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Accessing controls of .aspx file in .aspx.cs without any declaration.!!??

I am able to access the controls of ".aspx" file in ".aspx.cs" directly without any declaration in ".aspx.cs" or in designer.cs. How is this possible? This is happeing only if I open website as using File System. Create a new ASP.NET web site application with Visual Studio 2008. So following three files will be created automatically "Default.aspx", "Default.aspx.cs" "Default.designer.cs" Now Delete "Default.designer.cs" perminently. Just create a button in Default.aspx file <asp:Button runat="server" Text="Save Plan" ID="btnSave" /> Close the Solution and open the website as File System. File -> Open Web Site -> File System -> Select Web Site Folder and Open the project. Now btnSave is automatically recognized in Default.aspx.cs without any declaration in Default.aspx.cs as bellow System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button btnSave; How btnSave is being recognized by .cs file without defining it anywhere as an object of System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button? Note: This happens only if you open Web Site from File System. and No Declaration at all for btnSave. Please refer this article on this. span.fullpost {display:none;}

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How to parse out MS Word formatting?

- by chobo2

I have a rich html textbox on my asp.net mvc application. The rich html textbox is some jquery plugin that I use and has basic stuff like bold,underline and etc. Now I am anticipating that people will maybe write something in word and then copy and paste it into my textbox. However I limit the number of characters a person can have. This is a test to show how much formatting gets made. • One • Two • Three So I wrote that above(it does not copy to well into here). Basically it is a line of text and "how" is bold and the "one,two,three" are a bullet list. Word says it is 70 characters long with spacing. However when I post this data from my textbox to my server I get a length back of 24577 characters. so I checked what was being sent and I get this <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 12"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 12"><link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5Cchobo2%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><link rel="themeData" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5Cchobo2%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_themedata.thmx"><link rel="colorSchemeMapping" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5Cchobo2%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_colorschememapping.xml"><style>  </style> <p class="MsoNormal">This is a test to show <b style="">how</b> much formatting gets made.</p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol;"><span style="">·<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">         </span></span></span>One</p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol;"><span style="">·<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">         </span></span></span>Two</p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-family: Symbol;"><span style="">·<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";">         </span></span></span>Three</p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast"><o:p> </o:p></p> Is there something I can use to get rid of all this stuff?

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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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Speaking at MK Code Camp 2012

- by hajan

This year same as the previous one, Macedonian .NET User Group is organizing the biggest event for developers and coders, event that is focusing on Microsoft technologies, Macedonian CODE CAMP 2012! The Code Camp 2012 will be held at 24th of November at FON University. In the first few hours we have more than 500 registered attendees and the number is increasing rapidly! At this year’s Code Camp, I will be speaking on topic “Modern Web Development Principles”, an interesting topic that will focus mainly on updating all the developer with the latest development trends. Here is the whole session description: “Through lot of code and demonstrations, this presentation aims to update you with the latest web development trends by clearly showing what has changed in web development today comparing with the previous years, what are the newest trends and how you can leverage the Microsoft ASP.NET platform together with all client-side centric development libraries to build the next generation of web apps following the standards and the modern web development principles. This is session for everyone who is involved into Web development in this way or another!” Quick links for those who want to learn more about this event: Code Camp 2012 Sessions (25 Sessions) Code Camp 2012 Speakers (More than 25 Speakers, 5 Microsoft MVPs, 1 MSFT, Many known Experts) Registration Link If you are somewhere around and interested to join the event, you are welcome! Hajan

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Is there a SUPPORTED way to run .NET 4.0 applications natively on a Mac?

- by Dan

What, if any, are the Microsoft supported options for running C#/.NET 4.0 code natively on the Mac? Yes, I know about Mono, but among other things, it lags Microsoft. And Silverlight only works in a web browser. A VMWare-type solution won't cut it either. Here's the subjective part (and might get this closed): is there any semi-authoritative answer to why Microsoft just doesn't support .NET on the Mac itself? It would seem like they could Silverlight and/or buy Mono and quickly be there. No need for native Visual Studio; cross-compiling and remote debugging is fine. The reason is that where I work there is a growing amount of Uncertainty about the future which is causing a lot more development to be done in C++ instead of C#; brand new projects are chosing to use C++. Nobody wants to tell management 18–24 months from now "sorry" should the Mac (or iPad) become a requirement. C++ is seen as the safer option, even if it (arguably) means a loss in productivity today.

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Is Linq having a mind-numbing effect on .NET programmers?

- by Aaronaught

A lot of us started seeing this phenomenon with jQuery about a year ago when people started asking how to do absolutely insane things like retrieve the query string with jQuery. The difference between the library (jQuery) and the language (JavaScript) is apparently lost on many programmers, and results in a lot of inappropriate, convoluted code being written where it is not necessary. Maybe it's just my imagination, but I swear I'm starting to see an uptick in the number of questions where people are asking to do similarly insane things with Linq, like find ranges in a sorted array. I can't get over how thoroughly inappropriate the Linq extensions are for solving that problem, but more importantly the fact that the author just assumed that the ideal solution would involve Linq without actually thinking about it (as far as I can tell). It seems that we are repeating history, breeding a new generation of .NET programmers who can't tell the difference between the language (C#/VB.NET) and the library (Linq). What is responsible for this phenomenon? Is it just hype? Magpie tendencies? Has Linq picked up a reputation as a form of magic, where instead of actually writing code you just have to utter the right incantation? I'm hardly satisfied with those explanations but I can't really think of anything else. More importantly, is it really a problem, and if so, what's the best way to help enlighten these people?

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Which .NET REST approach/technology/tool should I use?

- by SonOfPirate

I am implementing a RESTful web service and several client applications that are mostly in Silverlight. I am finding a litany of options for developing both the server-side and client-side of the API but am not sure which is the best approach. I'm concerned about stability as well as a platform that will continue to exist a few months from now. We started using the REST Starter Kit with .NET 3.5 but moved to the new WCF Web API when updating to .NET 4.0. All of their documentation indicates that WCF Web API is the replacement for the RSK. However, Web API is only in Preview 4 and does not include support for Silverlight or Windows Phone 7 clients (yet). WCF Web API looks like a wrapper on top of the WCF WebHttp Services stuff provided in the System.ServiceModel.Web library which makes me think that maybe it would be simpler to just go with the built-in stuff but Web API does offer some nice features. I am specifically tied-up trying to determine the best course for the client-side. My main requirement is that I need to support deserializing into my client-side objects quickly and easily. The Web API offers a nice client library but doesn't have a Silverlight version. I'd like to use the latest approach and the toolset that is being actively developed and supported. Is the REST Starter Kit really obsolete? Has anyone had any success implementing the WCF Web API toolkit? Is there merit to using either of these over the built-in WCF WebHttp Services features found in System.ServiceModel.Web? Is there a single solution that works for any client (web, Silverlight, etc.)? What suggestions do you have?

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How to implement smart card authentication with a .NET Fat client?

