mvc 4 - Page 353 - Developer IT

RewriteRule causes POST data to get dumped before I can access it

- by MatthewMcGovern

I'm currently setting up my own 'webserver' (a Ubuntu Server on some old hardware) so I can have a mess around with PHP and get some experience managing a server. I'm using my own little MVC framework and I've hit a snag... In order for all requests to make it through the dispatcher, I am using: <Directory /var/www/> RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.(png|jpg|jpeg|bmp|gif|css|js)$ [NC] RewriteRule . HomeProjects/index.php [L] </Directory> Which works great. I read on Stackoverflow to change the [L] to [P] to preserve post data. However, this causes every page to return: Not Found The requested URL <url> was not found on this server. So after some more searching, I found, "Note that you need to enable the proxy module, and the proxy_http_module in the config files for this to work." The problem is, I have no idea how to do this and everything I google has people using examples with virtual hosts and I don't know how to 'translate' that into something useful for my setup. I'm accessing my webserver via my public IP and forwarding traffic on port 80 to the web server (like I'm pretending I have a domain/server). How can I get this enabled/get post data working again? Edit: When I use the following, the server never responds and the page loads indefinately? LoadModule proxy_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_proxy.so LoadModule proxy_http_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_proxy_http.so <Directory /var/www/> RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?82\.6\.150\.51/ [NC] RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png|jpg)$ /no-hotlink.png [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.(png|jpg|jpeg|bmp|gif|css|js)$ [NC] RewriteRule . HomeProjects/index.php [P] </Directory>

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SSL configuration issue. SSL/IIS7 not loading all scripts/CSS on user's first visit

- by Chris

Hi all, Hopefully this isnt a tricky one. I've got a web app that doesn't load all javascript/css/images on the first visit. Second visit is fine. After approximately 2 minutes of inactivity the problem reoccurs. These problems only started occuring after the customer requested SSL be applied to the application. Ajax requests stop working after 2 minutes of activity despite a successful page load of all javascript elements. Application timeout is 30 minutes - like I said, everything was fine before SSL was applied. All javascript and CSS files use absolute URLS - e.g https://blablabla There appears to be no pattern as to why certain files arent loaded. The firebug Net output shows the status for the failed elements as 'Aborted'. For example, site.css and nav.css are in the same folder, are declared after each other in the head tag yet one is loaded and the other is not. Both will load fine after refreshing the page (unless roughly two minutes have passed). An Ajax request also shows as aborted after two minutes. However, if i do the request again the Ajax request will succeed. Almost as if the first request woke something up. None of these problems occur in Chrome Any ideas? FYI this is a .Net 4 C# MVC app running under IIS7 but I'm not sure its relevant since it works in Chrome. Everything worked fine before SSL was applied. Originally posted on stackoverflow but recommended to list here. Can provide additional details if necessary.

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What are the right questions to ask when deciding whether to use Chef or Puppet?

- by John Feminella

I am about to start a new project which will, in part, require deploying many identical nodes of approximately three different classes: Data nodes, which will run sharded instances of MongoDB. Application nodes, which will run instances of a Ruby on Rails application and an older ASP.NET MVC application. Processing nodes, which will run jobs requested by the application nodes. ALl the nodes will run on instances of Ubuntu 10.04, though they will have different packages installed. I have some familiarity with Chef from previous projects, though I don't consider myself an expert. In an effort to do due diligence, I have been investigating alternative possibilities. We have a number of folks in-house who are long-time Puppet users, and they have encouraged me to take a look. I am having trouble evaluating both choices, though. Chef and Puppet share many of the same domain terminology -- packages, resources, attributes, and so on, and they have a common history that stems from taking different approaches to the same problem. So in some sense they are very similar. But much of the comparison information I've found, like this article, is a little outdated. If you were starting this project today, what questions would you ask yourself to decide whether you should use Chef or Puppet for configuration management? (Note: I don't want answer to the question "Should I use Chef or Puppet?")

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Capturing and Transforming ASP.NET Output with Response.Filter

