Search Results

Search found 20715 results on 829 pages for 'non mvc'.

facebook twitter digg google delicious technorati stumbleupon myspace wordpress linkedin gmail igoogle windows live tumblr viadeo yahoo buzz yahoo mail yahoo bookmarks favorites email print

Page 479/829 | < Previous Page | 475 476 477 478 479 480 481 482 483 484 485 486  | Next Page >

  • Why can't we reach some (but not all) external web service via VPN connection?

    - by Paul Haldane
    At work (UK university) we use a set of Windows servers running WS2008R2 and RRAS which offer VPN service to students in our accommodation. We do this to associate the network connections with individuals. Before they've connected to the VPN all they can talk to is the stuff thats needed to setup the VPN and a local web site with documentation on how to connect. Medium term we'll probably replace this but it's what we're using at the moment. VPN on the 2008 servers allocates client a private (10.x) address. Access to external sites is through NAT on the campus routers (same as any other directly connected client on a private address). Non-VPN connections aren't seeing this problem. Older servers run WS 2003 and ISA2004. That setup works but has become unreliable under load. Big difference there was that we were allocating non-RFC1918 addresses to the clients (so no NAT required). Behaviour we're seeing is that once connected to the VPN, clients can reach local web sites (that is sites on the campus network) but only some external sites. It seems (but this may be chance) that the sites we can reach are Google ones (including YouTube). We certainly have trouble reaching Microsoft's Office 365 service (which is a pain because that's where mail for most of our students is). One odd bit of behaviour is that clients can fetch (using wget on a Windows 7 client) http://www.oracle.com/ (which gets a 301 redirect) but hangs when asked to fetch http://www.oracle.com/index.html (which is what the first URL redirects to). Access works reliably if we configure clients to use our local web proxies (Squid). My gut tells me that this is likely to be something in the chain dropping replies either based on HTTP inspection or the IP address in the reply. However I'm puzzled about why we're seeing this with the VPN clients. Plan for tomorrow (when I'm back in the office) is to setup a web server on external connection so that we can monitor behaviour at both ends of the conversation (hoping that the problem manifests itself with our test server). Any suggestions for things we should be looking at?

    Read the article

  • How to remove Unicode characters and/or convert OpenOffice spreadsheet cells to plaintext?

    - by gonzobrains
    I have an OpenOffice spreadsheet into which I occasionally copy/paste snippets from web pages. However, I need the file, as a whole, to be free of fancy formatting and non-ASCII text. Is tried highlighting cells and selecting "Default Formatting" but this still seems to keep extraneous characters even though it looks like normal text to the human eye. If this is not possible, is there a way to at least reveal the "raw" data within a cell so that I can manually strip it? Thanks, Jeff

    Read the article

  • rsync delete remote duplicates

    - by BlakBat
    I'm trying to delete remote duplicate files without transferring the non-existing files, and without updating the existing files. If I specify both --existing and --ignore-existing (along with "-av --remove-source-files", the operation is a no-op and nothing will be transfered, but nothing will be deleted either. The best I got so far is to make a local copy of destination, use rsync without --ignore-existing, then rsync my local copy on top of the destination

    Read the article

  • Do I need the meta-key for vim?

    - by Riyaah
    I'm looking in to learning emacs or vim. I started out with emacs but found the need for a meta key to be a hassle, especially since I have a non-english keyboard layout on my macbook. So far I haven't seen any references to meta in vim, so my question is: Can I live without meta in vim? If so that'll settle the vim vs. emacs question for me, otherwise I'll just have to learn to live with some workaround.

    Read the article

  • Tools for reformatting a spreadsheet into PDF?

    - by Todd
    I'm looking for an easy way to produce nicely formatted PDF documents using a subset of data available in a spreadsheet. Ideally, I would be able to produce one or more PDF documents for each row int e spreadsheet. Each row contains scientific data about a sample. There are numbers, text and images in the Spreadsheet that need to be reformatted in a nice way in a PDF. Ideally, the solution would be a piece of software that a non-technical but highly intelligent scientist could operate.