- by John Nevermore

I know very little about smart card authentication in general so please point out or correct me if anything below doesn't make sense. Lets say i have: A Certificate Authority "X"-s smart card (non-exportable private key) Drivers for that smart card written in C A smart card reader CA-s authentication OCSP web service A requirement to implement user authentication in a .NET fat client application via a smart card, that was given out by the CA "X". I tried searching info on the web but no prevail. What would the steps be ? My first thought was: Set up a web service, that would allow saving of (for example) scores of a ping pong game for each user. Each time someone tries to submit a score via the client application, he can only do so by inserting the smart card into the reader. Then the public key is read from the smart card by native c calls through .NET and sent to my custom web service, which in return uses the CA-s authentication OCSP web service to prove the validity of the public key/public certificate (?). If the public key is okay and valid, encrypt a random sequence of bytes with the public key and send it to the client application. If the client application sends back the correctly decrypted random sequence of bytes along with the score of the ping pong game, then the score is saved in the database for the given user. My question is, is this the correct way to do it ? What else should i know about smart card authentication ?

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What is the simplest way to render video into memory (for drawing to a texture) in .NET?

- by sebf

In my project I would like to be able to play back video on surfaces in the world. I intend to do this by having the video frames rendered to a block of memory, then use this to update a texture each frame. Everything is in place - except for the part that actually gets the video. I have looked on Google and found that the video library world is very expansive (and geared towards video processing), and am having trouble finding a suitable one. FFMpeg is very comprehensive, but is an entire suite and would take a good amount of work to integrate. So far the most promising library I've found is the one based on the VLC player libraries - by virtue of it using the same resources as VLC Player it is known to be very capable; it also renders to blocks of memory, but the API (at least of the one on Codeplex) is more of a port of the C++ API rather than a managed wrapper. The 'solution' can be any wrapper/API/library, but with characteristics that make it suitable for use in a rendering engine, namely: Renders the video frame data to memory, so it can be picked up and passed to a texture on the GPU easily. Super simple - all that is needed is a way to load, jump and render a frame programatically - ideally it would use the systems codecs and not require an assortment of plugins. Permissive license (LGPL or more free-er) .NET bindings at least; all the better if it is natively managed Can anyone suggest a lightweight, (.NET) library, that can take a video file, and spit out some frames into a byte[]?

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VPN iptables Forwarding: Net-to-net

- by Mike Holler

I've tried to look elsewhere on this site but I couldn't find anything matching this problem. Right now I have an ipsec tunnel open between our local network and a remote network. Currently, the local box running Openswan ipsec with the tunnel open can ping the remote ipsec box and any of the other computers in the remote network. When logged into on of the remote computers, I can ping any box in our local network. That's what works, this is what doesn't: I can't ping any of the remote computers via a local machine that is not the ipsec box. Here's a diagram of our network: [local ipsec box] ----------\ \ [arbitrary local computer] --[local gateway/router] -- [internet] -- [remote ipsec box] -- [arbitrary remote computer] The local ipsec box and the arbitrary local computer have no direct contact, instead they communicate through the gateway/router. The router has been set up to forward requests from local computers for the remote subnet to the ipsec box. This works. The problem is the ipsec box doesn't forward anything. Whenever an arbitrary local computer pings something on the remote subnet, this is the response: [user@localhost ~]# ping 172.16.53.12 PING 172.16.53.12 (172.16.53.12) 56(84) bytes of data. From 10.31.14.16 icmp_seq=1 Destination Host Prohibited From 10.31.14.16 icmp_seq=2 Destination Host Prohibited From 10.31.14.16 icmp_seq=3 Destination Host Prohibited Here's the traceroute: [root@localhost ~]# traceroute 172.16.53.12 traceroute to 172.16.53.12 (172.16.53.12), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets 1 router.address.net (10.31.14.1) 0.374 ms 0.566 ms 0.651 ms 2 10.31.14.16 (10.31.14.16) 2.068 ms 2.081 ms 2.100 ms 3 10.31.14.16 (10.31.14.16) 2.132 ms !X 2.272 ms !X 2.312 ms !X That's the IP for our ipsec box it's reaching, but it's not being forwarded. On the IPSec box I have enabled IP Forwarding in /etc/sysctl.conf net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1 And I have tried to set up IPTables to forward: *filter :INPUT ACCEPT [0:0] :FORWARD ACCEPT [0:0] :OUTPUT ACCEPT [759:71213] -A INPUT -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p icmp -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m state --state NEW -m tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m state --state NEW -m tcp --dport 25 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p udp -m state --state NEW -m udp --dport 500 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p udp -m state --state NEW -m udp --dport 4500 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -m policy --dir in --pol ipsec -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p esp -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited -A FORWARD -s 10.31.14.0/24 -d 172.16.53.0/24 -j ACCEPT -A FORWARD -m policy --dir in --pol ipsec -j ACCEPT -A FORWARD -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited COMMIT Am I missing a rule in IPTables? Is there something I forgot? NOTE: All the machines are running CentOS 6.x Edit: Note 2: eth1 is the only network interface on the local ipsec box.

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Header Div Position Edit according to Content Div

- by Melih Mucuk

I want to design my web site. I have two main div, one of them "header", other "content". I want to set width property:80% and I set center for both of them. But I don't do that. Other question about header div. I uploaded an image and I want to design like this. How can I do all of them? My CSS: #main { margin:0px auto; margin-left:50px; margin-right:50px; margin-top:25px; margin-bottom:25px; height:auto; text-align:center;} #content { width:80%; height:auto; margin:0px auto; } #header { width:80%; height:100px; top:20px; } #header_left { float:left ; height: 100px; text-align: center; } #header_right { margin:0px auto; height:30px; text-align:center; margin-top:35px; } #header_social { float:right; height:30px; text-align:center; margin-top:35px;} My client code: <div id="main"> <div id="content"> <div id="header"> <div id="header_left"> <asp:Image ID="Image1" runat="server" /> </div> <div id="header_right"> <asp:LinkButton ID="LinkButton5" runat="server" ForeColor="Gray"></asp:LinkButton> | <asp:LinkButton ID="LinkButton4" runat="server" ForeColor="Gray" ></asp:LinkButton> | <asp:LinkButton ID="LinkButton3" runat="server" ForeColor="#FF3300" ></asp:LinkButton> | <asp:LinkButton ID="LinkButton2" runat="server" ForeColor="Gray" ></asp:LinkButton> | <asp:LinkButton ID="LinkButton1" runat="server" ForeColor="Gray" ></asp:LinkButton> </div> <div id="header_social"> <asp:ImageButton ID="ImageButton1" runat="server"/> <asp:ImageButton ID="ImageButton2" runat="server"/> </div> </div> ******CONTENT FIELD***** </div> </div>