- by Rick Strahl

During one of my Handlers and Modules session at DevConnections this week one of the attendees asked a question that I didn’t have an immediate answer for. Basically he wanted to capture response output completely and then apply some filtering to the output – effectively injecting some additional content into the page AFTER the page had completely rendered. Specifically the output should be captured from anywhere – not just a page and have this code injected into the page. Some time ago I posted some code that allows you to capture ASP.NET Page output by overriding the Render() method, capturing the HtmlTextWriter() and reading its content, modifying the rendered data as text then writing it back out. I’ve actually used this approach on a few occasions and it works fine for ASP.NET pages. But this obviously won’t work outside of the Page class environment and it’s not really generic – you have to create a custom page class in order to handle the output capture. [updated 11/16/2009 – updated ResponseFilterStream implementation and a few additional notes based on comments] Enter Response.Filter However, ASP.NET includes a Response.Filter which can be used – well to filter output. Basically Response.Filter is a stream through which the OutputStream is piped back to the Web Server (indirectly). As content is written into the Response object, the filter stream receives the appropriate Stream commands like Write, Flush and Close as well as read operations although for a Response.Filter that’s uncommon to be hit. The Response.Filter can be programmatically replaced at runtime which allows you to effectively intercept all output generation that runs through ASP.NET. A common Example: Dynamic GZip Encoding A rather common use of Response.Filter hooking up code based, dynamic GZip compression for requests which is dead simple by applying a GZipStream (or DeflateStream) to Response.Filter. The following generic routines can be used very easily to detect GZip capability of the client and compress response output with a single line of code and a couple of library helper routines: WebUtils.GZipEncodePage(); which is handled with a few lines of reusable code and a couple of static helper methods: /// <summary> ///Sets up the current page or handler to use GZip through a Response.Filter ///IMPORTANT: ///You have to call this method before any output is generated! /// </summary> public static void GZipEncodePage() { HttpResponse Response = HttpContext.Current.Response; if(IsGZipSupported()) { stringAcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if(AcceptEncoding.Contains("deflate")) { Response.Filter = newSystem.IO.Compression.DeflateStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "deflate"); } else { Response.Filter = newSystem.IO.Compression.GZipStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "gzip"); } } // Allow proxy servers to cache encoded and unencoded versions separately Response.AppendHeader("Vary", "Content-Encoding"); } /// <summary> /// Determines if GZip is supported /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public static bool IsGZipSupported() { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(AcceptEncoding) && (AcceptEncoding.Contains("gzip") || AcceptEncoding.Contains("deflate"))) return true; return false; } GZipStream and DeflateStream are streams that are assigned to Response.Filter and by doing so apply the appropriate compression on the active Response. Response.Filter content is chunked So to implement a Response.Filter effectively requires only that you implement a custom stream and handle the Write() method to capture Response output as it’s written. At first blush this seems very simple – you capture the output in Write, transform it and write out the transformed content in one pass. And that indeed works for small amounts of content. But you see, the problem is that output is written in small buffer chunks (a little less than 16k it appears) rather than just a single Write() statement into the stream, which makes perfect sense for ASP.NET to stream data back to IIS in smaller chunks to minimize memory usage en route. Unfortunately this also makes it a more difficult to implement any filtering routines since you don’t directly get access to all of the response content which is problematic especially if those filtering routines require you to look at the ENTIRE response in order to transform or capture the output as is needed for the solution the gentleman in my session asked for. So in order to address this a slightly different approach is required that basically captures all the Write() buffers passed into a cached stream and then making the stream available only when it’s complete and ready to be flushed. As I was thinking about the implementation I also started thinking about the few instances when I’ve used Response.Filter implementations. Each time I had to create a new Stream subclass and create my custom functionality but in the end each implementation did the same thing – capturing output and transforming it. I thought there should be an easier way to do this by creating a re-usable Stream class that can handle stream transformations that are common to Response.Filter implementations. Creating a semi-generic Response Filter Stream Class What I ended up with is a ResponseFilterStream class that provides a handful of Events that allow you to capture and/or transform Response content. The class implements a subclass of Stream and then overrides Write() and Flush() to handle capturing and transformation operations. By exposing events it’s easy to hook up capture or transformation operations via single focused methods. ResponseFilterStream exposes the following events: CaptureStream, CaptureString Captures the output only and provides either a MemoryStream or String with the final page output. Capture is hooked to the Flush() operation of the stream. TransformStream, TransformString Allows you to transform the complete response output with events that receive a MemoryStream or String respectively and can you modify the output then return it back as a return value. The transformed output is then written back out in a single chunk to the response output stream. These events capture all output internally first then write the entire buffer into the response. TransformWrite, TransformWriteString Allows you to transform the Response data as it is written in its original chunk size in the Stream’s Write() method. Unlike TransformStream/TransformString which operate on the complete output, these events only see the current chunk of data written. This is more efficient as there’s no caching involved, but can cause problems due to searched content splitting over multiple chunks. Using this implementation, creating a custom Response.Filter transformation becomes as simple as the following code. To hook up the Response.Filter using the MemoryStream version event: ResponseFilterStream filter = new ResponseFilterStream(Response.Filter); filter.TransformStream += filter_TransformStream; Response.Filter = filter; and the event handler to do the transformation: MemoryStream filter_TransformStream(MemoryStream ms) { Encoding encoding = HttpContext.Current.Response.ContentEncoding; string output = encoding.GetString(ms.ToArray()); output = FixPaths(output); ms = new MemoryStream(output.Length); byte[] buffer = encoding.GetBytes(output); ms.Write(buffer,0,buffer.Length); return ms; } private string FixPaths(string output) { string path = HttpContext.Current.Request.ApplicationPath; // override root path wonkiness if (path == "/") path = ""; output = output.Replace("\"~/", "\"" + path + "/").Replace("'~/", "'" + path + "/"); return output; } The idea of the event handler is that you can do whatever you want to the stream and return back a stream – either the same one that’s been modified or a brand new one – which is then sent back to as the final response. The above code can be simplified even more by using the string version events which handle the stream to string conversions for you: ResponseFilterStream filter = new ResponseFilterStream(Response.Filter); filter.TransformString += filter_TransformString; Response.Filter = filter; and the event handler to do the transformation calling the same FixPaths method shown above: string filter_TransformString(string output) { return FixPaths(output); } The events for capturing output and capturing and transforming chunks work in a very similar way. By using events to handle the transformations ResponseFilterStream becomes a reusable component and we don’t have to create a new stream class or subclass an existing Stream based classed. By the way, the example used here is kind of a cool trick which transforms “~/” expressions inside of the final generated HTML output – even in plain HTML controls not HTML controls – and transforms them into the appropriate application relative path in the same way that ResolveUrl would do. So you can write plain old HTML like this: <a href=”~/default.aspx”>Home</a> and have it turned into: <a href=”/myVirtual/default.aspx”>Home</a> without having to use an ASP.NET control like Hyperlink or Image or having to constantly use: <img src=”<%= ResolveUrl(“~/images/home.gif”) %>” /> in MVC applications (which frankly is one of the most annoying things about MVC especially given the path hell that extension-less and endpoint-less URLs impose). I can’t take credit for this idea. While discussing the Response.Filter issues on Twitter a hint from Dylan Beattie who pointed me at one of his examples which does something similar. I thought the idea was cool enough to use an example for future demos of Response.Filter functionality in ASP.NET next I time I do the Modules and Handlers talk (which was great fun BTW). How practical this is is debatable however since there’s definitely some overhead to using a Response.Filter in general and especially on one that caches the output and the re-writes it later. Make sure to test for performance anytime you use Response.Filter hookup and make sure it' doesn’t end up killing perf on you. You’ve been warned :-}. How does ResponseFilterStream work? The big win of this implementation IMHO is that it’s a reusable component – so for implementation there’s no new class, no subclassing – you simply attach to an event to implement an event handler method with a straight forward signature to retrieve the stream or string you’re interested in. The implementation is based on a subclass of Stream as is required in order to handle the Response.Filter requirements. What’s different than other implementations I’ve seen in various places is that it supports capturing output as a whole to allow retrieving the full response output for capture or modification. The exception are the TransformWrite and TransformWrite events which operate only active chunk of data written by the Response. For captured output, the Write() method captures output into an internal MemoryStream that is cached until writing is complete. So Write() is called when ASP.NET writes to the Response stream, but the filter doesn’t pass on the Write immediately to the filter’s internal stream. The data is cached and only when the Flush() method is called to finalize the Stream’s output do we actually send the cached stream off for transformation (if the events are hooked up) and THEN finally write out the returned content in one big chunk. Here’s the implementation of ResponseFilterStream: /// <summary> /// A semi-generic Stream implementation for Response.Filter with /// an event interface for handling Content transformations via /// Stream or String. /// <remarks> /// Use with care for large output as this implementation copies /// the output into a memory stream and so increases memory usage. /// </remarks> /// </summary> public class ResponseFilterStream : Stream { /// <summary> /// The original stream /// </summary> Stream _stream; /// <summary> /// Current position in the original stream /// </summary> long _position; /// <summary> /// Stream that original content is read into /// and then passed to TransformStream function /// </summary> MemoryStream _cacheStream = new MemoryStream(5000); /// <summary> /// Internal pointer that that keeps track of the size /// of the cacheStream /// </summary> int _cachePointer = 0; /// <summary> /// /// </summary> /// <param name="responseStream"></param> public ResponseFilterStream(Stream responseStream) { _stream = responseStream; } /// <summary> /// Determines whether the stream is captured /// </summary> private bool IsCaptured { get { if (CaptureStream != null || CaptureString != null || TransformStream != null || TransformString != null) return true; return false; } } /// <summary> /// Determines whether the Write method is outputting data immediately /// or delaying output until Flush() is fired. /// </summary> private bool IsOutputDelayed { get { if (TransformStream != null || TransformString != null) return true; return false; } } /// <summary> /// Event that captures Response output and makes it available /// as a MemoryStream instance. Output is captured but won't /// affect Response output. /// </summary> public event Action<MemoryStream> CaptureStream; /// <summary> /// Event that captures Response output and makes it available /// as a string. Output is captured but won't affect Response output. /// </summary> public event Action<string> CaptureString; /// <summary> /// Event that allows you transform the stream as each chunk of /// the output is written in the Write() operation of the stream. /// This means that that it's possible/likely that the input /// buffer will not contain the full response output but only /// one of potentially many chunks. /// /// This event is called as part of the filter stream's Write() /// operation. /// </summary> public event Func<byte[], byte[]> TransformWrite; /// <summary> /// Event that allows you to transform the response stream as /// each chunk of bytep[] output is written during the stream's write /// operation. This means it's possibly/likely that the string /// passed to the handler only contains a portion of the full /// output. Typical buffer chunks are around 16k a piece. /// /// This event is called as part of the stream's Write operation. /// </summary> public event Func<string, string> TransformWriteString; /// <summary> /// This event allows capturing and transformation of the entire /// output stream by caching all write operations and delaying final /// response output until Flush() is called on the stream. /// </summary> public event Func<MemoryStream, MemoryStream> TransformStream; /// <summary> /// Event that can be hooked up to handle Response.Filter /// Transformation. Passed a string that you can modify and /// return back as a return value. The modified content /// will become the final output. /// </summary> public event Func<string, string> TransformString; protected virtual void OnCaptureStream(MemoryStream ms) { if (CaptureStream != null) CaptureStream(ms); } private void OnCaptureStringInternal(MemoryStream ms) { if (CaptureString != null) { string content = HttpContext.Current.Response.ContentEncoding.GetString(ms.ToArray()); OnCaptureString(content); } } protected virtual void OnCaptureString(string output) { if (CaptureString != null) CaptureString(output); } protected virtual byte[] OnTransformWrite(byte[] buffer) { if (TransformWrite != null) return TransformWrite(buffer); return buffer; } private byte[] OnTransformWriteStringInternal(byte[] buffer) { Encoding encoding = HttpContext.Current.Response.ContentEncoding; string output = OnTransformWriteString(encoding.GetString(buffer)); return encoding.GetBytes(output); } private string OnTransformWriteString(string value) { if (TransformWriteString != null) return TransformWriteString(value); return value; } protected virtual MemoryStream OnTransformCompleteStream(MemoryStream ms) { if (TransformStream != null) return TransformStream(ms); return ms; } /// <summary> /// Allows transforming of strings /// /// Note this handler is internal and not meant to be overridden /// as the TransformString Event has to be hooked up in order /// for this handler to even fire to avoid the overhead of string /// conversion on every pass through. /// </summary> /// <param name="responseText"></param> /// <returns></returns> private string OnTransformCompleteString(string responseText) { if (TransformString != null) TransformString(responseText); return responseText; } /// <summary> /// Wrapper method form OnTransformString that handles /// stream to string and vice versa conversions /// </summary> /// <param name="ms"></param> /// <returns></returns> internal MemoryStream OnTransformCompleteStringInternal(MemoryStream ms) { if (TransformString == null) return ms; //string content = ms.GetAsString(); string content = HttpContext.Current.Response.ContentEncoding.GetString(ms.ToArray()); content = TransformString(content); byte[] buffer = HttpContext.Current.Response.ContentEncoding.GetBytes(content); ms = new MemoryStream(); ms.Write(buffer, 0, buffer.Length); //ms.WriteString(content); return ms; } /// <summary> /// /// </summary> public override bool CanRead { get { return true; } } public override bool CanSeek { get { return true; } } /// <summary> /// /// </summary> public override bool CanWrite { get { return true; } } /// <summary> /// /// </summary> public override long Length { get { return 0; } } /// <summary> /// /// </summary> public override long Position { get { return _position; } set { _position = value; } } /// <summary> /// /// </summary> /// <param name="offset"></param> /// <param name="direction"></param> /// <returns></returns> public override long Seek(long offset, System.IO.SeekOrigin direction) { return _stream.Seek(offset, direction); } /// <summary> /// /// </summary> /// <param name="length"></param> public override void SetLength(long length) { _stream.SetLength(length); } /// <summary> /// /// </summary> public override void Close() { _stream.Close(); } /// <summary> /// Override flush by writing out the cached stream data /// </summary> public override void Flush() { if (IsCaptured && _cacheStream.Length > 0) { // Check for transform implementations _cacheStream = OnTransformCompleteStream(_cacheStream); _cacheStream = OnTransformCompleteStringInternal(_cacheStream); OnCaptureStream(_cacheStream); OnCaptureStringInternal(_cacheStream); // write the stream back out if output was delayed if (IsOutputDelayed) _stream.Write(_cacheStream.ToArray(), 0, (int)_cacheStream.Length); // Clear the cache once we've written it out _cacheStream.SetLength(0); } // default flush behavior _stream.Flush(); } /// <summary> /// /// </summary> /// <param name="buffer"></param> /// <param name="offset"></param> /// <param name="count"></param> /// <returns></returns> public override int Read(byte[] buffer, int offset, int count) { return _stream.Read(buffer, offset, count); } /// <summary> /// Overriden to capture output written by ASP.NET and captured /// into a cached stream that is written out later when Flush() /// is called. /// </summary> /// <param name="buffer"></param> /// <param name="offset"></param> /// <param name="count"></param> public override void Write(byte[] buffer, int offset, int count) { if ( IsCaptured ) { // copy to holding buffer only - we'll write out later _cacheStream.Write(buffer, 0, count); _cachePointer += count; } // just transform this buffer if (TransformWrite != null) buffer = OnTransformWrite(buffer); if (TransformWriteString != null) buffer = OnTransformWriteStringInternal(buffer); if (!IsOutputDelayed) _stream.Write(buffer, offset, buffer.Length); } } The key features are the events and corresponding OnXXX methods that handle the event hookups, and the Write() and Flush() methods of the stream implementation. All the rest of the members tend to be plain jane passthrough stream implementation code without much consequence. I do love the way Action<t> and Func<T> make it so easy to create the event signatures for the various events – sweet. A few Things to consider Performance Response.Filter is not great for performance in general as it adds another layer of indirection to the ASP.NET output pipeline, and this implementation in particular adds a memory hit as it basically duplicates the response output into the cached memory stream which is necessary since you may have to look at the entire response. If you have large pages in particular this can cause potentially serious memory pressure in your server application. So be careful of wholesale adoption of this (or other) Response.Filters. Make sure to do some performance testing to ensure it’s not killing your app’s performance. Response.Filter works everywhere A few questions came up in comments and discussion as to capturing ALL output hitting the site and – yes you can definitely do that by assigning a Response.Filter inside of a module. If you do this however you’ll want to be very careful and decide which content you actually want to capture especially in IIS 7 which passes ALL content – including static images/CSS etc. through the ASP.NET pipeline. So it is important to filter only on what you’re looking for – like the page extension or maybe more effectively the Response.ContentType. Response.Filter Chaining Originally I thought that filter chaining doesn’t work at all due to a bug in the stream implementation code. But it’s quite possible to assign multiple filters to the Response.Filter property. So the following actually works to both compress the output and apply the transformed content: WebUtils.GZipEncodePage(); ResponseFilterStream filter = new ResponseFilterStream(Response.Filter); filter.TransformString += filter_TransformString; Response.Filter = filter; However the following does not work resulting in invalid content encoding errors: ResponseFilterStream filter = new ResponseFilterStream(Response.Filter); filter.TransformString += filter_TransformString; Response.Filter = filter; WebUtils.GZipEncodePage(); In other words multiple Response filters can work together but it depends entirely on the implementation whether they can be chained or in which order they can be chained. In this case running the GZip/Deflate stream filters apparently relies on the original content length of the output and chokes when the content is modified. But if attaching the compression first it works fine as unintuitive as that may seem. Resources Download example code Capture Output from ASP.NET Pages © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET

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The Microsoft Ajax Library and Visual Studio Beta 2

- by Stephen Walther

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 was released this week and one of the first things that I hope you notice is that it no longer contains the latest version of ASP.NET AJAX. What happened? Where did AJAX go? Just like Sting and The Police, just like Phil Collins and Genesis, just like Greg Page and the Wiggles, AJAX has gone out of band! We are starting a solo career. A Name Change First things first. In previous releases, our Ajax framework was named ASP.NET AJAX. We now have changed the name of the framework to the Microsoft Ajax Library. There are two reasons behind this name change. First, the members of the Ajax team got tired of explaining to everyone that our Ajax framework is not tied to the server-side ASP.NET framework. You can use the Microsoft Ajax Library with ASP.NET Web Forms, ASP.NET MVC, PHP, Ruby on RAILS, and even pure HTML applications. Our framework can be used as a client-only framework and having the word ASP.NET in our name was confusing people. Second, it was time to start spelling the word Ajax like everyone else. Notice that the name is the Microsoft Ajax Library and not the Microsoft AJAX library. Originally, Microsoft used upper case AJAX because AJAX originally was an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. And, according to Strunk and Wagnell, acronyms should be all uppercase. However, Ajax is one of those words that have migrated from acronym status to “just a word” status. So whenever you hear one of your co-workers talk about ASP.NET AJAX, gently correct your co-worker and say “It is now called the Microsoft Ajax Library.” Why OOB? But why move out-of-band (OOB)? The short answer is that we have had approximately 6 preview releases of the Microsoft Ajax Library over the last year. That’s a lot. We pride ourselves on being agile. Client-side technology evolves quickly. We want to be able to get a preview version of the Microsoft Ajax Library out to our customers, get feedback, and make changes to the library quickly. Shipping the Microsoft Ajax Library out-of-band keeps us agile and enables us to continue to ship new versions of the library even after ASP.NET 4 ships. Showing Love for JavaScript Developers One area in which we have received a lot of feedback is around making the Microsoft Ajax Library easier to use for developers who are comfortable with JavaScript. We also wanted to make it easy for jQuery developers to take advantage of the innovative features of the Microsoft Ajax Library. To achieve these goals, we’ve added the following features to the Microsoft Ajax Library (these features are included in the latest preview release that you can download right now): A simplified imperative syntax – We wanted to make it brain-dead simple to create client-side Ajax controls when writing JavaScript. A client script loader – We wanted the Microsoft Ajax Library to load all of the scripts required by a component or control automatically. jQuery integration – We love the jQuery selector syntax. We wanted to make it easy for jQuery developers to use the Microsoft Ajax Library without changing their programming style. If you are interested in learning about these new features of the Microsoft Ajax Library, I recommend that you read the following blog post by Scott Guthrie: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/10/15/announcing-microsoft-ajax-library-preview-6-and-the-microsoft-ajax-minifier.aspx Downloading the Latest Version of the Microsoft Ajax Library Currently, the best place to download the latest version of the Microsoft Ajax Library is directly from the ASP.NET CodePlex project: http://aspnet.codeplex.com/ As I write this, the current version is Preview 6. The next version is coming out at the PDC. Summary I’m really excited about the future of the Microsoft Ajax Library. Moving outside of the ASP.NET framework provides us the flexibility to remain agile and continue to innovate aggressively. The latest preview release of the Microsoft Ajax Library includes several major new features including a client script loader, jQuery integration, and a simplified client control creation syntax.