    Read the article

  • recommendations for public facing file server

    - by Seaweed
    I've been asked to setup a server for exchanging non-critical company data e.g. marketing PDF's etc. Can anyone recommend a Linux-based solution I can use? We're looking for something with a really simple GUI front end here... I've already setup SFTP but they found the process 'too-techy'. Any ideas would be really welcome... Thanks!

    Read the article

  • How is network traffic routed (VPN vs. 'open')?

    - by craibuc
    If my workstation has a VPN connection to a given network (a client's, for instance) and an open connection, what determines how a request for a network resource (e.g. a web page) is routed? Moreover, given that a resource (e.g. google.com) could be available via either route (i.e. VPN or non-VPN), how is this route determined? Is there a way to 'force' the routing to use a given route or the route with lower overhead?

    Read the article

  • How to give user read/write access to folders?

    - by Will
    I'm running a certain script that is using a non-root user to do the following... mkdir: cannot create directory `/srv/www/example.com/releases' *** [err :: 12.23.45.789] : Permission denied How would I allow user xyz to have permanent permissions to do so and still keep this web server secure? Also is it possible to make it recursive for all subfolders? I know its probably chmod something but I'm not that linux savy, thanks.

    Read the article

  • Making many network shares appear as one

    - by jimbojw
    Givens: disk is cheap, and there's plenty lying around on various computers around the corporate intranet redundant contiguous large storage volumes are expensive Problem: It would be fantastic to have a single entry point (drive letter, network path) that presents all this space as one contiguous filesystem, effectively abstracting the disk and network architecture from the paths presented to users. Does anyone know how to implement such a solution? I'm open to Windows and non-windows solutions, free and proprietary.

    Read the article

  • Postfix sendmail bypass restrictions [on hold]

    - by EnEli
    I have setup a postfix/dovecot mail server and all thing work fine! BUT: I use virtual mailboxes and when you try to send a mail to a non existent mailbox via telnet postfix will punch you... But if you use sendmail, all restricitons are bypassed... This is bad becuase dovecot does not know what to do with this mail! It will stay in the queue for ever... How can I force sendmail to use normal smtp?

    Read the article

  • Avoiding memory full -> swap full -> crash

    - by Noam
    I'm experiencing an issue when sometimes the memory gets 100% full, and the swap file also, and the server becomes non-responsive and has to be restarted (causing also problems in database). This is what Cacti shows: The server is running a web-app (database + apache) and during that specific moment didn't experience any ir-regular traffic or usage. This scenario happened twice in the last week. What can cause this? How can I resolve the issue?

    Read the article

  • Nginx rewrites - When does one use the break flag (pattern target break)?

    - by anonymous-one
    The nginx wiki states: break - completes processing of current rewrite directives and non-rewrite processing continues within the current location block only. Is this to say that: If the rewrite pattern matches, process the rewrite (rewrite to target) but do not process any of the other rules in the location block, and process all other (cache, proxy, etc) directives in the location block? I am talking about the break flag as per: PATTERN TARGET FLAG Not the "break;" directive. Thanks.

    Read the article

  • Other than using `split`, is there a way around the Apache 2.0 maximum file size limit of 2GB?

    - by warren
    I have some ISOs that need to be available across a WAN, so we are using an http server to host them (allows for non-authenticated, read-only access (beyond being on the VPN) to the data store). The server the ISOs reside on is running CentOS 4, and Apache 2.0.58. Is there a way around the 2GB filesize limit with Apache 2.0 without using the split utility to chunk the ISOs down to a less-than-2GB size?

    Read the article

  • Apache - Only allow certain domains access to a Restful service

    - by user18910
    For certain Restful URIs I want to block certain domains from executing the requests. How can i do this with Apache? Is it possible For example: www.nottrusted.com calls my Restful Api Apache identifies the request is coming from a non-authorized site Apache blocks the caller and returns a 401 Is this possible? Is it easy for someone one spoof the domain? If a request comes from server side code of nottrusted.com will Apache catch the request? Thanks

    Read the article

  • Why is ksoftirqd using 100% of the CPU?

    - by Yegor
    Running FC release 12. Im alaways seeing ksoftirqd/x (x being 0-9) at the top of the processlist, with 100% cpu. The server has a bonded 2gbit connection, serving files from an SSD array. Currently its using 1.6gbit. Server load is ~ 1.5 (dual quad core). iowait is non-existent.