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WCF REST on .Net 4.0

- by AngelEyes

A simple and straight forward article taken from: http://christopherdeweese.com/blog2/post/drop-the-soap-wcf-rest-and-pretty-uris-in-net-4 Drop the Soap: WCF, REST, and Pretty URIs in .NET 4 Years ago I was working in libraries when the Web 2.0 revolution began. One of the things that caught my attention about early start-ups using the AJAX/REST/Web 2.0 model was how nice the URIs were for their applications. Those were my first impressions of REST; pretty URIs. Turns out there is a little more to it than that. REST is an architectural style that focuses on resources and structured ways to access those resources via the web. REST evolved as an “anti-SOAP” movement, driven by developers who did not want to deal with all the complexity SOAP introduces (which is al lot when you don’t have frameworks hiding it all). One of the biggest benefits to REST is that browsers can talk to rest services directly because REST works using URIs, QueryStrings, Cookies, SSL, and all those HTTP verbs that we don’t have to think about anymore. If you are familiar with ASP.NET MVC then you have been exposed to rest at some level. MVC is relies heavily on routing to generate consistent and clean URIs. REST for WCF gives you the same type of feel for your services. Let’s dive in. WCF REST in .NET 3.5 SP1 and .NET 4 This post will cover WCF REST in .NET 4 which drew heavily from the REST Starter Kit and community feedback. There is basic REST support in .NET 3.5 SP1 and you can also grab the REST Starter Kit to enable some of the features you’ll find in .NET 4. This post will cover REST in .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010. Getting Started To get started we’ll create a basic WCF Rest Service Application using the new on-line templates option in VS 2010: When you first install a template you are prompted with this dialog: Dude Where’s my .Svc File? The WCF REST template shows us the new way we can simply build services. Before we talk about what’s there, let’s look at what is not there: The .Svc File An Interface Contract Dozens of lines of configuration that you have to change to make your service work REST in .NET 4 is greatly simplified and leverages the Web Routing capabilities used in ASP.NET MVC and other parts of the web frameworks. With REST in .NET 4 you use a global.asax to set the route to your service using the new ServiceRoute class. From there, the WCF runtime handles dispatching service calls to the methods based on the Uri Templates. global.asax using System; using System.ServiceModel.Activation; using System.Web; using System.Web.Routing; namespace Blog.WcfRest.TimeService { public class Global : HttpApplication { void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { RegisterRoutes(); } private static void RegisterRoutes() { RouteTable.Routes.Add(new ServiceRoute("TimeService", new WebServiceHostFactory(), typeof(TimeService))); } } } The web.config contains some new structures to support a configuration free deployment. Note that this is the default config generated with the template. I did not make any changes to web.config. web.config <?xml version="1.0"?> <configuration> <system.web> <compilation debug="true" targetFramework="4.0" /> </system.web> <system.webServer> <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true"> <add name="UrlRoutingModule" type="System.Web.Routing.UrlRoutingModule, System.Web, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" /> </modules> </system.webServer> <system.serviceModel> <serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true"/> <standardEndpoints> <webHttpEndpoint>  <standardEndpoint name="" helpEnabled="true" automaticFormatSelectionEnabled="true"/> </webHttpEndpoint> </standardEndpoints> </system.serviceModel> </configuration> Building the Time Service We’ll create a simple “TimeService” that will return the current time. Let’s start with the following code: using System; using System.ServiceModel; using System.ServiceModel.Activation; using System.ServiceModel.Web; namespace Blog.WcfRest.TimeService { [ServiceContract] [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)] [ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.PerCall)] public class TimeService { [WebGet(UriTemplate = "CurrentTime")] public string CurrentTime() { return DateTime.Now.ToString(); } } } The endpoint for this service will be http://[machinename]:[port]/TimeService. To get the current time http://[machinename]:[port]/TimeService/CurrentTime will do the trick. The Results Are In Remember That Route In global.asax? Turns out it is pretty important. When you set the route name, that defines the resource name starting after the host portion of the Uri. Help Pages in WCF 4 Another feature that came from the starter kit are the help pages. To access the help pages simply append Help to the end of the service’s base Uri. Dropping the Soap Having dabbled with REST in the past and after using Soap for the last few years, the WCF 4 REST support is certainly refreshing. I’m currently working on some REST implementations in .NET 3.5 and VS 2008 and am looking forward to working on REST in .NET 4 and VS 2010.

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ASP.NET AJAX Modal Popup on Mouse Over

Todays customer question concerns client side predicates for showing a Modal Popup control. Im happy to be getting these kind of questions because it shows how ASP.NET developers are continuing to evolve their web development perspective and separate server logic execution and client logic execution. Though the Modal Popup Extender is a Server Side control extender it HAS client side events and methods. This exposes the Modal Popup to any JavaScript coding that we want. Example mouseover !...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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Design by Contract with Microsoft .Net Code Contract

