session slots not filled due MIA speakers stranded by Sandy. I had samples from my previous Web API article so decided to go ahead and put together a session from it. Given that I spent only a couple of hours preparing and putting slides together I was glad it turned out as it did - kind of just ran itself by way of the examples I guess as well as nice audience interactions and questions. Lots of interest - and also some confusion about when Web API makes sense. Both this session and the jQuery session ended up getting a ton of questions about when to use Web API vs. MVC, whether it would make sense to switch to Web API for all AJAX backend work etc. In my opinion there's no need to jump to Web API for existing applications that already have a good AJAX foundation. Web API is awesome for real externally consumed APIs and clearly defined application AJAX APIs. For typical application level AJAX calls, it's still a good idea, but ASP.NET MVC can serve most if not all of that functionality just as well. There's no need to abandon MVC (or even ASP.NET AJAX or third party AJAX backends) just to move to Web API. For new projects Web API probably makes good sense for isolation of AJAX calls, but it really depends on how the application is set up. In some cases sharing business logic between the HTML and AJAX interfaces with a single MVC API can be cleaner than creating two completely separate code paths to serve essentially the same business logic. Resources: Slides and Code Samples Sample Code on GitHub Introduction to ASP.NET Web API White Paper© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Conferences  ASP.NET   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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• Creating ASP.NET MVC Negotiated Content Results