    Read the article

  • Windows 2008 RenderFarm Service: CreateProcessAsUser "Session 0 Isolation" and OpenGL

    - by holtavolt
    Hello, I have a legacy Windows server service and (spawned) application that works fine in XP-64 and W2K3, but fails on W2K8. I believe it is because of the new "Session 0 isolation " feature. (Note: As a StackOverflow newbie I'm being limited to one link in this post, so you'll need to scroll to bottom to lookup the links for '' items)* Consequently, I'm looking for code samples/security settings mojo that let you create a new process from a windows service for Windows 2008 Server such that I can restore (and possibly surpass) the previous behavior. I need a solution that: Creates the new process in a non-zero session to get around session-0 isolation restrictions (no access to graphics hardware from session 0) - the official MS line on this is: Because Session 0 is no longer a user session, services that are running in Session 0 do not have access to the video driver. This means that any attempt that a service makes to render graphics fails. Querying the display resolution and color depth in Session 0 reports the correct results for the system up to a maximum of 1920x1200 at 32 bits per pixel. The new process gets a windows station/desktop (e.g. winsta0/default) that can be used to create windows DCs. I've found a solution (that launches OK in an interactive session) for this here: *(Starting an Interactive Client Process in C++ - 2) The windows DC, when used as the basis for an *(OpenGL DescribePixelFormat enumeration - 3), is able to find and use the hardware-accelerated format (on a system appropriately equipped with OpenGL hardware.) Note that our current solution works OK on XP-64 and W2K3, except if a terminal services session is running (VNC works fine.) A solution that also allowed the process to work (i.e. run with OpenGL hardware acceleration even when a terminal services session is open) would be fanastic, although not required. I'm stuck at item #1 currently, and although there are some similar postings that discuss this (like *(this -4), and *(this - 5) - they are not suitable solutions, as there is no guarantee of a user session logged in already to "take" a session id from, nor am I running from a LocalSystem account (I'm running from a domain account for the service, for which I can adjust the privileges of, within reason, although I'd prefer to not have to escalate priorities to include SeTcbPrivileges.) For instance - here's a stub that I think should work, but always returns an error 1314 on the SetTokenInformation call (even though the AdjustTokenPrivileges returned no errors) I've used some alternate strategies involving "LogonUser" as well (instead of opening the existing process token), but I can't seem to swap out the session id. I'm also dubious about using the WTSActiveConsoleSessionId in all cases (for instance, if no interactive user is logged in) - although a quick test of the service running with no