- by Fredrik N

I have done some talks on different events and summits about Defensive Programming and Design by Contract, last time was at Cornerstone’s Developer Summit 2010. Next time will be at SweNug (Sweden .Net User Group). I decided to write a blog post about of some stuffs I was talking about. Users are a terrible thing! Protect your self from them ”Human users have a gift for doing the worst possible thing at the worst possible time.” – Michael T. Nygard, Release It! The kind of users Michael T. Nygard are talking about is the users of a system. We also have users that uses our code, the users I’m going to focus on is the users of our code. Me and you and another developers. “Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.” – Martin Fowler Good programmers also writes code that humans know how to use, good programmers also make sure software behave in a predictable manner despise inputs or user actions. Design by Contract Design by Contract (DbC) is a way for us to make a contract between us (the code writer) and the users of our code. It’s about “If you give me this, I promise to give you this”. It’s not about business validations, that is something completely different that should be part of the domain model. DbC is to make sure the users of our code uses it in a correct way, and that we can rely on the contract and write code in a way where we know that the users will follow the contract. It will make it much easier for us to write code with a contract specified. Something like the following code is something we may see often: public void DoSomething(Object value) { value.DoIKnowThatICanDoThis(); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Where “value” can be uses directly or passed to other methods and later be used. What some of us can easily forget here is that the “value” can be “null”. We will probably not passing a null value, but someone else that uses our code maybe will do it. I think most of you (including me) have passed “null” into a method because you don’t know if the argument need to be specified to a valid value etc. I bet most of you also have got the “Null reference exception”. Sometimes this “Null reference exception” can be hard and take time to fix, because we need to search among our code to see where the “null” value was passed in etc. Wouldn’t it be much better if we can as early as possible specify that the value can’t not be null, so the users of our code also know it when the users starts to use our code, and before run time execution of the code? This is where DbC comes into the picture. We can use DbC to specify what we need, and by doing so we can rely on the contract when we write our code. So the code above can actually use the DoIKnowThatICanDoThis() method on the value object without being worried that the “value” can be null. The contract between the users of the code and us writing the code, says that the “value” can’t be null. Pre- and Postconditions When working with DbC we are specifying pre- and postconditions. Precondition is a condition that should be met before a query or command is executed. An example of a precondition is: “The Value argument of the method can’t be null”, and we make sure the “value” isn’t null before the method is called. Postcondition is a condition that should be met when a command or query is completed, a postcondition will make sure the result is correct. An example of a postconditon is “The method will return a list with at least 1 item”. Commands an Quires When using DbC, we need to know what a Command and a Query is, because some principles that can be good to follow are based on commands and queries. A Command is something that will not return anything, like the SQL’s CREATE, UPDATE and DELETE. There are two kinds of Commands when using DbC, the Creation commands (for example a Constructor), and Others. Others can for example be a Command to add a value to a list, remove or update a value etc. //Creation commands public Stack(int size) //Other commands public void Push(object value); public void Remove(); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } A Query, is something that will return something, for example an Attribute, Property or a Function, like the SQL’s SELECT. There are two kinds of Queries, the Basic Queries (Quires that aren’t based on another queries), and the Derived Queries, queries that is based on another queries. Here is an example of queries of a Stack: //Basic Queries public int Count; public object this[int index] { get; } //Derived Queries //Is related to Count Query public bool IsEmpty() { return Count == 0; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } To understand about some principles that are good to follow when using DbC, we need to know about the Commands and different Queries. The 6 Principles When working with DbC, it’s advisable to follow some principles to make it easier to define and use contracts. The following DbC principles are: Separate commands and queries. Separate basic queries from derived queries. For each derived query, write a postcondition that specifies what result will be returned, in terms of one or more basic queries. For each command, write a postcondition that specifies the value of every basic query. For every query and command, decide on a suitable precondition. Write invariants to define unchanging properties of objects. Before I will write about each of them I want you to now that I’m going to use .Net 4.0 Code Contract. I will in the rest of the post uses a simple Stack (Yes I know, .Net already have a Stack class) to give you the basic understanding about using DbC. A Stack is a data structure where the first item in, will be the first item out. Here is a basic implementation of a Stack where not contract is specified yet: public class Stack { private object[] _array; //Basic Queries public uint Count; public object this[uint index] { get { return _array[index]; } set { _array[index] = value; } } //Derived Queries //Is related to Count Query public bool IsEmpty() { return Count == 0; } //Is related to Count and this[] Query public object Top() { return this[Count]; } //Creation commands public Stack(uint size) { Count = 0; _array = new object[size]; } //Other commands public void Push(object value) { this[++Count] = value; } public void Remove() { this[Count] = null; Count--; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Note: The Stack is implemented in a way to demonstrate the use of Code Contract in a simple way, the implementation may not look like how you would implement it, so don’t think this is the perfect Stack implementation, only used for demonstration. Before I will go deeper into the principles I will simply mention how we can use the .Net Code Contract. I mention before about pre- and postcondition, is about “Require” something and to “Ensure” something. When using Code Contract, we will use a static class called “Contract” and is located in he “System.Diagnostics.Contracts” namespace. The contract must be specified at the top or our member statement block. To specify a precondition with Code Contract we uses the Contract.Requires method, and to specify a postcondition, we uses the Contract.Ensure method. Here is an example where both a pre- and postcondition are used: public object Top() { Contract.Requires(Count > 0, "Stack is empty"); Contract.Ensures(Contract.Result<object>() == this[Count]); return this[Count]; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The contract above requires that the Count is greater than 0, if not we can’t get the item at the Top of a Stack. We also Ensures that the results (By using the Contract.Result method, we can specify a postcondition that will check if the value returned from a method is correct) of the Top query is equal to this[Count]. 1. Separate Commands and Queries When working with DbC, it’s important to separate Command and Quires. A method should either be a command that performs an Action, or returning information to the caller, not both. By asking a question the answer shouldn’t be changed. The following is an example of a Command and a Query of a Stack: public void Push(object value) public object Top() .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The Push is a command and will not return anything, just add a value to the Stack, the Top is a query to get the item at the top of the stack. 2. Separate basic queries from derived queries There are two different kinds of queries, the basic queries that doesn’t rely on another queries, and derived queries that uses a basic query. The “Separate basic queries from derived queries” principle is about about that derived queries can be specified in terms of basic queries. So this principles is more about recognizing that a query is a derived query or a basic query. It will then make is much easier to follow the other principles. The following code shows a basic query and a derived query: //Basic Queries public uint Count; //Derived Queries //Is related to Count Query public bool IsEmpty() { return Count == 0; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } We can see that IsEmpty will use the Count query, and that makes the IsEmpty a Derived query. 3. For each derived query, write a postcondition that specifies what result will be returned, in terms of one or more basic queries. When the derived query is recognize we can follow the 3ed principle. For each derived query, we can create a postcondition that specifies what result our derived query will return in terms of one or more basic queries. Remember that DbC is about contracts between the users of the code and us writing the code. So we can’t use demand that the users will pass in a valid value, we must also ensure that we will give the users what the users wants, when the user is following our contract. The IsEmpty query of the Stack will use a Count query and that will make the IsEmpty a Derived query, so we should now write a postcondition that specified what results will be returned, in terms of using a basic query and in this case the Count query, //Basic Queries public uint Count; //Derived Queries public bool IsEmpty() { Contract.Ensures(Contract.Result<bool>() == (Count == 0)); return Count == 0; } The Contract.Ensures is used to create a postcondition. The above code will make sure that the results of the IsEmpty (by using the Contract.Result to get the result of the IsEmpty method) is correct, that will say that the IsEmpty will be either true or false based on Count is equal to 0 or not. The postcondition are using a basic query, so the IsEmpty is now following the 3ed principle. We also have another Derived Query, the Top query, it will also need a postcondition and it uses all basic queries. The Result of the Top method must be the same value as the this[] query returns. //Basic Queries public uint Count; public object this[uint index] { get { return _array[index]; } set { _array[index] = value; } } //Derived Queries //Is related to Count and this[] Query public object Top() { Contract.Ensures(Contract.Result<object>() == this[Count]); return this[Count]; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } 4. For each command, write a postcondition that specifies the value of every basic query. For each command we will create a postconditon that specifies the value of basic queries. If we look at the Stack implementation we will have three Commands, one Creation command, the Constructor, and two others commands, Push and Remove. Those commands need a postcondition and they should include basic query to follow the 4th principle. //Creation commands public Stack(uint size) { Contract.Ensures(Count == 0); Count = 0; _array = new object[size]; } //Other commands public void Push(object value) { Contract.Ensures(Count == Contract.OldValue<uint>(Count) + 1); Contract.Ensures(this[Count] == value); this[++Count] = value; } public void Remove() { Contract.Ensures(Count == Contract.OldValue<uint>(Count) - 1); this[Count] = null; Count--; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } As you can see the Create command will Ensures that Count will be 0 when the Stack is created, when a Stack is created there shouldn’t be any items in the stack. The Push command will take a value and put it into the Stack, when an item is pushed into the Stack, the Count need to be increased to know the number of items added to the Stack, and we must also make sure the item is really added to the Stack. The postconditon of the Push method will make sure the that old value of the Count (by using the Contract.OldValue we can get the value a Query has before the method is called) plus 1 will be equal to the Count query, this is the way we can ensure that the Push will increase the Count with one. We also make sure the this[] query will now contain the item we pushed into the Stack. The Remove method must make sure the Count is decreased by one when the top item is removed from the Stack. The Commands is now following the 4th principle, where each command now have a postcondition that used the value of basic queries. Note: The principle says every basic Query, the Remove only used one Query the Count, it’s because this command can’t use the this[] query because an item is removed, so the only way to make sure an item is removed is to just use the Count query, so the Remove will still follow the principle. 5. For every query and command, decide on a suitable precondition. We have now focused only on postcondition, now time for some preconditons. The 5th principle is about deciding a suitable preconditon for every query and command. If we starts to look at one of our basic queries (will not go through all Queries and commands here, just some of them) the this[] query, we can’t pass an index that is lower then 1 (.Net arrays and list are zero based, but not the stack in this blog post ;)) and the index can’t be lesser than the number of items in the stack. So here we will need a preconditon. public object this[uint index] { get { Contract.Requires(index >= 1); Contract.Requires(index <= Count); return _array[index]; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Think about the Contract as an documentation about how to use the code in a correct way, so if the contract could be specified elsewhere (not part of the method body), we could simply write “return _array[index]” and there is no need to check if index is greater or lesser than Count, because that is specified in a “contract”. The implementation of Code Contract, requires that the contract is specified in the code. As a developer I would rather have this contract elsewhere (Like Spec#) or implemented in a way Eiffel uses it as part of the language. Now when we have looked at one Query, we can also look at one command, the Remove command (You can see the whole implementation of the Stack at the end of this blog post, where precondition is added to more queries and commands then what I’m going to show in this section). We can only Remove an item if the Count is greater than 0. So we can write a precondition that will require that Count must be greater than 0. public void Remove() { Contract.Requires(Count > 0); Contract.Ensures(Count == Contract.OldValue<uint>(Count) - 1); this[Count] = null; Count--; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } 6. Write invariants to define unchanging properties of objects. The last principle is about making sure the object are feeling great! This is done by using invariants. When using Code Contract we can specify invariants by adding a method with the attribute ContractInvariantMethod, the method must be private or public and can only contains calls to Contract.Invariant. To make sure the Stack feels great, the Stack must have 0 or more items, the Count can’t never be a negative value to make sure each command and queries can be used of the Stack. Here is our invariant for the Stack object: [ContractInvariantMethod] private void ObjectInvariant() { Contract.Invariant(Count >= 0); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Note: The ObjectInvariant method will be called every time after a Query or Commands is called. Here is the full example using Code Contract: public class Stack { private object[] _array; //Basic Queries public uint Count; public object this[uint index] { get { Contract.Requires(index >= 1); Contract.Requires(index <= Count); return _array[index]; } set { Contract.Requires(index >= 1); Contract.Requires(index <= Count); _array[index] = value; } } //Derived Queries //Is related to Count Query public bool IsEmpty() { Contract.Ensures(Contract.Result<bool>() == (Count == 0)); return Count == 0; } //Is related to Count and this[] Query public object Top() { Contract.Requires(Count > 0, "Stack is empty"); Contract.Ensures(Contract.Result<object>() == this[Count]); return this[Count]; } //Creation commands public Stack(uint size) { Contract.Requires(size > 0); Contract.Ensures(Count == 0); Count = 0; _array = new object[size]; } //Other commands public void Push(object value) { Contract.Requires(value != null); Contract.Ensures(Count == Contract.OldValue<uint>(Count) + 1); Contract.Ensures(this[Count] == value); this[++Count] = value; } public void Remove() { Contract.Requires(Count > 0); Contract.Ensures(Count == Contract.OldValue<uint>(Count) - 1); this[Count] = null; Count--; } [ContractInvariantMethod] private void ObjectInvariant() { Contract.Invariant(Count >= 0); } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Summary By using Design By Contract we can make sure the users are using our code in a correct way, and we must also make sure the users will get the expected results when they uses our code. This can be done by specifying contracts. To make it easy to use Design By Contract, some principles may be good to follow like the separation of commands an queries. With .Net 4.0 we can use the Code Contract feature to specify contracts.