  - by Rick Strahl

  In a recent ASP.NET MVC application I’m involved with, we had a late in the process request to handle Content Negotiation: Returning output based on the HTTP Accept header of the incoming HTTP request. This is standard behavior in ASP.NET Web API but ASP.NET MVC doesn’t support this functionality directly out of the box. Another reason this came up in discussion is last week’s announcements of ASP.NET vNext, which seems to indicate that ASP.NET Web API is not going to be ported to the cloud version of vNext, but rather be replaced by a combined version of MVC and Web API. While it’s not clear what new API features will show up in this new framework, it’s pretty clear that the ASP.NET MVC style syntax will be the new standard for all the new combined HTTP processing framework. Why negotiated Content? Content negotiation is one of the key features of Web API even though it’s such a relatively simple thing. But it’s also something that’s missing in MVC and once you get used to automatically having your content returned based on Accept headers it’s hard to go back to manually having to create separate methods for different output types as you’ve had to with Microsoft server technologies all along (yes, yes I know other frameworks – including my own – have done this for years but for in the box features this is relatively new from Web API). As a quick review,  Accept Header content negotiation works off the request’s HTTP Accept header:POST http://localhost/mydailydosha/Editable/NegotiateContent HTTP/1.1 Content-Type: application/json Accept: application/json Host: localhost Content-Length: 76 Pragma: no-cache { ElementId: "header", PageName: "TestPage", Text: "This is a nice header" } If I make this request I would expect to get back a JSON result based on my application/json Accept header. To request XML  I‘d just change the accept header:Accept: text/xml and now I’d expect the response to come back as XML. Now this only works with media types that the server can process. In my case here I need to handle JSON, XML, HTML (using Views) and Plain Text. HTML results might need more than just a data return – you also probably need to specify a View to render the data into either by specifying the view explicitly or by using some sort of convention that can automatically locate a view to match. Today ASP.NET MVC doesn’t support this sort of automatic content switching out of the box. Unfortunately, in my application scenario we have an application that started out primarily with an AJAX backend that was implemented with JSON only. So there are lots of JSON results like this:[Route("Customers")] public ActionResult GetCustomers() { return Json(repo.GetCustomers(),JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet); } These work fine, but they are of course JSON specific. Then a couple of weeks ago, a requirement came in that an old desktop application needs to also consume this API and it has to use XML to do it because there’s no JSON parser available for it. Ooops – stuck with JSON in this case. While it would have been easy to add XML specific methods I figured it’s easier to add basic content negotiation. And that’s what I show in this post. Missteps – IResultFilter, IActionFilter My first attempt at this was to use IResultFilter or IActionFilter which look like they would be ideal to modify result content after it’s been generated using OnResultExecuted() or OnActionExecuted(). Filters are great because they can look globally at all controller methods or individual methods that are marked up with the Filter’s attribute. But it turns out these filters don’t work for raw POCO result values from Action methods. What we wanted to do for API calls is get back to using plain .NET types as results rather than result actions. That is  you write a method that doesn’t return an ActionResult, but a standard .NET type like this:public Customer UpdateCustomer(Customer cust) { … do stuff to customer :-) return cust; } Unfortunately both OnResultExecuted and OnActionExecuted receive an MVC ContentResult instance from the POCO object. MVC basically takes any non-ActionResult return value and turns it into a ContentResult by converting the value using .ToString(). Ugh. The ContentResult itself doesn’t contain the original value, which is lost AFAIK with no way to retrieve it. So there’s no way to access the raw customer object in the example above. Bummer. Creating a NegotiatedResult This leaves mucking around with custom ActionResults. ActionResults are MVC’s standard way to return action method results – you basically specify that you would like to render your result in a specific format. Common ActionResults are ViewResults (ie. View(vn,model)), JsonResult, RedirectResult etc. They work and are fairly effective and work fairly well for testing as well as it’s the ‘standard’ interface to return results from actions. The problem with the this is mainly that you’re explicitly saying that you want a specific result output type. This works well for many things, but sometimes you do want your result to be negotiated. My first crack at this solution here is to create a simple ActionResult subclass that looks at the Accept header and based on that writes the output. I need to support JSON and XML content and HTML as well as text – so effectively 4 media types: application/json, text/xml, text/html and text/plain. Everything else is passed through as ContentResult – which effecively returns whatever .ToString() returns. Here’s what the NegotiatedResult usage looks like:public ActionResult GetCustomers() { return new NegotiatedResult(repo.GetCustomers()); } public ActionResult GetCustomer(int id) { return new NegotiatedResult("Show", repo.GetCustomer(id)); } There are two overloads of this method – one that returns just the raw result value and a second version that accepts an optional view name. The second version returns the Razor view specified only if text/html is requested – otherwise the raw data is returned. This is useful in applications where you have an HTML front end that can also double as an API interface endpoint that’s using the same model data you send to the View. For the application I mentioned above this was another actual use-case we needed to address so this was a welcome side effect of creating a custom ActionResult. There’s also an extension method that directly attaches a Negotiated() method to the controller using the same syntax:public ActionResult GetCustomers() { return this.Negotiated(repo.GetCustomers()); } public ActionResult GetCustomer(int id) { return this.Negotiated("Show",repo.GetCustomer(id)); } Using either of these mechanisms now allows you to return JSON, XML, HTML or plain text results depending on the Accept header sent. Send application/json you get just the Customer JSON data. Ditto for text/xml and XML data. Pass text/html for the Accept header and the "Show.cshtml" Razor view is rendered passing the result model data producing final HTML output. While this isn’t as clean as passing just POCO objects back as I had intended originally, this approach fits better with how MVC action methods are intended to be used and we get the bonus of being able to specify a View to render (optionally) for HTML. How does it work An ActionResult implementation is pretty straightforward. You inherit from ActionResult and implement the ExecuteResult method to send your output to the ASP.NET output stream. ActionFilters are an easy way to effectively do post processing on ASP.NET MVC controller actions just before the content is sent to the output stream, assuming your specific action result was used. Here’s the full code to the NegotiatedResult class (you can also check it out on GitHub):/// <summary> /// Returns a content negotiated result based on the Accept header. /// Minimal implementation that works with JSON and XML content, /// can also optionally return a view with HTML. /// </summary> /// <example> /// // model data only /// public ActionResult GetCustomers() /// { /// return new