sessions logged in seemed to return a reasonable session value (1). I’ve removed error handling for ease of reading (still a bit messy - apologies) //Also tried using LogonUser(..) here OpenProcessToken(GetCurrentProcess(), TOKEN_QUERY | TOKEN_ADJUST_PRIVILEGES | TOKEN_ADJUST_SESSIONID | TOKEN_ADJUST_DEFAULT | TOKEN_ASSIGN_PRIMARY | TOKEN_DUPLICATE, &hToken) GetTokenInformation( hToken, TokenSessionId, &logonSessionId, sizeof(DWORD), &dwTokenLength ) DWORD consoleSessionId = WTSGetActiveConsoleSessionId(); /* Can't use this - requires very elevated privileges (LOCAL only, SeTcbPrivileges as well) if( !WTSQueryUserToken(consoleSessionId, &hToken)) ... */ DuplicateTokenEx(hToken, (TOKEN_QUERY | TOKEN_ADJUST_PRIVILEGES | TOKEN_ADJUST_SESSIONID | TOKEN_ADJUST_DEFAULT | TOKEN_ASSIGN_PRIMARY | TOKEN_DUPLICATE), NULL, SecurityIdentification, TokenPrimary, &hDupToken)) // Look up the LUID for the TCB Name privilege. LookupPrivilegeValue(NULL, SE_TCB_NAME, &tp.Privileges[0].Luid)) // Enable the TCB Name privilege in the token. tp.PrivilegeCount = 1; tp.Privileges[0].Attributes = SE_PRIVILEGE_ENABLED; if (!AdjustTokenPrivileges(hDupToken, FALSE, &tp, sizeof(TOKEN_PRIVILEGES), NULL, 0)) { DisplayError("AdjustTokenPrivileges"); ... } if (GetLastError() == ERROR_NOT_ALL_ASSIGNED) { DEBUG( "Token does not have the necessary privilege.\n"); } else { DEBUG( "No error reported from AdjustTokenPrivileges!\n"); } // Never errors here DEBUG(LM_INFO, "Attempting setting of sessionId to: %d\n", consoleSessionId ); if (!SetTokenInformation(hDupToken, TokenSessionId, &consoleSessionId, sizeof(DWORD))) *** ALWAYS FAILS WITH 1314 HERE *** All the debug output looks fine up until the SetTokenInformation call - I see session 0 is my current process session, and in my case, it's trying to set session 1 (the result of the WTSGetActiveConsoleSessionId). (Note that I'm logged into the W2K8 box via VNC, not RDC) So - a the questions: Is this approach valid, or are all service-initiated processes restricted to session 0 intentionally? Is there a better approach (short of "Launch on logon" and auto-logon for the servers?) Is there something wrong with this code, or a different way to create a process token where I can swap out the session id to indicate I want to spawn the process in a new session? I did try using LogonUser instead of OpenProcessToken, but that didn't work either. (I don't care if all spawned processes share the same non-zero session or not at this point.) Any help much appreciated - thanks! (You need to replace the 'zttp' with 'http' - StackOverflow restriction on one link in my newbie post) 2: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa379608(VS.85).aspx 3: http://www.opengl.org/resources/faq/technical/mswindows.htm 4: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2237696/creating-a-process-in-a-non-zero-session-from-a-service-in-windows-2008-server 5: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1602996/how-can-i-lauch-a-process-which-has-a-ui-from-windows-service