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Telerik Reporting introduces WPF Report Viewer, the first reporting tool supporting all .NET desktop

With the release of Telerik Reporting Q1 2010 Service Pack 1 we are proud to announce a very important addition to Telerik Reporting. Finally, our suite of report viewers is now complete, making Telerik Reporting the first reporting tool to support all .NET desktop and web platforms: ASP.NET, Silverlight (incl. out-of-browser support), Windows Forms, and WPF. The newest member of the viewer family is the WPF Report Viewer which allows developers to deliver reports produced by Telerik Reporting to any rich application developed with WPF. The viewer supports all functionality available in the ASP.NET, Silverlight and Win Viewers, including printing and exporting to all supported formats. Here is a quick overview of the most important features (in WPF disguise): Different technology, same report The WPF Viewer is tightly integrated with Telerik Reporting and as such uses the same powerful reporting engine, which guarantees that you will ...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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Windows Azure: Import/Export Hard Drives, VM ACLs, Web Sockets, Remote Debugging, Continuous Delivery, New Relic, Billing Alerts and More

- by ScottGu

Two weeks ago we released a giant set of improvements to Windows Azure, as well as a significant update of the Windows Azure SDK. This morning we released another massive set of enhancements to Windows Azure. Today’s new capabilities include: Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to your Storage Accounts HDInsight: General Availability of our Hadoop Service in the cloud Virtual Machines: New VM Gallery, ACL support for VIPs Web Sites: WebSocket and Remote Debugging Support Notification Hubs: Segmented customer push notification support with tag expressions TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics Billing: New Billing Alert Service that sends emails notifications when your bill hits a threshold you define All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview). Below are more details about them. Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to Windows Azure I am excited to announce the preview of our new Windows Azure Import/Export Service! The Windows Azure Import/Export Service enables you to move large amounts of on-premises data into and out of your Windows Azure Storage accounts. It does this by enabling you to securely ship hard disk drives directly to our Windows Azure data centers. Once we receive the drives we’ll automatically transfer the data to or from your Windows Azure Storage account. This enables you to import or export massive amounts of data more quickly and cost effectively (and not be constrained by available network bandwidth). Encrypted Transport Our Import/Export service provides built-in support for BitLocker disk encryption – which enables you to securely encrypt data on the hard drives before you send it, and not have to worry about it being compromised even if the disk is lost/stolen in transit (since the content on the transported hard drives is completely encrypted and you are the only one who has the key to it). The drive preparation tool we are shipping today makes setting up bitlocker encryption on these hard drives easy. How to Import/Export your first Hard Drive of Data You can read our Getting Started Guide to learn more about how to begin using the import/export service. You can create import and export jobs via the Windows Azure Management Portal as well as programmatically using our Server Management APIs. It is really easy to create a new import or export job using the Windows Azure Management Portal. Simply navigate to a Windows Azure storage account, and then click the new Import/Export tab now available within it (note: if you don’t have this tab make sure to sign-up for the Import/Export preview): Then click the “Create Import Job” or “Create Export Job” commands at the bottom of it. This will launch a wizard that easily walks you through the steps required: For more comprehensive information about Import/Export, refer to Windows Azure Storage team blog. You can also send questions and comments to the [email protected] email address. We think you’ll find this new service makes it much easier to move data into and out of Windows Azure, and it will dramatically cut down the network bandwidth required when working on large data migration projects. We hope you like it. HDInsight: 100% Compatible Hadoop Service in the Cloud Last week we announced the general availability release of Windows Azure HDInsight. HDInsight is a 100% compatible Hadoop service that allows you to easily provision and manage Hadoop clusters for big data processing in Windows Azure. This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported 24x7 by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production scenarios. HDInsight allows you to use Apache Hadoop tools, such as Pig and Hive, to process large amounts of data in Windows Azure Blob Storage. Because data is stored in Windows Azure Blob Storage, you can choose to dynamically create Hadoop clusters only when you need them, and then shut them down when they are no longer required (since you pay only for the time the Hadoop cluster instances are running this provides a super cost effective way to use them). You can create Hadoop clusters using either the Windows Azure Management Portal (see below) or using our PowerShell and Cross Platform Command line tools: The import/export hard drive support that came out today is a perfect companion service to use with HDInsight – the combination allows you to easily ingest, process and optionally export a limitless amount of data. We’ve also integrated HDInsight with our Business Intelligence tools, so users can leverage familiar tools like Excel in order to analyze the output of jobs. You can find out more about how to get started with HDInsight here. Virtual Machines: VM Gallery Enhancements Today’s update of Windows Azure brings with it a new Virtual Machine gallery that you can use to create new VMs in the cloud. You can launch the gallery by doing New->Compute->Virtual Machine->From Gallery within the Windows Azure Management Portal: The new Virtual Machine Gallery includes some nice enhancements that make it even easier to use: Search: You can now easily search and filter images using the search box in the top-right of the dialog. For example, simply type “SQL” and we’ll filter to show those images in the gallery that contain that substring. Category Tree-view: Each month we add more built-in VM images to the gallery. You can continue to browse these using the “All” view within the VM Gallery – or now quickly filter them using the category tree-view on the left-hand side of the dialog. For example, by selecting “Oracle” in the tree-view you can now quickly filter to see the official Oracle supplied images. MSDN and Supported checkboxes: With today’s update we are also introducing filters that makes it easy to filter out types of images that you may not be interested in. The first checkbox is MSDN: using this filter you can exclude any image that is not part of the Windows Azure benefits for MSDN subscribers (which have highly discounted pricing - you can learn more about the MSDN pricing here). The second checkbox is Supported: this filter will exclude any image that contains prerelease software, so you can feel confident that the software you choose to deploy is fully supported by Windows Azure and our partners. Sort options: We sort gallery images by what we think customers are most interested in, but sometimes you might want to sort using different views. So we’re providing some additional sort options, like “Newest,” to customize the image list for what suits you best. Pricing information: We now provide additional pricing information about images and options on how to cost effectively run them directly within the VM Gallery. The above improvements make it even easier to use the VM Gallery and quickly create launch and run Virtual Machines in the cloud. Virtual Machines: ACL Support for VIPs A few months ago we exposed the ability to configure Access Control Lists (ACLs) for Virtual Machines using Windows PowerShell cmdlets and our Service Management API. With today’s release, you can now configure VM ACLs using the Windows Azure Management Portal as well. You can now do this by clicking the new Manage ACL command in the Endpoints tab of a virtual machine instance: This will enable you to configure an ordered list of permit and deny rules to scope the traffic that can access your VM’s network endpoints. For example, if you were on a virtual network, you could limit RDP access to a Windows Azure virtual machine to only a few computers attached to your enterprise. Or if you weren’t on a virtual network you could alternatively limit traffic from public IPs that can access your workloads: Here is the default behaviors for ACLs in Windows Azure: By default (i.e. no rules specified), all traffic is permitted. When using only Permit rules, all other traffic is denied. When using only Deny rules, all other traffic is permitted. When there is a combination of Permit and Deny rules, all other traffic is denied. Lastly, remember that configuring endpoints does not automatically configure them within the VM if it also has firewall rules enabled at the OS level. So if you create an endpoint using the Windows Azure Management Portal, Windows PowerShell, or REST API, be sure to also configure your guest VM firewall appropriately as well. Web Sites: Web Sockets