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• 11gR2???---gipc????

  - by Allen Gao

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3"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 3"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 3"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 3"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 3"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 3"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 3"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 3"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 3"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Dark List Accent 3"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 3"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful List Accent 3"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 3"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Shading Accent 4"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light List Accent 4"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Light Grid Accent 4"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 4"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 4"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 4"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" 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UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Intense Emphasis"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Subtle Reference"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Intense Reference"/ UnhideWhenUsed="false" QFormat="true" Name="Book Title"/ classid="clsid:38481807-CA0E-42D2-BF39-B33AF135CC4D" id=ieooui st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:????; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} ??????,????11gR2 ??????gipcd(????ora.gipcd)????,????gipc???,????????????? ????,??oracle????,??????????,??????????,???????????cache fusion ?????????????,?????????????oracle????????????,??????,???????(?????????Note 220970.1:RAC: Frequently Asked Questions,?????????)???????,???????????/????,?????????????? ??,?10gR2 ?11gR1????,?????????????,??:Linux bonding, AIX EtherChannel, HP-UX APA ???????????????????????????????(??,????????????????,???????)???????10g ?11.1 ??????,??????????????????(???????),????????????????subnet??????,????,?????oracle???????????,??????????????,???????????,??????????????,??????????????????????,??:????,?????? ?????????,?11gR2??(????,?11.2.0.2??),oracle??????????????,?????gipc(Grid IPC)???,??????????gipcd.bin?????????,??????? 1. ??????,????????????,?????????,?????????gpnp profile??????????????????? 2. ???????????,??????????,???????????????? 3. ?????????????,?????????/???????????,????????,???????? ??,oracle????????????????????????/??????,??,?????????? ??,???????????????,?????gipc ?HAIP????????????,??????????????,???????????????????:?????????,??:ocssd.bin????,crsd.bin??????;???:oracle RAC ??,??:ASM ??????,?????????????,?????????????????????gipc,???????????,?????????????????????,????????????????,?????,????????????,??,?????????????????gipc???,oracle ??????????????,??????????????,????????????????,HAIP ????,????oracle RAC??????/?????????,????????????????,????,????????HAIP?????,????????????ASM??,?????(???NM??)??????????,?????????????????HAIP,????????,????,???????? “Redundant Interconnect with Highly Available IP (HAIP) ??”? ???,???????????????????????? 1.??????gipcd.log 2013-07-17 12:28:28.071: [ default][3041003216]gipcd START pid=22337 Oracle Grid IPC Daemon 2013-07-17 12:28:28.072: [ GIPCD][3041003216] gipcdMain: gipcd Started <<<<<< gipcd????????? …… 2013-07-17 12:28:29.046: [ GPNP][3041003216]clsgpnp_getCachedProfileEx: [at clsgpnp.c:613] Result: (26) CLSGPNP_NO_PROFILE. Can't get offline GPnP service profile: local gpnpd is up and running. Use getProfile instead. 2013-07-17 12:28:29.046: [ GPNP][3041003216]clsgpnp_getCachedProfileEx: [at clsgpnp.c:623] Result: (26) CLSGPNP_NO_PROFILE. Failed to get offline GPnP service profile. 2013-07-17 12:28:29.066: [ GPNP][3041003216]clsgpnpm_newWiredMsg: [at clsgpnpm.c:741] Msg-reply has soap fault 10 (Operation returned Retry (error CLSGPNP_CALL_AGAIN)) [uri "http://www.grid-pnp.org/2005/12/gpnp-errors#"] <<<< gipcd ????gpnp profile?????????log??GI??????,?????????,?????gpnpd???????? …… 2013-07-17 12:28:39.342: [ CLSINET][3023027088] # 0 Interface 'eth1',ip='192.168.254.30',mac='00-0c-29-a8-14-65',mask='255.255.255.0',net='192.168.254.0',use='cluster_interconnect' 2013-07-17 12:28:39.342: [ CLSINET][3023027088] # 1 Interface 'eth2',ip='192.168.254.31',mac='00-0c-29-a8-14-6f',mask='255.255.255.0',net='192.168.254.0',use='cluster_interconnect' <<<<< gipcd ????????????????,???????2??????????? …… 2013-07-17 12:28:39.344: [GIPCHTHR][3025128336] gipchaWorkerUpdateInterface: created local bootstrap interface for node 'single1', haName 'gipcd_ha_name', inf 'mcast://230.0.1.0:42424/192.168.254.30' 2013-07-17 12:28:39.344: [GIPCHTHR][3025128336] gipchaWorkerUpdateInterface: created local interface for node 'single1', haName 'gipcd_ha_name', inf '192.168.254.30:46782' 2013-07-17 12:28:39.345: [GIPCHTHR][3025128336] gipchaWorkerUpdateInterface: created local bootstrap interface for node 'single1', haName 'gipcd_ha_name', inf 'mcast://230.0.1.0:42424/192.168.254.31' 2013-07-17 12:28:39.345: [GIPCHTHR][3025128336] gipchaWorkerUpdateInterface: created local interface for node 'single1', haName 'gipcd_ha_name', inf '192.168.254.31:39332' <<<<<<< gipcd ????????(????????????????)?endpoint ????? …… 2013-07-17 12:28:56.767: [GIPCHGEN][3023027088] gipchaNodeCreate: adding new node 0x9c107d8 { host 'single2', haName 'gipcd_ha_name', srcLuid 465fb26d-8b46eb95, dstLuid 00000000-00000000 numInf 0, contigSeq 0, lastAck 0, lastValidAck 0, sendSeq [0 : 0], createTime 797327224, flags 0x0 } <<<<< ???????? …… 2013-07-17 12:28:58.415: [GIPCHTHR][3025128336] gipchaWorkerUpdateInterface: created remote interface for node 'single2', haName 'gipcd_ha_name', inf 'udp://192.168.254.33:16663' 2013-07-17 12:28:58.415: [GIPCHGEN][3025128336] gipchaWorkerAttachInterface: Interface attached inf 0x9c0bb60 { host 'single2', haName 'gipcd_ha_name', local 0xb4c4e590, ip '192.168.254.33:16663', subnet '192.168.254.0', mask '255.255.255.0', numRef 0, numFail 0, flags 0x6 } 2013-07-17 12:28:58.415: [GIPCHTHR][3025128336] gipchaWorkerUpdateInterface: created remote interface for node 'single2', haName 'gipcd_ha_name', inf 'udp://192.168.254.32:17578' 2013-07-17 12:28:58.415: [GIPCHGEN][3025128336] gipchaWorkerAttachInterface: Interface attached inf 0x9c0a900 { host 'single2', haName 'gipcd_ha_name', local 0xb4cb8eb8, ip '192.168.254.32:17578', subnet '192.168.254.0', mask '255.255.255.0', numRef 0, numFail 0, flags 0x6 } <<<<<< gipcd ??????????????? …… 2013-07-17 12:29:36.120: [GIPCDMON][3027229584] gipcdMonitorSaveInfMetrics: inf[ 0] eth1 - rank 99, avgms 6.326531 [ 257 / 250 / 245 ] 2013-07-17 12:29:36.120: [GIPCDMON][3027229584] gipcdMonitorSaveInfMetrics: inf[ 1] eth2 - rank 99, avgms 5.182186 [ 259 / 250 / 247 ] <<<<<gipcd ??????????? ……  2. ?????????down???gipcd.log? 2013-07-17 13:23:20.346: [ CLSINET][3027229584] Returning NETDATA: 2 interfaces 2013-07-17 13:23:20.346: [ CLSINET][3027229584] # 0 Interface 'eth1',ip='192.168.254.30',mac='00-0c-29-a8-14-65',mask='255.255.255.0',net='192.168.254.0',use='cluster_interconnect' 2013-07-17 13:23:20.346: [ CLSINET][3027229584] # 1 Interface 'eth2',ip='192.168.254.31',mac='00-0c-29-a8-14-6f',mask='255.255.255.0',net='192.168.254.0',use='cluster_interconnect' 2013-07-17 13:23:20.359: [GIPCDMON][3027229584] gipcdMonitorSaveInfMetrics: inf[ 0] eth1 - rank 99, avgms 1.560694 [ 171 / 173 / 173 ] 2013-07-17 13:23:20.359: [GIPCDMON][3027229584] gipcdMonitorSaveInfMetrics: inf[ 1] eth2 - rank 99, avgms 1.802326 [ 172 / 172 / 172 ] <<<<<<<< gipcd ?????????? …… +++????“ifconfig eth1 down”????????????? …… 2013-07-17 13:23:44.397: [ CLSINET][3027229584] # 0 Interface 'eth2',ip='192.168.254.31',mac='00-0c-29-a8-14-6f',mask='255.255.255.0',net='192.168.254.0',use='cluster_interconnect' 2013-07-17 13:23:44.397: [GIPCDMON][3027229584] gipcdMonitorUpdate: interface went down - [ ip 192.168.254.30, subnet 192.168.254.0, mask 255.255.255.0 ] 2013-07-17 13:23:44.397: [GIPCDMON][3027229584] gipcdMonitorUpdate: msg sent to client thread (([update(ip: 192.168.254.30, mask: 255.255.255.0, subnet 192.168.254.0), state(gipcdadapterstateDown)])) <<<<<<<< gipcd ????eth1 down?,???????(??:ocssd.bin)????? …… 2013-07-17 13:23:44.426: [GIPCHGEN][3025128336] gipchaInterfaceDisable: disabling interface 0xb4c4e590 { host '', haName 'gipcd_ha_name', local (nil), ip '192.168.254.30', subnet '192.168.254.0', mask '255.255.255.0', numRef 0, numFail 1, flags 0x1cd } 2013-07-17 13:23:44.428: [GIPCHGEN][3025128336] gipchaInterfaceDisable: disabling interface 0x9c0bb60 { host 'single2', haName 'gipcd_ha_name', local 0xb4c4e590, ip '192.168.254.33:16663', subnet '192.168.254.0', mask '255.255.255.0', numRef 0, numFail 0, flags 0x86 } 2013-07-17 13:23:44.428: [GIPCHALO][3025128336] gipchaLowerCleanInterfaces: performing cleanup of disabled interface 0x9c0bb60 { host 'single2', haName 'gipcd_ha_name', local 0xb4c4e590, ip '192.168.254.33:16663', subnet '192.168.254.0', mask '255.255.255.0', numRef 0, numFail 0, flags 0xa6 } <<<<<<<<gipcd ????????eth1 ???,????????????????????? …… 2013-07-17 13:24:08.747: [GIPCDMON][3027229584] gipcdMonitorSaveInfMetrics: inf[ 0] eth2 - rank 99, avgms 1.955307 [ 204 / 181 / 179 ] <<<<<<<gipcd ???????????? ??:??????,??????????????????,????????????????,???????????eth1??HAIP,?failover?eth2 ?,????,????ASM??????? 3. ???eht1???? ++ ????”ifconfig eth1 up”????eth1 2013-07-17 13:36:31.260: [GIPCDMON][3027229584] gipcdMonitorUpdate: New Interface found - [ ip 192.168.254.30, subnet 192.168.254.0, mask 255.255.255.0 ] 2013-07-17 13:36:31.260: [GIPCDMON][3027229584] gipcdMonitorUpdate: msg sent to client thread (([update(ip: 192.168.254.30, mask: 255.255.255.0, subnet 192.168.254.0), state(gipcdadapterstateUp)])) <<<<< gpicd ?????????? …… 2013-07-17 13:36:31.471: [GIPCHTHR][3025128336] gipchaWorkerUpdateInterface: created local bootstrap interface for node 'single1', haName 'gipcd_ha_name', inf 'mcast://230.0.1.0:42424/192.168.254.30' 2013-07-17 13:36:31.471: [GIPCHTHR][3025128336] gipchaWorkerUpdateInterface: created local interface for node 'single1', haName 'gipcd_ha_name', inf '192.168.254.30:55548' <<<<<< ?????endpoint???? …… 2013-07-17 13:37:11.493: [ CLSINET][3027229584] Returning NETDATA: 2 interfaces 2013-07-17 13:37:11.493: [ CLSINET][3027229584] # 0 Interface 'eth1',ip='192.168.254.30',mac='00-0c-29-a8-14-65',mask='255.255.255.0',net='192.168.254.0',use='cluster_interconnect' 2013-07-17 13:37:11.493: [ CLSINET][3027229584] # 1 Interface 'eth2',ip='192.168.254.31',mac='00-0c-29-a8-14-6f',mask='255.255.255.0',net='192.168.254.0',use='cluster_interconnect' 2013-07-17 13:37:11.510: [GIPCDMON][3027229584] gipcdMonitorSaveInfMetrics: inf[ 0] eth2 - rank 99, avgms 6.141304 [ 307 / 184 / 184 ] <<<<<<<< <<<<<<<< gipcd??????? ??:??????,??????????????????,????????????????,????????failover?eth2??HAIP,?????eth1 ?,????,????ASM??????? ??,????????,gipcd ???????????,??,????????,?????????(????)????,gipcd???????????,??????HAIP???,???????????????(??:Linux bonding,etherchannel?),???????????,????????? ??????????????11gR2 ??????gipcd????,????????????,?????????? ??????????,???????????,??“??:11gR2???---gipc????"?

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• SQL Server suddenly using only a small portion of CPU.

  - by hermiod

  We've got a Windows 2008 R2 server running SQL Server 2008. All of a sudden, the SQLServer process is refusing to go above 20% CPU usage. As of last week, when running a heavy query against the db it would rise to 100% usage as I would expect. We've had this server for a while and it seems strange that it would just suddenly have this limit. This limit is causing our queries to take a lot longer than they normally would. No one has (knowingly at least) made any changes to the server configuration. After a bit of investigation, I discovered the sys.dm_os_sys_memory view. This shows 'available physical memory is high' bu at the same time the available physical memory is 339552kb where as the total is 4193848kb. It is worth noting that this is a virtual server running on vmware. Is there a setting somewhere with in SQL Server that sets the maximum CPU usage? I've found the settings in resource governor, although this is currently off as it always has been. We have recently started using Spotlight for SQL Server by Quest Software. It's playback database was located on this server for a short time this morning, I first noticed the problem shortly afterwards, although I hadn't been doing any queries prior to this so I don't know if this is the point at which the problem began, however the database was working as expected on Friday afternoon. The Windows log shows that the following settings were applied to the SpotlightPlaybackDatabase when it was created. 02/21/2011 08:45:02,spid60,Unknown,Setting database option TORN_PAGE_DETECTION to ON for database SpotlightPlaybackDatabase. 02/21/2011 08:45:02,spid60,Unknown,Setting database option MULTI_USER to ON for database SpotlightPlaybackDatabase. 02/21/2011 08:45:02,spid60,Unknown,Setting database option READ_WRITE to ON for database SpotlightPlaybackDatabase. 02/21/2011 08:45:02,spid60,Unknown,Setting database option AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS to ON for database SpotlightPlaybackDatabase. 02/21/2011 08:45:02,spid60,Unknown,Setting database option AUTO_CREATE_STATISTICS to ON for database SpotlightPlaybackDatabase. 02/21/2011 08:45:02,spid60,Unknown,Setting database option ANSI_WARNINGS to OFF for database SpotlightPlaybackDatabase. 02/21/2011 08:45:02,spid60,Unknown,Setting database option CONCAT_NULL_YIELDS_NULL to ON for database SpotlightPlaybackDatabase. 02/21/2011 08:45:02,spid60,Unknown,Setting database option RECOVERY to SIMPLE for database SpotlightPlaybackDatabase. 02/21/2011 08:45:02,spid60,Unknown,Setting database option QUOTED_IDENTIFIER to OFF for database SpotlightPlaybackDatabase. 02/21/2011 08:45:02,spid60,Unknown,Setting database option AUTO_CLOSE to OFF for database SpotlightPlaybackDatabase. Could any of these settings changes modified the settings applied to the whole server?

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• .NET WebRequest.PreAuthenticate not quite what it sounds like

  - by Rick Strahl

  I’ve run into the  problem a few times now: How to pre-authenticate .NET WebRequest calls doing an HTTP call to the server – essentially send authentication credentials on the very first request instead of waiting for a server challenge first? At first glance this sound like it should be easy: The .NET WebRequest object has a PreAuthenticate property which sounds like it should force authentication credentials to be sent on the first request. Looking at the MSDN example certainly looks like it does: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.webrequest.preauthenticate.aspx Unfortunately the MSDN sample is wrong. As is the text of the Help topic which incorrectly leads you to believe that PreAuthenticate… wait for it - pre-authenticates. But it doesn’t allow you to set credentials that are sent on the first request. What this property actually does is quite different. It doesn’t send credentials on the first request but rather caches the credentials ONCE you have already authenticated once. Http Authentication is based on a challenge response mechanism typically where the client sends a request and the server responds with a 401 header requesting authentication. So the client sends a request like this: GET /wconnect/admin/wc.wc?_maintain~ShowStatus HTTP/1.1 Host: rasnote User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 4.0.20506) Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Language: en,de;q=0.7,en-us;q=0.3 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Keep-Alive: 300 Connection: keep-alive and the server responds with: HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized Cache-Control: private Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5 WWW-Authenticate: basic realm=rasnote" X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727 WWW-Authenticate: Negotiate WWW-Authenticate: NTLM WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="rasnote" X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:58:20 GMT Content-Length: 5163 plus the actual error message body. The client then is responsible for re-sending the current request with the authentication token information provided (in this case Basic Auth): GET /wconnect/admin/wc.wc?_maintain~ShowStatus HTTP/1.1 Host: rasnote User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 4.0.20506) Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Language: en,de;q=0.7,en-us;q=0.3 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Keep-Alive: 300 Connection: keep-alive Cookie: TimeTrakker=2HJ1998WH06696; WebLogCommentUser=Rick Strahl|http://www.west-wind.com/|[email protected]; WebStoreUser=b8bd0ed9 Authorization: Basic cgsf12aDpkc2ZhZG1zMA== Once the authorization info is sent the server responds with the actual page result. Now if you use WebRequest (or WebClient) the default behavior is to re-authenticate on every request that requires authorization. This means if you look in  Fiddler or some other HTTP client Proxy that captures requests you’ll see that each request re-authenticates: Here are two requests fired back to back: and you can see the 401 challenge, the 200 response for both requests. If you watch this same conversation between a browser and a server you’ll notice that the first 401 is also there but the subsequent 401 requests are not present. WebRequest.PreAuthenticate And this is precisely what the WebRequest.PreAuthenticate property does: It’s a caching mechanism that caches the connection credentials for a given domain in the active process and resends it on subsequent requests. It does not send credentials on the first request but it will cache credentials on subsequent requests after authentication has succeeded: string url = "http://rasnote/wconnect/admin/wc.wc?_maintain~ShowStatus"; HttpWebRequest req = HttpWebRequest.Create(url) as HttpWebRequest; req.PreAuthenticate = true; req.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("rick", "secret", "rasnote"); req.AuthenticationLevel = System.Net.Security.AuthenticationLevel.MutualAuthRequested; req.UserAgent = ": Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 4.0.20506)"; WebResponse resp = req.GetResponse(); resp.Close(); req = HttpWebRequest.Create(url) as HttpWebRequest; req.PreAuthenticate = true; req.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("rstrahl", "secret", "rasnote"); req.AuthenticationLevel = System.Net.Security.AuthenticationLevel.MutualAuthRequested; req.UserAgent = ": Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 4.0.20506)"; resp = req.GetResponse(); which results in the desired sequence: where only the first request doesn’t send credentials. This is quite useful as it saves quite a few round trips to the server – bascially it saves one auth request request for every authenticated request you make. In most scenarios I think you’d want to send these credentials this way but one downside to this is that there’s no way to log out the client. Since the client always sends the credentials once authenticated only an explicit operation ON THE SERVER can undo the credentials by forcing another login explicitly (ie. re-challenging with a forced 401 request). Forcing Basic Authentication Credentials on the first Request On a few occasions I’ve needed to send credentials on a first request – mainly to some oddball third party Web Services (why you’d want to use Basic Auth on a Web Service is beyond me – don’t ask but it’s not uncommon in my experience). This is true of certain services that are using Basic Authentication (especially some Apache based Web Services) and REQUIRE that the authentication is sent right from the first request. No challenge first. Ugly but there it is. Now the following works only with Basic Authentication because it’s pretty straight forward to create the Basic Authorization ‘token’ in code since it’s just an unencrypted encoding of the user name and password into base64. As you might guess this is totally unsecure and should only be used when using HTTPS/SSL connections (i’m not in this example so I can capture the Fiddler trace and my local machine doesn’t have a cert installed, but for production apps ALWAYS use SSL with basic auth). The idea is that you simply add the required Authorization header to the request on your own along with the authorization string that encodes the username and password: string url = "http://rasnote/wconnect/admin/wc.wc?_maintain~ShowStatus"; HttpWebRequest req = HttpWebRequest.Create(url) as HttpWebRequest; string user = "rick"; string pwd = "secret"; string domain = "www.west-wind.com"; string auth = "Basic " + Convert.ToBase64String(System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes(user + ":" + pwd)); req.PreAuthenticate = true; req.AuthenticationLevel = System.Net.Security.AuthenticationLevel.MutualAuthRequested;req.Headers.Add("Authorization", auth); req.UserAgent = ": Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 4.0.20506)"; WebResponse resp = req.GetResponse(); resp.Close(); This works and causes the request to immediately send auth information to the server. However, this only works with Basic Auth because you can actually create the authentication credentials easily on the client because it’s essentially clear text. The same doesn’t work for Windows or Digest authentication since you can’t easily create the authentication token on the client and send it to the server. Another issue with this approach is that PreAuthenticate has no effect when you manually force the authentication. As far as Web Request is concerned it never sent the authentication information so it’s not actually caching the value any longer. If you run 3 requests in a row like this: string url = "http://rasnote/wconnect/admin/wc.wc?_maintain~ShowStatus"; HttpWebRequest req = HttpWebRequest.Create(url) as HttpWebRequest; string user = "ricks"; string pwd = "secret"; string domain = "www.west-wind.com"; string auth = "Basic " + Convert.ToBase64String(System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes(user + ":" + pwd)); req.PreAuthenticate = true; req.Headers.Add("Authorization", auth); req.UserAgent = ": Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 4.0.20506)"; WebResponse resp = req.GetResponse(); resp.Close(); req = HttpWebRequest.Create(url) as HttpWebRequest; req.PreAuthenticate = true; req.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(user, pwd, domain); req.UserAgent = ": Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 4.0.20506)"; resp = req.GetResponse(); resp.Close(); req = HttpWebRequest.Create(url) as HttpWebRequest; req.PreAuthenticate = true; req.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(user, pwd, domain); req.UserAgent = ": Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 4.0.20506)"; resp = req.GetResponse(); you’ll find the trace looking like this: where the first request (the one we explicitly add the header to) authenticates, the second challenges, and any subsequent ones then use the PreAuthenticate credential caching. In effect you’ll end up with one extra 401 request in this scenario, which is still better than 401 challenges on each request. Getting Access to WebRequest in Classic .NET Web Service Clients If you’re running a classic .NET Web Service client (non-WCF) one issue with the above is how do you get access to the WebRequest to actually add the custom headers to do the custom Authentication described above? One easy way is to implement a partial class that allows you add headers with something like this: public partial class TaxService { protected NameValueCollection Headers = new NameValueCollection(); public void AddHttpHeader(string key, string value) { this.Headers.Add(key,value); } public void ClearHttpHeaders() { this.Headers.Clear(); } protected override WebRequest GetWebRequest(Uri uri) { HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest) base.GetWebRequest(uri); request.Headers.Add(this.Headers); return request; } } where TaxService is the name of the .NET generated proxy class. In code you can then call AddHttpHeader() anywhere to add additional headers which are sent as part of the GetWebRequest override. Nice and simple once you know where to hook it. For WCF there’s a bit more work involved by creating a message extension as described here: http://weblogs.asp.net/avnerk/archive/2006/04/26/Adding-custom-headers-to-every-WCF-call-_2D00_-a-solution.aspx. FWIW, I think that HTTP header manipulation should be readily available on any HTTP based Web Service client DIRECTLY without having to subclass or implement a special interface hook. But alas a little extra work is required in .NET to make this happen Not a Common Problem, but when it happens… This has been one of those issues that is really rare, but it’s bitten me on several occasions when dealing with oddball Web services – a couple of times in my own work interacting with various Web Services and a few times on customer projects that required interaction with credentials-first services. Since the servers determine the protocol, we don’t have a choice but to follow the protocol. Lovely following standards that implementers decide to ignore, isn’t it? :-}© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in .NET  CSharp  Web Services  