    Read the article

  • asp.net - csharp - jquery - looking for a better and usage solution

    - by LostLord
    hi my dear friends i have a little problem about using jquery...(i reeally do not know jquery but i forced to use it) i am using vs 2008 - asp.net web app with c# also i am using telerik controls in my pages also i am using sqldatasources (Connecting to storedprocedures) in my pages my pages base on master and content pages and in content pages i have mutiviews ================================================================================= in one of the views(inside one of those multiviews)i had made two radcombo boxes for country and city requirement like cascading dropdowns as parent and child combo boxes. i used old way for doing that , i mean i used update panel and in the SelectedIndexChange Event of Parent RadComboBox(Country) i Wrote this code : protected void RadcomboboxCountry_SelectedIndexChanged(object o, RadComboBoxSelectedIndexChangedEventArgs e) { hfSelectedCo_ID.Value = RadcomboboxCountry.SelectedValue; RadcomboboxCity.Items.Clear(); RadcomboboxCity.Items.Add(new RadComboBoxItem(" ...", "5")); RadcomboboxCity.DataBind(); RadcomboboxCity.SelectedIndex = 0; } my child radcombo box can fill by upper code , let me tell you how : the child sqldatasource have a sp that has a parameter and i fill that parameter by this line - hfSelectedCo_ID.Value = RadcbCoNameInInsert.SelectedValue; RadcbCoNameInInsert.SelectedValue means country ID. after doing that SelectedIndexChange Event of Parent RadComboBox(Country) could not be fire therefore i forced to set the autopostback property to true. afetr doing that every thing was ok until some one told me can u control focus and keydown of your radcombo boxes (when u press enter key on the parent combobox[country] , so child combobox gets focus -- and when u press upperkey on child radcombobox [city], so parent combobox[country] gets focus) (For Users That Do Not Want To Use Mouse for Input Info And Choose items) i told him this is web app , not win form and we can not do that. i googled it and i found jquery the only way for doing that ... so i started using jquery . i wrote this code with jquery for both of them : <script src="../JQuery/jquery-1.4.1.js" language="javascript" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> $(function() { $('input[id$=RadcomboboxCountry_Input]').focus(); $('input[id$=RadcomboboxCountry_Input]').select(); $('input[id$=RadcomboboxCountry_Input]').bind('keyup', function(e) { var code = (e.keyCode ? e.keyCode : e.which); if (code == 13) { -----------> Enter Key $('input[id$=RadcomboboxCity_Input]').focus(); $('input[id$=RadcomboboxCity_Input]').select(); } }); $('input[id$=RadcomboboxCity_Input]').bind('keyup', function(e) { var code = (e.keyCode ? e.keyCode : e.which); if (code == 38) { -----------> Upper Key $('input[id$=RadcomboboxCountry_Input]').focus(); $('input[id$=RadcomboboxCountry_Input]').select(); } }); }); </script> this jquery code worked BBBBBBUUUUUUUTTTTTT autopostback=true of the Parent RadComboBox Became A Problem , Because when SelectedIndex Change Of ParentRadComboBox is fired after that Telerik Skins runs and after that i lost parent ComboBox Focus and we should use mouse but we don't want it.... for fix this problem i decided to set autopostback of perentCB to false and convert protected void RadcomboboxCountry_SelectedIndexChanged(object o, RadComboBoxSelectedIndexChangedEventArgs e) { hfSelectedCo_ID.Value = RadcomboboxCountry.SelectedValue; RadcomboboxCity.Items.Clear(); RadcomboboxCity.Items.Add(new RadComboBoxItem(" ...", "5")); RadcomboboxCity.DataBind(); RadcomboboxCity.SelectedIndex = 0; } to a public non static method without parameters and call it with jquey like this : (i used onclientchanged property of parentcombo box like onclientchanged = "MyMethodForParentCB_InJquery();" insread of selectedindexchange event) public void MyMethodForParentCB_InCodeBehind() { hfSelectedCo_ID.Value = RadcomboboxCountry.SelectedValue; RadcomboboxCity.Items.Clear(); RadcomboboxCity.Items.Add(new RadComboBoxItem(" ...", "5")); RadcomboboxCity.DataBind(); RadcomboboxCity.SelectedIndex = 0; } for doing that i read the blow manual and do that step by step : ======================================================================= http://www.ajaxprojects.com/ajax/tutorialdetails.php?itemid=732 ======================================================================= but this manual is about static methods and this is my new problem ... when i am using static method like : public static void MyMethodForParentCB_InCodeBehind() { hfSelectedCo_ID.Value = RadcomboboxCountry.SelectedValue; RadcomboboxCity.Items.Clear(); RadcomboboxCity.Items.Add(new RadComboBoxItem(" ...", "5")); RadcomboboxCity.DataBind(); RadcomboboxCity.SelectedIndex = 0; } so i recieved some errors and this method could not recognize my controls and hidden field... one of those errors like this : Error 2 An object reference is required for the non-static field, method, or property 'Darman.SuperAdmin.Users.hfSelectedCo_ID' C:\Javad\Copy of Darman 6\Darman\SuperAdmin\Users.aspx.cs 231 13 Darman any idea or is there any way to call non static methods with jquery (i know we can not do that but is there another way to solve my problem)???????????????