Support With today’s release you can now use Web Sockets with Windows Azure Web Sites. This feature enables you to easily integrate real-time communication scenarios within your web based applications, and is available at no extra charge (it even works with the free tier). Higher level programming libraries like SignalR and socket.io are also now supported with it. You can enable Web Sockets support on a web site by navigating to the Configure tab of a Web Site, and by toggling Web Sockets support to “on”: Once Web Sockets is enabled you can start to integrate some really cool scenarios into your web applications. Check out the new SignalR documentation hub on www.asp.net to learn more about some of the awesome scenarios you can do with it. Web Sites: Remote Debugging Support The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 we released two weeks ago introduced remote debugging support for Windows Azure Cloud Services. With today’s Windows Azure release we are extending this remote debugging support to also work with Windows Azure Web Sites. With live, remote debugging support inside of Visual Studio, you are able to have more visibility than ever before into how your code is operating live in Windows Azure. It is now super easy to attach the debugger and quickly see what is going on with your application in the cloud. Remote Debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 Enabling the remote debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 is really easy. Start by opening up your web application’s project within Visual Studio. Then navigate to the “Server Explorer” tab within Visual Studio, and click on the deployed web-site you want to debug that is running within Windows Azure using the Windows Azure->Web Sites node in the Server Explorer. Then right-click and choose the “Attach Debugger” option on it: When you do this Visual Studio will remotely attach the debugger to the Web Site running within Windows Azure. The debugger will then stop the web site’s execution when it hits any break points that you have set within your web application’s project inside Visual Studio. For example, below I set a breakpoint on the “ViewBag.Message” assignment statement within the HomeController of the standard ASP.NET MVC project template. When I hit refresh on the “About” page of the web site within the browser, the breakpoint was triggered and I am now able to debug the app remotely using Visual Studio: Note above how we can debug variables (including autos/watchlist/etc), as well as use the Immediate and Command Windows. In the debug session above I used the Immediate Window to explore some of the request object state, as well as to dynamically change the ViewBag.Message property. When we click the the “Continue” button (or press F5) the app will continue execution and the Web Site will render the content back to the browser. This makes it super easy to debug web apps remotely. Tips for Better Debugging To get the best experience while debugging, we recommend publishing your site using the Debug configuration within Visual Studio’s Web Publish dialog. This will ensure that debug symbol information is uploaded to the Web Site which will enable a richer debug experience within Visual Studio. You can find this option on the Web Publish dialog on the Settings tab: When you ultimately deploy/run the application in production we recommend using the “Release” configuration setting – the release configuration is memory optimized and will provide the best production performance. To learn more about diagnosing and debugging Windows Azure Web Sites read our new Troubleshooting Windows Azure Web Sites in Visual Studio guide. Notification Hubs: Segmented Push Notification support with tag expressions In August we announced the General Availability of Windows Azure Notification Hubs - a powerful Mobile Push Notifications service that makes it easy to send high volume push notifications with low latency from any mobile app back-end. Notification hubs can be used with any mobile app back-end (including ones built using our Mobile Services capability) and can also be used with back-ends that run in the cloud as well as on-premises. Beginning with the initial release, Notification Hubs allowed developers to send personalized push notifications to both individual users as well as groups of users by interest, by associating their devices with tags representing the logical target of the notification. For example, by registering all devices of customers interested in a favorite MLB team with a corresponding tag, it is possible to broadcast one message to millions of Boston Red Sox fans and another message to millions of St. Louis Cardinals fans with a single API call respectively. New support for using tag expressions to enable advanced customer segmentation With today’s release we are adding support for even more advanced customer targeting. You can now identify customers that you want to send push notifications to by defining rich tag expressions. With tag expressions, you can now not only broadcast notifications to Boston Red Sox fans, but take that segmenting a step farther and reach more granular segments. This opens up a variety of scenarios, for example: Offers based on multiple preferences—e.g. send a game day vegetarian special to users tagged as both a Boston Red Sox fan AND a vegetarian Push content to multiple segments in a single message—e.g. rain delay information only to users who are tagged as either a Boston Red Sox fan OR a St. Louis Cardinal fan Avoid presenting subsets of a segment with irrelevant content—e.g. season ticket availability reminder to users who are tagged as a Boston Red Sox fan but NOT also a season ticket holder To illustrate with code, consider a restaurant chain app that sends an offer related to a Red Sox vs Cardinals game for users in Boston. Devices can be tagged by your app with location tags (e.g. “Loc:Boston”) and interest tags (e.g. “Follows:RedSox”, “Follows:Cardinals”), and then a notification can be sent by your back-end to “(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston” in order to deliver an offer to all devices in Boston that follow either the RedSox or the Cardinals. This can be done directly in your server backend send logic using the code below: var notification = new WindowsNotification(messagePayload); hub.SendNotificationAsync(notification, "(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston"); In your expressions you can use all Boolean operators: AND (&&), OR (||), and NOT (!). Some other cool use cases for tag expressions that are now supported include: Social: To “all my group except me” - group:id && !user:id Events: Touchdown event is sent to everybody following either team or any of the players involved in the action: Followteam:A || Followteam:B || followplayer:1 || followplayer:2 … Hours: Send notifications at specific times. E.g. Tag devices with time zone and when it is 12pm in Seattle send to: GMT8 && follows:thaifood Versions and platforms: Send a reminder to people still using your first version for Android - version:1.0 && platform:Android For help on getting started with Notification Hubs, visit the Notification Hub documentation center. Then download the latest NuGet package (or use the Notification Hubs REST APIs directly) to start sending push notifications using tag expressions. They are really powerful and enable a bunch of great new scenarios. TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable continuous delivery support with Windows Azure and Team Foundation Services. Team Foundation Services is a cloud based offering from Microsoft that provides integrated source control (with both TFS and Git support), build server, test execution, collaboration tools, and agile planning support. It makes it really easy to setup a team project (complete with automated builds and test runners) in the cloud, and it has really rich integration with Visual Studio. With today’s Windows Azure release it is now really easy to enable continuous delivery support with both TFS and Git based repositories hosted using Team Foundation Services. This enables a workflow where when code is checked in, built successfully on an automated build server, and all tests pass on it – I can automatically have the app deployed on Windows Azure with zero manual intervention or work required. The below screen-shots demonstrate how to quickly setup a continuous delivery workflow to Windows Azure with a Git-based ASP.NET MVC project hosted using Team Foundation Services. Enabling Continuous Delivery to Windows Azure with Team Foundation Services The project I’m going to enable continuous delivery with is a simple ASP.NET MVC project whose source code I’m hosting using Team Foundation Services. I did this by creating a “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” repository there using Git – and then used the new built-in Git tooling support within Visual Studio 2013 to push the source code to it. Below is a screen-shot of the Git repository hosted within Team Foundation Services: I can access the repository within Visual Studio 2013 and easily make commits with it (as well as branch, merge and do other tasks). Using VS 2013 I can also setup automated builds to take place in the cloud using Team Foundation Services every time someone checks in code to the repository: The cool thing about this is that I don’t have to buy or rent my own build server – Team Foundation Services automatically maintains its own build server farm and can automatically queue up a build for me (for free) every time someone checks in code using the above settings. This build server (and automated testing) support now