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• Loading jQuery Consistently in a .NET Web App

  - by Rick Strahl

  One thing that frequently comes up in discussions when using jQuery is how to best load the jQuery library (as well as other commonly used and updated libraries) in a Web application. Specifically the issue is the one of versioning and making sure that you can easily update and switch versions of script files with application wide settings in one place and having your script usage reflect those settings in the entire application on all pages that use the script. Although I use jQuery as an example here, the same concepts can be applied to any script library - for example in my Web libraries I use the same approach for jQuery.ui and my own internal jQuery support library. The concepts used here can be applied both in WebForms and MVC. Loading jQuery Properly From CDN Before we look at a generic way to load jQuery via some server logic, let me first point out my preferred way to embed jQuery into the page. I use the Google CDN to load jQuery and then use a fallback URL to handle the offline or no Internet connection scenario. Why use a CDN? CDN links tend to be loaded more quickly since they are very likely to be cached in user's browsers already as jQuery CDN is used by many, many sites on the Web. Using a CDN also removes load from your Web server and puts the load bearing on the CDN provider - in this case Google - rather than on your Web site. On the downside, CDN links gives the provider (Google, Microsoft) yet another way to track users through their Web usage. Here's how I use jQuery CDN plus a fallback link on my WebLog for example: <!DOCTYPE HTML> <html> <head> <script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.4/jquery.min.js"></script> <script> if (typeof (jQuery) == 'undefined') document.write(unescape("%3Cscript " + "src='/Weblog/wwSC.axd?r=Westwind.Web.Controls.Resources.jquery.js' %3E%3C/script%3E")); </script> <title>Rick Strahl's Web Log</title> ... </head>   You can see that the CDN is referenced first, followed by a small script block that checks to see whether jQuery was loaded (jQuery object exists). If it didn't load another script reference is added to the document dynamically pointing to a backup URL. In this case my backup URL points at a WebResource in my Westwind.Web  assembly, but the URL can also be local script like src="/scripts/jquery.min.js". Important: Use the proper Protocol/Scheme for  for CDN Urls [updated based on comments] If you're using a CDN to load an external script resource you should always make sure that the script is loaded with the same protocol as the parent page to avoid mixed content warnings by the browser. You don't want to load a script link to an http:// resource when you're on an https:// page. The easiest way to use this is by using a protocol relative URL: <script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.4/jquery.min.js"></script> which is an easy way to load resources from other domains. This URL syntax will automatically use the parent page's protocol (or more correctly scheme). As long as the remote domains support both http:// and https:// access this should work. BTW this also works in CSS (with some limitations) and links. BTW, I didn't know about this until it was pointed out in the comments. This is a very useful feature for many things - ah the benefits of my blog to myself :-) Version Numbers When you use a CDN you notice that you have to reference a specific version of jQuery. When using local files you may not have to do this as you can rename your private copy of jQuery.js, but for CDN the references are always versioned. The version number is of course very important to ensure you getting the version you have tested with, but it's also important to the provider because it ensures that cached content is always correct. If an existing file was updated the updates might take a very long time to get past the locally cached content and won't refresh properly. The version number ensures you get the right version and not some cached content that has been changed but not updated in your cache. On the other hand version numbers also mean that once you decide to use a new version of the script you now have to change all your script references in your pages. Depending on whether you use some sort of master/layout page or not this may or may not be easy in your application. Even if you do use master/layout pages, chances are that you probably have a few of them and at the very least all of those have to be updated for the scripts. If you use individual pages for all content this issue then spreads to all of your pages. Search and Replace in Files will do the trick, but it's still something that's easy to forget and worry about. Personaly I think it makes sense to have a single place where you can specify common script libraries that you want to load and more importantly which versions thereof and where they are loaded from. Loading Scripts via Server Code Script loading has always been important to me and as long as I can remember I've always built some custom script loading routines into my Web frameworks. WebForms makes this fairly easy because it has a reasonably useful script manager (ClientScriptManager and the ScriptManager) which allow injecting script into the page easily from anywhere in the Page cycle. What's nice about these components is that they allow scripts to be injected by controls so components can wrap up complex script/resource dependencies more easily without having to require long lists of CSS/Scripts/Image includes. In MVC or pure script driven applications like Razor WebPages  the process is more raw, requiring you to embed script references in the right place. But its also more immediate - it lets you know exactly which versions of scripts to use because you have to manually embed them. In WebForms with different controls loading resources this often can get confusing because it's quite possible to load multiple versions of the same script library into a page, the results of which are less than optimal… In this post I look a simple routine that embeds jQuery into the page based on a few application wide configuration settings. It returns only a string of the script tags that can be manually embedded into a Page template. It's a small function that merely a string of the script tags shown at the begging of this post along with some options on how that string is comprised. You'll be able to specify in one place which version loads and then all places where the help function is used will automatically reflect this selection. Options allow specification of the jQuery CDN Url, the fallback Url and where jQuery should be loaded from (script folder, Resource or CDN in my case). While this is specific to jQuery you can apply this to other resources as well. For example I use a similar approach with jQuery.ui as well using practically the same semantics. Providing Resources in ControlResources In my Westwind.Web Web utility library I have a class called ControlResources which is responsible for holding resource Urls, resource IDs and string contants that reference those resource IDs. The library also provides a few helper methods for loading common scriptscripts into a Web page. There are specific versions for WebForms which use the ClientScriptManager/ScriptManager and script link methods that can be used in any .NET technology that can embed an expression into the output template (or code for that matter). The ControlResources class contains mostly static content - references to resources mostly. But it also contains a few static properties that configure script loading: A Script LoadMode (CDN, Resource, or script url) A default CDN Url A fallback url They are  static properties in the ControlResources class: public class ControlResources { /// <summary> /// Determines what location jQuery is loaded from /// </summary> public static JQueryLoadModes jQueryLoadMode = JQueryLoadModes.ContentDeliveryNetwork; /// <summary> /// jQuery CDN Url on Google /// </summary> public static string jQueryCdnUrl = "//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.4/jquery.min.js"; /// <summary> /// jQuery CDN Url on Google /// </summary> public static string jQueryUiCdnUrl = "//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.16/jquery-ui.min.js"; /// <summary> /// jQuery UI fallback Url if CDN is unavailable or WebResource is used /// Note: The file needs to exist and hold the minimized version of jQuery ui /// </summary> public static string jQueryUiLocalFallbackUrl = "~/scripts/jquery-ui.min.js"; } These static properties are fixed values that can be changed at application startup to reflect your preferences. Since they're static they are application wide settings and respected across the entire Web application running. It's best to set these default in Application_Init or similar startup code if you need to change them for your application: protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Force jQuery to be loaded off Google Content Network ControlResources.jQueryLoadMode = JQueryLoadModes.ContentDeliveryNetwork; // Allow overriding of the Cdn url ControlResources.jQueryCdnUrl = "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.2/jquery.min.js"; // Route to our own internal handler App.OnApplicationStart(); } With these basic settings in place you can then embed expressions into a page easily. In WebForms use: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head runat="server"> <%= ControlResources.jQueryLink() %> <script src="scripts/ww.jquery.min.js"></script> </head> In Razor use: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> @Html.Raw(ControlResources.jQueryLink()) <script src="scripts/ww.jquery.min.js"></script> </head> Note that in Razor you need to use @Html.Raw() to force the string NOT to escape. Razor by default escapes string results and this ensures that the HTML content is properly expanded as raw HTML text. Both the WebForms and Razor output produce: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.2/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> if (typeof (jQuery) == 'undefined') document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='/WestWindWebToolkitWeb/WebResource.axd?d=-b6oWzgbpGb8uTaHDrCMv59VSmGhilZP5_T_B8anpGx7X-PmW_1eu1KoHDvox-XHqA1EEb-Tl2YAP3bBeebGN65tv-7-yAimtG4ZnoWH633pExpJor8Qp1aKbk-KQWSoNfRC7rQJHXVP4tC0reYzVw2&t=634535391996872492' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));</script> <script src="scripts/ww.jquery.min.js"></script> </head> which produces the desired effect for both CDN load and fallback URL. The implementation of jQueryLink is pretty basic of course: /// <summary> /// Inserts a script link to load jQuery into the page based on the jQueryLoadModes settings /// of this class. Default load is by CDN plus WebResource fallback /// </summary> /// <param name="url"> /// An optional explicit URL to load jQuery from. Url is resolved. /// When specified no fallback is applied /// </param> /// <returns>full script tag and fallback script for jQuery to load</returns> public static string jQueryLink(JQueryLoadModes jQueryLoadMode = JQueryLoadModes.Default, string url = null) { string jQueryUrl = string.Empty; string fallbackScript = string.Empty; if (jQueryLoadMode == JQueryLoadModes.Default) jQueryLoadMode = ControlResources.jQueryLoadMode; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(url)) jQueryUrl = WebUtils.ResolveUrl(url); else if (jQueryLoadMode == JQueryLoadModes.WebResource) { Page page = new Page(); jQueryUrl = page.ClientScript.GetWebResourceUrl(typeof(ControlResources), ControlResources.JQUERY_SCRIPT_RESOURCE); } else if (jQueryLoadMode == JQueryLoadModes.ContentDeliveryNetwork) { jQueryUrl = ControlResources.jQueryCdnUrl; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(jQueryCdnUrl)) { // check if jquery loaded - if it didn't we're not online and use WebResource fallbackScript = @"<script type=""text/javascript"">if (typeof(jQuery) == 'undefined') document.write(unescape(""%3Cscript src='{0}' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E""));</script>"; fallbackScript = string.Format(fallbackScript, WebUtils.ResolveUrl(ControlResources.jQueryCdnFallbackUrl)); } } string output = "<script src=\"" + jQueryUrl + "\" type=\"text/javascript\"></script>"; // add in the CDN fallback script code if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(fallbackScript)) output += "\r\n" + fallbackScript + "\r\n"; return output; } There's one dependency here on WebUtils.ResolveUrl() which resolves Urls without access to a Page/Control (another one of those features that should be in the runtime, not in the WebForms or MVC engine). You can see there's only a little bit of logic in this code that deals with potentially different load modes. I can load scripts from a Url, WebResources or - my preferred way - from CDN. Based on the static settings the scripts to embed are composed to be returned as simple string <script> tag(s). I find this extremely useful especially when I'm not connected to the internet so that I can quickly swap in a local jQuery resource instead of loading from CDN. While CDN loading with the fallback works it can be a bit slow as the CDN is probed first before the fallback kicks in. Switching quickly in one place makes this trivial. It also makes it very easy once a new version of jQuery rolls around to move up to the new version and ensure that all pages are using the new version immediately. I'm not trying to make this out as 'the' definite way to load your resources, but rather provide it here as a pointer so you can maybe apply your own logic to determine where scripts come from and how they load. You could even automate this some more by using configuration settings or reading the locations/preferences out of some sort of data/metadata store that can be dynamically updated instead via recompilation. FWIW, I use a very similar approach for loading jQuery UI and my own ww.jquery library - the same concept can be applied to any kind of script you might be loading from different locations. Hopefully some of you find this a useful addition to your toolset. Resources Google CDN for jQuery Full ControlResources Source Code ControlResource Documentation Westwind.Web NuGet This method is part of the Westwind.Web library of the West Wind Web Toolkit or you can grab the Web library from NuGet and add to your Visual Studio project. This package includes a host of Web related utilities and script support features. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in ASP.NET  jQuery   Tweet (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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• .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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• Using JSON.NET for dynamic JSON parsing