NegotiatedResult(repo.Customers.OrderBy( c=> c.Company) ) /// } /// // optional view for HTML /// public ActionResult GetCustomers() /// { /// return new NegotiatedResult("List", repo.Customers.OrderBy( c=> c.Company) ) /// } /// </example> public class NegotiatedResult : ActionResult { /// <summary> /// Data stored to be 'serialized'. Public /// so it's potentially accessible in filters. /// </summary> public object Data { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Optional name of the HTML view to be rendered /// for HTML responses /// </summary> public string ViewName { get; set; } public static bool FormatOutput { get; set; } static NegotiatedResult() { FormatOutput = HttpContext.Current.IsDebuggingEnabled; } /// <summary> /// Pass in data to serialize /// </summary> /// <param name="data">Data to serialize</param> public NegotiatedResult(object data) { Data = data; } /// <summary> /// Pass in data and an optional view for HTML views /// </summary> /// <param name="data"></param> /// <param name="viewName"></param> public NegotiatedResult(string viewName, object data) { Data = data; ViewName = viewName; } public override void ExecuteResult(ControllerContext context) { if (context == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("context"); HttpResponseBase response = context.HttpContext.Response; HttpRequestBase request = context.HttpContext.Request; // Look for specific content types if (request.AcceptTypes.Contains("text/html")) { response.ContentType = "text/html"; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(ViewName)) { var viewData = context.Controller.ViewData; viewData.Model = Data; var viewResult = new ViewResult { ViewName = ViewName, MasterName = null, ViewData = viewData, TempData = context.Controller.TempData, ViewEngineCollection = ((Controller)context.Controller).ViewEngineCollection }; viewResult.ExecuteResult(context.Controller.ControllerContext); } else response.Write(Data); } else if (request.AcceptTypes.Contains("text/plain")) { response.ContentType = "text/plain"; response.Write(Data); } else if (request.AcceptTypes.Contains("application/json")) { using (JsonTextWriter writer = new JsonTextWriter(response.Output)) { var settings = new JsonSerializerSettings(); if (FormatOutput) settings.Formatting = Newtonsoft.Json.Formatting.Indented; JsonSerializer serializer = JsonSerializer.Create(settings); serializer.Serialize(writer, Data); writer.Flush(); } } else if (request.AcceptTypes.Contains("text/xml")) { response.ContentType = "text/xml"; if (Data != null) { using (var writer = new XmlTextWriter(response.OutputStream, new UTF8Encoding())) { if (FormatOutput) writer.Formatting = System.Xml.Formatting.Indented; XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(Data.GetType()); serializer.Serialize(writer, Data); writer.Flush(); } } } else { // just write data as a plain string response.Write(Data); } } } /// <summary> /// Extends Controller with Negotiated() ActionResult that does /// basic content negotiation based on the Accept header. /// </summary> public static class NegotiatedResultExtensions { /// <summary> /// Return content-negotiated content of the data based on Accept header. /// Supports: /// application/json - using JSON.NET /// text/xml - Xml as XmlSerializer XML /// text/html - as text, or an optional View /// text/plain - as text /// </summary> /// <param name="controller"></param> /// <param name="data">Data to return</param> /// <returns>serialized data</returns> /// <example> /// public ActionResult GetCustomers() /// { /// return this.Negotiated( repo.Customers.OrderBy( c=> c.Company) ) /// } /// </example> public static NegotiatedResult Negotiated(this Controller controller, object data) { return new NegotiatedResult(data); } /// <summary> /// Return content-negotiated content of the data based on Accept header. /// Supports: /// application/json - using JSON.NET /// text/xml - Xml as XmlSerializer XML /// text/html - as text, or an optional View /// text/plain - as text /// </summary> /// <param name="controller"></param> /// <param name="viewName">Name of the View to when Accept is text/html</param> /// /// <param name="data">Data to return</param> /// <returns>serialized data</returns> /// <example> /// public ActionResult GetCustomers() /// { /// return this.Negotiated("List", repo.Customers.OrderBy( c=> c.Company) ) /// } /// </example> public static NegotiatedResult Negotiated(this Controller controller, string viewName, object data) { return new NegotiatedResult(viewName, data); } } Output Generation – JSON and XML Generating output for XML and JSON is simple – you use the desired serializer and off you go. Using XmlSerializer and JSON.NET it’s just a handful of lines each to generate serialized output directly into the HTTP output stream. Please note this implementation uses JSON.NET for its JSON generation rather than the default JavaScriptSerializer that MVC uses which I feel is an additional bonus to implementing this custom action. I’d already been using a custom JsonNetResult class previously, but now this is just rolled into this custom ActionResult. Just keep in mind that JSON.NET outputs slightly different JSON for certain things like collections for example, so behavior may change. One addition to this implementation might be a flag to allow switching the JSON serializer. Html View Generation Html View generation actually turned out to be easier than anticipated. Initially I used my generic ASP.NET ViewRenderer Class that can render MVC views from any ASP.NET application. However it turns out since we are executing inside of an active MVC request there’s an easier way: We can simply create a custom ViewResult and populate its members and then execute it. The code in text/html handling code that renders the view is simply this:response.ContentType = "text/html"; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(ViewName)) { var viewData = context.Controller.ViewData; viewData.Model = Data; var viewResult = new ViewResult { ViewName = ViewName, MasterName = null, ViewData = viewData, TempData = context.Controller.TempData, ViewEngineCollection = ((Controller)context.Controller).ViewEngineCollection }; viewResult.ExecuteResult(context.Controller.ControllerContext); } else response.Write(Data); which is a neat and easy way to render a Razor view assuming you have an active controller that’s ready for rendering. Sweet – dependency removed which makes this class self-contained without any external dependencies other than JSON.NET. Summary While this isn’t exactly a new topic, it’s the first time I’ve actually delved into this with MVC. I’ve been doing content negotiation with Web API and prior to that with my REST library. This is the first time it’s come up as an issue in MVC. But as I have worked through this I find that having a way to specify both HTML Views *and* JSON and XML results from a single controller certainly is appealing to me in many situations as we are in this particular application returning identical data models for each of these operations. Rendering content negotiated views is something that I hope ASP.NET vNext will provide natively in the combined MVC and WebAPI model, but we’ll see how this actually will be implemented. In the meantime having a custom ActionResult that provides this functionality is a workable and easily adaptable way of handling this going forward. Whatever ends up happening in ASP.NET vNext the abstraction can probably be changed to support the native features of the future. Anyway I hope some of you found this useful if not for direct integration then as insight into some of the rendering logic that MVC uses to get output into the HTTP stream… Related Resources Latest Version of NegotiatedResult.cs on GitHub Understanding Action Controllers Rendering ASP.NET Views To String© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in MVC  ASP.NET  HTTP   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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• Is it possible to De-Serialize a new Derived class using Old Binary?