works with both TFS and Git based source control repositories. Connecting a Team Foundation Services project to Windows Azure Once I have a source repository hosted in Team Foundation Services with Automated Builds and Testing set up, I can then go even further and set it up so that it will be automatically deployed to Windows Azure when a source code commit is made to the repository (assuming the Build + Tests pass). Enabling this is now really easy. To set this up with a Windows Azure Web Site simply use the New->Compute->Web Site->Custom Create command inside the Windows Azure Management Portal. This will create a dialog like below. I gave the web site a name and then made sure the “Publish from source control” checkbox was selected: When we click next we’ll be prompted for the location of the source repository. We’ll select “Team Foundation Services”: Once we do this we’ll be prompted for our Team Foundation Services account that our source repository is hosted under (in this case my TFS account is “scottguthrie”): When we click the “Authorize Now” button we’ll be prompted to give Windows Azure permissions to connect to the Team Foundation Services account. Once we do this we’ll be prompted to pick the source repository we want to connect to. Starting with today’s Windows Azure release you can now connect to both TFS and Git based source repositories. This new support allows me to connect to the “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” respository we created earlier: Clicking the finish button will then create the Web Site with the continuous delivery hooks setup with Team Foundation Services. Now every time someone pushes source control to the repository in Team Foundation Services, it will kick off an automated build, run all of the unit tests in the solution , and if they pass the app will be automatically deployed to our Web Site in Windows Azure. You can monitor the history and status of these automated deployments using the Deployments tab within the Web Site: This enables a really slick continuous delivery workflow, and enables you to build and deploy apps in a really nice way. Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable Developer Analytics and Monitoring support with both Windows Azure Web Site and Windows Azure Mobile Services. We are partnering with New Relic, who provide a great dev analytics and app performance monitoring offering, to enable this - and we have updated the Windows Azure Management Portal to make it really easy to configure. Enabling New Relic with a Windows Azure Web Site Enabling New Relic support with a Windows Azure Web Site is now really easy. Simply navigate to the Configure tab of a Web Site and scroll down to the “developer analytics” section that is now within it: Clicking the “add-on” button will display some additional UI. If you don’t already have a New Relic subscription, you can click the “view windows azure store” button to obtain a subscription (note: New Relic has a perpetually free tier so you can enable it even without paying anything): Clicking the “view windows azure store” button will launch the integrated Windows Azure Store experience we have within the Windows Azure Management Portal. You can use this to browse from a variety of great add-on services – including New Relic: Select “New Relic” within the dialog above, then click the next button, and you’ll be able to choose which type of New Relic subscription you wish to purchase. For this demo we’ll simply select the “Free Standard Version” – which does not cost anything and can be used forever: Once we’ve signed-up for our New Relic subscription and added it to our Windows Azure account, we can go back to the Web Site’s configuration tab and choose to use the New Relic add-on with our Windows Azure Web Site. We can do this by simply selecting it from the “add-on” dropdown (it is automatically populated within it once we have a New Relic subscription in our account): Clicking the “Save” button will then cause the Windows Azure Management Portal to automatically populate all of the needed New Relic configuration settings to our Web Site: Deploying the New Relic Agent as part of a Web Site The final step to enable developer analytics using New Relic is to add the New Relic runtime agent to our web app. We can do this within Visual Studio by right-clicking on our web project and selecting the “Manage NuGet Packages” context menu: This will bring up the NuGet package manager. You can search for “New Relic” within it to find the New Relic agent. Note that there is both a 32-bit and 64-bit edition of it – make sure to install the version that matches how your Web Site is running within Windows Azure (note: you can configure your Web Site to run in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode using the Web Site’s “Configuration” tab within the Windows Azure Management Portal): Once we install the NuGet package we are all set to go. We’ll simply re-publish the web site again to Windows Azure and New Relic will now automatically start monitoring the application Monitoring a Web Site using New Relic Now that the application has developer analytics support with New Relic enabled, we can launch the New Relic monitoring portal to start monitoring the health of it. We can do this by clicking on the “Add Ons” tab in the left-hand side of the Windows Azure Management Portal. Then select the New Relic add-on we signed-up for within it. The Windows Azure Management Portal will provide some default information about the add-on when we do this. Clicking the “Manage” button in the tray at the bottom will launch a new browser tab and single-sign us into the New Relic monitoring portal associated with our account: When we do this a new browser tab will launch with the New Relic admin tool loaded within it: We can now see insights into how our app is performing – without having to have written a single line of monitoring code. The New Relic service provides a ton of great built-in monitoring features allowing us to quickly see: Performance times (including browser rendering speed) for the overall site and individual pages. You can optionally set alert thresholds to trigger if the speed does not meet a threshold you specify. Information about where in the world your customers are hitting the site from (and how performance varies by region) Details on the latency performance of external services your web apps are using (for example: SQL, Storage, Twitter, etc) Error information including call stack details for exceptions that have occurred at runtime SQL Server profiling information – including which queries executed against your database and what their performance was And a whole bunch more… The cool thing about New Relic is that you don’t need to write monitoring code within your application to get all of the above reports (plus a lot more). The New Relic agent automatically enables the CLR profiler within applications and automatically captures the information necessary to identify these. This makes it super easy to get started and immediately have a rich developer analytics view for your solutions with very little effort. If you haven’t tried New Relic out yet with Windows Azure I recommend you do so – I think you’ll find it helps you build even better cloud applications. Following the above steps will help you get started and deliver you a really good application monitoring solution in only minutes. Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics With today’s release, we are enabling support within Service Bus for partitioned queues and topics. Enabling partitioning enables you to achieve a higher message throughput and better availability from your queues and topics. Higher message throughput is achieved by implementing multiple message brokers for each partitioned queue and topic. The multiple messaging stores will also provide higher availability. You can create a partitioned queue or topic by simply checking the Enable Partitioning option in the custom create wizard for a Queue or Topic: Read this article to learn more about partitioned queues and topics and how to take advantage of them today. Billing: New Billing Alert Service Today’s Windows Azure update enables a new Billing Alert Service Preview that enables you to get proactive email notifications when your Windows Azure bill goes above a certain monetary threshold that you configure. This makes it easier to manage your bill and avoid potential surprises at the end of the month. With the Billing Alert Service Preview, you can now create email alerts to monitor and manage your monetary credits or your current bill total. To set up an alert first sign-up for the free Billing Alert Service Preview. Then visit the account management page, click on a subscription you have setup, and then navigate to the new Alerts tab that is available: The alerts tab allows you to setup email alerts that will be sent automatically once a certain threshold is hit. For example, by clicking the “add alert” button above I can setup a rule to send myself email anytime my Windows Azure bill goes above $100 for the month: The Billing Alert Service will evolve to support additional aspects of your bill as well as support multiple forms of alerts such as SMS. Try out the new Billing Alert Service Preview today and give us feedback. Summary Today’s Windows Azure release enables a ton of great new scenarios, and makes building applications hosted in the cloud even easier. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today. Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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Integrating Twitter Into An ASP.NET Website Using OAuth