  - by Rick Strahl

  With the release of ASP.NET Web API as part of .NET 4.5 and MVC 4.0, JSON.NET has effectively pushed out the .NET native serializers to become the default serializer for Web API. JSON.NET is vastly more flexible than the built in DataContractJsonSerializer or the older JavaScript serializer. The DataContractSerializer in particular has been very problematic in the past because it can't deal with untyped objects for serialization - like values of type object, or anonymous types which are quite common these days. The JavaScript Serializer that came before it actually does support non-typed objects for serialization but it can't do anything with untyped data coming in from JavaScript and it's overall model of extensibility was pretty limited (JavaScript Serializer is what MVC uses for JSON responses). JSON.NET provides a robust JSON serializer that has both high level and low level components, supports binary JSON, JSON contracts, Xml to JSON conversion, LINQ to JSON and many, many more features than either of the built in serializers. ASP.NET Web API now uses JSON.NET as its default serializer and is now pulled in as a NuGet dependency into Web API projects, which is great. Dynamic JSON Parsing One of the features that I think is getting ever more important is the ability to serialize and deserialize arbitrary JSON content dynamically - that is without mapping the JSON captured directly into a .NET type as DataContractSerializer or the JavaScript Serializers do. Sometimes it isn't possible to map types due to the differences in languages (think collections, dictionaries etc), and other times you simply don't have the structures in place or don't want to create them to actually import the data. If this topic sounds familiar - you're right! I wrote about dynamic JSON parsing a few months back before JSON.NET was added to Web API and when Web API and the System.Net HttpClient libraries included the System.Json classes like JsonObject and JsonArray. With the inclusion of JSON.NET in Web API these classes are now obsolete and didn't ship with Web API or the client libraries. I re-linked my original post to this one. In this post I'll discus JToken, JObject and JArray which are the dynamic JSON objects that make it very easy to create and retrieve JSON content on the fly without underlying types. Why Dynamic JSON? So, why Dynamic JSON parsing rather than strongly typed parsing? Since applications are interacting more and more with third party services it becomes ever more important to have easy access to those services with easy JSON parsing. Sometimes it just makes lot of sense to pull just a small amount of data out of large JSON document received from a service, because the third party service isn't directly related to your application's logic most of the time - and it makes little sense to map the entire service structure in your application. For example, recently I worked with the Google Maps Places API to return information about businesses close to me (or rather the app's) location. The Google API returns a ton of information that my application had no interest in - all I needed was few values out of the data. Dynamic JSON parsing makes it possible to map this data, without having to map the entire API to a C# data structure. Instead I could pull out the three or four values I needed from the API and directly store it on my business entities that needed to receive the data - no need to map the entire Maps API structure. Getting JSON.NET The easiest way to use JSON.NET is to grab it via NuGet and add it as a reference to your project. You can add it to your project with: PM> Install-Package Newtonsoft.Json From the Package Manager Console or by using Manage NuGet Packages in your project References. As mentioned if you're using ASP.NET Web API or MVC 4 JSON.NET will be automatically added to your project. Alternately you can also go to the CodePlex site and download the latest version including source code: http://json.codeplex.com/ Creating JSON on the fly with JObject and JArray Let's start with creating some JSON on the fly. It's super easy to create a dynamic object structure with any of the JToken derived JSON.NET objects. The most common JToken derived classes you are likely to use are JObject and JArray. JToken implements IDynamicMetaProvider and so uses the dynamic  keyword extensively to make it intuitive to create object structures and turn them into JSON via dynamic object syntax. Here's an example of creating a music album structure with child songs using JObject for the base object and songs and JArray for the actual collection of songs:[TestMethod] public void JObjectOutputTest() { // strong typed instance var jsonObject = new JObject(); // you can explicitly add values here using class interface jsonObject.Add("Entered", DateTime.Now); // or cast to dynamic to dynamically add/read properties dynamic album = jsonObject; album.AlbumName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"; album.Artist = "AC/DC"; album.YearReleased = 1976; album.Songs = new JArray() as dynamic; dynamic song = new JObject(); song.SongName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"; song.SongLength = "4:11"; album.Songs.Add(song); song = new JObject(); song.SongName = "Love at First Feel"; song.SongLength = "3:10"; album.Songs.Add(song); Console.WriteLine(album.ToString()); } This produces a complete JSON structure: { "Entered": "2012-08-18T13:26:37.7137482-10:00", "AlbumName": "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap", "Artist": "AC/DC", "YearReleased": 1976, "Songs": [ { "SongName": "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap", "SongLength": "4:11" }, { "SongName": "Love at First Feel", "SongLength": "3:10" } ] } Notice that JSON.NET does a nice job formatting the JSON, so it's easy to read and paste into blog posts :-). JSON.NET includes a bunch of configuration options that control how JSON is generated. Typically the defaults are just fine, but you can override with the JsonSettings object for most operations. The important thing about this code is that there's no explicit type used for holding the values to serialize to JSON. Rather the JSON.NET objects are the containers that receive the data as I build up my JSON structure dynamically, simply by adding properties. This means this code can be entirely driven at runtime without compile time restraints of structure for the JSON output. Here I use JObject to create a album 'object' and immediately cast it to dynamic. JObject() is kind of similar in behavior to ExpandoObject in that it allows you to add properties by simply assigning to them. Internally, JObject values are stored in pseudo collections of key value pairs that are exposed as properties through the IDynamicMetaObject interface exposed in JSON.NET's JToken base class. For objects the syntax is very clean - you add simple typed values as properties. For objects and arrays you have to explicitly create new JObject or JArray, cast them to dynamic and then add properties and items to them. Always remember though these values are dynamic - which means no Intellisense and no compiler type checking. It's up to you to ensure that the names and values you create are accessed consistently and without typos in your code. Note that you can also access the JObject instance directly (not as dynamic) and get access to the underlying JObject type. This means you can assign properties by string, which can be useful for fully data driven JSON generation from other structures. Below you can see both styles of access next to each other:// strong type instance var jsonObject = new JObject(); // you can explicitly add values here jsonObject.Add("Entered", DateTime.Now); // expando style instance you can just 'use' properties dynamic album = jsonObject; album.AlbumName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"; JContainer (the base class for JObject and JArray) is a collection so you can also iterate over the properties at runtime easily:foreach (var item in jsonObject) { Console.WriteLine(item.Key + " " + item.Value.ToString()); } The functionality of the JSON objects are very similar to .NET's ExpandObject and if you used it before, you're already familiar with how the dynamic interfaces to the JSON objects works. Importing JSON with JObject.Parse() and JArray.Parse() The JValue structure supports importing JSON via the Parse() and Load() methods which can read JSON data from a string or various streams respectively. Essentially JValue includes the core JSON parsing to turn a JSON string into a collection of JsonValue objects that can be then referenced using familiar dynamic object syntax. Here's a simple example:public void JValueParsingTest() { var jsonString = @"{""Name"":""Rick"",""Company"":""West Wind"", ""Entered"":""2012-03-16T00:03:33.245-10:00""}"; dynamic json = JValue.Parse(jsonString); // values require casting string name = json.Name; string company = json.Company; DateTime entered = json.Entered; Assert.AreEqual(name, "Rick"); Assert.AreEqual(company, "West Wind"); } The JSON string represents an object with three properties which is parsed into a JObject class and cast to dynamic. Once cast to dynamic I can then go ahead and access the object using familiar object syntax. Note that the actual values - json.Name, json.Company, json.Entered - are actually of type JToken and I have to cast them to their appropriate types first before I can do type comparisons as in the Asserts at the end of the test method. This is required because of the way that dynamic types work which can't determine the type based on the method signature of the Assert.AreEqual(object,object) method. I have to either assign the dynamic value to a variable as I did above, or explicitly cast ( (string) json.Name) in the actual method call. The JSON structure can be much more complex than this simple example. Here's another example of an array of albums serialized to JSON and then parsed through with JsonValue():[TestMethod] public void JsonArrayParsingTest() { var jsonString = @"[ { ""Id"": ""b3ec4e5c"", ""AlbumName"": ""Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"", ""Artist"": ""AC/DC"", ""YearReleased"": 1976, ""Entered"": ""2012-03-16T00:13:12.2810521-10:00"", ""AlbumImageUrl"": ""http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61kTaH-uZBL._AA115_.jpg"", ""AmazonUrl"": ""http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/…ASIN=B00008BXJ4"", ""Songs"": [ { ""AlbumId"": ""b3ec4e5c"", ""SongName"": ""Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"", ""SongLength"": ""4:11"" }, { ""AlbumId"": ""b3ec4e5c"", ""SongName"": ""Love at First Feel"", ""SongLength"": ""3:10"" }, { ""AlbumId"": ""b3ec4e5c"", ""SongName"": ""Big Balls"", ""SongLength"": ""2:38"" } ] }, { ""Id"": ""7b919432"", ""AlbumName"": ""End of the Silence"", ""Artist"": ""Henry Rollins Band"", ""YearReleased"": 1992, ""Entered"": ""2012-03-16T00:13:12.2800521-10:00"", ""AlbumImageUrl"": ""http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51FO3rb1tuL._SL160_AA160_.jpg"", ""AmazonUrl"": ""http://www.amazon.com/End-Silence-Rollins-Band/dp/B0000040OX/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1302232195&sr=8-5"", ""Songs"": [ { ""AlbumId"": ""7b919432"", ""SongName"": ""Low Self Opinion"", ""SongLength"": ""5:24"" }, { ""AlbumId"": ""7b919432"", ""SongName"": ""Grip"", ""SongLength"": ""4:51"" } ] } ]"; JArray jsonVal = JArray.Parse(jsonString) as JArray; dynamic albums = jsonVal; foreach (dynamic album in albums) { Console.WriteLine(album.AlbumName + " (" + album.YearReleased.ToString() + ")"); foreach (dynamic song in album.Songs) { Console.WriteLine("\t" + song.SongName); } } Console.WriteLine(albums[0].AlbumName); Console.WriteLine(albums[0].Songs[1].SongName); } JObject and JArray in ASP.NET Web API Of course these types also work in ASP.NET Web API controller methods. If you want you can accept parameters using these object or return them back to the server. The following contrived example receives dynamic JSON input, and then creates a new dynamic JSON object and returns it based on data from the first:[HttpPost] public JObject PostAlbumJObject(JObject jAlbum) { // dynamic input from inbound JSON dynamic album = jAlbum; // create a new JSON object to write out dynamic newAlbum = new JObject(); // Create properties on the new instance // with values from the first newAlbum.AlbumName = album.AlbumName + " New"; newAlbum.NewProperty = "something new"; newAlbum.Songs = new JArray(); foreach (dynamic song in album.Songs) { song.SongName = song.SongName + " New"; newAlbum.Songs.Add(song); } return newAlbum; } The raw POST request to the server looks something like this: POST http://localhost/aspnetwebapi/samples/PostAlbumJObject HTTP/1.1User-Agent: FiddlerContent-type: application/jsonHost: localhostContent-Length: 88 {AlbumName: "Dirty Deeds",Songs:[ { SongName: "Problem Child"},{ SongName: "Squealer"}]} and the output that comes back looks like this: {  "AlbumName": "Dirty Deeds New",  "NewProperty": "something new",  "Songs": [    {      "SongName": "Problem Child New"    },    {      "SongName": "Squealer New"    }  ]} The original values are echoed back with something extra appended to demonstrate that we're working with a new object. When you receive or return a JObject, JValue, JToken or JArray instance in a Web API method, Web API ignores normal content negotiation and assumes your content is going to be received and returned as JSON, so effectively the parameter and result type explicitly determines the input and output format which is nice. Dynamic to Strong Type Mapping You can also map JObject and JArray instances to a strongly typed object, so you can mix dynamic and static typing in the same piece of code. Using the 2 Album jsonString shown earlier, the code below takes an array of albums and picks out only a single album and casts that album to a static Album instance.[TestMethod] public void JsonParseToStrongTypeTest() { JArray albums = JArray.Parse(jsonString) as JArray; // pick out one album JObject jalbum = albums[0] as JObject; // Copy to a static Album instance Album album = jalbum.ToObject<Album>(); Assert.IsNotNull(album); Assert.AreEqual(album.AlbumName,jalbum.Value<string>("AlbumName")); Assert.IsTrue(album.Songs.Count > 0); } This is pretty damn useful for the scenario I mentioned earlier - you can read a large chunk of JSON and dynamically walk the property hierarchy down to the item you want to access, and then either access the specific item dynamically (as shown earlier) or map a part of the JSON to a strongly typed object. That's very powerful if you think about it - it leaves you in total control to decide what's dynamic and what's static. Strongly typed JSON Parsing With all this talk of dynamic let's not forget that JSON.NET of course also does strongly typed serialization which is drop dead easy. Here's a simple example on how to serialize and deserialize an object with JSON.NET:[TestMethod] public void StronglyTypedSerializationTest() { // Demonstrate deserialization from a raw string var album = new Album() { AlbumName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap", Artist = "AC/DC", Entered = DateTime.Now, YearReleased = 1976, Songs = new List<Song>() { new Song() { SongName = "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap", SongLength = "4:11" }, new Song() { SongName = "Love at First Feel", SongLength = "3:10" } } }; // serialize to string string json2 = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(album,Formatting.Indented); Console.WriteLine(json2); // make sure we can serialize back var album2 = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<Album>(json2); Assert.IsNotNull(album2); Assert.IsTrue(album2.AlbumName == "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"); Assert.IsTrue(album2.Songs.Count == 2); } JsonConvert is a high level static class that wraps lower level functionality, but you can also use the JsonSerializer class, which allows you to serialize/parse to and from streams. It's a little more work, but gives you a bit more control. The functionality available is easy to discover with Intellisense, and that's good because there's not a lot in the way of documentation that's actually useful. Summary JSON.NET is a pretty complete JSON implementation with lots of different choices for JSON parsing from dynamic parsing to static serialization, to complex querying of JSON objects using LINQ. It's good to see this open source library getting integrated into .NET, and pushing out the old and tired stock .NET parsers so that we finally have a bit more flexibility - and extensibility - in our JSON parsing. Good to go! Resources Sample Test Project http://json.codeplex.com/© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in .NET  Web Api  AJAX   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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• Using an alternate JSON Serializer in ASP.NET Web API

  - by Rick Strahl

  The new ASP.NET Web API that Microsoft released alongside MVC 4.0 Beta last week is a great framework for building REST and AJAX APIs. I've been working with it for quite a while now and I really like the way it works and the complete set of features it provides 'in the box'. It's about time that Microsoft gets a decent API for building generic HTTP endpoints into the framework. DataContractJsonSerializer sucks As nice as Web API's overall design is one thing still sucks: The built-in JSON Serialization uses the DataContractJsonSerializer which is just too limiting for many scenarios. The biggest issues I have with it are: No support for untyped values (object, dynamic, Anonymous Types) MS AJAX style Date Formatting Ugly serialization formats for types like Dictionaries To me the most serious issue is dealing with serialization of untyped objects. I have number of applications with AJAX front ends that dynamically reformat data from business objects to fit a specific message format that certain UI components require. The most common scenario I have there are IEnumerable query results from a database with fields from the result set rearranged to fit the sometimes unconventional formats required for the UI components (like jqGrid for example). Creating custom types to fit these messages seems like overkill and projections using Linq makes this much easier to code up. Alas DataContractJsonSerializer doesn't support it. Neither does DataContractSerializer for XML output for that matter. What this means is that you can't do stuff like this in Web API out of the box:public object GetAnonymousType() { return new { name = "Rick", company = "West Wind", entered= DateTime.Now }; } Basically anything that doesn't have an explicit type DataContractJsonSerializer will not let you return. FWIW, the same is true for XmlSerializer which also doesn't work with non-typed values for serialization. The example above is obviously contrived with a hardcoded object graph, but it's not uncommon to get dynamic values returned from queries that have anonymous types for their result projections. Apparently there's a good possibility that Microsoft will ship Json.NET as part of Web API RTM release.  Scott Hanselman confirmed this as a footnote in his JSON Dates post a few days ago. I've heard several other people from Microsoft confirm that Json.NET will be included and be the default JSON serializer, but no details yet in what capacity it will show up. Let's hope it ends up as the default in the box. Meanwhile this post will show you how you can use it today with the beta and get JSON that matches what you should see in the RTM version. What about JsonValue? To be fair Web API DOES include a new JsonValue/JsonObject/JsonArray type that allow you to address some of these scenarios. JsonValue is a new type in the System.Json assembly that can be used to build up an object graph based on a dictionary. It's actually a really cool implementation of a dynamic type that allows you to create an object graph and spit it out to JSON without having to create .NET type first. JsonValue can also receive a JSON string and parse it without having to actually load it into a .NET type (which is something that's been missing in the core framework). This is really useful if you get a JSON result from an arbitrary service and you don't want to explicitly create a mapping type for the data returned. For serialization you can create an object structure on the fly and pass it back as part of an Web API action method like this:public JsonValue GetJsonValue() { dynamic json = new JsonObject(); json.name = "Rick"; json.company = "West Wind"; json.entered = DateTime.Now; dynamic address = new JsonObject(); address.street = "32 Kaiea"; address.zip = "96779"; json.address = address; dynamic phones = new JsonArray(); json.phoneNumbers = phones; dynamic phone = new JsonObject(); phone.type = "Home"; phone.number = "808 123-1233"; phones.Add(phone); phone = new JsonObject(); phone.type = "Home"; phone.number = "808 123-1233"; phones.Add(phone); //var jsonString = json.ToString(); return json; } which produces the following output (formatted here for easier reading):{ name: "rick", company: "West Wind", entered: "2012-03-08T15:33:19.673-10:00", address: { street: "32 Kaiea", zip: "96779" }, phoneNumbers: [ { type: "Home", number: "808 123-1233" }, { type: "Mobile", number: "808 123-1234" }] } If you need to build a simple JSON type on the fly these types work great. But if you have an existing type - or worse a query result/list that's already formatted JsonValue et al. become a pain to work with. As far as I can see there's no way to just throw an object instance at JsonValue and have it convert into JsonValue dictionary. It's a manual process. Using alternate Serializers in Web API So, currently the default serializer in WebAPI is DataContractJsonSeriaizer and I don't like it. You may not either, but luckily you can swap the serializer fairly easily. If you'd rather use the JavaScriptSerializer built into System.Web.Extensions or Json.NET today, it's not too difficult to create a custom MediaTypeFormatter that uses these serializers and can replace or partially replace the native serializer. Here's a MediaTypeFormatter implementation using the ASP.NET JavaScriptSerializer:using System; using System.Net.Http.Formatting; using System.Threading.Tasks; using System.Web.Script.Serialization; using System.Json; using System.IO; namespace Westwind.Web.WebApi { public class JavaScriptSerializerFormatter : MediaTypeFormatter { public JavaScriptSerializerFormatter() { SupportedMediaTypes.Add(new System.Net.Http.Headers.MediaTypeHeaderValue("application/json")); } protected override bool CanWriteType(Type type) { // don't serialize JsonValue structure use default for that if (type == typeof(JsonValue) || type == typeof(JsonObject) || type== typeof(JsonArray) ) return false; return true; } protected override bool CanReadType(Type type) { if (type == typeof(IKeyValueModel)) return false; return true; } protected override System.Threading.Tasks.Taskobject OnReadFromStreamAsync(Type type, System.IO.Stream stream, System.Net.Http.Headers.HttpContentHeaders contentHeaders, FormatterContext formatterContext) { var task = Taskobject.Factory.StartNew(() = { var ser = new JavaScriptSerializer(); string json; using (var sr = new StreamReader(stream)) { json = sr.ReadToEnd(); sr.Close(); } object val = ser.Deserialize(json,type); return val; }); return task; } protected override System.Threading.Tasks.Task OnWriteToStreamAsync(Type type, object value, System.IO.Stream stream, System.Net.Http.Headers.HttpContentHeaders contentHeaders, FormatterContext formatterContext, System.Net.TransportContext transportContext) { var task = Task.Factory.StartNew( () = { var ser = new JavaScriptSerializer(); var json = ser.Serialize(value); byte[] buf = System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes(json); stream.Write(buf,0,buf.Length); stream.Flush(); }); return task; } } } Formatter implementation is pretty simple: You override 4 methods to tell which types you can handle and then handle the input or output streams to create/parse the JSON data. Note that when creating output you want to take care to still allow JsonValue/JsonObject/JsonArray types to be handled by the default serializer so those objects serialize properly - if you let either JavaScriptSerializer or JSON.NET handle them they'd try to render the dictionaries which is very undesirable. If you'd rather use Json.NET here's the JSON.NET version of the formatter:// this code requires a reference to JSON.NET in your project #if true using System; using System.Net.Http.Formatting; using System.Threading.Tasks; using System.Web.Script.Serialization; using System.Json; using Newtonsoft.Json; using System.IO; using Newtonsoft.Json.Converters; namespace Westwind.Web.WebApi { public class JsonNetFormatter : MediaTypeFormatter { public JsonNetFormatter() { SupportedMediaTypes.Add(new System.Net.Http.Headers.MediaTypeHeaderValue("application/json")); } protected override bool CanWriteType(Type type) { // don't serialize JsonValue structure use default for that if (type == typeof(JsonValue) || type == typeof(JsonObject) || type == typeof(JsonArray)) return false; return true; } protected override bool CanReadType(Type type) { if (type == typeof(IKeyValueModel)) return false; return true; } protected override System.Threading.Tasks.Taskobject OnReadFromStreamAsync(Type type, System.IO.Stream stream, System.Net.Http.Headers.HttpContentHeaders contentHeaders, FormatterContext formatterContext) { var task = Taskobject.Factory.StartNew(() = { var settings = new JsonSerializerSettings() { NullValueHandling = NullValueHandling.Ignore, }; var sr = new StreamReader(stream); var jreader = new JsonTextReader(sr); var ser = new JsonSerializer(); ser.Converters.Add(new IsoDateTimeConverter()); object val = ser.Deserialize(jreader, type); return val; }); return task; } protected override System.Threading.Tasks.Task OnWriteToStreamAsync(Type type, object value, System.IO.Stream stream, System.Net.Http.Headers.HttpContentHeaders contentHeaders, FormatterContext formatterContext, System.Net.TransportContext transportContext) { var task = Task.Factory.StartNew( () = { var settings = new JsonSerializerSettings() { NullValueHandling = NullValueHandling.Ignore, }; string json = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(value, Formatting.Indented, new JsonConverter[1] { new IsoDateTimeConverter() } ); byte[] buf = System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes(json); stream.Write(buf,0,buf.Length); stream.Flush(); }); return task; } } } #endif   One advantage of the Json.NET serializer is that you can specify a few options on how things are formatted and handled. You get null value handling and you can plug in the IsoDateTimeConverter which is nice to product proper ISO dates that I would expect any Json serializer to output these days. Hooking up the Formatters Once you've created the custom formatters you need to enable them for your Web API application. To do this use the GlobalConfiguration.Configuration object and add the formatter to the Formatters collection. Here's what this looks like hooked up from Application_Start in a Web project:protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Action based routing (used for RPC calls) RouteTable.Routes.MapHttpRoute( name: "StockApi", routeTemplate: "stocks/{action}/{symbol}", defaults: new { symbol = RouteParameter.Optional, controller = "StockApi" } ); // WebApi Configuration to hook up formatters and message handlers // optional RegisterApis(GlobalConfiguration.Configuration); } public static void RegisterApis(HttpConfiguration config) { // Add JavaScriptSerializer formatter instead - add at top to make default //config.Formatters.Insert(0, new JavaScriptSerializerFormatter()); // Add Json.net formatter - add at the top so it fires first! // This leaves the old one in place so JsonValue/JsonObject/JsonArray still are handled config.Formatters.Insert(0, new JsonNetFormatter()); } One thing to remember here is the GlobalConfiguration object which is Web API's static configuration instance. I think this thing is seriously misnamed given that GlobalConfiguration could stand for anything and so is hard to discover if you don't know what you're looking for. How about WebApiConfiguration or something more descriptive? Anyway, once you know what it is you can use the Formatters collection to insert your custom formatter. Note that I insert my formatter at the top of the list so it takes precedence over the default formatter. I also am not removing the old formatter because I still want JsonValue/JsonObject/JsonArray to be handled by the default serialization mechanism. Since they process in sequence and I exclude processing for these types JsonValue et al. still get properly serialized/deserialized. Summary Currently DataContractJsonSerializer in Web API is a pain, but at least we have the ability with relatively limited effort to replace the MediaTypeFormatter and plug in our own JSON serializer. This is useful for many scenarios - if you have existing client applications that used MVC JsonResult or ASP.NET AJAX results from ASMX AJAX services you can plug in the JavaScript serializer and get exactly the same serializer you used in the past so your results will be the same and don't potentially break clients. JSON serializers do vary a bit in how they serialize some of the more complex types (like Dictionaries and dates for example) and so if you're migrating it might be helpful to ensure your client code doesn't break when you switch to ASP.NET Web API. Going forward it looks like Microsoft is planning on plugging in Json.Net into Web API and make that the default. I think that's an awesome choice since Json.net has been around forever, is fast and easy to use and provides a ton of functionality as part of this great library. I just wish Microsoft would have figured this out sooner instead of now at the last minute integrating with it especially given that Json.Net has a similar set of lower level JSON objects JsonValue/JsonObject etc. which now will end up being duplicated by the native System.Json stuff. It's not like we don't already have enough confusion regarding which JSON serializer to use (JavaScriptSerializer, DataContractJsonSerializer, JsonValue/JsonObject/JsonArray and now Json.net). For years I've been using my own JSON serializer because the built in choices are both limited. However, with an official encorsement of Json.Net I'm happily moving on to use that in my applications. Let's see and hope Microsoft gets this right before ASP.NET Web API goes gold.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api  AJAX  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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• 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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• SQL SERVER – Securing TRUNCATE Permissions in SQL Server