  - by Anand

  In my project I have a class which I Serialize in Binary format to the disk. Due to some new requirement I need to create a new class which is derived from the original class. eg [Serializable] public class Sample { String someString; int someInt; public Sample() { } public Sample(String _someString, int _someInt) { this.someInt = _someInt; this.someString = _someString; } public String SomeString { get { return someString; } } public int SomeInt { get { return someInt; } } } [Serializable] public class DerivedSample : Sample { String someMoreString; int someMoreInt; public DerivedSample () : base() { } public DerivedSample (String _someString, int _someInt, String _someMoreString, int _someMoreInt) : base(_someString, _someInt) { this.someMoreString = _someMoreString; this.someMoreInt = _someMoreInt; } public String SomeMoreString { get { return someMoreString; } } public int SomeMoreInt { get { return someMoreInt; } } } When I try to De serialize an old file which contains only object of Sample it works fine, in the current assembly. That means backward compatibility is there. But when I try to deserialize the file which contains object of DerivedSample using the previous version of the assembly application crashes. Which means forward compatibilty needs to be taken care off... It it possible to say read only the base class part of the object from new version of the file?

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• How to setup nginx and a subdomain

  - by Evolutio

  i have gitlab installed on my server and it works on all domains eg: git.lars-dev.de, lars-dev.de and *.lars-dev.de how I can run gitlab only on git.lars-dev.de and another subdomain on files.lars-dev.de? my lars-dev conf: server { listen *:80; ## listen for ipv4; this line is default and implied #listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on; ## listen for ipv6 root /var/www/webdata/lars-dev.de/htdocs; index index.html index.htm; server_name lars-dev.de; location / { try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html; } #error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html; #location = /50x.html { # root /usr/share/nginx/www; #} # deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root # concurs with nginx's one # #location ~ /\.ht { # deny all; #} } and the gitlab configuration: upstream gitlab { server unix:/home/git/gitlab/tmp/sockets/gitlab.socket; } server { listen *:80; # e.g., listen 192.168.1.1:80; In most cases *:80 is a good idea server_name git.lars-dev.de; # e.g., server_name source.example.com; server_tokens off; # don't show the version number, a security best practice root /home/git/gitlab/public; # individual nginx logs for this gitlab vhost access_log /var/log/nginx/gitlab_access.log; error_log /var/log/nginx/gitlab_error.log; location / { # serve static files from defined root folder;. # @gitlab is a named location for the upstream fallback, see below try_files $uri $uri/index.html $uri.html @gitlab; } # if a file, which is not found in the root folder is requested, # then the proxy pass the request to the upsteam (gitlab unicorn) location @gitlab { proxy_read_timeout 300; # https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/issues/694 proxy_connect_timeout 300; # https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/issues/694 proxy_redirect off; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme; proxy_set_header Host $http_host; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_pass http://gitlab; } }

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• Why does my computer beep when i type <shift>-DE quickly?