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Tip/Trick: Fix Common SEO Problems Using the URL Rewrite Extension

- by ScottGu

Search engine optimization (SEO) is important for any publically facing web-site. A large % of traffic to sites now comes directly from search engines, and improving your site’s search relevancy will lead to more users visiting your site from search engine queries. This can directly or indirectly increase the money you make through your site. This blog post covers how you can use the free Microsoft URL Rewrite Extension to fix a bunch of common SEO problems that your site might have. It takes less than 15 minutes (and no code changes) to apply 4 simple URL Rewrite rules to your site, and in doing so cause search engines to drive more visitors and traffic to your site. The techniques below work equally well with both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC based sites. They also works with all versions of ASP.NET (and even work with non-ASP.NET content). [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] Measuring the SEO of your website with the Microsoft SEO Toolkit A few months ago I blogged about the free SEO Toolkit that we’ve shipped. This useful tool enables you to automatically crawl/scan your site for SEO correctness, and it then flags any SEO issues it finds. I highly recommend downloading and using the tool against any public site you work on. It makes it easy to spot SEO issues you might have in your site, and pinpoint ways to optimize it further. Below is a simple example of a report I ran against one of my sites (www.scottgu.com) prior to applying the URL Rewrite rules I’ll cover later in this blog post: Search Relevancy and URL Splitting Two of the important things that search engines evaluate when assessing your site’s “search relevancy” are: How many other sites link to your content. Search engines assume that if a lot of people around the web are linking to your content, then it is likely useful and so weight it higher in relevancy. The uniqueness of the content it finds on your site. If search engines find that the content is duplicated in multiple places around the Internet (or on multiple URLs on your site) then it is likely to drop the relevancy of the content. One of the things you want to be very careful to avoid when building public facing sites is to not allow different URLs to retrieve the same content within your site. Doing so will hurt with both of the situations above. In particular, allowing external sites to link to the same content with multiple URLs will cause your link-count and page-ranking to be split up across those different URLs (and so give you a smaller page rank than what it would otherwise be if it was just one URL). Not allowing external sites to link to you in different ways sounds easy in theory – but you might wonder what exactly this means in practice and how you avoid it. 4 Really Common SEO Problems Your Sites Might Have Below are 4 really common scenarios that can cause your site to inadvertently expose multiple URLs for the same content. When this happens external sites linking to yours will end up splitting their page links across multiple URLs - and as a result cause you to have a lower page ranking with search engines than you deserve. SEO Problem #1: Default Document IIS (and other web servers) supports the concept of a “default document”. This allows you to avoid having to explicitly specify the page you want to serve at either the root of the web-site/application, or within a sub-directory. This is convenient – but means that by default this content is available via two different publically exposed URLs (which is bad). For example: http://scottgu.com/ http://scottgu.com/default.aspx SEO Problem #2: Different URL Casings Web developers often don’t realize URLs are case sensitive to search engines on the web. This means that search engines will treat the following links as two completely different URLs: http://scottgu.com/Albums.aspx http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx SEO Problem #3: Trailing Slashes Consider the below two URLs – they might look the same at first, but they are subtly different. The trailing slash creates yet another situation that causes search engines to treat the URLs as different and so split search rankings: http://scottgu.com http://scottgu.com/ SEO Problem #4: Canonical Host Names Sometimes sites support scenarios where they support a web-site with both a leading “www” hostname prefix as well as just the hostname itself. This causes search engines to treat the URLs as different and split search rankling: http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx/ http://www.scottgu.com/albums.aspx/ How to Easily Fix these SEO Problems in 10 minutes (or less) using IIS Rewrite If you haven’t been careful when coding your sites, chances are you are suffering from one (or more) of the above SEO problems. Addressing these issues will improve your search engine relevancy ranking and drive more traffic to your site. The “good news” is that fixing the above 4 issues is really easy using the URL Rewrite Extension. This is a completely free Microsoft extension available for IIS 7.x (on Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7 and Windows Vista). The great thing about using the IIS Rewrite extension is that it allows you to fix the above problems *without* having to change any code within your applications. You can easily install the URL Rewrite Extension in under 3 minutes using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (a free tool we ship that automates setting up web servers and development machines). Just click the green “Install Now” button on the URL Rewrite Spotlight page to install it on your Windows Server 2008, Windows 7 or Windows Vista machine: Once installed you’ll find that a new “URL Rewrite” icon is available within the IIS 7 Admin Tool: Double-clicking the icon will open up the URL Rewrite admin panel – which will display the list of URL Rewrite rules configured for a particular application or site: Notice that our rewrite rule list above is currently empty (which is the default when you first install the extension). We can click the “Add Rule…” link button in the top-right of the panel to add and enable new URL Rewriting logic for our site. Scenario 1: Handling Default Document Scenarios One of the SEO problems I discussed earlier in this post was the scenario where the “default document” feature of IIS causes you to inadvertently expose two URLs for the same content on your site. For example: http://scottgu.com/ http://scottgu.com/default.aspx We can fix this by adding a new IIS Rewrite rule that automatically redirects anyone who navigates to the second URL to instead go to the first one. We will setup the HTTP redirect to be a “permanent redirect” – which will indicate to search engines that they should follow the redirect and use the new URL they are redirected to as the identifier of the content they retrieve. Let’s look at how we can create such a rule. We’ll begin by clicking the “Add Rule” link in the screenshot above. This will cause the below dialog to display: We’ll select the “Blank Rule” template within the “Inbound rules” section to create a new custom URL Rewriting rule. This will display an empty pane like below: Don’t worry – setting up the above rule is easy. The following 4 steps explain how to do so: Step 1: Name the Rule Our first step will be to name the rule we are creating. Naming it with a descriptive name will make it easier to find and understand later. Let’s name this rule our “Default Document URL Rewrite” rule: Step 2: Setup the Regular Expression that Matches this Rule Our second step will be to specify a regular expression filter that will cause this rule to execute when an incoming URL matches the regex pattern. Don’t worry if you aren’t good with regular expressions - I suck at them too. The trick is to know someone who is good at them or copy/paste them from a web-site. Below we are going to specify the following regular expression as our pattern rule: (.*?)/?Default\.aspx$ This pattern will match any URL string that ends with Default.aspx. The "(.*?)" matches any preceding character zero or more times. The "/?" part says to match the slash symbol zero or one times. The "$" symbol at the end will ensure that the pattern will only match strings that end with Default.aspx. Combining all these regex elements allows this rule to work not only for the root of your web site (e.g. http://scottgu.com/default.aspx) but also for any application or subdirectory within the site (e.g. http://scottgu.com/photos/default.aspx. Because the “ignore case” checkbox is selected it will match both “Default.aspx” as well as “default.aspx” within the URL. One nice feature built-into the rule editor is a “Test pattern” button that you can click to bring up a dialog that allows you to test out a few URLs with the rule you are configuring: Above I've added a “products/default.aspx” URL and clicked the “Test” button. This will give me immediate feedback on whether the rule will execute for it. Step 3: Setup a Permanent Redirect Action We’ll then setup an action to occur when our regular expression pattern matches the incoming URL: In the dialog above I’ve changed the “Action Type” drop down to be a “Redirect” action. The “Redirect Type” will be a HTTP 301 Permanent redirect – which means search engines will follow it. I’ve also set the “Redirect URL” property to be: {R:1}/ This indicates that we want to redirect the web client requesting the original URL to a new URL that has the originally requested URL path - minus the "Default.aspx" in it. For example, requests for http://scottgu.com/default.aspx will be redirected to http://scottgu.com/, and requests for http://scottgu.com/photos/default.aspx will be redirected to http://scottgu.com/photos/ The "{R:N}" regex construct, where N >= 0, is called a back-reference and N is the back-reference index. In the case of our pattern "(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$", if the input URL is "products/Default.aspx" then {R:0} will contain "products/Default.aspx" and {R:1} will contain "products". We are going to use this {R:1}/ value to be the URL we redirect users to. Step 4: Apply and Save the Rule Our final step is to click the “Apply” button in the top right hand of the IIS admin tool – which will cause the tool to persist the URL Rewrite rule into our application’s root web.config file (under a <system.webServer/rewrite> configuration section): <configuration> <system.webServer> <rewrite> <rules> <rule name="Default Document" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$" /> <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" /> </rule> </rules> </rewrite> </system.webServer> </configuration> Because IIS 7.x and ASP.NET share the same web.config files, you can actually just copy/paste the above code into your web.config files using Visual Studio and skip the need to run the admin tool entirely. This also makes adding/deploying URL Rewrite rules with your ASP.NET applications really easy. Step 5: Try the Rule Out Now that we’ve saved the rule, let’s try it out on our site. Try the following two URLs on my site: http://scottgu.com/ http://scottgu.com/default.aspx Notice that the second URL automatically redirects to the first one. Because it is a permanent redirect, search engines will follow the URL and should update the page ranking of http://scottgu.com to include links to http://scottgu.com/default.aspx as well. Scenario 2: Different URL Casing Another common SEO problem I discussed earlier in this post is that URLs are case sensitive to search engines on the web. This means that search engines will treat the following links as two completely different URLs: http://scottgu.com/Albums.aspx http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx We can fix this by adding a new IIS Rewrite rule that automatically redirects anyone who navigates to the first URL to instead go to the second (all lower-case) one. Like before, we will setup the HTTP redirect to be a “permanent redirect” – which will indicate to search engines that they should follow the redirect and use the new URL they are redirected to as the identifier of the content they retrieve. To create such a rule we’ll click the “Add Rule” link in the URL Rewrite admin tool again. This will cause the “Add Rule” dialog to appear again: Unlike the previous scenario (where we created a “Blank Rule”), with this scenario we can take advantage of a built-in “Enforce lowercase URLs” rule template. When we click the “ok” button we’ll see the following dialog which asks us if we want to create a rule that enforces the use of lowercase letters in URLs: When we click the “Yes” button we’ll get a pre-written rule that automatically performs a permanent redirect if an incoming URL has upper-case characters in it – and automatically send users to a lower-case version of the URL: We can click the “Apply” button to use this rule “as-is” and have it apply to all incoming URLs to our site. Because my www.scottgu.com site uses ASP.NET Web Forms, I’m going to make one small change to the rule we generated above – which is to add a condition that will ensure that URLs to ASP.NET’s built-in “WebResource.axd” handler are excluded from our case-sensitivity URL Rewrite logic. URLs to the WebResource.axd handler will only come from server-controls emitted from my pages – and will never be linked to from external sites. While my site will continue to function fine if we redirect these URLs to automatically be lower-case – doing so isn’t necessary and will add an extra HTTP redirect to many of my pages. The good news is that adding a condition that prevents my URL Rewriting rule from happening with certain URLs is easy. We simply need to expand the “Conditions” section of the form above We can then click the “Add” button to add a condition clause. This will bring up the “Add Condition” dialog: Above I’ve entered {URL} as the Condition input – and said that this rule should only execute if the URL does not match a regex pattern which contains the string “WebResource.axd”. This will ensure that WebResource.axd URLs to my site will be allowed to execute just fine without having the URL be re-written to be all lower-case. Note: If you have static resources (like references to .jpg, .css, and .js files) within your site that currently use upper-case characters you’ll probably want to add additional condition filter clauses so that URLs to them also don’t get redirected to be lower-case (just add rules for patterns like .jpg, .gif, .js, etc). Your site will continue to work fine if these URLs get redirected to be lower case (meaning the site won’t break) – but it will cause an extra HTTP redirect to happen on your site for URLs that don’t need to be redirected for SEO reasons. So setting up a condition clause makes sense to add. When I click the “ok” button above and apply our lower-case rewriting rule the admin tool will save the following additional rule to our web.config file: <configuration> <system.webServer> <rewrite> <rules> <rule name="Default Document" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$" /> <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" /> </rule> <rule name="Lower Case URLs" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="[A-Z]" ignoreCase="false" /> <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false"> <add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="{ToLower:{URL}}" /> </rule> </rules> </rewrite> </system.webServer> </configuration> Try the Rule Out Now that we’ve saved the rule, let’s try it out on our site. Try the following two URLs on my site: http://scottgu.com/Albums.aspx http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx Notice that the first URL (which has a capital “A”) automatically does a redirect to a lower-case version of the URL. Scenario 3: Trailing Slashes Another common SEO problem I discussed earlier in this post is the scenario of trailing slashes within URLs. The trailing slash creates yet another situation that causes search engines to treat the URLs as different and so split search rankings: http://scottgu.com http://scottgu.com/ We can fix this by adding a new IIS Rewrite rule that automatically redirects anyone who navigates to the first URL (that does not have a trailing slash) to instead go to the second one that does. Like before, we will setup the HTTP redirect to be a “permanent redirect” – which will indicate to search engines that they should follow the redirect and use the new URL they are redirected to as the identifier of the content they retrieve. To create such a rule we’ll click the “Add Rule” link in the URL Rewrite admin tool again. This will cause the “Add Rule” dialog to appear again: The URL Rewrite admin tool has a built-in “Append or remove the trailing slash symbol” rule template. When we select it and click the “ok” button we’ll see the following dialog which asks us if we want to create a rule that automatically redirects users to a URL with a trailing slash if one isn’t present: Like within our previous lower-casing rewrite rule we’ll add one additional condition clause that will exclude WebResource.axd URLs from being processed by this rule. This will avoid an unnecessary redirect for happening for those URLs. When we click the “OK” button we’ll get a pre-written rule that automatically performs a permanent redirect if the URL doesn’t have a trailing slash – and if the URL is not processed by either a directory or a file. This will save the following additional rule to our web.config file: <configuration> <system.webServer> <rewrite> <rules> <rule name="Default Document" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$" /> <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" /> </rule> <rule name="Lower Case URLs" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="[A-Z]" ignoreCase="false" /> <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false"> <add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="{ToLower:{URL}}" /> </rule> <rule name="Trailing Slash" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="(.*[^/])$" /> <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false"> <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true" /> <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" /> <add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" /> </rule> </rules> </rewrite> </system.webServer> </configuration> Try the Rule Out Now that we’ve saved the rule, let’s try it out on our site. Try the following two URLs on my site: http://scottgu.com http://scottgu.com/ Notice that the first URL (which has no trailing slash) automatically does a redirect to a URL with the trailing slash. Because it is a permanent redirect, search engines will follow the URL and update the page ranking. Scenario 4: Canonical Host Names The final SEO problem I discussed earlier are scenarios where a site works with both a leading “www” hostname prefix as well as just the hostname itself. This causes search engines to treat the URLs as different and split search rankling: http://www.scottgu.com/albums.aspx http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx We can fix this by adding a new IIS Rewrite rule that automatically redirects anyone who navigates to the first URL (that has a www prefix) to instead go to the second URL. Like before, we will setup the HTTP redirect to be a “permanent redirect” – which will indicate to search engines that they should follow the redirect and use the new URL they are redirected to as the identifier of the content they retrieve. To create such a rule we’ll click the “Add Rule” link in the URL Rewrite admin tool again. This will cause the “Add Rule” dialog to appear again: The URL Rewrite admin tool has a built-in “Canonical domain name” rule template. When we select it and click the “ok” button we’ll see the following dialog which asks us if we want to create a redirect rule that automatically redirects users to a primary host name URL: Above I’m entering the primary URL address I want to expose to the web: scottgu.com. When we click the “OK” button we’ll get a pre-written rule that automatically performs a permanent redirect if the URL has another leading domain name prefix. This will save the following additional rule to our web.config file: <configuration> <system.webServer> <rewrite> <rules> <rule name="Cannonical Hostname"> <match url="(.*)" /> <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false"> <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^scottgu\.com$" negate="true" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="http://scottgu.com/{R:1}" /> </rule> <rule name="Default Document" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="(.*?)/?Default\.aspx$" /> <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" /> </rule> <rule name="Lower Case URLs" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="[A-Z]" ignoreCase="false" /> <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false"> <add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="{ToLower:{URL}}" /> </rule> <rule name="Trailing Slash" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="(.*[^/])$" /> <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false"> <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true" /> <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" /> <add input="{URL}" pattern="WebResource.axd" negate="true" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/" /> </rule> </rules> </rewrite> </system.webServer> </configuration> Try the Rule Out Now that we’ve saved the rule, let’s try it out on our site. Try the following two URLs on my site: http://www.scottgu.com/albums.aspx http://scottgu.com/albums.aspx Notice that the first URL (which has the “www” prefix) now automatically does a redirect to the second URL which does not have the www prefix. Because it is a permanent redirect, search engines will follow the URL and update the page ranking. 4 Simple Rules for Improved SEO The above 4 rules are pretty easy to setup and should take less than 15 minutes to configure on existing sites you already have. The beauty of using a solution like the URL Rewrite Extension is that you can take advantage of it without having to change code within your web-site – and without having to break any existing links already pointing at your site. Users who follow existing links will be automatically redirected to the new URLs you wish to publish. And search engines will start to give your site a higher search relevancy ranking – which will list your site higher in search results and drive more traffic to it. Customizing your URL Rewriting rules further is easy to-do either by editing the web.config file directly, or alternatively, just double click the URL Rewrite icon within the IIS 7.x admin tool and it will list all the active rules for your web-site or application: Clicking any of the rules above will open the rules editor back up and allow you to tweak/customize/save them further. Summary Measuring and improving SEO is something every developer building a public-facing web-site needs to think about and focus on. If you haven’t already, download and use the SEO Toolkit to analyze the SEO of your sites today. New URL Routing features in ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web Forms 4 make it much easier to build applications that have more control over the URLs that are published. Tools like the URL Rewrite Extension that I’ve talked about in this blog post make it much easier to improve the URLs that are published from sites you already have built today – without requiring you to change a lot of code. The URL Rewrite Extension provides a bunch of additional great capabilities – far beyond just SEO - as well. I’ll be covering these additional capabilities more in future blog posts. Hope this helps, Scott