  - by pinaldave

  Download the Script of this article from here. On December 11, 2010, Vinod Kumar, a Databases & BI technology evangelist from Microsoft Corporation, graced Ahmedabad by spending some time with the Community during the Community Tech Days (CTD) event. As he was running through a few demos, Vinod asked the audience one of the most fundamental and common interview questions – “What is the difference between a DELETE and TRUNCATE?“ Ahmedabad SQL Server User Group Expert Nakul Vachhrajani has come up with excellent solutions of the same. I must congratulate Nakul for this excellent solution and as a encouragement to User Group member, I am publishing the same article over here. Nakul Vachhrajani is a Software Specialist and systems development professional with Patni Computer Systems Limited. He has functional experience spanning legacy code deprecation, system design, documentation, development, implementation, testing, maintenance and support of complex systems, providing business intelligence solutions, database administration, performance tuning, optimization, product management, release engineering, process definition and implementation. He has comprehensive grasp on Database Administration, Development and Implementation with MS SQL Server and C, C++, Visual C++/C#. He has about 6 years of total experience in information technology. Nakul is an member of the Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar SQL Server User Groups, and actively contributes to the community by actively participating in multiple forums and websites like SQLAuthority.com, BeyondRelational.com, SQLServerCentral.com and many others. Please note: The opinions expressed herein are Nakul own personal opinions and do not represent his employer’s view in anyway. All data from everywhere here on Earth go through a series of  four distinct operations, identified by the words: CREATE, READ, UPDATE and DELETE, or simply, CRUD. Putting in Microsoft SQL Server terms, is the process goes like this: INSERT, SELECT, UPDATE and DELETE/TRUNCATE. Quite a few interesting responses were received and evaluated live during the session. To summarize them, the most important similarity that came out was that both DELETE and TRUNCATE participate in transactions. The major differences (not all) that came out of the exercise were: DELETE: DELETE supports a WHERE clause DELETE removes rows from a table, row-by-row Because DELETE moves row-by-row, it acquires a row-level lock Depending upon the recovery model of the database, DELETE is a fully-logged operation. Because DELETE moves row-by-row, it can fire off triggers TRUNCATE: TRUNCATE does not support a WHERE clause TRUNCATE works by directly removing the individual data pages of a table TRUNCATE directly occupies a table-level lock. (Because a lock is acquired, and because TRUNCATE can also participate in a transaction, it has to be a logged operation) TRUNCATE is, therefore, a minimally-logged operation; again, this depends upon the recovery model of the database Triggers are not fired when TRUNCATE is used (because individual row deletions are not logged) Finally, Vinod popped the big homework question that must be critically analyzed: “We know that we can restrict a DELETE operation to a particular user, but how can we restrict the TRUNCATE operation to a particular user?” After returning home and having a nice cup of coffee, I noticed that my gray cells immediately started to work. Below was the result of my research. As what is always said, the devil is in the details. Upon looking at the Permissions section for the TRUNCATE statement in Books On Line, the following jumps right out: “The minimum permission required is ALTER on table_name. TRUNCATE TABLE permissions default to the table owner, members of the sysadmin fixed server role, and the db_owner and db_ddladmin fixed database roles, and are not transferable. However, you can incorporate the TRUNCATE TABLE statement within a module, such as a stored procedure, and grant appropriate permissions to the module using the EXECUTE AS clause.“ Now, what does this mean? Unlike DELETE, one cannot directly assign permissions to a user/set of users allowing or revoking TRUNCATE rights. However, there is a way to circumvent this. It is important to recall that in Microsoft SQL Server, database engine security surrounds the concept of a “securable”, which is any object like a table, stored procedure, trigger, etc. Rights are assigned to a principal on a securable. Refer to the image below (taken from the SQL Server Books On Line). urable”, which is any object like a table, stored procedure, trigger, etc. Rights are assigned to a principal on a securable. Refer to the image below (taken from the SQL Server Books On Line). SETTING UP THE ENVIRONMENT – (01A_Truncate Table Permissions.sql) Script Provided at the end of the article. By the end of this demo, one will be able to do all the CRUD operations, except the TRUNCATE, and the other will only be able to execute the TRUNCATE. All you will need for this test is any edition of SQL Server 2008. (With minor changes, these scripts can be made to work with SQL 2005.) We begin by creating the following: 1.       A test database 2.        Two database roles: associated logins and users 3.       Switch over to the test database and create a test table. Then, add some data into it. I am using row constructors, which is new to SQL 2008. Creating the modules that will be used to enforce permissions 1.       We have already created one of the modules that we will be assigning permissions to. That module is the table: TruncatePermissionsTest 2.       We will now create two stored procedures; one is for the DELETE operation and the other for the TRUNCATE operation. Please note that for all practical purposes, the end result is the same – all data from the table TruncatePermissionsTest is removed Assigning the permissions Now comes the most important part of the demonstration – assigning permissions. A permissions matrix can be worked out as under: To apply the security rights, we use the GRANT and DENY clauses, as under: That’s it! We are now ready for our big test! THE TEST (01B_Truncate Table Test Queries.sql) Script Provided at the end of the article. I will now need two separate SSMS connections, one with the login AllowedTruncate and the other with the login RestrictedTruncate. Running the test is simple; all that’s required is to run through the script – 01B_Truncate Table Test Queries.sql. What I will demonstrate here via screen-shots is the behavior of SQL Server when logged in as the AllowedTruncate user. There are a few other combinations than what are highlighted here. I will leave the reader the right to explore the behavior of the RestrictedTruncate user and these additional scenarios, as a form of self-study. 1.       Testing SELECT permissions 2.       Testing TRUNCATE permissions (Remember, “deny by default”?) 3.       Trying to circumvent security by trying to TRUNCATE the table using the stored procedure Hence, we have now proved that a user can indeed be assigned permissions to specifically assign TRUNCATE permissions. I also hope that the above has sparked curiosity towards putting some security around the probably “destructive” operations of DELETE and TRUNCATE. I would like to wish each and every one of the readers a very happy and secure time with Microsoft SQL Server. (Please find the scripts – 01A_Truncate Table Permissions.sql and 01B_Truncate Table Test Queries.sql that have been used in this demonstration. Please note that these scripts contain purely test-level code only. These scripts must not, at any cost, be used in the reader’s production environments). 01A_Truncate Table Permissions.sql /* ***************************************************************************************************************** Developed By          : Nakul Vachhrajani Functionality         : This demo is focused on how to allow only TRUNCATE permissions to a particular user How to Use            : 1. Run through, step-by-step through the sequence till Step 08 to create a test database 2. Switch over to the "Truncate Table Test Queries.sql" and execute it step-by-step in two different SSMS windows, one where you have logged in as 'RestrictedTruncate', and the other as 'AllowedTruncate' 3. Come back to "Truncate Table Permissions.sql" 4. Execute Step 10 to cleanup! Modifications         : December 13, 2010 - NAV - Updated to add a security matrix and improve code readability when applying security December 12, 2010 - NAV - Created ***************************************************************************************************************** */ -- Step 01: Create a new test database CREATE DATABASE TruncateTestDB GO USE TruncateTestDB GO -- Step 02: Add roles and users to demonstrate the security of the Truncate operation -- 2a. Create the new roles CREATE ROLE AllowedTruncateRole; GO CREATE ROLE RestrictedTruncateRole; GO -- 2b. Create new logins CREATE LOGIN AllowedTruncate WITH PASSWORD = 'truncate@2010', CHECK_POLICY = ON GO CREATE LOGIN RestrictedTruncate WITH PASSWORD = 'truncate@2010', CHECK_POLICY = ON GO -- 2c. Create new Users using the roles and logins created aboave CREATE USER TruncateUser FOR LOGIN AllowedTruncate WITH DEFAULT_SCHEMA = dbo GO CREATE USER NoTruncateUser FOR LOGIN RestrictedTruncate WITH DEFAULT_SCHEMA = dbo GO -- 2d. Add the newly created login to the newly created role sp_addrolemember 'AllowedTruncateRole','TruncateUser' GO sp_addrolemember 'RestrictedTruncateRole','NoTruncateUser' GO -- Step 03: Change over to the test database USE TruncateTestDB GO -- Step 04: Create a test table within the test databse CREATE TABLE TruncatePermissionsTest (Id INT IDENTITY(1,1), Name NVARCHAR(50)) GO -- Step 05: Populate the required data INSERT INTO TruncatePermissionsTest VALUES (N'Delhi'), (N'Mumbai'), (N'Ahmedabad') GO -- Step 06: Encapsulate the DELETE within another module CREATE PROCEDURE proc_DeleteMyTable WITH EXECUTE AS SELF AS DELETE FROM TruncateTestDB..TruncatePermissionsTest GO -- Step 07: Encapsulate the TRUNCATE within another module CREATE PROCEDURE proc_TruncateMyTable WITH EXECUTE AS SELF AS TRUNCATE TABLE TruncateTestDB..TruncatePermissionsTest GO -- Step 08: Apply Security /* *****************************SECURITY MATRIX*************************************** =================================================================================== Object                   | Permissions |                 Login |             | AllowedTruncate   |   RestrictedTruncate |             |User:NoTruncateUser|   User:TruncateUser =================================================================================== TruncatePermissionsTest  | SELECT,     |      GRANT        |      (Default) | INSERT,     |                   | | UPDATE,     |                   | | DELETE      |                   | -------------------------+-------------+-------------------+----------------------- TruncatePermissionsTest  | ALTER       |      DENY         |      (Default) -------------------------+-------------+----*/----------------+----------------------- proc_DeleteMyTable | EXECUTE | GRANT | DENY -------------------------+-------------+-------------------+----------------------- proc_TruncateMyTable | EXECUTE | DENY | GRANT -------------------------+-------------+-------------------+----------------------- *****************************SECURITY MATRIX*************************************** */ /* Table: TruncatePermissionsTest*/ GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE ON TruncateTestDB..TruncatePermissionsTest TO NoTruncateUser GO DENY ALTER ON TruncateTestDB..TruncatePermissionsTest TO NoTruncateUser GO /* Procedure: proc_DeleteMyTable*/ GRANT EXECUTE ON TruncateTestDB..proc_DeleteMyTable TO NoTruncateUser GO DENY EXECUTE ON TruncateTestDB..proc_DeleteMyTable TO TruncateUser GO /* Procedure: proc_TruncateMyTable*/ DENY EXECUTE ON TruncateTestDB..proc_TruncateMyTable TO NoTruncateUser GO GRANT EXECUTE ON TruncateTestDB..proc_TruncateMyTable TO TruncateUser GO -- Step 09: Test --Switch over to the "Truncate Table Test Queries.sql" and execute it step-by-step in two different SSMS windows: --    1. one where you have logged in as 'RestrictedTruncate', and --    2. the other as 'AllowedTruncate' -- Step 10: Cleanup sp_droprolemember 'AllowedTruncateRole','TruncateUser' GO sp_droprolemember 'RestrictedTruncateRole','NoTruncateUser' GO DROP USER TruncateUser GO DROP USER NoTruncateUser GO DROP LOGIN AllowedTruncate GO DROP LOGIN RestrictedTruncate GO DROP ROLE AllowedTruncateRole GO DROP ROLE RestrictedTruncateRole GO USE MASTER GO DROP DATABASE TruncateTestDB GO 01B_Truncate Table Test Queries.sql /* ***************************************************************************************************************** Developed By          : Nakul Vachhrajani Functionality         : This demo is focused on how to allow only TRUNCATE permissions to a particular user How to Use            : 1. Switch over to this from "Truncate Table Permissions.sql", Step #09 2. Execute this step-by-step in two different SSMS windows a. One where you have logged in as 'RestrictedTruncate', and b. The other as 'AllowedTruncate' 3. Return back to "Truncate Table Permissions.sql" 4. Execute Step 10 to cleanup! Modifications         : December 12, 2010 - NAV - Created ***************************************************************************************************************** */ -- Step 09A: Switch to the test database USE TruncateTestDB GO -- Step 09B: Ensure that we have valid data SELECT * FROM TruncatePermissionsTest GO -- (Expected: Following error will occur if logged in as "AllowedTruncate") -- Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Line 1 -- The SELECT permission was denied on the object 'TruncatePermissionsTest', database 'TruncateTestDB', schema 'dbo'. --Step 09C: Attempt to Truncate Data from the table without using the stored procedure TRUNCATE TABLE TruncatePermissionsTest GO -- (Expected: Following error will occur) --  Msg 1088, Level 16, State 7, Line 2 --  Cannot find the object "TruncatePermissionsTest" because it does not exist or you do not have permissions. -- Step 09D:Regenerate Test Data INSERT INTO TruncatePermissionsTest VALUES (N'London'), (N'Paris'), (N'Berlin') GO -- (Expected: Following error will occur if logged in as "AllowedTruncate") -- Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Line 1 -- The INSERT permission was denied on the object 'TruncatePermissionsTest', database 'TruncateTestDB', schema 'dbo'. --Step 09E: Attempt to Truncate Data from the table using the stored procedure EXEC proc_TruncateMyTable GO -- (Expected: Will execute successfully with 'AllowedTruncate' user, will error out as under with 'RestrictedTruncate') -- Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Procedure proc_TruncateMyTable, Line 1 -- The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object 'proc_TruncateMyTable', database 'TruncateTestDB', schema 'dbo'. -- Step 09F:Regenerate Test Data INSERT INTO TruncatePermissionsTest VALUES (N'Madrid'), (N'Rome'), (N'Athens') GO --Step 09G: Attempt to Delete Data from the table without using the stored procedure DELETE FROM TruncatePermissionsTest GO -- (Expected: Following error will occur if logged in as "AllowedTruncate") -- Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Line 2 -- The DELETE permission was denied on the object 'TruncatePermissionsTest', database 'TruncateTestDB', schema 'dbo'. -- Step 09H:Regenerate Test Data INSERT INTO TruncatePermissionsTest VALUES (N'Spain'), (N'Italy'), (N'Greece') GO --Step 09I: Attempt to Delete Data from the table using the stored procedure EXEC proc_DeleteMyTable GO -- (Expected: Following error will occur if logged in as "AllowedTruncate") -- Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Procedure proc_DeleteMyTable, Line 1 -- The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object 'proc_DeleteMyTable', database 'TruncateTestDB', schema 'dbo'. --Step 09J: Close this SSMS window and return back to "Truncate Table Permissions.sql" Thank you Nakul to take up the challenge and prove that Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar SQL Server User Group has talent to solve difficult problems. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Best Practices, Pinal Dave, Readers Contribution, Readers Question, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Security, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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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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• Creating packages in code – Execute SQL Task

  The Execute SQL Task is for obvious reasons very well used, so I thought if you are building packages in code the chances are you will be using it. Using the task basic features of the task are quite straightforward, add the task and set some properties, just like any other. When you start interacting with variables though it can be a little harder to grasp so these samples should see you through. Some of these more advanced features are explained in much more detail in our ever popular post The Execute SQL Task, here I’ll just be showing you how to implement them in code. The abbreviated code blocks below demonstrate the different features of the task. The complete code has been encapsulated into a sample class which you can download (ExecSqlPackage.cs). Each feature described has its own method in the sample class which is mentioned after the code block. This first sample just shows adding the task, setting the basic properties for a connection and of course an SQL statement. Package package = new Package(); // Add the SQL OLE-DB connection ConnectionManager sqlConnection = AddSqlConnection(package, "localhost", "master"); // Add the SQL Task package.Executables.Add("STOCK:SQLTask"); // Get the task host wrapper TaskHost taskHost = package.Executables[0] as TaskHost; // Set required properties taskHost.Properties["Connection"].SetValue(taskHost, sqlConnection.ID); taskHost.Properties["SqlStatementSource"].SetValue(taskHost, "SELECT * FROM sysobjects"); For the full version of this code, see the CreatePackage method in the sample class. The AddSqlConnection method is a helper method that adds an OLE-DB connection to the package, it is of course in the sample class file too. Returning a single value with a Result Set The following sample takes a different approach, getting a reference to the ExecuteSQLTask object task itself, rather than just using the non-specific TaskHost as above. Whilst it means we need to add an extra reference to our project (Microsoft.SqlServer.SQLTask) it makes coding much easier as we have compile time validation of any property and types we use. For the more complex properties that is very valuable and saves a lot of time during development. The query has also been changed to return a single value, one row and one column. The sample shows how we can return that value into a variable, which we also add to our package in the code. To do this manually you would set the Result Set property on the General page to Single Row and map the variable on the Result Set page in the editor. Package package = new Package(); // Add the SQL OLE-DB connection ConnectionManager sqlConnection = AddSqlConnection(package, "localhost", "master"); // Add the SQL Task package.Executables.Add("STOCK:SQLTask"); // Get the task host wrapper TaskHost taskHost = package.Executables[0] as TaskHost; // Add variable to hold result value package.Variables.Add("Variable", false, "User", 0); // Get the task object ExecuteSQLTask task = taskHost.InnerObject as ExecuteSQLTask; // Set core properties task.Connection = sqlConnection.Name; task.SqlStatementSource = "SELECT id FROM sysobjects WHERE name = 'sysrowsets'"; // Set single row result set task.ResultSetType = ResultSetType.ResultSetType_SingleRow; // Add result set binding, map the id column to variable task.ResultSetBindings.Add(); IDTSResultBinding resultBinding = task.ResultSetBindings.GetBinding(0); resultBinding.ResultName = "id"; resultBinding.DtsVariableName = "User::Variable"; For the full version of this code, see the CreatePackageResultVariable method in the sample class. The other types of Result Set behaviour are just a variation on this theme, set the property and map the result binding as required. Parameter Mapping for SQL Statements This final example uses a parameterised SQL statement, with the coming from a variable. The syntax varies slightly between connection types, as explained in the Working with Parameters and Return Codes in the Execute SQL Taskhelp topic, but OLE-DB is the most commonly used, for which a question mark is the parameter value placeholder. Package package = new Package(); // Add the SQL OLE-DB connection ConnectionManager sqlConnection = AddSqlConnection(package, ".", "master"); // Add the SQL Task package.Executables.Add("STOCK:SQLTask"); // Get the task host wrapper TaskHost taskHost = package.Executables[0] as TaskHost; // Get the task object ExecuteSQLTask task = taskHost.InnerObject as ExecuteSQLTask; // Set core properties task.Connection = sqlConnection.Name; task.SqlStatementSource = "SELECT id FROM sysobjects WHERE name = ?"; // Add variable to hold parameter value package.Variables.Add("Variable", false, "User", "sysrowsets"); // Add input parameter binding task.ParameterBindings.Add(); IDTSParameterBinding parameterBinding = task.ParameterBindings.GetBinding(0); parameterBinding.DtsVariableName = "User::Variable"; parameterBinding.ParameterDirection = ParameterDirections.Input; parameterBinding.DataType = (int)OleDBDataTypes.VARCHAR; parameterBinding.ParameterName = "0"; parameterBinding.ParameterSize = 255; For the full version of this code, see the CreatePackageParameterVariable method in the sample class. You’ll notice the data type has to be specified for the parameter IDTSParameterBinding .DataType Property, and these type codes are connection specific too. My enumeration I wrote several years ago is shown below was probably done by reverse engineering a package and also the API header file, but I recently found a very handy post that covers more connections as well for exactly this, Setting the DataType of IDTSParameterBinding objects (Execute SQL Task). /// <summary> /// Enumeration of OLE-DB types, used when mapping OLE-DB parameters. /// </summary> private enum OleDBDataTypes { BYTE = 0x11, CURRENCY = 6, DATE = 7, DB_VARNUMERIC = 0x8b, DBDATE = 0x85, DBTIME = 0x86, DBTIMESTAMP = 0x87, DECIMAL = 14, DOUBLE = 5, FILETIME = 0x40, FLOAT = 4, GUID = 0x48, LARGE_INTEGER = 20, LONG = 3, NULL = 1, NUMERIC = 0x83, NVARCHAR = 130, SHORT = 2, SIGNEDCHAR = 0x10, ULARGE_INTEGER = 0x15, ULONG = 0x13, USHORT = 0x12, VARCHAR = 0x81, VARIANT_BOOL = 11 } Download Sample code ExecSqlPackage.cs (10KB)

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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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• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Released