This ASP.NET tutorial shows how to use the open source Twitterizer project to integrate Twitter into an ASP.NET website using OAuth.

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Integrating Twitter Into An ASP.NET Website

ASP.NET Developer, Scott Mitchell, shows how to use the open source Twitterizer project to integrate Twitter into an ASP.NET website.

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Integrating Twitter Into An ASP.NET Website

ASP.NET Developer, Scott Mitchell, shows how to use the open source Twitterizer project to integrate Twitter into an ASP.NET website.

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Extending ASP.NET Output Caching

One of the most sure-fire ways to improve a web application's performance is to employ caching. Caching takes some expensive operation and stores its results in a quickly accessible location. Since it's inception, ASP.NET has offered two flavors of caching: Output Caching - caches the entire rendered markup of an ASP.NET page or User Control for a specified duration.Data Caching - a API for caching objects. Using the data cache you can write code to add, remove, and retrieve items from the cache.Until recently, the underlying functionality of these two caching mechanisms was fixed - both cached data in the web server's memory. This has its drawbacks. In some cases, developers may want to save output cache content to disk. When using the data cache you may want to cache items to the cloud or to a distributed caching architecture like memcached. The good news is that with ASP.NET 4 and the .NET Framework 4, the output caching and data caching options are now much more extensible. Both caching features are now based upon the provider model, meaning that you can create your own output cache and data cache providers (or download and use a third-party or open source provider) and plug them into a new or existing ASP.NET 4 application. This article focuses on extending the output caching feature. We'll walk through how to create a custom output cache provider that caches a page or User Control's rendered output to disk (as opposed to memory) and then see how to plug the provider into an ASP.NET application. A complete working example, available in both VB and C#, is available for download at the end of this article. Read on to learn more! Read More >

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Extending ASP.NET Output Caching

This ASP.NET tutorial shows how to customize ASP.NET 4's output caching functionality to save cached content to disk instead of memory.

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The .NET Rocks! Visual Studio 2010 Road Trip

Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell, hosts of the .NET Rocks radio show, have decided to set off in their DotNetMobile (a 30 foot RV) to 15 US cities between April 19th and May 7th. What for, you ask? Why, to meet up with .NET developers and show off the latest and greatest in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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T-4 Templates for ASP.NET Web Form Databound Control Friendly Logical Layers

- by joycsharp

I just released an open source project at codeplex, which includes a set of T-4 templates to enable you to build logical layers (i.e. DAL/BLL) with just few clicks! The logical layers implemented here are based on Entity Framework 4.0, ASP.NET Web Form Data Bound control friendly and fully unit testable. In this open source project you will get Entity Framework 4.0 based T-4 templates for following types of logical layers: Data Access Layer: Entity Framework 4.0 provides excellent ORM data access layer. It also includes support for T-4 templates, as built-in code generation strategy in Visual Studio 2010, where we can customize default structure of data access layer based on Entity Framework. default structure of data access layer has been enhanced to get support for mock testing in Entity Framework 4.0 object model. Business Logic Layer: ASP.NET web form based data bound control friendly business logic layer, which will enable you few clicks to build data bound web applications on top of ASP.NET Web Form and Entity Framework 4.0 quickly with great support of mock testing. Download it to make your web development productive. Enjoy!

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Dissecting ASP.NET Routing

The ASP.NET Routing framework allows developers to decouple the URL of a resource from the physical file on the web server. Specifically, the developer defines <i>routing rules</i>, which map URL patterns to a class or ASP.NET page that generates the content. For instance, you could create a URL pattern of the form <code>Categories/<i>CategoryName</i></code> and map it to the ASP.NET page <code>ShowCategoryDetails.aspx</code>; the <code>ShowCategoryDetails.aspx</code> page would display details about the category <i>CategoryName</i>. With such a mapping, users could view category about the Beverages category by visiting <code>www.yoursite.com/Categories/Beverages</code>. In short, ASP.NET Routing allows

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Automatically Minify, Combine, Compress, and Cache *.js and *.css Files in your ASP.NET Project

Automatically minify, combine, compress, and cache .js and .css files in your ASP.NET project

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