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Software development stack 2012

A couple of months ago, I posted on Google+ about my evaluation period for a new software development stack in general. "Analysing existing 'jungle' of multiple applications and tools in various languages for clarification and future design decisions. Great fun and lots of headaches... #DevelopersLife" Surprisingly, there was response... ;-) - And this series of articles is initiated by this post. Thanks Olaf. The past few years... Well, after all my first choice of software development in the past was Microsoft Visual FoxPro 6.0 - 9.0 in combination with Microsoft SQL Server 2000 - 2008 and Crystal Reports 9.x - XI. Honestly, it is my main working environment due to exisiting maintenance and support plans with my customers, but also for new project requests. And... hands on, it is still my first choice for data manipulation and migration options. But the earth is spinning, and as a software craftsman one has to be flexible with the choice of tools. In parallel to my knowledge and expertise in the above mentioned tools, I already started very early to get my hands dirty with the Microsoft .NET Framework. If I remember correctly, I started back in 2002/2003 with the first version ever. But this was more out of curiousity. During the years this kind of development got more serious and demanding, and I focused myself on interop and integrational libraries and applications. Mainly, to expose exisitng features of the .NET Framework to Visual FoxPro - I even had a session about that at the German Developer's Conference in Frankfurt. Observation of recent developments With the recent hype on Javascript and HTML5, especially for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 development, I had several 'Deja vu' events... Back in early 2006 (roughly) I had a conversation on the future of Web and Desktop development with my former colleagues Golo Roden and Thomas Wilting about the underestimation of Javascript and its root as a prototype-based, dynamic, full-featured programming language. During this talk with them I took the Mozilla applications, namely Firefox and Thunderbird, as a reference which are mainly based on XML, CSS, Javascript and images - besides the core rendering engine. And that it is very simple to write your own extensions for the Gecko rendering engine. Looking at the Windows Vista Sidebar widgets, just underlines this kind of usage. So, yes the 'Modern UI' of Windows 8 based on HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript didn't come as any surprise to me. Just allow me to ask why did it take so long for Microsoft to come up with this step? A new set of tools Ok, coming from web development in HTML 4, CSS and Javascript prior to Visual FoxPro, I am partly going back to that combination of technologies. What is the other part of the software development stack here at IOS Indian Ocean Software Ltd? Frankly, it is easy and straight forward to describe: Microsoft Visual FoxPro 9.0 SP 2 - still going strong! Visual Studio 2012 (C# on latest .NET Framework) MonoDevelop Telerik DevCraft Suite WPF ASP.NET MVC Windows 8 Kendo UI OpenAccess ORM Reporting JustCode CODE Framework by EPS Software MonoTouch and Mono for Android Subversion and additional tools for the daily routine: Notepad++, JustCode, SQL Compare, DiffMerge, VMware, etc. Following the principles of Clean Code Developer and the Agile Manifesto Actually, nothing special about this combination but rather a solid fundament to work with and create line of business applications for customers.Honestly, I am really interested in your choice of 'weapons' for software development, and hopefully there might be some nice conversations in the comment section. Over the next coming days/weeks I'm going to describe a little bit more in detail about the reasons for my decision. Articles will be added bit by bit here as reference, too. Please bear with me... Regards, JoKi

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What's new in ASP.Net 4.5 and VS 2012 - part 2

- by nikolaosk

This is the second post in a series of posts titled "What's new in ASP.Net 4.5 and VS 2012".You can have a look at the first post in this series, here. Please find all my posts regarding VS 2012, here. In this post I will be looking into the various new features available in ASP.Net 4.5 and VS 2012.I will be looking into the enhancements in the HTML Editor,CSS Editor and Javascript Editor.In order to follow along this post you must have Visual Studio 2012 and .Net Framework 4.5 installed in your machine.Download and install VS 2012 using this link.My machine runs on Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012 works just fine.I will work fine in Windows 7 as well so do not worry if you do not have the latest Microsoft operating system.1) Launch VS 2012 and create a new Web Forms application by going to File - >New Web Site - > ASP.Net Web Forms Site.2) Choose an appropriate name for your web site.3) I would like to point out the new enhancements in the CSS editor in VS 2012. In the Solution Explorer in the Content folder and open the Site.cssThen when I try to change the background-color property of the html element, I get a brand new handy color-picker. Have a look at the picture below Please note that the color-picker shows all the colors that have been used in this website. Then you can expand the color-picker by clicking on the arrows. Opacity is also supported. Have a look at the picture below4) There are also mobile styles in the Site.css .These are based on media queries.Please have a look at another post of mine on CSS3 media queries. Have a look at the picture below In this case when the maximum width of the screen is less than 850px there will be a new layout that will be dictated by these new rules. Also CSS snippets are supported. Have a look at the picture below I am writing a new CSS rule for an image element. I write the property transform and hit tab and then I have cross-browser CSS handling all of the major vendors.Then I simply add the value rotate and it is applied to all the cross browser options.Have a look at the picture below. I am sure you realise how productive you can become with all these CSS snippets. 5) Now let's have a look at the new HTML editor enhancements in VS 2012You can drag and drop a GridView web server control from the Toolbox in the Site.master file.You will see a smart tag (that was only available in the Design View) that you can expand and add fields, format the web server control.Have a look at the picture below 6) We also have available code snippets. I type <video and then press tab twice.By doing that I have the rest of the HTML 5 markup completed.Have a look at the picture below 7) I have new support for the input tag including all the HTML 5 types and all the new accessibility features.Have a look at the picture below 8) Another interesting feature is the new Intellisense capabilities. When I change the DocType to 4.01 and the type <audio>,<video> HTML 5 tags, Intellisense does not recognise them and add squiggly lines.Have a look at the picture below All these features support ASP.Net Web forms, ASP.Net MVC applications and Web Pages. 9) Finally I would like to show you the enhanced support that we have for Javascript in VS 2012. I have full Intellisense support and code snippets support.I create a sample javascript file. I type If and press tab. I type while and press tab.I type for and press tab.In all three cases code snippet support kicks in and completes the code stack. Have a look at the picture below We also have full Intellisense support.Have a look at the picture below I am creating a simple function and then type some sort of XML like comments for the input parameters. Have a look at the picture below. Then when I call this function, Intellisense has picked up the XML comments and shows the variables data types.Have a look at the picture below Hope it helps!!!