  - by ScottGu

  The final release of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 is now available. Download and Install Today MSDN subscribers, as well as WebsiteSpark/BizSpark/DreamSpark members, can now download the final releases of Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010 through the MSDN subscribers download center.  If you are not an MSDN Subscriber, you can download free 90-day trial editions of Visual Studio 2010.  Or you can can download the free Visual Studio express editions of Visual Web Developer 2010, Visual Basic 2010, Visual C# 2010 and Visual C++.  These express editions are available completely for free (and never time out).  If you are looking for an easy way to setup a new machine for web-development you can automate installing ASP.NET 4, ASP.NET MVC 2, IIS, SQL Server Express and Visual Web Developer 2010 Express really quickly with the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (just click the install button on the page). What is new with VS 2010 and .NET 4 Today’s release is a big one – and brings with it a ton of new feature and capabilities. One of the things we tried hard to focus on with this release was to invest heavily in making existing applications, projects and developer experiences better.  What this means is that you don’t need to read 1000+ page books or spend time learning major new concepts in order to take advantage of the release.  There are literally thousands of improvements (both big and small) that make you more productive and successful without having to learn big new concepts in order to start using them.  Below is just a small sampling of some of the improvements with this release: Visual Studio 2010 IDE  Visual Studio 2010 now supports multiple-monitors (enabling much better use of screen real-estate).  It has new code Intellisense support that makes it easier to find and use classes and methods. It has improved code navigation support for searching code-bases and seeing how code is called and used.  It has new code visualization support that allows you to see the relationships across projects and classes within projects, as well as to automatically generate sequence diagrams to chart execution flow.  The editor now supports HTML and JavaScript snippet support as well as improved JavaScript intellisense. The VS 2010 Debugger and Profiling support is now much, much richer and enables new features like Intellitrace (aka Historical Debugging), debugging of Crash/Dump files, and better parallel debugging.  VS 2010’s multi-targeting support is now much richer, and enables you to use VS 2010 to target .NET 2, .NET 3, .NET 3.5 and .NET 4 applications.  And the infamous Add Reference dialog now loads much faster. TFS 2010 is now easy to setup (you can now install the server in under 10 minutes) and enables great source-control, bug/work-item tracking, and continuous integration support.  Testing (both automated and manual) is now much, much richer.  And VS 2010 Premium and Ultimate provide much richer architecture and design tooling support. VB and C# Language Features VB and C# in VS 2010 both contain a bunch of new features and capabilities.  VB adds new support for automatic properties, collection initializers, and implicit line continuation support among many other features.  C# adds support for optional parameters and named arguments, a new dynamic keyword, co-variance and contra-variance, and among many other features. ASP.NET 4 and ASP.NET MVC 2 With ASP.NET 4, Web Forms controls now render clean, semantically correct, and CSS friendly HTML markup. Built-in URL routing functionality allows you to expose clean, search engine friendly, URLs and increase the traffic to your Website.  ViewState within applications can now be more easily controlled and made smaller.  ASP.NET Dynamic Data support has been expanded.  More controls, including rich charting and data controls, are now built-into ASP.NET 4 and enable you to build applications even faster.  New starter project templates now make it easier to get going with new projects.  SEO enhancements make it easier to drive traffic to your public facing sites.  And web.config files are now clean and simple. ASP.NET MVC 2 is now built-into VS 2010 and ASP.NET 4, and provides a great way to build web sites and applications using a model-view-controller based pattern. ASP.NET MVC 2 adds features to easily enable client and server validation logic, provides new strongly-typed HTML and UI-scaffolding helper methods.  It also enables more modular/reusable applications.  The new <%: %> syntax in ASP.NET makes it easier to HTML encode output.  Visual Studio 2010 also now includes better tooling support for unit testing and TDD.  In particular, “Consume first intellisense” and “generate from usage" support within VS 2010 make it easier to write your unit tests first, and then drive your implementation from them. Deploying ASP.NET applications gets a lot easier with this release. You can now publish your Websites and applications to a staging or production server from within Visual Studio itself. Visual Studio 2010 makes it easy to transfer all your files, code, configuration, database schema and data in one complete package. VS 2010 also makes it easy to manage separate web.config configuration files settings depending upon whether you are in debug, release, staging or production modes. WPF 4 and Silverlight 4 WPF 4 includes a ton of new improvements and capabilities including more built-in controls, richer graphics features (cached composition, pixel shader 3 support, layoutrounding, and animation easing functions), a much improved text stack (with crisper text rendering, custom dictionary support, and selection and caret brush options).  WPF 4 also includes a bunch of support to enable you to take advantage of new Windows 7 features – including multi-touch and Windows 7 shell integration. Silverlight 4 will launch this week as well.  You can watch my Silverlight 4 launch keynote streamed live Tuesday (April 13th) at 8am Pacific Time.  Silverlight 4 includes a ton of new capabilities – including a bunch for making it possible to build great business applications and out of the browser applications.  I’ll be doing a separate blog post later this week (once it is live on the web) that talks more about its capabilities. Visual Studio 2010 now includes great tooling support for both WPF and Silverlight.  The new VS 2010 WPF and Silverlight designer makes it much easier to build client applications as well as build great line of business solutions, as well as integrate and bind with data.  Tooling support for Silverlight 4 with the final release of Visual Studio 2010 will be available when Silverlight 4 releases to the web this week. SharePoint and Azure Visual Studio 2010 now includes built-in support for building SharePoint applications.  You can now create, edit, build, and debug SharePoint applications directly within Visual Studio 2010.  You can also now use SharePoint with TFS 2010. Support for creating Azure-hosted applications is also now included with VS 2010 – allowing you to build ASP.NET and WCF based applications and host them within the cloud. Data Access Data access has a lot of improvements coming to it with .NET 4.  Entity Framework 4 includes a ton of new features and capabilities – including support for model first and POCO development, default support for lazy loading, built-in support for pluralization/singularization of table/property names within the VS 2010 designer, full support for all the LINQ operators, the ability to optionally expose foreign keys on model objects (useful for some stateless web scenarios), disconnected API support to better handle N-Tier and stateless web scenarios, and T4 template customization support within VS 2010 to allow you to customize and automate how code is generated for you by the data designer.  In addition to improvements with the Entity Framework, LINQ to SQL with .NET 4 also includes a bunch of nice improvements.  WCF and Workflow WCF includes a bunch of great new capabilities – including better REST, activation and configuration support.  WCF Data Services (formerly known as Astoria) and WCF RIA Services also now enable you to easily expose and work with data from remote clients. Windows Workflow is now much faster, includes flowchart services, and now makes it easier to make custom services than before.  More details can be found here. CLR and Core .NET Library Improvements .NET 4 includes the new CLR 4 engine – which includes a lot of nice performance and feature improvements.  CLR 4 engine now runs side-by-side in-process with older versions of the CLR – allowing you to use two different versions of .NET within the same process.  It also includes improved COM interop support.  The .NET 4 base class libraries (BCL) include a bunch of nice additions and refinements.  In particular, the .NET 4 BCL now includes new parallel programming support that makes it much easier to build applications that take advantage of multiple CPUs and cores on a computer.  This work dove-tails nicely with the new VS 2010 parallel debugger (making it much easier to debug parallel applications), as well as the new F# functional language support now included in the VS 2010 IDE.  .NET 4 also now also has the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) library built-in – which makes it easier to use dynamic language functionality with .NET.  MEF – a really cool library that enables rich extensibility – is also now built-into .NET 4 and included as part of the base class libraries.  .NET 4 Client Profile The download size of the .NET 4 redist is now much smaller than it was before (the x86 full .NET 4 package is about 36MB).  We also now have a .NET 4 Client Profile package which is a pure sub-set of the full .NET that can be used to streamline client application installs. C++ VS 2010 includes a bunch of great improvements for C++ development.  This includes better C++ Intellisense support, MSBuild support for projects, improved parallel debugging and profiler support, MFC improvements, and a number of language features and compiler optimizations. My VS 2010 and .NET 4 Blog Series I’ve been cranking away on a blog series the last few months that highlights many of the new VS 2010 and .NET 4 improvements.  The good news is that I have about 20 in-depth posts already written.  The bad news (for me) is that I have about 200 more to go until I’m done!  I’m going to try and keep adding a few more each week over the next few months to discuss the new improvements and how best to take advantage of them. Below is a list of the already written ones that you can check out today: Clean Web.Config Files Starter Project Templates Multi-targeting Multiple Monitor Support New Code Focused Web Profile Option HTML / ASP.NET / JavaScript Code Snippets Auto-Start ASP.NET Applications URL Routing with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms Searching and Navigating Code in VS 2010 VS 2010 Code Intellisense Improvements WPF 4 Add Reference Dialog Improvements SEO Improvements with ASP.NET 4 Output Cache Extensibility with ASP.NET 4 Built-in Charting Controls for ASP.NET and Windows Forms Cleaner HTML Markup with ASP.NET 4 - Client IDs Optional Parameters and Named Arguments in C# 4 - and a cool scenarios with ASP.NET MVC 2 Automatic Properties, Collection Initializers and Implicit Line Continuation Support with VB 2010 New <%: %> Syntax for HTML Encoding Output using ASP.NET 4 JavaScript Intellisense Improvements with VS 2010 Stay tuned to my blog as I post more.  Also check out this page which links to a bunch of great articles and videos done by others. VS 2010 Installation Notes If you have installed a previous version of VS 2010 on your machine (either the beta or the RC) you must first uninstall it before installing the final VS 2010 release.  I also recommend uninstalling .NET 4 betas (including both the client and full .NET 4 installs) as well as the other installs that come with VS 2010 (e.g. ASP.NET MVC 2 preview builds, etc).  The uninstalls of the betas/RCs will clean up all the old state on your machine – after which you can install the final VS 2010 version and should have everything just work (this is what I’ve done on all of my machines and I haven’t had any problems). The VS 2010 and .NET 4 installs add a bunch of new managed assemblies to your machine.  Some of these will be “NGEN’d” to native code during the actual install process (making them run fast).  To avoid adding too much time to VS setup, though, we don’t NGEN all assemblies immediately – and instead will NGEN the rest in the background when your machine is idle.  Until it finishes NGENing the assemblies they will be JIT’d to native code the first time they are used in a process – which for large assemblies can sometimes cause a slight performance hit. If you run into this you can manually force all assemblies to be NGEN’d to native code immediately (and not just wait till the machine is idle) by launching the Visual Studio command line prompt from the Windows Start Menu (Microsoft Visual Studio 2010->Visual Studio Tools->Visual Studio Command Prompt).  Within the command prompt type “Ngen executequeueditems” – this will cause everything to be NGEN’d immediately. How to Buy Visual Studio 2010 You can can download and use the free Visual Studio express editions of Visual Web Developer 2010, Visual Basic 2010, Visual C# 2010 and Visual C++.  These express editions are available completely for free (and never time out). You can buy a new copy of VS 2010 Professional that includes a 1 year subscription to MSDN Essentials for $799.  MSDN Essentials includes a developer license of Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, SQL Server 2008 DataCenter R2, and 20 hours of Azure hosting time.  Subscribers also have access to MSDN’s Online Concierge, and Priority Support in MSDN Forums. Upgrade prices from previous releases of Visual Studio are also available.  Existing Visual Studio 2005/2008 Standard customers can upgrade to Visual Studio 2010 Professional for a special $299 retail price until October.  You can take advantage of this VS Standard->Professional upgrade promotion here. Web developers who build applications for others, and who are either independent developers or who work for companies with less than 10 employees, can also optionally take advantage of the Microsoft WebSiteSpark program.  This program gives you three copies of Visual Studio 2010 Professional, 1 copy of Expression Studio, and 4 CPU licenses of both Windows 2008 R2 Web Server and SQL 2008 Web Edition that you can use to both develop and deploy applications with at no cost for 3 years.  At the end of the 3 years there is no obligation to buy anything.  You can sign-up for WebSiteSpark today in under 5 minutes – and immediately have access to the products to download. Summary Today’s release is a big one – and has a bunch of improvements for pretty much every developer.  Thank you everyone who provided feedback, suggestions and reported bugs throughout the development process – we couldn’t have delivered it without you.  Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Setting up and using Bing Translate API Service for Machine Translation

  - by Rick Strahl

  Last week I spent quite a bit of time trying to set up the Bing Translate API service. I can honestly say this was one of the most screwed up developer experiences I've had in a long while - specifically related to the byzantine sign up process that Microsoft has in place. Not only is it nearly impossible to find decent documentation on the required signup process, some of the links in the docs are just plain wrong, and some of the account pages you need to access the actual account information once signed up are not linked anywhere from the administration UI. To make things even harder is the fact that the APIs changed a while back, with a completely new authentication scheme that's described and not directly linked documentation topic also made for a very frustrating search experience. It's a bummer that this is the case too, because the actual API itself is easy to use and works very well - fast and reasonably accurate (as accurate as you can expect machine translation to be). But the sign up process is a pain in the ass doubtlessly leaving many people giving up in frustration. In this post I'll try to hit all the points needed to set up to use the Bing Translate API in one place since such a document seems to be missing from Microsoft. Hopefully the API folks at Microsoft will get their shit together and actually provide this sort of info on their site… Signing Up The first step required is to create a Windows Azure MarketPlace account. Go to: https://datamarket.azure.com/ Sign in with your Windows Live Id If you don't have an account you will be taken to a registration page which you have to fill out. Follow the links and complete the registration. Once you're signed in you can start adding services. Click on the Data Link on the main page Select Microsoft Translator from the list This adds the Microsoft Bing Translator to your services. Pricing The page shows the pricing matrix and the free service which provides 2 megabytes for translations a month for free. Prices go up steeply from there. Pricing is determined by actual bytes of the result translations used. Max translations are 1000 characters so at minimum this means you get around 2000 translations a month for free. However most translations are probable much less so you can expect larger number of translations to go through. For testing or low volume translations this should be just fine. Once signed up there are no further instructions and you're left in limbo on the MS site. Register your Application Once you've created the Data association with Translator the next step is registering your application. To do this you need to access your developer account. Go to https://datamarket.azure.com/developer/applications/register Provide a ClientId, which is effectively the unique string identifier for your application (not your customer id!) Provide your name The client secret was auto-created and this becomes your 'password' For the redirect url provide any https url: https://microsoft.com works Give this application a description of your choice so you can identify it in the list of apps Now, once you've registered your application, keep track of the ClientId and ClientSecret - those are the two keys you need to authenticate before you can call the Translate API. Oddly the applications page is hidden from the Azure Portal UI. I couldn't find a direct link from anywhere on the site back to this page where I can examine my developer application keys. To find them you can go to: https://datamarket.azure.com/developer/applications You can come back here to look at your registered applications and pick up the ClientID and ClientSecret. Fun eh? But we're now ready to actually call the API and do some translating. Using the Bing Translate API The good news is that after this signup hell, using the API is pretty straightforward. To use the translation API you'll need to actually use two services: You need to call an authentication API service first, before you can call the actual translator API. These two APIs live on different domains, and the authentication API returns JSON data while the translator service returns XML. So much for consistency. Authentication The first step is authentication. The service uses oAuth authentication with a  bearer token that has to be passed to the translator API. The authentication call retrieves the oAuth token that you can then use with the translate API call. The bearer token has a short 10 minute life time, so while you can cache it for successive calls, the token can't be cached for long periods. This means for Web backend requests you typically will have to authenticate each time unless you build a more elaborate caching scheme that takes the timeout into account (perhaps using the ASP.NET Cache object). For low volume operations you can probably get away with simply calling the auth API for every translation you do. To call the Authentication API use code like this:/// /// Retrieves an oAuth authentication token to be used on the translate /// API request. The result string needs to be passed as a bearer token /// to the translate API. /// /// You can find client ID and Secret (or register a new one) at: /// https://datamarket.azure.com/developer/applications/ /// /// The client ID of your application /// The client secret or password /// public string GetBingAuthToken(string clientId = null, string clientSecret = null) { string authBaseUrl = https://datamarket.accesscontrol.windows.net/v2/OAuth2-13; if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(clientId) || string.IsNullOrEmpty(clientSecret)) { ErrorMessage = Resources.Resources.Client_Id_and_Client_Secret_must_be_provided; return null; } var postData = string.Format("grant_type=client_credentials&client_id={0}" + "&client_secret={1}" + "&scope=http://api.microsofttranslator.com", HttpUtility.UrlEncode(clientId), HttpUtility.UrlEncode(clientSecret)); // POST Auth data to the oauth API string res, token; try { var web = new WebClient(); web.Encoding = Encoding.UTF8; res = web.UploadString(authBaseUrl, postData); } catch (Exception ex) { ErrorMessage = ex.GetBaseException().Message; return null; } var ser = new JavaScriptSerializer(); var auth = ser.Deserialize<BingAuth>(res); if (auth == null) return null; token = auth.access_token; return token; } private class BingAuth { public string token_type { get; set; } public string access_token { get; set; } } This code basically takes the client id and secret and posts it at the oAuth endpoint which returns a JSON string. Here I use the JavaScript serializer to deserialize the JSON into a custom object I created just for deserialization. You can also use JSON.NET and dynamic deserialization if you are already using JSON.NET in your app in which case you don't need the extra type. In my library that houses this component I don't, so I just rely on the built in serializer. The auth method returns a long base64 encoded string which can be used as a bearer token in the translate API call. Translation Once you have the authentication token you can use it to pass to the translate API. The auth token is passed as an Authorization header and the value is prefixed with a 'Bearer ' prefix for the string. Here's what the simple Translate API call looks like:/// /// Uses the Bing API service to perform translation /// Bing can translate up to 1000 characters. /// /// Requires that you provide a CLientId and ClientSecret /// or set the configuration values for these two. /// /// More info on setup: /// http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/ /// /// Text to translate /// Two letter culture name /// Two letter culture name /// Pass an access token retrieved with GetBingAuthToken. /// If not passed the default keys from .config file are used if any /// public string TranslateBing(string text, string fromCulture, string toCulture, string accessToken = null) { string serviceUrl = "http://api.microsofttranslator.com/V2/Http.svc/Translate"; if (accessToken == null) { accessToken = GetBingAuthToken(); if (accessToken == null) return null; } string res; try { var web = new WebClient(); web.Headers.Add("Authorization", "Bearer " + accessToken); string ct = "text/plain"; string postData = string.Format("?text={0}&from={1}&to={2}&contentType={3}", HttpUtility.UrlEncode(text), fromCulture, toCulture, HttpUtility.UrlEncode(ct)); web.Encoding = Encoding.UTF8; res = web.DownloadString(serviceUrl + postData); } catch (Exception e) { ErrorMessage = e.GetBaseException().Message; return null; } // result is a single XML Element fragment var doc = new XmlDocument(); doc.LoadXml(res); return doc.DocumentElement.InnerText; } The first of this code deals with ensuring the auth token exists. You can either pass the token into the method manually or let the method automatically retrieve the auth code on its own. In my case I'm using this inside of a Web application and in that situation I simply need to re-authenticate every time as there's no convenient way to manage the lifetime of the auth cookie. The auth token is added as an Authorization HTTP header prefixed with 'Bearer ' and attached to the request. The text to translate, the from and to language codes and a result format are passed on the query string of this HTTP GET request against the Translate API. The translate API returns an XML string which contains a single element with the translated string. Using the Wrapper Methods It should be pretty obvious how to use these two methods but here are a couple of test methods that demonstrate the two usage scenarios:[TestMethod] public void TranslateBingWithAuthTest() { var translate = new TranslationServices(); string clientId = DbResourceConfiguration.Current.BingClientId; string clientSecret = DbResourceConfiguration.Current.BingClientSecret; string auth = translate.GetBingAuthToken(clientId, clientSecret); Assert.IsNotNull(auth); string text = translate.TranslateBing("Hello World we're back home!", "en", "de",auth); Assert.IsNotNull(text, translate.ErrorMessage); Console.WriteLine(text); } [TestMethod] public void TranslateBingIntegratedTest() { var translate = new TranslationServices(); string text = translate.TranslateBing("Hello World we're back home!","en","de"); Assert.IsNotNull(text, translate.ErrorMessage); Console.WriteLine(text); } Other API Methods The Translate API has a number of methods available and this one is the simplest one but probably also the most common one that translates a single string. You can find additional methods for this API here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff512419.aspx Soap and AJAX APIs are also available and documented on MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd576287.aspx These links will be your starting points for calling other methods in this API. Dual Interface I've talked about my database driven localization provider here in the past, and it's for this tool that I added the Bing localization support. Basically I have a localization administration form that allows me to translate individual strings right out of the UI, using both Google and Bing APIs: As you can see in this example, the results from Google and Bing can vary quite a bit - in this case Google is stumped while Bing actually generated a valid translation. At other times it's the other way around - it's pretty useful to see multiple translations at the same time. Here I can choose from one of the values and driectly embed them into the translated text field. Lost in Translation There you have it. As I mentioned using the API once you have all the bureaucratic crap out of the way calling the APIs is fairly straight forward and reasonably fast, even if you have to call the Auth API for every call. Hopefully this post will help out a few of you trying to navigate the Microsoft bureaucracy, at least until next time Microsoft upends everything and introduces new ways to sign up again. Until then - happy translating… Related Posts Translation method Source on Github Translating with Google Translate without Google API Keys Creating a data-driven ASP.NET Resource Provider© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in Localization  ASP.NET  .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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• An easy way to create Side by Side registrationless COM Manifests with Visual Studio