  - by Bedwyr Humphreys

  I'm writing a report on developing EJBs in Jdeveloper and every time i type "IDE" my laptop beeps twice in quick succesion. Actually, whilst typing this I've worked out that any combination of shift plus two adjacent keys, one from the row that starts qwerty and one from the row that starts asdfg will beep. It's really quite annoying. It's a hp laptop. Anyone know how I can make it stop?

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• Which Windows OS Supports 8 GB RAM in a Laptop and Suggestions for a Better Laptop for Personal & De

  - by Ellen

  I am about to purchase a laptop and have zeroed on the following two of them. Toshiba L500-ST2544 Toshiba L505-ES5034 The Common Specification for both of them are as follows - RAM - 4GB DDR3 Memory HDD - 320 GB Processor - Intel® Core™ i3-330M Processor WebCam and Mic - Available HDMI Port - Available Numeric Key Pad - Available Windows 7 (64 bit) Home Premium Now, the only difference between ST2544 and ES5034 is that, the ST2544 has a maximum of 2 slots with 2 GB in each. So, you can have a max of 4 GB RAM in that. The ES5034 can support 8 GB RAM, so, in a couple of years, if I want to add another 4 GB RAM I will be able to do it. The price for ST2544 is USD 629.00 whereas, the price for a ES5034 is USD685. A difference is USD 55.00 (not a major amount, but still something extra). Is it worthwhile going for the ES5034? Which Windows Operating System supports 8 GB of RAM?

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• De-duplicating backup tool on a block basis? [closed]

  - by SST

  I am looking for an (ideally free as in speech or beer) backup tool for Unix-like OS which can store deduplicated backups, i.e. only nonredundant content takes up additional space. I already looked at dirvish (my first candidate) and rsnapshot which use hardlinks to achieve deduplication on a per-file level. However, as I want to back up large files (Thunderbird mailboxes 3GB, VMware images 10GB), such file are stored again entirely even if just a few bytes change. Then there are rsync-based tools like rdiff-backup which only store deltas and a current mirror. However, as the deltas are generated against each previous mirror, it is difficult to fine-tune the retention granularity (only keep one backup after a week, etc.) because the deltas would have to be re-evaluated. Another approach is to partition content into blocks and store each block only if it is not stored yet, otherwise just linking it to the first occurrence. The only tool I know of that does this by now is obnam (http://liw.fi/obnam), and it even supports zlib-compression and gpg-encryption -- nice! But it is very slow, AFAICT. Does any one know any other, solid backup software which supports deduplication on a sub-file level, ideally with at least some management options (show/select/delete generations...)?

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• Why do people like widescreen when it is, de facto, less space?

  - by Kerry

  I find that many of my friends/non-programmers or designers like widescreens. It makes very little sense to me as you in fact have less space than a 4:3 (do the math). The closer to a perfect square the more space you actually have on your screen. I got a 21" 16:9 and two 19" 4:3 The 21" is nearly the same height, but I think its a tenth of an inch shorter if I'm correct. I forget the calculation but it is nearly the same actual space. I can understand if you're using your computer for constant movie-watching but I think that's more of people's "ideal" than a reality. Thoughts?

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• mod_rewrite add and switch directory

  - by Markus

  How to change the url pattern with mod_rewrite first from domain.de/images/myfile.jpg to domain.de/directory/images/myfile.jpg and then finally to domain.de/images/directory/myfile.jpg My rules so far RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?domain\.de$ RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^\/directory RewriteRule ^(.*)$ directory/$1 [NC] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^\/directory\/images RewriteRule ^\/directory\/images\/(.*)$ images/directory/$1 [qsappend,L] The first part is working but the exchange of directory fails

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• best way to receive email for multiple domains with multiple user accouts into rails app

  - by rick moss

  hi all I have a cms that runs on multiple domains and therefore needs to pull emails into the app for multiple email addresses. I have setup rackspace email for a hosted email solution and am trying to find the best way to pull the emails into my app from all the mailboxes. Should i be using pop3 or imap ? should i be pulling into a que system then into rails app ? Is there a gem / plugin for this ? thanks alot for help in advance Rick

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