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Using the ASP.NET Membership API with SQL Server / SQL Azure: The new “System.Web.Providers” namespace

- by Harish Ranganathan

The Membership API came in .NET 2.0 and was a huge enhancement in building web applications with users, managing roles, permissions etc., The Membership API by default uses SQL Express and until Visual Studio 2008, it was available only through the ASP.NET Configuration manager screen (Website – ASP.NET Configuration) or (Project – ASP.NET Configuration) and for every application, one has to manually visit this place to start using the Security and other settings. Upon doing that the default SQL Express database aspnet.mdf is created to store all the user profiles. Starting Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0, the Default Website template includes the Membership API controls as a part of the page i.e. When you create a “File – New – ASP.NET Web Application” or an “ASP.NET MVC Application”, by default the Login/Register controls are enabled in the MasterPage and they are termed under “ApplicationServices” setting in the web.config file with connection string pointed to the SQL Express database. In fact, when you run the default website and click on “Logon” –> “Register”, and enter the details for registration and click “Register”, that is the time the aspnet.mdf file is created with the tables for Users, Roles, UsersInRoles, Profile etc., Now, this uses the default SQL Express database within the App_Data folder. If you want to move your Membership information to some other database such as SQL Server, SQL CE or SQL Azure, you need to manually run the aspnet_regsql command and specify the destination database name. This would create all the Tables, Procedures and Views required to handle the Membership information. Thereafter you can change the connection string for “ApplicationServices” to point to the database where you had run all the scripts. Now, enter “System.Web.Providers” Alpha. This is available as a part of the NuGet package library. Scott Hanselman has a neat post describing the steps required to get it up and running as well as doing the basic changes at http://www.hanselman.com/blog/IntroducingSystemWebProvidersASPNETUniversalProvidersForSessionMembershipRolesAndUserProfileOnSQLCompactAndSQLAzure.aspx Pretty much, it covers what the new System.Web.Providers do. One thing I wanted to clarify is that, the new “System.Web.Providers” add a lot of new settings which are also marked as the defaults, in the web.config. Even now, they use SQL Express as the default database. But, if you change the connection string for “DefaultConnection” under connectionStrings to point to your SQL Server or SQL Azure, Membership API would now be able to create all the tables, procedures and views at the destination specified (i.e. SQL Server or SQL Azure). In my case, I modified the DefaultConneciton to point to my SQL Azure database. Next, I hit F5 to run the application. The default view loads. I clicked on “LogOn” and then “Register” since I knew there are no tables/users as of then. One thing to note is that, I had put “NewDB” as the database name in the connection string that points to SQL Azure. NewDB wasn’t existing and I would assume it would be created before the tables/views/procedures for Membership are created. Once I clicked on the “Register” to register my first username, it took a while and then registered as well as logged in me in. Also, I went to the SQL Azure Management Portal and verified that there exists “NewDB” which has just been created I could also connect to the SQL Azure database “NewDB” from Management Studio and found that the tables now don’t have the aspnet_ prefix. The tables were simply Users, Roles, UsersInRoles, Profiles etc., So, with a few clicks and configuration change, I could actually set up the user base for my application on SQL Azure and even make the SessionState, Roles, Profiles being stored in SQL Azure database. The new System.Web.Proivders also required MARS (MultipleActiveResultSets=true) setting since it uses Entity Framework for the DAL operations. Also, the “Project – ASP.NET Configuration” screen can be used to further create/manage users/roles etc., although the data is stored on the remote database. With that, a long pending request from the community to have the ability to configure and use remote databases for Application users management without having to run the scripts from SQL Express is fulfilled. Cheers !!!

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ASP.NET Routing not working on IIS 7.0

- by Rick Strahl

I ran into a nasty little problem today when deploying an application using ASP.NET 4.0 Routing to my live server. The application and its Routing were working just fine on my dev machine (Windows 7 and IIS 7.5), but when I deployed (Windows 2008 R1 and IIS 7.0) Routing would just not work. Every time I hit a routed url IIS would just throw up a 404 error: This is an IIS error, not an ASP.NET error so this doesn’t actually come from ASP.NET’s routing engine but from IIS’s handling of expressionless URLs. Note that it’s clearly falling through all the way to the StaticFile handler which is the last handler to fire in the typical IIS handler list. In other words IIS is trying to parse the extension less URL and not firing it into ASP.NET but failing. As I mentioned on my local machine this all worked fine and to make sure local and live setups match I re-copied my Web.config, double checked handler mappings in IIS and re-copied the actual application assemblies to the server. It all looked exactly matched. However no workey on the server with IIS 7.0!!! Finally, totally by chance, I remembered the runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests attribute flag on the modules key in web.config and set it to true: <system.webServer> <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true"> <add name="ScriptCompressionModule" type="Westwind.Web.ScriptCompressionModule,Westwind.Web" /> </modules> </system.webServer> And lo and behold, Routing started working on the live server and IIS 7.0! This seems really obvious now of course, but the really tricky thing about this is that on IIS 7.5 this key is not necessary. So on my Windows 7 machine ASP.NET Routing was working just fine without the key set. However on IIS 7.0 on my live server the same missing setting was not working. On IIS 7.0 this key must be present or Routing will not work. Oddly on IIS 7.5 it appears that you can’t even turn off the behavior – setting runtAllManagedModuleForAllRequests="false" had no effect at all and Routing continued to work just fine even with the flag set to false, which is NOT what I would have expected. Kind of disappointing too that Windows Server 2008 (R1) can’t be upgraded to IIS 7.5. It sure seems like that should have been possible since the OS server core changes in R2 are pretty minor. For the future I really hope Microsoft will allow updating IIS versions without tying them explicitly to the OS. It looks like that with the release of IIS Express Microsoft has taken some steps to untie some of those tight OS links from IIS. Let’s hope that’s the case for the future – it sure is nice to run the same IIS version on dev and live boxes, but upgrading live servers is too big a deal to do just because an updated OS release came out. Moral of the story – never assume that your dev setup will work as is on the live setup. It took me forever to figure this out because I assumed that because my web.config on the local machine was fine and working and I copied all relevant web.config data to the server it can’t be the configuration settings. I was looking everywhere but in the .config file forever before getting desperate and remembering the flag when I accidentally checked the intellisense settings in the modules key. Never assume anything. The other moral is: Try to keep your dev machine and server OS’s in sync whenever possible. Maybe it’s time to upgrade to Windows Server 2008 R2 after all. More info on Extensionless URLs in IIS Want to find out more exactly on how extensionless Urls work on IIS 7? The check out How ASP.NET MVC Routing Works and its Impact on the Performance of Static Requests which goes into great detail on the complexities of the process. Thanks to Jeff Graves for pointing me at this article – a great linked reference for this topic!© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in IIS7 Windows

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Microsoft ReportViewer SetParameters continuous refresh issue

- by Ilya Verbitskiy

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/ilich/archive/2013/10/16/microsoft-reportviewer-setparameters-continuous-refresh-issue.aspxI am a big fun of using ASP.NET MVC for building web-applications. It allows us to create simple, robust and testable solutions. However, .NET world is not perfect. There is tons of code written in ASP.NET web-forms. You cannot simply ignore it, even if you want to. Sometimes ASP.NET web-forms controls bring us non-obvious issues. The good example is Microsoft ReportViewer control. I have an example for you. 1: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="_Default" %> 2: <%@ Register Assembly="Microsoft.ReportViewer.WebForms, Version=11.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91" Namespace="Microsoft.Reporting.WebForms" TagPrefix="rsweb" %> 3: 4: <!DOCTYPE html> 5: 6: <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> 7: <head runat="server"> 8: <title>Report Viewer Continiuse Resfresh Issue Example</title> 9: </head> 10: <body> 11: <form id="form1" runat="server"> 12: <div> 13: <asp:ScriptManager runat="server"></asp:ScriptManager> 14: <rsweb:ReportViewer ID="_reportViewer" runat="server" Width="100%" Height="100%"></rsweb:ReportViewer> 15: </div> 16: </form> 17: </body> 18: </html> The back-end code is simple as well. I want to show a report with some parameters to a user. 1: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) 2: { 3: _reportViewer.ProcessingMode = ProcessingMode.Remote; 4: _reportViewer.ShowParameterPrompts = false; 5: 6: var serverReport = _reportViewer.ServerReport; 7: serverReport.ReportServerUrl = new Uri("http://localhost/ReportServer_SQLEXPRESS"); 8: serverReport.ReportPath = "/Reports/TestReport"; 9: 10: var reportParameter1 = new ReportParameter("Parameter1"); 11: reportParameter1.Values.Add("Hello World!"); 12: 13: var reportParameter2 = new ReportParameter("Parameter2"); 14: reportParameter2.Values.Add("10/16/2013"); 15: 16: var reportParameter3 = new ReportParameter("Parameter3"); 17: reportParameter3.Values.Add("10"); 18: 19: serverReport.SetParameters(new[] { reportParameter1, reportParameter2, reportParameter3 }); 20: } I set ShowParametersPrompts to false because I do not want user to refine the search. It looks good until you run the report. The report will refresh itself all the time. The problem caused by ServerReport.SetParameters method in Page_Load. The method cause ReportViewer control to execute the report on the NEXT post back. That is why the page has continuous post-backs. The fix is very simple: do nothing if Page_Load method executed during post-back. 1: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) 2: { 3: if (IsPostBack) 4: { 5: return; 6: } 7: 8: _reportViewer.ProcessingMode = ProcessingMode.Remote; 9: _reportViewer.ShowParameterPrompts = false; 10: 11: var serverReport = _reportViewer.ServerReport; 12: serverReport.ReportServerUrl = new Uri("http://localhost/ReportServer_SQLEXPRESS"); 13: serverReport.ReportPath = "/Reports/TestReport"; 14: 15: var reportParameter1 = new ReportParameter("Parameter1"); 16: reportParameter1.Values.Add("Hello World!"); 17: 18: var reportParameter2 = new ReportParameter("Parameter2"); 19: reportParameter2.Values.Add("10/16/2013"); 20: 21: var reportParameter3 = new ReportParameter("Parameter3"); 22: reportParameter3.Values.Add("10"); 23: 24: serverReport.SetParameters(new[] { reportParameter1, reportParameter2, reportParameter3 }); 25: } You can download sample code from GitHub - https://github.com/ilich/Examples/tree/master/ReportViewerContinuousRefresh

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

- by Harish Ranganathan

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

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Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 3.5: Node.js relay

- by Elton Stoneman

This is an extension to Part 3 in the IPASBR series, see also: Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 1: Exposing the on-premise service Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 2: Anonymous full-trust .NET consumer Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 3: Anonymous partial-trust consumer In Part 3 I said “there isn't actually a .NET requirement here”, and this post just follows up on that statement. In Part 3 we had an ASP.NET MVC Website making a REST call to an Azure Service Bus service; to show that the REST stuff is really interoperable, in this version we use Node.js to make the secure service call. The code is on GitHub here: IPASBR Part 3.5. The sample code is simpler than Part 3 - rather than code up a UI in Node.js, the sample just relays the REST service call out to Azure. The steps are the same as Part 3: REST call to ACS with the service identity credentials, which returns an SWT; REST call to Azure Service Bus Relay, presenting the SWT; request gets relayed to the on-premise service. In Node.js the authentication step looks like this: var options = { host: acs.namespace() + '-sb.accesscontrol.windows.net', path: '/WRAPv0.9/', method: 'POST' }; var values = { wrap_name: acs.issuerName(), wrap_password: acs.issuerSecret(), wrap_scope: 'http://' + acs.namespace() + '.servicebus.windows.net/' }; var req = https.request(options, function (res) { console.log("statusCode: ", res.statusCode); console.log("headers: ", res.headers); res.on('data', function (d) { var token = qs.parse(d.toString('utf8')); callback(token.wrap_access_token); }); }); req.write(qs.stringify(values)); req.end(); Once we have the token, we can wrap it up into an Authorization header and pass it to the Service Bus call: token = 'WRAP access_token=\"' + swt + '\"'; //... var reqHeaders = { Authorization: token }; var options = { host: acs.namespace() + '.servicebus.windows.net', path: '/rest/reverse?string=' + requestUrl.query.string, headers: reqHeaders }; var req = https.request(options, function (res) { console.log("statusCode: ", res.statusCode); console.log("headers: ", res.headers); response.writeHead(res.statusCode, res.headers); res.on('data', function (d) { var reversed = d.toString('utf8') console.log('svc returned: ' + d.toString('utf8')); response.end(reversed); }); }); req.end(); Running the sample Usual routine to add your own Azure details into Solution Items\AzureConnectionDetails.xml and “Run Custom Tool” on the .tt files. Build and you should be able to navigate to the on-premise service at http://localhost/Sixeyed.Ipasbr.Services/FormatService.svc/rest/reverse?string=abc123 and get a string response, going to the service direct. Install Node.js (v0.8.14 at time of writing), run FormatServiceRelay.cmd, navigate to http://localhost:8013/reverse?string=abc123, and you should get exactly the same response but through Node.js, via Azure Service Bus Relay to your on-premise service. The console logs the WRAP token returned from ACS and the response from Azure Service Bus Relay which it forwards:

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Employee Info Starter Kit: Project Mission

- by Mohammad Ashraful Alam

Employee Info Starter Kit is an open source ASP.NET project template that is intended to address different types of real world challenges faced by web application developers when performing common CRUD operations. Using a single database table ‘Employee’, it illustrates how to utilize Microsoft ASP.NET 4.0, Entity Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 effectively in that context. Employee Info Starter Kit is highly influenced by the concept ‘Pareto Principle’ or 80-20 rule. where it is targeted to enable a web developer to gain 80% productivity with 20% of effort with respect to learning curve and production. User Stories The user end functionalities of this starter kit are pretty simple and straight forward that are focused in to perform CRUD operation on employee records as described below. Creating a new employee record Read existing employee record Update an existing employee record Delete existing employee records Key Technology Areas ASP.NET 4.0 Entity Framework 4.0 T-4 Template Visual Studio 2010 Architectural Objective There is no universal architecture which can be considered as the best for all sorts of applications around the world. Based on requirements, constraints, environment, application architecture can differ from one to another. Trade-off factors are one of the important considerations while deciding a particular architectural solution. Employee Info Starter Kit is highly influenced by the concept ‘Pareto Principle’ or 80-20 rule, where it is targeted to enable a web developer to gain 80% productivity with 20% of effort with respect to learning curve and production. “Productivity” as the architectural objective typically also includes other trade-off factors as well as, such as testability, flexibility, performance etc. Fortunately Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 includes lots of great features that have been implemented cleverly in this project to reduce these trade-off factors in the minimum level. Why Employee Info Starter Kit is Not a Framework? Application frameworks are really great for productivity, some of which are really unavoidable in this modern age. However relying too many frameworks may overkill a project, as frameworks are typically designed to serve wide range of different usage and are less customizable or editable. On the other hand having implementation patterns can be useful for developers, as it enables them to adjust application on demand. Employee Info Starter Kit provides hundreds of “connected” snippets and implementation patterns to demonstrate problem solutions in actual production environment. It also includes Visual Studio T-4 templates that generate thousands lines of data access and business logic layer repetitive codes in literally few seconds on the fly, which are fully mock testable due to language support for partial methods and latest support for mock testing in Entity Framework. Why Employee Info Starter Kit is Different than Other Open-source Web Applications? Software development is one of the rapid growing industries around the globe, where the technology is being updated very frequently to adapt greater challenges over time. There are literally thousands of community web sites, blogs and forums that are dedicated to provide support to adapt new technologies. While some are really great to enable learning new technologies quickly, in most cases they are either too “simple and brief” to be used in real world scenarios or too “complex and detailed” which are typically focused to achieve a product goal (such as CMS, e-Commerce etc) from "end user" perspective and have a long duration learning curve with respect to the corresponding technology. Employee Info Starter Kit, as a web project, is basically "developer" oriented which actually considers a hybrid approach as “simple and detailed”, where a simple domain has been considered to intentionally illustrate most of the architectural and implementation challenges faced by web application developers so that anyone can dive into deep into the corresponding new technology or concept quickly. Roadmap Since its first release by 2008 in MSDN Code Gallery, Employee Info Starter Kit gained a huge popularity in ASP.NET community and had 1, 50,000+ downloads afterwards. Being encouraged with this great response, we have a strong commitment for the community to provide support for it with respect to latest technologies continuously. Currently hosted in Codeplex, this community driven project is planned to have a wide range of individual editions, each of which will be focused on a selected application architecture, framework or platform, such as ASP.NET Webform, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, ASP.NET MVC, jQuery Ajax (RIA), Silverlight (RIA), Azure Service Platform (Cloud), Visual Studio Automated Test etc. See here for full list of current and future editions.

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St. Louis ALT.NET

- by Brian Schroer

I’m a huge fan of the St. Louis .NET User Group and a regular attendee of their meetings, but always wished there was a local group that discussed more advanced .NET topics. (That’s not a criticism of the group - I appreciate that they want to server developers with a broad range of skill levels). That’s why I was thrilled when Nicholas Cloud started a St. Louis ALT.NET group in 2010. Here’s the “about us” statement from the group’s web site: The ALT.NET community is a loosely coupled, highly cohesive group of like-minded individuals who believe that the best developers do not align themselves with platforms and languages, but with principles and ideas. In 2007, David Laribee created the term "ALT.NET" to explain this "alternative" view of the Microsoft development universe--a view that challenged the "Microsoft-only" approach to software development. He distilled his thoughts into four key developer characteristics which form the basis of the ALT.NET philosophy: You're the type of developer who uses what works while keeping an eye out for a better way. You reach outside the mainstream to adopt the best of any community: Open Source, Agile, Java, Ruby, etc. You're not content with the status quo. Things can always be better expressed, more elegant and simple, more mutable, higher quality, etc. You know tools are great, but they only take you so far. It's the principles and knowledge that really matter. The best tools are those that embed the knowledge and encourage the principles (e.g. Resharper.) The St. Louis ALT.NET meetup group is a place where .NET developers can learn, share, and critique approaches to software development on the .NET stack. We cater to the highest common denominator, not the lowest, and want to help all St. Louis .NET developers achieve a superior level of software craftsmanship. I don’t see a lot of ALT.NET talk in blogs these days. The movement was harmed early on by the negative attitudes of some of its early leaders, including jerk moves like the Entity Framework “vote of no confidence”, but I do see occasional mentions of local groups like the St. Louis one. I think ALT.NET has been successful at bringing some of its ideas into the .NET world, including heavily influencing ASP.NET MVC and raising the general level of software craftsmanship for developers working on the Microsoft stack. The ideas and ideals live on, they’re just not branded as “this is ALT.NET!” In the past 18 months, St. Louis ALT.NET meetups have discussed topics like: NHibernate F# and other functional languages AOP CoffeeScript “How Ruby Is Making Me a Stronger C# Developer” Using rake for builds CQRS .NET dynamic programming micro web frameworks – Nancy & Jessica Git ALT.NET doesn’t mean (to me, anyway) “alternatives to .NET”, but “alternatives for .NET”. We look at how things are done in Ruby and other languages/platforms, but always with the idea “What can I learn from this to take back to my “day job” with .NET?”. Meetings are held at 7PM on the fourth Wednesday of each month at the offices of Professional Employment Group. PEG is located at 999 Executive Parkway (Suite 100 – lower level) in Creve Coeur (South of Olive off of Mason Road - Here's a map). Food is not supplied (sorry if you’re a big fan of the Papa John’s Crust-Lovers’ Pizza that’s a staple of user group meetings), but attendees are encouraged to come early and bring/share beer, so that’s cool. Thanks to Nick for organizing, and to Professional Employment Group for lending their offices. Please visit the meetup site for more information.

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Rules and advice for logging?

- by Nick Rosencrantz

In my organization we've put together some rules / guildelines about logging that I would like to know if you can add to or comment. We use Java but you may comment in general about loggin - rules and advice Use the correct logging level ERROR: Something has gone very wrong and need fixing immediately WARNING: The process can continue without fixing. The application should tolerate this level but the warning should always get investigated. INFO: Information that an important process is finished DEBUG. Is only used during development Make sure that you know what you're logging. Avoid that the logging influences the behavior of the application The function of the logging should be to write messages in the log. Log messages should be descriptive, clear, short and concise. There is not much use of a nonsense message when troubleshooting. Put the right properties in log4j Put in that the right method and class is written automatically. Example: Datedfile -web log4j.rootLogger=ERROR, DATEDFILE log4j.logger.org.springframework=INFO log4j.logger.waffle=ERROR log4j.logger.se.prv=INFO log4j.logger.se.prv.common.mvc=INFO log4j.logger.se.prv.omklassning=DEBUG log4j.appender.DATEDFILE=biz.minaret.log4j.DatedFileAppender log4j.appender.DATEDFILE.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout log4j.appender.DATEDFILE.layout.ConversionPattern=%d{HH:mm:ss,SSS} %-5p [%C{1}.%M] - %m%n log4j.appender.DATEDFILE.Prefix=omklassning. log4j.appender.DATEDFILE.Suffix=.log log4j.appender.DATEDFILE.Directory=//localhost/WebSphereLog/omklassning/ Log value. Please log values from the application. Log prefix. State which part of the application it is that the logging is written from, preferably with something for the project agreed prefix e.g. PANDORA_DB The amount of text. Be careful so that there is not too much logging text. It can influence the performance of the app. Loggning format: -There are several variants and methods to use with log4j but we would like a uniform use of the following format, when we log at exceptions: logger.error("PANDORA_DB2: Fel vid hämtning av frist i TP210_RAPPORTFRIST", e); In the example above it is assumed that we have set log4j properties so that it automatically write the class and the method. Always use logger and not the following: System.out.println(), System.err.println(), e.printStackTrace() If the web app uses our framework you can get very detailed error information from EJB, if using try-catch in the handler and logging according to the model above: In our project we use this conversion pattern with which method and class names are written out automatically . Here we use two different pattents for console and for datedfileappender: log4j.appender.CONSOLE.layout.ConversionPattern=%d{ABSOLUTE} %5p %c{1}:%L - %m%n log4j.appender.DATEDFILE.layout.ConversionPattern=%d [%t] %-5p %c - %m%n In both the examples above method and class wioll be written out. In the console row number will also be written our. toString() Please have a toString() for every object. EX: @Override public String toString() { StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(); sb.append(" DwfInformation [ "); sb.append("cc: ").append(cc); sb.append("pn: ").append(pn); sb.append("kc: ").append(kc); sb.append("numberOfPages: ").append(numberOfPages); sb.append("publicationDate: ").append(publicationDate); sb.append("version: ").append(version); sb.append(" ]"); return sb.toString(); } instead of special method which make these outputs public void printAll() { logger.info("inbet: " + getInbetInput()); logger.info("betdat: " + betdat); logger.info("betid: " + betid); logger.info("send: " + send); logger.info("appr: " + appr); logger.info("rereg: " + rereg); logger.info("NY: " + ny); logger.info("CNT: " + cnt); } So is there anything you can add, comment or find questionable with these ways of using the logging? Feel free to answer or comment even if it is not related to Java, Java and log4j is just an implementation of how this is reasoned.