  - by Rick Strahl

  Here's something I didn't find out until today: You can use Visual Studio to easily create registrationless COM manifest files for you with just a couple of small steps. Registrationless COM lets you use COM component without them being registered in the registry. This means it's possible to deploy COM components along with another application using plain xcopy semantics. To be sure it's rarely quite that easy - you need to watch out for dependencies - but if you know you have COM components that are light weight and have no or known dependencies it's easy to get everything into a single folder and off you go. Registrationless COM works via manifest files which carry the same name as the executable plus a .manifest extension (ie. yourapp.exe.manifest) I'm going to use a Visual FoxPro COM object as an example and create a simple Windows Forms app that calls the component - without that component being registered. Let's take a walk down memory lane… Create a COM Component I start by creating a FoxPro COM component because that's what I know and am working with here in my legacy environment. You can use VB classic or C++ ATL object if that's more to your liking. Here's a real simple Fox one: DEFINE CLASS SimpleServer as Session OLEPUBLIC FUNCTION HelloWorld(lcName) RETURN "Hello " + lcName ENDDEFINE Compile it into a DLL COM component with: BUILD MTDLL simpleserver FROM simpleserver RECOMPILE And to make sure it works test it quickly from Visual FoxPro: server = CREATEOBJECT("simpleServer.simpleserver") MESSAGEBOX( server.HelloWorld("Rick") ) Using Visual Studio to create a Manifest File for a COM Component Next open Visual Studio and create a new executable project - a Console App or WinForms or WPF application will all do. Go to the References Node Select Add Reference Use the Browse tab and find your compiled DLL to import  Next you'll see your assembly in the project. Right click on the reference and select Properties Click on the Isolated DropDown and select True Compile and that's all there's to it. Visual Studio will create a App.exe.manifest file right alongside your application's EXE. The manifest file created looks like this: xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"? assembly xsi:schemaLocation="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1 assembly.adaptive.xsd" manifestVersion="1.0" xmlns:asmv1="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" xmlns:asmv2="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v2" xmlns:asmv3="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v3" xmlns:dsig="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#" xmlns:co.v1="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:clickonce.v1" xmlns:co.v2="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:clickonce.v2" xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" assemblyIdentity name="App.exe" version="1.0.0.0" processorArchitecture="x86" type="win32" / file name="simpleserver.DLL" asmv2:size="27293" hash xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v2" dsig:Transforms dsig:Transform Algorithm="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:HashTransforms.Identity" / dsig:Transforms dsig:DigestMethod Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#sha1" / dsig:DigestValuepuq+ua20bbidGOWhPOxfquztBCU=dsig:DigestValue hash typelib tlbid="{f10346e2-c9d9-47f7-81d1-74059cc15c3c}" version="1.0" helpdir="" resourceid="0" flags="HASDISKIMAGE" / comClass clsid="{af2c2811-0657-4264-a1f5-06d033a969ff}" threadingModel="Apartment" tlbid="{f10346e2-c9d9-47f7-81d1-74059cc15c3c}" progid="simpleserver.SimpleServer" description="simpleserver.SimpleServer" / file assembly Now let's finish our super complex console app to test with: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Text; namespace ConsoleApplication1 {     class Program     {         static voidMain(string[] args)         { Type type = Type.GetTypeFromProgID("simpleserver.simpleserver",true); dynamic server = Activator.CreateInstance(type); Console.WriteLine(server.HelloWorld("rick")); Console.ReadLine(); } } } Now run the Console Application… As expected that should work. And why not? The COM component is still registered, right? :-) Nothing tricky about that. Let's unregister the COM component and then re-run and see what happens. Go to the Command Prompt Change to the folder where the DLL is installed Unregister with: RegSvr32 -u simpleserver.dll      To be sure that the COM component no longer works, check it out with the same test you used earlier (ie. o = CREATEOBJECT("SimpleServer.SimpleServer") in your development environment or VBScript etc.). Make sure you run the EXE and you don't re-compile the application or else Visual Studio will complain that it can't find the COM component in the registry while compiling. In fact now that we have our .manifest file you can remove the COM object from the project. When you run run the EXE from Windows Explorer or a command prompt to avoid the recompile. Watch out for embedded Manifest Files Now recompile your .NET project and run it… and it will most likely fail! The problem is that .NET applications by default embeds a manifest file into the compiled EXE application which results in the externally created manifest file being completely ignored. Only one manifest can be applied at a time and the compiled manifest takes precedency. Uh, thanks Visual Studio - not very helpful… Note that if you use another development tool like Visual FoxPro to create your EXE this won't be an issue as long as the tool doesn't automatically add a manifest file. Creating a Visual FoxPro EXE for example will work immediately with the generated manifest file as is. If you are using .NET and Visual Studio you have a couple of options of getting around this: Remove the embedded manifest file Copy the contents of the generated manifest file into a project manifest file and compile that in To remove an embedded manifest in a Visual Studio project: Open the Project Properties (Alt-Enter on project node) Go down to Resources | Manifest and select | Create Application without a Manifest   You can now add use the external manifest file and it will actually be respected when the app runs. The other option is to let Visual Studio create the manifest file on disk and then explicitly add the manifest file into the project. Notice on the dialog above I did this for app.exe.manifest and the manifest actually shows up in the list. If I select this file it will be compiled into the EXE and be used in lieu of any external files and that works as well. Remove the simpleserver.dll reference so you can compile your code and run the application. Now it should work without COM registration of the component. Personally I prefer external manifests because they can be modified after the fact - compiled manifests are evil in my mind because they are immutable - once they are there they can't be overriden or changed. So I prefer an external manifest. However, if you are absolutely sure nothing needs to change and you don't want anybody messing with your manifest, you can also embed it. The option to either is there. Watch for Manifest Caching While working trying to get this to work I ran into some problems at first. Specifically when it wasn't working at first (due to the embedded schema) I played with various different manifest layouts in different files etc.. There are a number of different ways to actually represent manifest files including offloading to separate folder (more on that later). A few times I made deliberate errors in the schema file and I found that regardless of what I did once the app failed or worked no amount of changing of the manifest file would make it behave differently. It appears that Windows is caching the manifest data for a given EXE or DLL. It takes a restart or a recompile of either the EXE or the DLL to clear the caching. Recompile your servers in order to see manifest changes unless there's an outright failure of an invalid manifest file. If the app starts the manifest is being read and caches immediately. This can be very confusing especially if you don't know that it's happening. I found myself always recompiling the exe after each run and before making any changes to the manifest file. Don't forget about Runtimes of COM Objects In the example I used above I used a Visual FoxPro COM component. Visual FoxPro is a runtime based environment so if I'm going to distribute an application that uses a FoxPro COM object the runtimes need to be distributed as well. The same is true of classic Visual Basic applications. Assuming that you don't know whether the runtimes are installed on the target machines make sure to install all the additional files in the EXE's directory alongside the COM DLL. In the case of Visual FoxPro the target folder should contain: The EXE  App.exe The Manifest file (unless it's compiled in) App.exe.manifest The COM object DLL (simpleserver.dll) Visual FoxPro Runtimes: VFP9t.dll (or VFP9r.dll for non-multithreaded dlls), vfp9rENU.dll, msvcr71.dll All these files should be in the same folder. Debugging Manifest load Errors If you for some reason get your manifest loading wrong there are a couple of useful tools available - SxSTrace and SxSParse. These two tools can be a huge help in debugging manifest loading errors. Put the following into a batch file (SxS_Trace.bat for example): sxstrace Trace -logfile:sxs.bin sxstrace Parse -logfile:sxs.bin -outfile:sxs.txt Then start the batch file before running your EXE. Make sure there's no caching happening as described in the previous section. For example, if I go into the manifest file and explicitly break the CLSID and/or ProgID I get a detailed report on where the EXE is looking for the manifest and what it's reading. Eventually the trace gives me an error like this: INFO: Parsing Manifest File C:\wwapps\Conf\SideBySide\Code\app.EXE.     INFO: Manifest Definition Identity is App.exe,processorArchitecture="x86",type="win32",version="1.0.0.0".     ERROR: Line 13: The value {AAaf2c2811-0657-4264-a1f5-06d033a969ff} of attribute clsid in element comClass is invalid. ERROR: Activation Context generation failed. End Activation Context Generation. pinpointing nicely where the error lies. Pay special attention to the various attributes - they have to match exactly in the different sections of the manifest file(s). Multiple COM Objects The manifest file that Visual Studio creates is actually quite more complex than is required for basic registrationless COM object invokation. The manifest file can be simplified a lot actually by stripping off various namespaces and removing the type library references altogether. Here's an example of a simplified manifest file that actually includes references to 2 COM servers: xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"? assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0" assemblyIdentity name="App.exe" version="1.0.0.0" processorArchitecture="x86" type="win32" / file name="simpleserver.DLL" comClass clsid="{af2c2811-0657-4264-a1f5-06d033a969ff}" threadingModel="Apartment" progid="simpleserver.SimpleServer" description="simpleserver.SimpleServer" / file file name = "sidebysidedeploy.dll" comClass clsid="{EF82B819-7963-4C36-9443-3978CD94F57C}" progid="sidebysidedeploy.SidebysidedeployServer" description="SidebySideDeploy Server" threadingModel="apartment" / file assembly Simple enough right? Routing to separate Manifest Files and Folders In the examples above all files ended up in the application's root folder - all the DLLs, support files and runtimes. Sometimes that's not so desirable and you can actually create separate manifest files. The easiest way to do this is to create a manifest file that 'routes' to another manifest file in a separate folder. Basically you create a new 'assembly identity' via a named id. You can then create a folder and another manifest with the id plus .manifest that points at the actual file. In this example I create: App.exe.manifest A folder called App.deploy A manifest file in App.deploy All DLLs and runtimes in App.deploy Let's start with that master manifest file. This file only holds a reference to another manifest file: App.exe.manifest xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"? assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0" assemblyIdentity name="App.exe" version="1.0.0.0" processorArchitecture="x86" type="win32" / dependency dependentAssembly assemblyIdentity name="App.deploy" version="1.0.0.0" type="win32" / dependentAssembly dependency assembly   Note this file only contains a dependency to App.deploy which is another manifest id. I can then create App.deploy.manifest in the current folder or in an App.deploy folder. In this case I'll create App.deploy and in it copy the DLLs and support runtimes. I then create App.deploy.manifest. App.deploy.manifest xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"? assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0" assemblyIdentity name="App.deploy" type="win32" version="1.0.0.0" / file name="simpleserver.DLL" comClass clsid="{af2c2811-0657-4264-a1f5-06d033a969ff}" threadingModel="Apartment" progid="simpleserver.SimpleServer" description="simpleserver.SimpleServer" / file file name="sidebysidedeploy.dll" comClass clsid="{EF82B819-7963-4C36-9443-3978CD94F57C}" threadingModel="Apartment" progid="sidebysidedeploy.SidebysidedeployServer" description="SidebySideDeploy Server" / file assembly   In this manifest file I then host my COM DLLs and any support runtimes. This is quite useful if you have lots of DLLs you are referencing or if you need to have separate configuration and application files that are associated with the COM object. This way the operation of your main application and the COM objects it interacts with is somewhat separated. You can see the two folders here:   Routing Manifests to different Folders In theory registrationless COM should be pretty easy in painless - you've seen the configuration manifest files and it certainly doesn't look very complicated, right? But the devil's in the details. The ActivationContext API (SxS - side by side activation) is very intolerant of small errors in the XML or formatting of the keys, so be really careful when setting up components, especially if you are manually editing these files. If you do run into trouble SxsTrace/SxsParse are a huge help to track down the problems. And remember that if you do have problems that you'll need to recompile your EXEs or DLLs for the SxS APIs to refresh themselves properly. All of this gets even more fun if you want to do registrationless COM inside of IIS :-) But I'll leave that for another blog post…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in COM  .NET  FoxPro   Tweet (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 packages in code – Execute SQL Task

  The Execute SQL Task is for obvious reasons very well used, so I thought if you are building packages in code the chances are you will be using it. Using the task basic features of the task are quite straightforward, add the task and set some properties, just like any other. When you start interacting with variables though it can be a little harder to grasp so these samples should see you through. Some of these more advanced features are explained in much more detail in our ever popular post The Execute SQL Task, here I’ll just be showing you how to implement them in code. The abbreviated code blocks below demonstrate the different features of the task. The complete code has been encapsulated into a sample class which you can download (ExecSqlPackage.cs). Each feature described has its own method in the sample class which is mentioned after the code block. This first sample just shows adding the task, setting the basic properties for a connection and of course an SQL statement. Package package = new Package(); // Add the SQL OLE-DB connection ConnectionManager sqlConnection = AddSqlConnection(package, "localhost", "master"); // Add the SQL Task package.Executables.Add("STOCK:SQLTask"); // Get the task host wrapper TaskHost taskHost = package.Executables[0] as TaskHost; // Set required properties taskHost.Properties["Connection"].SetValue(taskHost, sqlConnection.ID); taskHost.Properties["SqlStatementSource"].SetValue(taskHost, "SELECT * FROM sysobjects"); For the full version of this code, see the CreatePackage method in the sample class. The AddSqlConnection method is a helper method that adds an OLE-DB connection to the package, it is of course in the sample class file too. Returning a single value with a Result Set The following sample takes a different approach, getting a reference to the ExecuteSQLTask object task itself, rather than just using the non-specific TaskHost as above. Whilst it means we need to add an extra reference to our project (Microsoft.SqlServer.SQLTask) it makes coding much easier as we have compile time validation of any property and types we use. For the more complex properties that is very valuable and saves a lot of time during development. The query has also been changed to return a single value, one row and one column. The sample shows how we can return that value into a variable, which we also add to our package in the code. To do this manually you would set the Result Set property on the General page to Single Row and map the variable on the Result Set page in the editor. Package package = new Package(); // Add the SQL OLE-DB connection ConnectionManager sqlConnection = AddSqlConnection(package, "localhost", "master"); // Add the SQL Task package.Executables.Add("STOCK:SQLTask"); // Get the task host wrapper TaskHost taskHost = package.Executables[0] as TaskHost; // Add variable to hold result value package.Variables.Add("Variable", false, "User", 0); // Get the task object ExecuteSQLTask task = taskHost.InnerObject as ExecuteSQLTask; // Set core properties task.Connection = sqlConnection.Name; task.SqlStatementSource = "SELECT id FROM sysobjects WHERE name = 'sysrowsets'"; // Set single row result set task.ResultSetType = ResultSetType.ResultSetType_SingleRow; // Add result set binding, map the id column to variable task.ResultSetBindings.Add(); IDTSResultBinding resultBinding = task.ResultSetBindings.GetBinding(0); resultBinding.ResultName = "id"; resultBinding.DtsVariableName = "User::Variable"; For the full version of this code, see the CreatePackageResultVariable method in the sample class. The other types of Result Set behaviour are just a variation on this theme, set the property and map the result binding as required. Parameter Mapping for SQL Statements This final example uses a parameterised SQL statement, with the coming from a variable. The syntax varies slightly between connection types, as explained in the Working with Parameters and Return Codes in the Execute SQL Taskhelp topic, but OLE-DB is the most commonly used, for which a question mark is the parameter value placeholder. Package package = new Package(); // Add the SQL OLE-DB connection ConnectionManager sqlConnection = AddSqlConnection(package, ".", "master"); // Add the SQL Task package.Executables.Add("STOCK:SQLTask"); // Get the task host wrapper TaskHost taskHost = package.Executables[0] as TaskHost; // Get the task object ExecuteSQLTask task = taskHost.InnerObject as ExecuteSQLTask; // Set core properties task.Connection = sqlConnection.Name; task.SqlStatementSource = "SELECT id FROM sysobjects WHERE name = ?"; // Add variable to hold parameter value package.Variables.Add("Variable", false, "User", "sysrowsets"); // Add input parameter binding task.ParameterBindings.Add(); IDTSParameterBinding parameterBinding = task.ParameterBindings.GetBinding(0); parameterBinding.DtsVariableName = "User::Variable"; parameterBinding.ParameterDirection = ParameterDirections.Input; parameterBinding.DataType = (int)OleDBDataTypes.VARCHAR; parameterBinding.ParameterName = "0"; parameterBinding.ParameterSize = 255; For the full version of this code, see the CreatePackageParameterVariable method in the sample class. You’ll notice the data type has to be specified for the parameter IDTSParameterBinding .DataType Property, and these type codes are connection specific too. My enumeration I wrote several years ago is shown below was probably done by reverse engineering a package and also the API header file, but I recently found a very handy post that covers more connections as well for exactly this, Setting the DataType of IDTSParameterBinding objects (Execute SQL Task). /// <summary> /// Enumeration of OLE-DB types, used when mapping OLE-DB parameters. /// </summary> private enum OleDBDataTypes { BYTE = 0x11, CURRENCY = 6, DATE = 7, DB_VARNUMERIC = 0x8b, DBDATE = 0x85, DBTIME = 0x86, DBTIMESTAMP = 0x87, DECIMAL = 14, DOUBLE = 5, FILETIME = 0x40, FLOAT = 4, GUID = 0x48, LARGE_INTEGER = 20, LONG = 3, NULL = 1, NUMERIC = 0x83, NVARCHAR = 130, SHORT = 2, SIGNEDCHAR = 0x10, ULARGE_INTEGER = 0x15, ULONG = 0x13, USHORT = 0x12, VARCHAR = 0x81, VARIANT_BOOL = 11 } Download Sample code ExecSqlPackage.cs (10KB)

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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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• Searching for tasks with code – Executables and Event Handlers

  Searching packages or just enumerating through all tasks is not quite as straightforward as it may first appear, mainly because of the way you can nest tasks within other containers. You can see this illustrated in the sample package below where I have used several sequence containers and loops. To complicate this further all containers types, including packages and tasks, can have event handlers which can then support the full range of nested containers again. Towards the lower right, the task called SQL In FEL also has an event handler not shown, within which is another Execute SQL Task, so that makes a total of 6 Execute SQL Tasks 6 tasks spread across the package. In my previous post about such as adding a property expressionI kept it simple and just looked at tasks at the package level, but what if you wanted to find any or all tasks in a package? For this post I've written a console program that will search a package looking at all tasks no matter how deeply nested, and check to see if the name starts with "SQL". When it finds a matching task it writes out the hierarchy by name for that task, starting with the package and working down to the task itself. The output for our sample package is shown below, note it has found all 6 tasks, including the one on the OnPreExecute event of the SQL In FEL task TaskSearch v1.0.0.0 (1.0.0.0) Copyright (C) 2009 Konesans Ltd Processing File - C:\Projects\Alpha\Packages\MyPackage.dtsx MyPackage\FOR Counter Loop\SQL In Counter Loop MyPackage\SEQ For Each Loop Wrapper\FEL Simple Loop\SQL In FEL MyPackage\SEQ For Each Loop Wrapper\FEL Simple Loop\SQL In FEL\OnPreExecute\SQL On Pre Execute for FEL SQL Task MyPackage\SEQ Top Level\SEQ Nested Lvl 1\SEQ Nested Lvl 2\SQL In Nested Lvl 2 MyPackage\SEQ Top Level\SEQ Nested Lvl 1\SQL In Nested Lvl 1 #1 MyPackage\SEQ Top Level\SEQ Nested Lvl 1\SQL In Nested Lvl 1 #2 6 matching tasks found in package. The full project and code is available for download below, but first we can walk through the project to highlight the most important sections of code. This code has been abbreviated for this description, but is complete in the download. First of all we load the package, and then start by looking at the Executables for the package. // Load the package file Application application = new Application(); using (Package package = application.LoadPackage(filename, null)) { int matchCount = 0; // Look in the package's executables ProcessExecutables(package.Executables, ref matchCount); ... // // ... // Write out final count Console.WriteLine("{0} matching tasks found in package.", matchCount); } The ProcessExecutables method is a key method, as an executable could be described as the the highest level of a working functionality or container. There are several of types of executables, such as tasks, or sequence containers and loops. To know what to do next we need to work out what type of executable we are dealing with as the abbreviated version of method shows below. private static void ProcessExecutables(Executables executables, ref int matchCount) { foreach (Executable executable in executables) { TaskHost taskHost = executable as TaskHost; if (taskHost != null) { ProcessTaskHost(taskHost, ref matchCount); ProcessEventHandlers(taskHost.EventHandlers, ref matchCount); continue; } ... // // ... ForEachLoop forEachLoop = executable as ForEachLoop; if (forEachLoop != null) { ProcessExecutables(forEachLoop.Executables, ref matchCount); ProcessEventHandlers(forEachLoop.EventHandlers, ref matchCount); continue; } } } As you can see if the executable we find is a task we then call out to our ProcessTaskHost method. As with all of our executables a task can have event handlers which themselves contain more executables such as task and loops, so we also make a call out our ProcessEventHandlers method. The other types of executables such as loops can also have event handlers as well as executables. As shown with the example for the ForEachLoop we call the same ProcessExecutables and ProcessEventHandlers methods again to drill down into the hierarchy of objects that the package may contain. This code needs to explicitly check for each type of executable (TaskHost, Sequence, ForLoop and ForEachLoop) because whilst they all have an Executables property this is not from a common base class or interface. This example was just a simple find a task by its name, so ProcessTaskHost really just does that. We also get the hierarchy of objects so we can write out for information, obviously you can adapt this method to do something more interesting such as adding a property expression. private static void ProcessTaskHost(TaskHost taskHost, ref int matchCount) { if (taskHost == null) { return; } // Check if the task matches our match name if (taskHost.Name.StartsWith(TaskNameFilter, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase)) { // Build up the full object hierarchy of the task // so we can write it out for information StringBuilder path = new StringBuilder(); DtsContainer container = taskHost; while (container != null) { path.Insert(0, container.Name); container = container.Parent; if (container != null) { path.Insert(0, "\\"); } } // Write the task path // e.g. Package\Container\Event\Task Console.WriteLine(path); Console.WriteLine(); // Increment match counter for info matchCount++; } } Just for completeness, the other processing method we covered above is for event handlers, but really that just calls back to the executables. This same method is called in our main package method, but it was omitted for brevity here. private static void ProcessEventHandlers(DtsEventHandlers eventHandlers, ref int matchCount) { foreach (DtsEventHandler eventHandler in eventHandlers) { ProcessExecutables(eventHandler.Executables, ref matchCount); } } As hopefully the code demonstrates, executables (Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime.Executable) are the workers, but within them you can nest more executables (except for task tasks).Executables themselves can have event handlers which can in turn hold more executables. I have tried to illustrate this highlight the relationships in the following diagram. Download Sample code project TaskSearch.zip (11KB)

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• Passing multiple POST parameters to Web API Controller Methods

  - by Rick Strahl

  ASP.NET Web API introduces a new API for creating REST APIs and making AJAX callbacks to the server. This new API provides a host of new great functionality that unifies many of the features of many of the various AJAX/REST APIs that Microsoft created before it - ASP.NET AJAX, WCF REST specifically - and combines them into a whole more consistent API. Web API addresses many of the concerns that developers had with these older APIs, namely that it was very difficult to build consistent REST style resource APIs easily. While Web API provides many new features and makes many scenarios much easier, a lot of the focus has been on making it easier to build REST compliant APIs that are focused on resource based solutions and HTTP verbs. But  RPC style calls that are common with AJAX callbacks in Web applications, have gotten a lot less focus and there are a few scenarios that are not that obvious, especially if you're expecting Web API to provide functionality similar to ASP.NET AJAX style AJAX callbacks. RPC vs. 'Proper' REST RPC style HTTP calls mimic calling a method with parameters and returning a result. Rather than mapping explicit server side resources or 'nouns' RPC calls tend simply map a server side operation, passing in parameters and receiving a typed result where parameters and result values are marshaled over HTTP. Typically RPC calls - like SOAP calls - tend to always be POST operations rather than following HTTP conventions and using the GET/POST/PUT/DELETE etc. verbs to implicitly determine what operation needs to be fired. RPC might not be considered 'cool' anymore, but for typical private AJAX backend operations of a Web site I'd wager that a large percentage of use cases of Web API will fall towards RPC style calls rather than 'proper' REST style APIs. Web applications that have needs for things like live validation against data, filling data based on user inputs, handling small UI updates often don't lend themselves very well to limited HTTP verb usage. It might not be what the cool kids do, but I don't see RPC calls getting replaced by proper REST APIs any time soon.  Proper REST has its place - for 'real' API scenarios that manage and publish/share resources, but for more transactional operations RPC seems a better choice and much easier to implement than trying to shoehorn a boatload of endpoint methods into a few HTTP verbs. In any case Web API does a good job of providing both RPC abstraction as well as the HTTP Verb/REST abstraction. RPC works well out of the box, but there are some differences especially if you're coming from ASP.NET AJAX service or WCF Rest when it comes to multiple parameters. Action Routing for RPC Style Calls If you've looked at Web API demos you've probably seen a bunch of examples of how to create HTTP Verb based routing endpoints. Verb based routing essentially maps a controller and then uses HTTP verbs to map the methods that are called in response to HTTP requests. This works great for resource APIs but doesn't work so well when you have many operational methods in a single controller. HTTP Verb routing is limited to the few HTTP verbs available (plus separate method signatures) and - worse than that - you can't easily extend the controller with custom routes or action routing beyond that. Thankfully Web API also supports Action based routing which allows you create RPC style endpoints fairly easily:RouteTable.Routes.MapHttpRoute( name: "AlbumRpcApiAction", routeTemplate: "albums/{action}/{title}", defaults: new { title = RouteParameter.Optional, controller = "AlbumApi", action = "GetAblums" } ); This uses traditional MVC style {action} method routing which is different from the HTTP verb based routing you might have read a bunch about in conjunction with Web API. Action based routing like above lets you specify an end point method in a Web API controller either via the {action} parameter in the route string or via a default value for custom routes. Using routing you can pass multiple parameters either on the route itself or pass parameters on the query string, via ModelBinding or content value binding. For most common scenarios this actually works very well. As long as you are passing either a single complex type via a POST operation, or multiple simple types via query string or POST buffer, there's no issue. But if you need to pass multiple parameters as was easily done with WCF REST or ASP.NET AJAX things are not so obvious. Web API has no issue allowing for single parameter like this:[HttpPost] public string PostAlbum(Album album) { return String.Format("{0} {1:d}", album.AlbumName, album.Entered); } There are actually two ways to call this endpoint: albums/PostAlbum Using the Model Binder with plain POST values In this mechanism you're sending plain urlencoded POST values to the server which the ModelBinder then maps the parameter. Each property value is matched to each matching POST value. This works similar to the way that MVC's  ModelBinder works. Here's how you can POST using the ModelBinder and jQuery:$.ajax( { url: "albums/PostAlbum", type: "POST", data: { AlbumName: "Dirty Deeds", Entered: "5/1/2012" }, success: function (result) { alert(result); }, error: function (xhr, status, p3, p4) { var err = "Error " + " " + status + " " + p3; if (xhr.responseText && xhr.responseText[0] == "{") err = JSON.parse(xhr.responseText).message; alert(err); } }); Here's what the POST data looks like for this request: The model binder and it's straight form based POST mechanism is great for posting data directly from HTML pages to model objects. It avoids having to do manual conversions for many operations and is a great boon for AJAX callback requests. Using Web API JSON Formatter The other option is to post data using a JSON string. The process for this is similar except that you create a JavaScript object and serialize it to JSON first.album = { AlbumName: "PowerAge", Entered: new Date(1977,0,1) } $.ajax( { url: "albums/PostAlbum", type: "POST", contentType: "application/json", data: JSON.stringify(album), success: function (result) { alert(result); } }); Here the data is sent using a JSON object rather than form data and the data is JSON encoded over the wire. The trace reveals that the data is sent using plain JSON (Source above), which is a little more efficient since there's no UrlEncoding that occurs. BTW, notice that WebAPI automatically deals with the date. I provided the date as a plain string, rather than a JavaScript date value and the Formatter and ModelBinder both automatically map the date propertly to the Entered DateTime property of the Album object. Passing multiple Parameters to a Web API Controller Single parameters work fine in either of these RPC scenarios and that's to be expected. ModelBinding always works against a single object because it maps a model. But what happens when you want to pass multiple parameters? Consider an API Controller method that has a signature like the following:[HttpPost] public string PostAlbum(Album album, string userToken) Here I'm asking to pass two objects to an RPC method. Is that possible? This used to be fairly straight forward either with WCF REST and ASP.NET AJAX ASMX services, but as far as I can tell this is not directly possible using a POST operation with WebAPI. There a few workarounds that you can use to make this work: Use both POST *and* QueryString Parameters in Conjunction If you have both complex and simple parameters, you can pass simple parameters on the query string. The above would actually work with: /album/PostAlbum?userToken=sekkritt but that's not always possible. In this example it might not be a good idea to pass a user token on the query string though. It also won't work if you need to pass multiple complex objects, since query string values do not support complex type mapping. They only work with simple types. Use a single Object that wraps the two Parameters If you go by service based architecture guidelines every service method should always pass and return a single value only. The input should wrap potentially multiple input parameters and the output should convey status as well as provide the result value. You typically have a xxxRequest and a xxxResponse class that wraps the inputs and outputs. Here's what this method might look like:public PostAlbumResponse PostAlbum(PostAlbumRequest request) { var album = request.Album; var userToken = request.UserToken; return new PostAlbumResponse() { IsSuccess = true, Result = String.Format("{0} {1:d} {2}", album.AlbumName, album.Entered,userToken) }; } with these support types:public class PostAlbumRequest { public Album Album { get; set; } public User User { get; set; } public string UserToken { get; set; } } public class PostAlbumResponse { public string Result { get; set; } public bool IsSuccess { get; set; } public string ErrorMessage { get; set; } }   To call this method you now have to assemble these objects on the client and send it up as JSON:var album = { AlbumName: "PowerAge", Entered: "1/1/1977" } var user = { Name: "Rick" } var userToken = "sekkritt"; $.ajax( { url: "samples/PostAlbum", type: "POST", contentType: "application/json", data: JSON.stringify({ Album: album, User: user, UserToken: userToken }), success: function (result) { alert(result.Result); } }); I assemble the individual types first and then combine them in the data: property of the $.ajax() call into the actual object passed to the server, that mimics the structure of PostAlbumRequest server class that has Album, User and UserToken properties. This works well enough but it gets tedious if you have to create Request and Response types for each method signature. If you have common parameters that are always passed (like you always pass an album or usertoken) you might be able to abstract this to use a single object that gets reused for all methods, but this gets confusing too: Overload a single 'parameter' too much and it becomes a nightmare to decipher what your method actual can use. Use JObject to parse multiple Property Values out of an Object If you recall, ASP.NET AJAX and WCF REST used a 'wrapper' object to make default AJAX calls. Rather than directly calling a service you always passed an object which contained properties for each parameter: { parm1: Value, parm2: Value2 } WCF REST/ASP.NET AJAX would then parse this top level property values and map them to the parameters of the endpoint method. This automatic type wrapping functionality is no longer available directly in Web API, but since Web API now uses JSON.NET for it's JSON serializer you can actually simulate that behavior with a little extra code. You can use the JObject class to receive a dynamic JSON result and then using the dynamic cast of JObject to walk through the child objects and even parse them into strongly typed objects. Here's how to do this on the API Controller end:[HttpPost] public string PostAlbum(JObject jsonData) { dynamic json = jsonData; JObject jalbum = json.Album; JObject juser = json.User; string token = json.UserToken; var album = jalbum.ToObject<Album>(); var user = juser.ToObject<User>(); return String.Format("{0} {1} {2}", album.AlbumName, user.Name, token); } This is clearly not as nice as having the parameters passed directly, but it works to allow you to pass multiple parameters and access them using Web API. JObject is JSON.NET's generic object container which sports a nice dynamic interface that allows you to walk through the object's properties using standard 'dot' object syntax. All you have to do is cast the object to dynamic to get access to the property interface of the JSON type. Additionally JObject also allows you to parse JObject instances into strongly typed objects, which enables us here to retrieve the two objects passed as parameters from this jquery code:var album = { AlbumName: "PowerAge", Entered: "1/1/1977" } var user = { Name: "Rick" } var userToken = "sekkritt"; $.ajax( { url: "samples/PostAlbum", type: "POST", contentType: "application/json", data: JSON.stringify({ Album: album, User: user, UserToken: userToken }), success: function (result) { alert(result); } }); Summary ASP.NET Web API brings many new features and many advantages over the older Microsoft AJAX and REST APIs, but realize that some things like passing multiple strongly typed object parameters will work a bit differently. It's not insurmountable, but just knowing what options are available to simulate this behavior is good to know. Now let me say here that it's probably not a good practice to pass a bunch of parameters to an API call. Ideally APIs should be closely factored to accept single parameters or a single content parameter at least along with some identifier parameters that can be passed on the querystring. But saying that doesn't mean that occasionally you don't run into a situation where you have the need to pass several objects to the server and all three of the options I mentioned might have merit in different situations. For now I'm sure the question of how to pass multiple parameters will come up quite a bit from people migrating WCF REST or ASP.NET AJAX code to Web API. At least there are options available to make it work.© 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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• Using C# 4.0’s DynamicObject as a Stored Procedure Wrapper

  - by EltonStoneman

  [Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman] Overview Ignoring the fashion, I still make a lot of use of DALs – typically when inheriting a codebase with an established database schema which is full of tried and trusted stored procedures. In the DAL a collection of base classes have all the scaffolding, so the usual pattern is to create a wrapper class for each stored procedure, giving typesafe access to parameter values and output. DAL calls then looks like instantiate wrapper-populate parameters-execute call:       using (var sp = new uspGetManagerEmployees())     {         sp.ManagerID = 16;         using (var reader = sp.Execute())         {             //map entities from the output         }     }   Or rolling it all into a fluent DAL call – which is nicer to read and implicitly disposes the resources:   This is fine, the wrapper classes are very simple to handwrite or generate. But as the codebase grows, you end up with a proliferation of very small wrapper classes: The wrappers don't add much other than encapsulating the stored procedure call and giving you typesafety for the parameters. With the dynamic extension in .NET 4.0 you have the option to build a single wrapper class, and get rid of the one-to-one stored procedure to wrapper class mapping. In the dynamic version, the call looks like this:       dynamic getUser = new DynamicSqlStoredProcedure("uspGetManagerEmployees", Database.AdventureWorks);     getUser.ManagerID = 16;       var employees = Fluently.Load<List<Employee>>()                             .With<EmployeeMap>()                             .From(getUser);   The important difference is that the ManagerId property doesn't exist in the DynamicSqlStoredProcedure class. Declaring the getUser object with the dynamic keyword allows you to dynamically add properties, and the DynamicSqlStoredProcedure class intercepts when properties are added and builds them as stored procedure parameters. When getUser.ManagerId = 16 is executed, the base class adds a parameter call (using the convention that parameter name is the property name prefixed by "@"), specifying the correct SQL Server data type (mapping it from the type of the value the property is set to), and setting the parameter value. Code Sample This is worked through in a sample project on github – Dynamic Stored Procedure Sample – which also includes a static version of the wrapper for comparison. (I'll upload this to the MSDN Code Gallery once my account has been resurrected). Points worth noting are: DynamicSP.Data – database-independent DAL that has all the data plumbing code. DynamicSP.Data.SqlServer – SQL Server DAL, thin layer on top of the generic DAL which adds SQL Server specific classes. Includes the DynamicSqlStoredProcedure base class. DynamicSqlStoredProcedure.TrySetMember. Invoked when a dynamic member is added. Assumes the property is a parameter named after the SP parameter name and infers the SqlDbType from the framework type. Adds a parameter to the internal stored procedure wrapper and sets its value. uspGetManagerEmployees – the static version of the wrapper. uspGetManagerEmployeesTest – test fixture which shows usage of the static and dynamic stored procedure wrappers. The sample uses stored procedures from the AdventureWorks database in the SQL Server 2008 Sample Databases. Discussion For this scenario, the dynamic option is very favourable. Assuming your DAL is itself wrapped by a higher layer, the stored procedure wrapper classes have very little reuse. Even if you're codegening the classes and test fixtures, it's still additional effort for very little value. The main consideration with dynamic classes is that the compiler ignores all the members you use, and evaluation only happens at runtime. In this case where scope is strictly limited that's not an issue – but you're relying on automated tests rather than the compiler to find errors, but that should just encourage better test coverage. Also you can codegen the dynamic calls at a higher level. Performance may be a consideration, as there is a first-time-use overhead when the dynamic members of an object are bound. For a single run, the dynamic wrapper took 0.2 seconds longer than the static wrapper. The framework does a good job of caching the effort though, so for 1,000 calls the dynamc version still only takes 0.2 seconds longer than the static: You don't get IntelliSense on dynamic objects, even for the declared members of the base class, and if you've been using class names as keys for configuration settings, you'll lose that option if you move to dynamics. The approach may make code more difficult to read, as you can't navigate through dynamic members, but you do still get full debugging support.     var employees = Fluently.Load<List<Employee>>()                             .With<EmployeeMap>()                             .From<uspGetManagerEmployees>                             (                                 i => i.ManagerID = 16,                                 x => x.Execute()                             );

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• Elfsign Object Signing on Solaris

  - by danx

  Elfsign Object Signing on Solaris Don't let this happen to you—use elfsign! Solaris elfsign(1) is a command that signs and verifies ELF format executables. That includes not just executable programs (such as ls or cp), but other ELF format files including libraries (such as libnvpair.so) and kernel modules (such as autofs). Elfsign has been available since Solaris 10 and ELF format files distributed with Solaris, since Solaris 10, are signed by either Sun Microsystems or its successor, Oracle Corporation. When an ELF file is signed, elfsign adds a new section the ELF file, .SUNW_signature, that contains a RSA public key signature and other information about the signer. That is, the algorithm used, algorithm OID, signer CN/OU, and time stamp. The signature section can later be verified by elfsign or other software by matching the signature in the file agains the ELF file contents (excluding the signature). ELF executable files may also be signed by a 3rd-party or by the customer. This is useful for verifying the origin and authenticity of executable files installed on a system. The 3rd-party or customer public key certificate should be installed in /etc/certs/ to allow verification by elfsign. For currently-released versions of Solaris, only cryptographic framework plugin libraries are verified by Solaris. However, all ELF files may be verified by the elfsign command at any time. Elfsign Algorithms Elfsign signatures are created by taking a digest of the ELF section contents, then signing the digest with RSA. To verify, one takes a digest of ELF file and compares with the expected digest that's computed from the signature and RSA public key. Originally elfsign took a MD5 digest of a SHA-1 digest of the ELF file sections, then signed the resulting digest with RSA. In Solaris 11.1 then Solaris 11.1 SRU 7 (5/2013), the elfsign crypto algorithms available have been expanded to keep up with evolving cryptography. The following table shows the available elfsign algorithms: Elfsign Algorithm Solaris Release Comments elfsign sign -F rsa_md5_sha1   S10, S11.0, S11.1 Default for S10. Not recommended* elfsign sign -F rsa_sha1 S11.1 Default for S11.1. Not recommended elfsign sign -F rsa_sha256 S11.1 patch SRU7+   Recommended ___ *Most or all CAs do not accept MD5 CSRs and do not issue MD5 certs due to MD5 hash collision problems. RSA Key Length. I recommend using RSA-2048 key length with elfsign is RSA-2048 as the best balance between a long expected "life time", interoperability, and performance. RSA-2048 keys have an expected lifetime through 2030 (and probably beyond). For details, see Recommendation for Key Management: Part 1: General, NIST Publication SP 800-57 part 1 (rev. 3, 7/2012, PDF), tables 2 and 4 (pp. 64, 67). Step 1: create or obtain a key and cert The first step in using elfsign is to obtain a key and cert from a public Certificate Authority (CA), or create your own self-signed key and cert. I'll briefly explain both methods. Obtaining a Certificate from a CA To obtain a cert from a CA, such as Verisign, Thawte, or Go Daddy (to name a few random examples), you create a private key and a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) file and send it to the CA, following the instructions of the CA on their website. They send back a signed public key certificate. The public key cert, along with the private key you created is used by elfsign to sign an ELF file. The public key cert is distributed with the software and is used by elfsign to verify elfsign signatures in ELF files. You need to request a RSA "Class 3 public key certificate", which is used for servers and software signing. Elfsign uses RSA and we recommend RSA-2048 keys. The private key and CSR can be generated with openssl(1) or pktool(1) on Solaris. Here's a simple example that uses pktool to generate a private RSA_2048 key and a CSR for sending to a CA: $ pktool gencsr keystore=file format=pem outcsr=MYCSR.p10 \ subject="CN=canineswworks.com,OU=Canine SW object signing" \ outkey=MYPRIVATEKEY.key $ openssl rsa -noout -text -in MYPRIVATEKEY.key Private-Key: (2048 bit) modulus: 00:d2:ef:42:f2:0b:8c:96:9f:45:32:fc:fe:54:94: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . c9:c7 publicExponent: 65537 (0x10001) privateExponent: 26:14:fc:49:26:bc:a3:14:ee:31:5e:6b:ac:69:83: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . 81 prime1: 00:f6:b7:52:73:bc:26:57:26:c8:11:eb:6c:dc:cb: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . bc:91:d0:40:d6:9d:ac:b5:69 prime2: 00:da:df:3f:56:b2:18:46:e1:89:5b:6c:f1:1a:41: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . f3:b7:48:de:c3:d9:ce:af:af exponent1: 00:b9:a2:00:11:02:ed:9a:3f:9c:e4:16:ce:c7:67: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . 55:50:25:70:d3:ca:b9:ab:99 exponent2: 00:c8:fc:f5:57:11:98:85:8e:9a:ea:1f:f2:8f:df: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . 23:57:0e:4d:b2:a0:12:d2:f5 coefficient: 2f:60:21:cd:dc:52:76:67:1a:d8:75:3e:7f:b0:64: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . 06:94:56:d8:9d:5c:8e:9b $ openssl req -noout -text -in MYCSR.p10 Certificate Request: Data: Version: 2 (0x2) Subject: OU=Canine SW object signing, CN=canineswworks.com Subject Public Key Info: Public Key Algorithm: rsaEncryption Public-Key: (2048 bit) Modulus: 00:d2:ef:42:f2:0b:8c:96:9f:45:32:fc:fe:54:94: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . c9:c7 Exponent: 65537 (0x10001) Attributes: Signature Algorithm: sha1WithRSAEncryption b3:e8:30:5b:88:37:68:1c:26:6b:45:af:5e:de:ea:60:87:ea: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . 06:f9:ed:b4 Secure storage of RSA private key. The private key needs to be protected if the key signing is used for production (as opposed to just testing). That is, protect the key to protect against unauthorized signatures by others. One method is to use a PIN-protected PKCS#11 keystore. The private key you generate should be stored in a secure manner, such as in a PKCS#11 keystore using pktool(1). Otherwise others can sign your signature. Other secure key storage mechanisms include a SCA-6000 crypto card, a USB thumb drive stored in a locked area, a dedicated server with restricted access, Oracle Key Manager (OKM), or some combination of these. I also recommend secure backup of the private key. Here's an example of generating a private key protected in the PKCS#11 keystore, and a CSR. $ pktool setpin # use if PIN not set yet Enter token passphrase: changeme Create new passphrase: Re-enter new passphrase: Passphrase changed. $ pktool gencsr keystore=pkcs11 label=MYPRIVATEKEY \ format=pem outcsr=MYCSR.p10 \ subject="CN=canineswworks.com,OU=Canine SW object signing" $ pktool list keystore=pkcs11 Enter PIN for Sun Software PKCS#11 softtoken: Found 1 asymmetric public keys. Key #1 - RSA public key: MYPRIVATEKEY Here's another example that uses openssl instead of pktool to generate a private key and CSR: $ openssl genrsa -out cert.key 2048 $ openssl req -new -key cert.key -out MYCSR.p10 Self-Signed Cert You can use openssl or pktool to create a private key and a self-signed public key certificate. A self-signed cert is useful for development, testing, and internal use. The private key created should be stored in a secure manner, as mentioned above. The following example creates a private key, MYSELFSIGNED.key, and a public key cert, MYSELFSIGNED.pem, using pktool and displays the contents with the openssl command. $ pktool gencert keystore=file format=pem serial=0xD06F00D lifetime=20-year \ keytype=rsa hash=sha256 outcert=MYSELFSIGNED.pem outkey=MYSELFSIGNED.key \ subject="O=Canine Software Works, OU=Self-signed CA, CN=canineswworks.com" $ pktool list keystore=file objtype=cert infile=MYSELFSIGNED.pem Found 1 certificates. 1. (X.509 certificate) Filename: MYSELFSIGNED.pem ID: c8:24:59:08:2b:ae:6e:5c:bc:26:bd:ef:0a:9c:54:de:dd:0f:60:46 Subject: O=Canine Software Works, OU=Self-signed CA, CN=canineswworks.com Issuer: O=Canine Software Works, OU=Self-signed CA, CN=canineswworks.com Not Before: Oct 17 23:18:00 2013 GMT Not After: Oct 12 23:18:00 2033 GMT Serial: 0xD06F00D0 Signature Algorithm: sha256WithRSAEncryption $ openssl x509 -noout -text -in MYSELFSIGNED.pem Certificate: Data: Version: 3 (0x2) Serial Number: 3496935632 (0xd06f00d0) Signature Algorithm: sha256WithRSAEncryption Issuer: O=Canine Software Works, OU=Self-signed CA, CN=canineswworks.com Validity Not Before: Oct 17 23:18:00 2013 GMT Not After : Oct 12 23:18:00 2033 GMT Subject: O=Canine Software Works, OU=Self-signed CA, CN=canineswworks.com Subject Public Key Info: Public Key Algorithm: rsaEncryption Public-Key: (2048 bit) Modulus: 00:bb:e8:11:21:d9:4b:88:53:8b:6c:5a:7a:38:8b: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . bf:77 Exponent: 65537 (0x10001) Signature Algorithm: sha256WithRSAEncryption 9e:39:fe:c8:44:5c:87:2c:8f:f4:24:f6:0c:9a:2f:64:84:d1: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . 5f:78:8e:e8 $ openssl rsa -noout -text -in MYSELFSIGNED.key Private-Key: (2048 bit) modulus: 00:bb:e8:11:21:d9:4b:88:53:8b:6c:5a:7a:38:8b: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . bf:77 publicExponent: 65537 (0x10001) privateExponent: 0a:06:0f:23:e7:1b:88:62:2c:85:d3:2d:c1:e6:6e: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . 9c:e1:e0:0a:52:77:29:4a:75:aa:02:d8:af:53:24: c1 prime1: 00:ea:12:02:bb:5a:0f:5a:d8:a9:95:b2:ba:30:15: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . 5b:ca:9c:7c:19:48:77:1e:5d prime2: 00:cd:82:da:84:71:1d:18:52:cb:c6:4d:74:14:be: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . 5f:db:d5:5e:47:89:a7:ef:e3 exponent1: 32:37:62:f6:a6:bf:9c:91:d6:f0:12:c3:f7:04:e9: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . 97:3e:33:31:89:66:64:d1 exponent2: 00:88:a2:e8:90:47:f8:75:34:8f:41:50:3b:ce:93: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . ff:74:d4:be:f3:47:45:bd:cb coefficient: 4d:7c:09:4c:34:73:c4:26:f0:58:f5:e1:45:3c:af: . . . [omitted for brevity] . . . af:01:5f:af:ad:6a:09:bf Step 2: Sign the ELF File object By now you should have your private key, and obtained, by hook or crook, a cert (either from a CA or use one you created (a self-signed cert). The next step is to sign one or more objects with your private key and cert. Here's a simple example that creates an object file, signs, verifies, and lists the contents of the ELF signature. $ echo '#include <stdio.h>\nint main(){printf("Hello\\n");}'>hello.c $ make hello cc -o hello hello.c $ elfsign verify -v -c MYSELFSIGNED.pem -e hello elfsign: no signature found in hello. $ elfsign sign -F rsa_sha256 -v -k MYSELFSIGNED.key -c MYSELFSIGNED.pem -e hello elfsign: hello signed successfully. format: rsa_sha256. signer: O=Canine Software Works, OU=Self-signed CA, CN=canineswworks.com. signed on: October 17, 2013 04:22:49 PM PDT. $ elfsign list -f format -e hello rsa_sha256 $ elfsign list -f signer -e hello O=Canine Software Works, OU=Self-signed CA, CN=canineswworks.com $ elfsign list -f time -e hello October 17, 2013 04:22:49 PM PDT $ elfsign verify -v -c MYSELFSIGNED.key -e hello elfsign: verification of hello failed. format: rsa_sha256. signer: O=Canine Software Works, OU=Self-signed CA, CN=canineswworks.com. signed on: October 17, 2013 04:22:49 PM PDT. Signing using the pkcs11 keystore To sign the ELF file using a private key in the secure pkcs11 keystore, replace "-K MYSELFSIGNED.key" in the "elfsign sign" command line with "-T MYPRIVATEKEY", where MYPRIVATKEY is the pkcs11 token label. Step 3: Install the cert and test on another system Just signing the object isn't enough. You need to copy or install the cert and the signed ELF file(s) on another system to test that the signature is OK. Your public key cert should be installed in /etc/certs. Use elfsign verify to verify the signature. Elfsign verify checks each cert in /etc/certs until it finds one that matches the elfsign signature in the file. If one isn't found, the verification fails. Here's an example: $ su Password: # rm /etc/certs/MYSELFSIGNED.key # cp MYSELFSIGNED.pem /etc/certs # exit $ elfsign verify -v hello elfsign: verification of hello passed. format: rsa_sha256. signer: O=Canine Software Works, OU=Self-signed CA, CN=canineswworks.com. signed on: October 17, 2013 04:24:20 PM PDT. After testing, package your cert along with your ELF object to allow elfsign verification after your cert and object are installed or copied. Under the Hood: elfsign verification Here's the steps taken to verify a ELF file signed with elfsign. The steps to sign the file are similar except the private key exponent is used instead of the public key exponent and the .SUNW_signature section is written to the ELF file instead of being read from the file. Generate a digest (SHA-256) of the ELF file sections. This digest uses all ELF sections loaded in memory, but excludes the ELF header, the .SUNW_signature section, and the symbol table Extract the RSA signature (RSA-2048) from the .SUNW_signature section Extract the RSA public key modulus and public key exponent (65537) from the public key cert Calculate the expected digest as follows:     signaturepublicKeyExponent % publicKeyModulus Strip the PKCS#1 padding (most significant bytes) from the above. The padding is 0x00, 0x01, 0xff, 0xff, . . ., 0xff, 0x00. If the actual digest == expected digest, the ELF file is verified (OK). Further Information elfsign(1), pktool(1), and openssl(1) man pages. "Signed Solaris 10 Binaries?" blog by Darren Moffat (2005) shows how to use elfsign. "Simple CLI based CA on Solaris" blog by Darren Moffat (2008) shows how to set up a simple CA for use with self-signed certificates. "How to Create a Certificate by Using the pktool gencert Command" System Administration Guide: Security Services (available at docs.oracle.com)