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St. Louis Day of .NET 2010

- by Scott Spradlin

Register now at http://www.stlouisdayofdotnet.com/registration.aspx The Date This year's conference will be held on Friday and Saturday, August 20-21, 2010, at the Ameristar Conference Center in St. Charles, Missouri. Sessions will begin at 8:00 a.m. and run through 4:30 p.m. on both days. Registration and sign-in will open at 7:00 a.m. on Friday morning, and will run throughout the event. The Venue Based on the almost unanimous feedback from last year's event, we are very excited to bring our conference back to the Ameristar Conference Center. The Ameristar has worked with us to offer a great rate on their large suites, should you be traveling from out-of-town -- or are just interested in a night away from home. Attendees can book a suite at a discounted rate of only $139/night, which is a substantial discount from their standard rates. We encourage you take the opportunity to hang around, spend the night, and enjoy the social events and networking opportunities that we have planned. If you are interested in taking advantage of the discounted hotel rate, you can reserve your room online at Ameristar's Online Registration Site, using the special offer code: GDOTH10. You can also call the hotel's reservation number at (636) 940-4301 and let them know you are attending the St. Louis Day of .NET 2010 to receive your discounted rates. The Content All attendees will have access to over 80 technical sessions by many great regional and national technology experts, covering a wide range of .NET development topics. In addition to refreshments throughout the event, all attendees will be provided with breakfast and lunch on both days of the conference. You will find sessions on many of the most current .NET development topics including: Visual Studio .NET 2010 Silverlight 4.0 Windows 7 Series Phone Development ASP.NET MVC DotNetNuke SharePoint 2010 Architecture Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) And much, much more... This year's event will also include many informal "Open Space" sessions where all attendees with similar interests can discuss current trends or issues they are facing in today's real-world development environments. Finally, all attendees are invited to a social networking event at the HOME Nightclub at the Ameristar, which will be held on the Friday evening of the conference. The Cost The cost of this year's conference is $200 per attendee. However, for a limited time we are offering a $75 discount for early registrants. To take advantage of this discounted rate, you must register on our site prior to July 10, 2010. We accept Visa, MasterCard, and American Express. In addition, this year we allow for a single user of our site to easily register multiple attendees at once. To register, please visit the official St. Louis Day of .NET site at www.stldodn.com, and click on the "Registration" tab. For More Information And for the most up-to-the-minute information on the event, please follow us online: Twitter: @stldodn Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/stldodn We strongly encourage you to share this email, as well as the attached flier, with your peers and colleagues, and anyone else you think might be interested in this exciting event. If you have any questions regarding registration, you can email us at [email protected] and we will be happy to address them. Sponsors We are extremely thankful to the many great sponsors who are partnering with us this year to help make the St. Louis Day of .NET 2010 a huge success. (There are still sponsorship opportunities available. For complete information, visit the sponsor page on the web site.)

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Is there a good [and modern] reason to not have static HTML pages with AJAX content , rather than generate pages?

- by user1725

Assumptions: We don't care about IE6, and Noscript users. Lets pretend we have the following design concept: All your pages are HTML/CSS that create the ascetics, layout, colours, general design related things. Lets pretend this basic code below is that: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html> <head> <link href="/example.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/> <script src="example.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <head> <body> <div class="left"> </div> <div class="mid"> </div> <div class="right"> </div> </body> </html> Which in theory should produce, with the right CSS, three vertical columns on the web page. Now, here's the root of the question, what are the serious advantages and/or disadvantages of loading the content of these columns (lets assume they are all indeed dynamic content, not static) via AJAX requests, or have the content pre-set with a scripting language? So for instance, we would have, in the AJAX example, lets asume jquery is used on-load: //Multiple http requests $("body > div.left").load("./script.php?content=news"); $("body > div.right").load("./script.php?content=blogs"); $("body > div.mid").load("./script.php?content=links"); OR--- //Single http request $.ajax({ url: './script.php?content=news|blogs|links', method: 'json', type: 'text', success: function (data) { $("body > div.left").html(data.news); $("body > div.right").html(data.blogs); $("body > div.mid").html(data.links); } }) Verses doing this: <body> <div class="left"> <?php echo function_returning_news(); ?> </div> <div class="mid"> <?php echo function_returning_blogs(); ?> </div> <div class="right"> <?php echo function_returning_links(); ?> </div> </body> I'm personally thinking right now that doing static HTML pages is a better method, my reasoning is: I've separated my data, logic, and presentation (ie, "MVC") code. I can make changes to one without others. Browser caches mean I'm just getting server load mostly for the content, not the presentation wrapped around it. I could turn my "script.php" into a more robust API for the website. But I'm not certain or clear that these are legitimately good reasons, and I'm not confidently aware of other issues that could happen, so I would like to know the pros-and-cons, so to speak.

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The WaitForAll Roadshow

- by adweigert

OK, so I took for granted some imaginative uses of WaitForAll but lacking that, here is how I am using. First, I have a nice little class called Parallel that allows me to spin together a list of tasks (actions) and then use WaitForAll, so here it is, WaitForAll's 15 minutes of fame ... First Parallel that allows me to spin together several Action delegates to execute, well in parallel. public static class Parallel { public static ParallelQuery Task(Action action) { return new Action[] { action }.AsParallel(); } public static ParallelQuery> Task(Action action) { return new Action[] { action }.AsParallel(); } public static ParallelQuery Task(this ParallelQuery actions, Action action) { var list = new List(actions); list.Add(action); return list.AsParallel(); } public static ParallelQuery> Task(this ParallelQuery> actions, Action action) { var list = new List>(actions); list.Add(action); return list.AsParallel(); } } Next, this is an example usage from an app I'm working on that just is rendering some basic computer information via WMI and performance counters. The WMI calls can be expensive given the distance and link speed of some of the computers it will be trying to communicate with. This is the actual MVC action from my controller to return the data for an individual computer. public PartialViewResult Detail(string computerName) { var computer = this.Computers.Get(computerName); var perf = Factory.GetInstance(); var detail = new ComputerDetailViewModel() { Computer = computer }; try { var work = Parallel .Task(delegate { // Win32_ComputerSystem var key = computer.Name + "_Win32_ComputerSystem"; var system = this.Cache.Get(key); if (system == null) { using (var impersonation = computer.ImpersonateElevatedIdentity()) { system = computer.GetWmiContext().GetInstances().Single(); } this.Cache.Set(key, system); } detail.TotalMemory = system.TotalPhysicalMemory; detail.Manufacturer = system.Manufacturer; detail.Model = system.Model; detail.NumberOfProcessors = system.NumberOfProcessors; }) .Task(delegate { // Win32_OperatingSystem var key = computer.Name + "_Win32_OperatingSystem"; var os = this.Cache.Get(key); if (os == null) { using (var impersonation = computer.ImpersonateElevatedIdentity()) { os = computer.GetWmiContext().GetInstances().Single(); } this.Cache.Set(key, os); } detail.OperatingSystem = os.Caption; detail.OSVersion = os.Version; }) // Performance Counters .Task(delegate { using (var impersonation = computer.ImpersonateElevatedIdentity()) { detail.AvailableBytes = perf.GetSample(computer, "Memory", "Available Bytes"); } }) .Task(delegate { using (var impersonation = computer.ImpersonateElevatedIdentity()) { detail.TotalProcessorUtilization = perf.GetValue(computer, "Processor", "% Processor Time", "_Total"); } }).WithExecutionMode(ParallelExecutionMode.ForceParallelism); if (!work.WaitForAll(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(15), task => task())) { return PartialView("Timeout"); } } catch (Exception ex) { this.LogException(ex); return PartialView("Error.ascx"); } return PartialView(detail); }

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RC of Entity Framework 4.1 (which includes EF Code First)

- by ScottGu

Last week the data team shipped the Release Candidate of Entity Framework 4.1. You can learn more about it and download it here. EF 4.1 includes the new “EF Code First” option that I’ve blogged about several times in the past. EF Code First provides a really elegant and clean way to work with data, and enables you to do so without requiring a designer or XML mapping file. Below are links to some tutorials I’ve written in the past about it: Code First Development with Entity Framework 4.x EF Code First: Custom Database Schema Mapping Using EF Code First with an Existing Database The above tutorials were written against the CTP4 release of EF Code First (and so some APIs might be a little different) – but the concepts and scenarios outlined in them are the same as with the RC. Go Live License Last week’s EF 4.1 RC ships with a “go live” license that enables you to use it in production environments. The final release of EF 4.1 will ship within the next 4 weeks and will be 100% API compatible with the RC release. Improvements with the RC The RC includes several improvements and enhancements. The EF team has a good blog post summarizing the RC changes. Scott Hanselman also has a nice video interview with the data team that talks more about the release. One of my favorite improvements introduced with last week’s RC is its support for medium trust security. This enables you to use EF 4.1 (and code-first) within low-cost ASP.NET shared hosting web environments – without requiring a hoster to install anything to use it. EF 4.1 also now supports validation with not only code-first scenarios, but also model-first and database-first workflows. Upgrading from previous releases The RC does include a few API tweaks and changes from the prior CTP builds. Read the release notes that come with the release to get a more detailed listing of the changes. John Papa also has an excellent Upgrading to EF 4.1 RC blog post that describes the steps he took when upgrading a large project he wrote with the previous CTP5 release. The work to upgrade is pretty straight forward and easy – use his write-up as a guide on how to quickly update projects of your own. NuGet Package Rename One of the changes that the data team made between the CTP5 and RC releases was to rename the NuGet package name from “EFCodeFirst” to “EntityFramework”. They decided to make this change since the EF 4.1 release now includes several additions above and beyond just code first. If you already have installed the “EFCodeFirst” NuGet package, you’ll want to uninstall it and then install the new “EntityFramework” NuGet package. John Papa’s blog post details the exact steps on how to do this (it only takes ~20 seconds to do this). More EF Tutorials Julie Lerman has created some nice whitepapers and tutorials for MSDN that show using the new EF4 and EF 4.1 feature set. Click here to find links to read and watch them. Summary I’m really excited about the EF 4.1 release that will be shipping next month. It significantly improves the Entity Framework, and makes it even easier and cleaner to work with data inside of .NET. You can take advantage of it within all ASP.NET projects (including both Web Forms and MVC), within client projects using Windows Forms and WPF, and within other project types like WCF, Console and Services. You can use NuGet to easily install it within all of them. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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Announcing the Winnipeg VS.NET 2012 Community Launch Event!

- by D'Arcy Lussier

Back in May 2010 the local Winnipeg technical community got together and put on a launch event for VS.NET 2010. That event was such a good time that we’re doing it again this year for the VS.NET 2012 launch! On December 6th, the Winnipeg .NET User Group is hosting a full day VS.NET 2012 Community Launch Event at the Imax theatre in Portage Place! We have 4 sessions planned covering dev tools, ALM/TFS, web development, and cloud development, presented by Dylan Smith, Tyler Doerksen, and myself. You can get all the details and register on our Eventbrite site: http://wpgvsnet2012launch.eventbrite.ca/ I’ve included the details below as well for convenience: Winnipeg VS.NET 2012 Community Launch Event Join us for a full day of sessions highlighting the new features and capabilities of Visual Studio .NET 2012 and the .NET 4.5 Framework! Hosted by the Winnipeg .NET User Group, this community event is FREE thanks to the generous support from our event sponsors: Imaginet Online Business Systems Prairie Developer Conference Event Details When: Thursday, Decemer 6th from 8:00 AM - 4:00 PM Where: IMAX Theatre, Portage Place Cost: *FREE!* Agenda 8:00 - 9:00 Continental Breakfast and Registration 9:00 - 9:15 Welcome 9:15 - 10:30 End-To-End Application Lifecycle Management with TFS 2012 10:30 - 10:45 Break 10:45 - 12:00 Improving Developer Productivity with Visual Studio 2012 12:00 - 1:00 Lunch Break (Lunch Not Provided) 1:00 - 2:15 Web Development in Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 2:15 - 2:30 Break 2:30 - 3:45 Microsoft Cloud Development with Azure and Visual Studio 2012 3:45 - 4:00 Prizes and Thanks Session Abstracts End-To-End Application Lifecycle Management with TFS 2012 Dylan Smith, Imaginet In this session we'll walk through the application development lifecycle from end-to-end and see how some of the new capabilities in TFS 2012 help streamline the software delivery process. There are some exciting new capabilities around Agile Project Management, Gathering Feedback, Code Reviews, Unit Testing, Version Control, Storyboarding, etc. During this session we’ll follow a fictional software development team through the process of planning, developing, testing, and deployment focusing on where the new functionality in VS/TFS 2012 fits in to make teams more effective. Improving Developer Productivity with Visual Studio 2012 Dylan Smith, Imaginet Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 enables developers to take full advantage of the capability of Windows using the skills and technologies developers already know and love to deliver exceptional and compelling apps. Whether working individually or in a small, medium or large development team Visual Studio 2012 sets a new standard for development tools, helping teams deliver superior results for their customers that help set them apart from their competitors. In this session we’ll walk through new features in Visual Studio 2012 specifically focusing on how these improve Developer Productivity. Web Development in Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 D’Arcy Lussier, Online Business Systems It’s an exciting time to be a web developer in the Microsoft ecosystem! The launch of Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 brings new tooling and features, and the ASP.NET team is continually releasing updates for MVC, SignalR, Web API, and other platform features. In this session we’ll take a tour of the new features and technologies available for Microsoft web developers here in 2012! Microsoft Cloud Development with Azure and Visual Studio 2012 Tyler Doerksen, Imaginet Microsoft’s public cloud platform is nearing its third year of public availability, supporting web site/service hosting, storage, relational databases, virtual machines, virtual networks and much more. Windows Azure provides both power and flexibility. But to capture this power you need to have the right tools! This session will demonstrate the primary ways you can harness Windows Azure with the .NET platform. We’ll explain cloud service development, packaging, deployment, testing and show how Visual Studio 2012 with the Windows Azure SDK and other Microsoft tools can be used to develop for and manage Windows Azure.Harness the power of the cloud from the comfort of Visual Studio 2012!