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• ODI and OBIEE 11g Integration

  - by David Allan

  Here we will see some of the connectivity options to OBIEE 11g using the JDBC driver. You’ll see based upon some connection properties how the physical or presentation layers can be utilized. In the integrators guide for OBIEE 11g you will find a brief statement indicating that there actually is a JDBC driver for OBIEE. In OBIEE 11g its now possible to connect directly to the physical layer, Venkat has an informative post here on this topic. In ODI 11g the Oracle BI technology is shipped with the product along with KMs for reverse engineering, and using OBIEE models for a data source. When you install OBIEE in 11g a light weight demonstration application is preinstalled in the server, when you open this in the BI Administration tool we see the regular 3 panel view within the administration tool. To interrogate this system via JDBC (just like ODI does using the KMs) need a couple of things; the JDBC driver from OBIEE 11g, a java client program and the credentials. In my java client program I want to connect to the OBIEE system, when I connect I can interrogate what the JDBC driver presents for the metadata. The metadata projected via the JDBC connection’s DatabaseMetadata changes depending on whether the property NQ_SESSION.SELECTPHYSICAL is set when the java client connects. Let’s use the sample app to illustrate. I have a java client program here that will print out the tables in the DatabaseMetadata, it will also output the catalog and schema. For example if I execute without any special JDBC properties as follows; java -classpath .;%BIHOMEDIR%\clients\bijdbc.jar meta_jdbc oracle.bi.jdbc.AnaJdbcDriver jdbc:oraclebi://localhost:9703/ weblogic mypass Then I get the following returned representing the presentation layer, the sample I used is XML, and has no schema; Catalog Schema Table Sample Sales Lite null Base Facts Sample Sales Lite null Calculated Facts …     Sample Targets Lite null Base Facts …     Now if I execute with the only difference being the JDBC property NQ_SESSION.SELECTPHYSICAL with the value Yes, then I see a different set of values representing the physical layer in OBIEE; java -classpath .;%BIHOMEDIR%\clients\bijdbc.jar meta_jdbc oracle.bi.jdbc.AnaJdbcDriver jdbc:oraclebi://localhost:9703/ weblogic mypass NQ_SESSION.SELECTPHYSICAL=Yes The following is returned; Catalog Schema Table Sample App Lite Data null D01 Time Day Grain Sample App Lite Data null F10 Revenue Facts (Order grain) …     System DB (Update me)     …     If this was a database system such as Oracle, the catalog value would be the OBIEE database name and the schema would be the Oracle database schema. Other systems which have real catalog structure such as SQLServer would use its catalog value. Its this ‘Catalog’ and ‘Schema’ value that is important when integration OBIEE with ODI. For the demonstration application in OBIEE 11g, the following illustration shows how the information from OBIEE is related via the JDBC driver through to ODI. In the XML example above, within ODI’s physical schema definition on the right, we leave the schema blank since the XML data source has no schema. When I did this at first, I left the default value that ODI places in the Schema field since which was ‘<Undefined>’ (like image below) but this string is actually used in the RKM so ended up not finding any tables in this schema! Entering an empty string resolved this. Below we see a regular Oracle database example that has the database, schema, physical table structure, and how this is defined in ODI.   Remember back to the physical versus presentation layer usage when we passed the special property, well to do this in ODI, the data server has a panel for properties where you can define key/value pairs. So if you want to select physical objects from the OBIEE server, then you must set this property. An additional changed in ODI 11g is the OBIEE connection pool support, this has been implemented via a ‘Connection Pool’ flex field for the Oracle BI data server. So here you set the connection pool name from the OBIEE system that you specifically want to use and this is used by the Oracle BI to Oracle (DBLINK) LKM, so if you are using this you must set this flex field. Hopefully a useful insight into some of the mechanics of how this hangs together.

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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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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 02, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 02, 2010New ProjectsBackupCleaner.Net: A C#.Net-based tool for automatically removing old backups selectively. It can be used when you already make daily backups on disk, and want to cle...C# Dotnetnuke Module development Template for Visual Studio 2010: C# DNN Module Development template for Visual Studio 2010 Get a head-start on DNN Module development. Whether you're a pro or just starting with D...Christoc's DotNetNuke C# Module Development Template: A quick and easy to use C# Module development template for DotNetNuke 5, Visual Studio 2008.Client per la digitalizzazione di documenti integrato con DotNetNuke: Questo applicativo in ambiente windows 32bit consente di digitalizzare documenti con piu scanner contemporaneamente, processare OCR in 17 Lingue (p...ContainerOne - C# application server: An application server completely written in c# (.net 4.0).Drop7 Silverlight: It's a clone of the original Drop7 written in Silverlight (C#). Echo.Net: Echo.Net is an embedded task manager for web and windows apps. It allows for simple management of background tasks at specific times. It's develope...energy: Smartgrid Demand Response ImplementationGenerate Twitter Message for Live Writer: This is a plug-in for Windows Live Writer that generates a twitter message with your blog post name and a TinyUrl link to the blog post. It will d...HomingCMS.Net: A lightweight cms.Information Système & Shell à distance: Un web service qui permet d'avoir des informations sur le système et de lancer de commande (terminal) à distance.Javascript And Jquery: gqq's javascript and jquery examplesMemory++: "Tweak the memory to speed up your computer" Memory ++ is basically an application that will speed up your computer ensuring comfort in their norma...Microformat Parsers for .NET: Microformat's Parsers for .NET helps you to collect information you run into on the web, that is stored by means of microformats. It's written in C...MoneyManager: Trying to make Personal Finances management System for my needs. Microsoft stopped to support MSMoney - it makes me so sad, so I wanna to make my ...Open source software for running a financial markets trading business: The core conceptual model will support running a business in the financial markets, for example running a trading exchange business.Ovik: Open Video Converter with simple and intuitive interface for converting video files to the open formats.Oxygen Smil Player: The <project name> is a open a-smil player implementation that is meaned to be connected to a Digital Signage CMS like Oxygen media platform ( www....Protect The Carrot: Protect The Carrot is a small fastpaced XNA game. You are a farmer whose single carrot is under attack by ravenous rabbits. You have to shoot the r...Race Day Commander: The core project is designed to support coaches of "long distance" or "endurance" sporting events coach their athletes during a race. The idea bein...Raygun Diplomacy: Raygun Diplomacy is an action shooter sandbox game set in a futuristic world. It will use procedural generation for the world, weapons, and vehicle...Resx-Translator-Bot: Resx-Translator-Bot uses Google Tanslate to automatically translate the .resx-files in your .NET and ASP.NET applications.Sistema de Expedición del Permiso Único de Siembra: Sistema de Expedición del Permiso Único de Siembra.SiteOA: 一个基于asp.net mvc2的OAStraighce: This is a low-featured, cyclic (log files reside in appname\1.txt to at mose 31.txt), thread-safe and non-blocking TraceListener with some extensio...Touch Mice: Touch Mice turns multiple mice on a computer into individual touch devices. This allows you to create multi-touch applications using the new touch...TStringValidator: A project helper to validate strings. Use this class to hold your regex strings for use with any project's string validation.Ultimate Dotnetnuke Skin Object: Ultimate Skin Object is a Dotnetnuke 5.4.2+ extension that will allow you to easily change your skins doc type, remove unneeded css files, inject e...Ventosus: Ventosus is an upcoming partially text-based game. No further information is available at this time.vit: vit based on asp.net mvcW7 Auto Playlist Generator: Purpose: This application is designed to create W7MC playlist automatically whenever you want. You can select if you want the playlist sorted Alpha...W7 Video Playlist Creator: Purpose: This program allows you to quickly create wvx video play list for Windows Media Center. This functionality is not included in WMC and is u...New ReleasesBCryptTool: BCryptTool v0.2.1: The Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 is needed to run this program.BFBC2 PRoCon: PRoCon 0.5.2.0: Notes available on phogue.netC# Dotnetnuke Module development Template for Visual Studio 2010: DNNModule 1.0: This is the initial release of DNNModule as was available for download from http://www.subodh.com/Projects/DNNModule In this release: Contains one...Client per la digitalizzazione di documenti integrato con DotNetNuke: Versione 3.0.1: Versione 3.0.1CommonLibrary.NET: CommonLibrary.NET 0.9.4 - Final Release: A collection of very reusable code and components in C# 3.5 ranging from ActiveRecord, Csv, Command Line Parsing, Configuration, Holiday Calendars,...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V20: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has ad...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V21: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has ad...DirectQ: Release 1.8.4: Significant bug fixes and improvments over 1.8.3c; there may be some bugs that I haven't caught here as development became a little disjointed towa...DotNetNuke 5 Thai Language Pack: 1.0.1: Fixed Installation Problem. Version 1.0 -> 1.0.1 Type : Character encoding. Change : ().dnn description file to "ไทย (ไทย)".dnnEcho.Net: Echo.Net 1.0: Initial release of Echo.Net.Extend SmallBasic: Teaching Extensions v.018: ShapeMaker, Program Window, Timer, and many threading errors fixedExtend SmallBasic: Teaching Extensions v.019: Added Rectangles to shapemaker, and the bubble quizGenerate Twitter Message for Live Writer: Final Source Code Plus Binaries: Compete C# source code available below. I have also included the binary for those that just want to run it.GoogleMap Control: GoogleMap Control 4.5: Map and map events are only functional. New state, persistence and event implementation in progress. Javascript classes are implemented as MS AJAX ...Industrial Dashboard: ID 3.1: -Added new widget IndustrialSlickGrid. -Added example with IndustrialChart.LongBar: LongBar 2.1 Build 310: - Library: Double-clicking on tile will install it - Feedback: Now you can type your e-mail and comment for errorMavention: Mavention Insert Lorem ipsum: A Sandbox Solution for SharePoint 2010 that allows you to easily insert Lorem ipsum text into RTE. More information and screenshots available @ htt...Memory++: Memory ++: Tweak the memory to speed up your computer Memory is basically an application that will speed up your computer ensuring comfort in their normal ac...MyVocabulary: Version 2.0: Improvements over version 1.0: Several bug fixes New shortcuts added to increase usability A new section for testing verbs was addednopCommerce. Open Source online shop e-commerce solution.: nopCommerce 1.60: You can also install nopCommerce using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. Simply click the button below: nopCommerce To see the full list of f...Nuntio Content: Nuntio Content 4.2.1: Patch release that fixes a couple of minor issues with version numbers and priority settings for role content. The release one package for DNN 4 an...Ovik: Ovik v0.0.1 (Preview Release): This is a very early preview release of Ovik. It contains only the pure processes of selecting files and launching a conversion process. Preview r...PHPExcel: PHPExcel 1.7.3c Production: This is a patch release for 26477. Want to contribute?Please refer the Contribute page. DonationsDonate via PayPal. If you want to, we can also a...PowerShell Admin Modules: PAM 0.2: Version 0.2 contains the PAMShare module with Get-Share Get-ShareAccessMask Get-ShareSecurity New-Share Remove-Share Set-Share and the PAMath modu...Professional MRDS: RDS 2008 R3 Release: This is an updated version of the code to work with RDS 2008 R3 (version 2.2.76.0). IMPORTANT NOTE These samples are supplied as a ZIP file. Unzip...Protect The Carrot: First release: We provide two ways to install the game. The first is PTC 1.0.0.0 Zip which contains a Click-Once installer (the DVD type since codeplex does not...PST File Format SDK: PST File Format SDK v0.2.0: Updated version of pstsdk with several bug fixes, including: Improved compiler support (several changes, including two patches from hub) Fixed Do...Race Day Commander: Race Day Commander v1: First release. The exact code that was written on the day in 6 hours.Resx-Translator-Bot: Release 1.0: Initial releaseSalient.StackApps: JavaScript API Wrapper beta 2: This is the first draft of the generated JS wrapper. Added basic test coverage for each route that can also serve as basic usage examples. More i...SharePoint 2010 PowerShell Scripts & Utilities: PSSP2010 Utils 0.2: Added Install-SPIFilter script cmdlet More information can be found at http://www.ravichaganti.com/blog/?p=1439SharePoint Tools from China Community: ECB菜单控制器: ECB菜单控制器Shopping Cart .NET: 1.5: Shopping Cart .NET 1.5 has received an upgrade to .NET 4.0 along with SQL Server 2005/8. There is a new AJAX Based inventory system that helps you ...sMODfix: sMODfix v1.0b: Added: provisional support for ecm_v54 Added: provisional support for gfx_v88SNCFT Gadget: SNCFT gadget v1: cette version est la version 1 de ma gadgetSnippet Designer: Snippet Designer 1.3: Change logChanges for Visual Studio 2010Fixed bug where "Export as Snippet" was failing in a website project Changed Snippet Explorer search to u...sNPCedit: sNPCedit v0.9b: + Fixed: structure of resources + Changed: some labels in GUISoftware Is Hardwork: Sw. Is Hw. Lib. 3.0.0.x+05: Sw. Is Hw. Lib. 3.0.0.x+05SQL Server PowerShell Extensions: 2.2.3 Beta: Release 2.2 re-implements SQLPSX as PowersShell version 2.0 modules. SQLPSX consists of 9 modules with 133 advanced functions, 2 cmdlets and 7 scri...StackOverflow.Net: Preview Beta: Goes with the Stack Apps API version 0.8Ultimate Dotnetnuke Skin Object: Ultimate Skin Object V1.00.00: Ultimate Skin Object is a Dotnetnuke 5.4.2+ extension that will allow you to easily change your skins doc type, remove unneeded css files, inject e...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30601.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVelocity Shop: JUNE 2010: Source code aligned to .NET Framework 4.0, ASP.NET 4.0 and Windows Server AppFabric Caching RC.ViperWorks Ignition: ViperWorks_5.0.1005.31: ViperWorks Ignition Source, version 5.0.1005.31.Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 VM Factory: Session Recordings: This release contains the "raw" and undedited session recordings and slides delivered by the team. 2010-06-01 Create package and add two session r...W7 Auto Playlist Generator: Source Code plus Binaries: Compete C# and WinForm source code available below. I have also included the binary for those that just want to run it.W7 Video Playlist Creator: Source Code plus Binaries: Compete C# and WPF source code available below. I have also included the binary for those that just want to run it.Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryPHPExcelMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesASP.NETMost Active ProjectsCommunity Forums NNTP bridgepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationBlogEngine.NETIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterMirror Testing SystemRawrCaliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and SilverlightPHPExcelCustomer Portal Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM

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