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WebCenter Customer Spotlight: Ancestry.com

- by me

Author: Peter Reiser - Social Business Evangelist, Oracle WebCenter Solution SummaryAncestry.com Inc is the largest for-profit genealogy company in the world and it operates a network of genealogical and historical record websites focused on the U.S. and nine foreign countries, develops and markets genealogical software, and offers a wide array of genealogical related services. As of June 2012, the company provided access to more than 10 billion records, 38 million family trees, and 2 million paying subscribers. Their main business challenges were to improve time to market and agility to respond quickly to fast changing Internet waves while integrating with their existing content (4 PetaByte) and legacy systems. Ancestry.com implemented Oracle WebCenter Sites as their Web Experience Management System for their landing pages and marketing micro sites, added dynamic sections to their existing websites and integrated the existing content and legacy systems through web services. The Ancestry.com landing pages and marketing sites are now managed by the business team without any involvement of engineering resources. Managed content can quickly be added to existing pages without having to refactor the whole page and existing content (4 PetaBytes) is now served trough Oracle WebCenter Sites without having to migrate from existing systems. Company OverviewAncestry.com Inc is a publicly traded Internet company (NASDAQ: ACOM) based in Provo, Utah, USA. The largest for-profit genealogy company in the world, it operates a network of genealogical and historical record websites focused on the U.S. and nine foreign countries, develops and markets genealogical software, and offers a wide array of genealogical related services. As of June 2012, the company provided access to more than 10 billion records, 38 million family trees, and 2 million paying subscribers. Business ChallengesAncestry main business challenge was to respond quickly to fast changing Internet waves. Product marketing could not change Web site content without going through development. They needed dedicated developers just to support their marketing efforts. Technical Requirements Support current systems and environments - ASP.NET, MVC.NET, Java, JSP, PHP Scalable and manageable for a world wide network Marketing Requirements Easy to enter content – Without having a degree in HTML Scheduling of content – When is content visible to users Product Requirements Easy to manage content – See when content is out-of-date Rotation of content – Producing new content as old content expires Solution DeployedAncestry implemented Oracle WebCenter Sites as their Web Experience Management System to manage their landing pages and marketing micro sites. This sites are fully managed by their business team without involvement of any engineering resources. The integration with their existing Web sites is done through Spot Management which allows the ability to add dynamic content to certain sections of a web page. The dynamic content is managed by Oracle WebCenter Sites. The integration with the existing content (4 PetaBytes!) is done trough a custom content provider interface which allows to mix existing content with content from Oracle WebCenter Sites. Business ResultsAncestry.com has achieved following impressive business results: Landing pages and marketing sites are now managed by the business team without any involvement of engineering resources Managed content can quickly be added to existing pages without having to refactor the whole page Provide access to existing content (4 PetaBytes) without having to migrate from existing systems Additional Information Ancestry Webcast Oracle WebCenter Sites

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SQL Authority News – FalafelCON 2014: 2 days with the Best Developers in the World

- by Pinal Dave

I love presenting at various forums on various technologies. I am extremely excited that I got invited to speak at Falafel Conference 2014 in San Francisco. I will present two technology sessions on SQL Server. If you are into web development or if you just want to attend a conference with the best of the industry speakers, this may be the right conference for you. What set apart this conference from other conference is technology presented as well as speakers. Usually one has to attend very expensive and high scale event when they have to hear good speakers. At this conference, you will find quite a many industry legends are available to present on the bleeding edge technology. Here are few of the reasons why I believe you should attend this conference: Choose from four tracks covering Web, Mobile development and testing, Sitefinity, and Automated Testing, or attend sessions from all four! Learn from the best developers and testers in the business in an intimate setting. Surround yourself with your peers and the opportunity to network Learn about the latest platforms and technologies including Kendo UI, AngularJS, ASP.NET MVC, WebAPI, and more! Here are the details for the sessions which I am going to present at Falafel Conference. Secrets of SQL Server: Database Worst Practices Abstract: Chances are you have heard, or even uttered, this expression. This demo-oriented session will show many examples where database professionals were dumbfounded by their own mistakes, and could even bring back memories of your own early DBA days. The goal of this session is to expose the small details that can be dangerous to the production environment and SQL Server as a whole, as well as talk about worst practices and how to avoid them. Shedding light on some of these perils and the tricks to avoid them may even save your current job. After attending this session, Developers will only need 60 seconds to improve performance of their database server in their SharePoint implementation. We will have a quiz during the session to keep the conversation alive. Developers will walk out with scripts and knowledge that can be applied to their servers, immediately post the session. Additionally, all attendees of the session will have access to learning material presented in the session. The Unsung Hero Abstract: Slow Running Queries are the most common problem that developers face while working with SQL Server. While it is easy to blame the SQL Server for unsatisfactory performance, however the issue often persists with the way queries have been written, and how Indexes has been set up. The session will focus on the ways of identifying problems that slow down SQL Server, and Indexing tricks to fix them. Developers will walk out with scripts and knowledge that can be applied to their servers, immediately post the session. Register Now! I have learned from the Falafel Team that they are running out of tickets and soon they will close the registration. For next 10 days the price for the registration is only USD 149. Trust me, you can’t get such a world class training and networking opportunity at such a low price. Click to Register Here! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL

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Stepping outside Visual Studio IDE [Part 2 of 2] with Mono 2.6.4

- by mbcrump

Continuing part 2 of my Stepping outside the Visual Studio IDE, is the open-source Mono Project. Mono is a software platform designed to allow developers to easily create cross platform applications. Sponsored by Novell (http://www.novell.com/), Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET Framework based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Runtime. A growing family of solutions and an active and enthusiastic contributing community is helping position Mono to become the leading choice for development of Linux applications. So, to clarify. You can use Mono to develop .NET applications that will run on Linux, Windows or Mac. It’s basically a IDE that has roots in Linux. Let’s first look at the compatibility: Compatibility If you already have an application written in .Net, you can scan your application with the Mono Migration Analyzer (MoMA) to determine if your application uses anything not supported by Mono. The current release version of Mono is 2.6. (Released December 2009) The easiest way to describe what Mono currently supports is: Everything in .NET 3.5 except WPF and WF, limited WCF. Here is a slightly more detailed view, by .NET framework version: Implemented C# 3.0 System.Core LINQ ASP.Net 3.5 ASP.Net MVC C# 2.0 (generics) Core Libraries 2.0: mscorlib, System, System.Xml ASP.Net 2.0 - except WebParts ADO.Net 2.0 Winforms/System.Drawing 2.0 - does not support right-to-left C# 1.0 Core Libraries 1.1: mscorlib, System, System.Xml ASP.Net 1.1 ADO.Net 1.1 Winforms/System.Drawing 1.1 Partially Implemented LINQ to SQL - Mostly done, but a few features missing WCF - silverlight 2.0 subset completed Not Implemented WPF - no plans to implement WF - Will implement WF 4 instead on future versions of Mono. System.Management - does not map to Linux System.EnterpriseServices - deprecated Links to documentation. The Official Mono FAQ’s Links to binaries. Mono IDE Latest Version is 2.6.4 That's it, nothing more is required except to compile and run .net code in Linux. Installation After landing on the mono project home page, you can select which platform you want to download. I typically pick the Virtual PC image since I spend all of my day using Windows 7. Go ahead and pick whatever version is best for you. The Virtual PC image comes with Suse Linux. Once the image is launch, you will see the following: I’m not going to go through each option but its best to start with “Start Here” icon. It will provide you with information on new projects or existing VS projects. After you get Mono installed, it's probably a good idea to run a quick Hello World program to make sure everything is setup properly. This allows you to know that your Mono is working before you try writing or running a more complex application. To write a "Hello World" program follow these steps: Start Mono Development Environment. Create a new Project: File->New->Solution Select "Console Project" in the category list. Enter a project name into the Project name field, for example, "HW Project". Click "Forward" Click “Packaging” then OK. You should have a screen very simular to a VS Console App. Click the "Run" button in the toolbar (Ctrl-F5). Look in the Application Output and you should have the “Hello World!” Your screen should look like the screen below. That should do it for a simple console app in mono. To test out an ASP.NET application, simply copy your code to a new directory in /srv/www/htdocs, then visit the following URL: http://localhost/directoryname/page.aspx where directoryname is the directory where you deployed your application and page.aspx is the initial page for your software. Databases You can continue to use SQL server database or use MySQL, Postgress, Sybase, Oracle, IBM’s DB2 or SQLite db. Conclusion I hope this brief look at the Mono IDE helps someone get acquainted with development outside of VS. As always, I welcome any suggestions or comments.

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Doubts about several best practices for rest api + service layer

- by TheBeefMightBeTough

I'm going to be starting a project soon that exposes a restful api for business intelligence. It may not be limited to a restful api, so I plan to delegate requests to a service layer that then coordinates multiple domain objects (each of which have business logic local to the object). The api will likely have many calls as it is a long-term project. While thinking about the design, I recalled a few best practices. 1) Use command objects at the controller layer (I'm using Spring MVC). 2) Use DTOs at the service layer. 3) Validate in both the controller and service layer, though for different reasons. I have my doubts about these recommendations. 1) Using command objects adds a lot of extra single-purpose classes (potentially one per request). What exactly is the benefit? Annotation based validation can be done using this approach, sure. What if I have two requests that take the same parameters, but have different validation requirements? I would have to have two different classes with exactly the same members but different annotations? Bleh. 2) I have heard that using DTOs is preferable to parameters because it makes for more maintainable code down the road (say, e.g., requirements change and the service parameters need to be altered). I don't quite understand this. Shouldn't an api be more-or-less set in stone? I would understand that in the early phases of a project (or, especially, an entire company) the domain itself will not be well understood, and thus core domain objects may change along with the apis that manipulate these objects. At this point however the number of api methods should be small and their dependents few, so changes to the methods could easily be tolerated from a maintainability standpoint. In a large api with many methods and a substantial domain model, I would think having a DTO for potentially each domain object would become unwieldy. Am I misunderstanding something here? 3) I see validation in the controller and service layer as redundant in most cases. Why would I validate that parameters are not null and are in general well formed in the controller if the service is going to do exactly the same (and more). Couldn't I just do all the validation in the service and throw a runtime exception with a list of bad parameters then catch that in the controller to make the error messages more presentable? Better yet, couldn't I just make the error messages user-friendly in the service and let the exception trickle up to a global handler (ControllerAdvice in spring, for example)? Is there something wrong with either of these approaches? (I do see a use case for controller validation if the input does not map one-to-one with the service input, but since the controllers are for a rest api and not forms, the api parameters will probably map directly to service parameters.) I do also have a question about unchecked vs checked exceptions. Namely, I'm not really sure why I'd ever want to use a checked exception. Every time I have seen them used they just get wrapped into general exceptions (DomainException, SystemException, ApplicationException, w/e) to reduce the signature length of methods, or devs catch Exception rather than dealing with the App1Exception, App2Exception, Sys1Exception, Sys2Exception. I don't see how either of these practices is very useful. Why not just use unchecked exceptions always and catch the ones you actually do care about? You could just document what unchecked exceptions the method throws.

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