    Read the article

  • A free standing ASP.NET Pager Web Control

    - by Rick Strahl
    Paging in ASP.NET has been relatively easy with stock controls supporting basic paging functionality. However, recently I built an MVC application and one of the things I ran into was that I HAD TO build manual paging support into a few of my pages. Dealing with list controls and rendering markup is easy enough, but doing paging is a little more involved. I ended up with a small but flexible component that can be dropped anywhere. As it turns out the task of creating a semi-generic Pager control for MVC was fairly easily. Now I’m back to working in Web Forms and thought to myself that the way I created the pager in MVC actually would also work in ASP.NET – in fact quite a bit easier since the whole thing can be conveniently wrapped up into an easily reusable control. A standalone pager would provider easier reuse in various pages and a more consistent pager display regardless of what kind of 'control’ the pager is associated with. Why a Pager Control? At first blush it might sound silly to create a new pager control – after all Web Forms has pretty decent paging support, doesn’t it? Well, sort of. Yes the GridView control has automatic paging built in and the ListView control has the related DataPager control. The built in ASP.NET paging has several issues though: Postback and JavaScript requirements If you look at paging links in ASP.NET they are always postback links with javascript:__doPostback() calls that go back to the server. While that works fine and actually has some benefit like the fact that paging saves changes to the page and post them back, it’s not very SEO friendly. Basically if you use javascript based navigation nosearch engine will follow the paging links which effectively cuts off list content on the first page. The DataPager control does support GET based links via the QueryStringParameter property, but the control is effectively tied to the ListView control (which is the only control that implements IPageableItemContainer). DataSource Controls required for Efficient Data Paging Retrieval The only way you can get paging to work efficiently where only the few records you display on the page are queried for and retrieved from the database you have to use a DataSource control - only the Linq and Entity DataSource controls  support this natively. While you can retrieve this data yourself manually, there’s no way to just assign the page number and render the pager based on this custom subset. Other than that default paging requires a full resultset for ASP.NET to filter the data and display only a subset which can be very resource intensive and wasteful if you’re dealing with largish resultsets (although I’m a firm believer in returning actually usable sets :-}). If you use your own business layer that doesn’t fit an ObjectDataSource you’re SOL. That’s a real shame too because with LINQ based querying it’s real easy to retrieve a subset of data that is just the data you want to display but the native Pager functionality doesn’t support just setting properties to display just the subset AFAIK. DataPager is not Free Standing The DataPager control is the closest thing to a decent Pager implementation that ASP.NET has, but alas it’s not a free standing component – it works off a related control and the only one that it effectively supports from the stock ASP.NET controls is the ListView control. This means you can’t use the same data pager formatting for a grid and a list view or vice versa and you’re always tied to the control. Paging Events In order to handle paging you have to deal with paging events. The events fire at specific time instances in the page pipeline and because of this you often have to handle data binding in a way to work around the paging events or else end up double binding your data sources based on paging. Yuk. Styling The GridView pager is a royal pain to beat into submission for styled rendering. The DataPager control has many more options and template layout and it renders somewhat cleaner, but it too is not exactly easy to get a decent display for. Not a Generic Solution The problem with the ASP.NET controls too is that it’s not generic. GridView, DataGrid use their own internal paging, ListView can use a DataPager and if you want to manually create data layout – well you’re on your own. IOW, depending on what you use you likely have very different looking Paging experiences. So, I figured I’ve struggled with this once too many and finally sat down and built a Pager control. The Pager Control My goal was to create a totally free standing control that has no dependencies on other controls and certainly no requirements for using DataSource controls. The idea is that you should be able to use this pager control without any sort of data requirements at all – you should just be able to set properties and be able to display a pager. The Pager control I ended up with has the following features: Completely free standing Pager control – no control or data dependencies Complete manual control – Pager can render without any data dependency Easy to use: Only need to set PageSize, ActivePage and TotalItems Supports optional filtering of IQueryable for efficient queries and Pager rendering Supports optional full set filtering of IEnumerable<T> and DataTable Page links are plain HTTP GET href Links Control automatically picks up Page links on the URL and assigns them (automatic page detection no page index changing events to hookup) Full CSS Styling support On the downside there’s no templating support for the control so the layout of the pager is relatively fixed. All elements however are stylable and there are options to control the text, and layout options such as whether to display first and last pages and the previous/next buttons and so on. To give you an idea what the pager looks like, here are two differently styled examples (all via CSS):   The markup for these two pagers looks like this: <ww:Pager runat="server" id="ItemPager" PageSize="5" PageLinkCssClass="gridpagerbutton" SelectedPageCssClass="gridpagerbutton-selected" PagesTextCssClass="gridpagertext" CssClass="gridpager" RenderContainerDiv="true" ContainerDivCssClass="gridpagercontainer" MaxPagesToDisplay="6" PagesText="Item Pages:" NextText="next" PreviousText="previous" /> <ww:Pager runat="server" id="ItemPager2" PageSize="5" RenderContainerDiv="true" MaxPagesToDisplay="6" /> The latter example uses default style settings so it there’s not much to set. The first example on the other hand explicitly assigns custom styles and overrides a few of the formatting options. Styling The styling is based on a number of CSS classes of which the the main pager, pagerbutton and pagerbutton-selected classes are the important ones. Other styles like pagerbutton-next/prev/first/last are based on the pagerbutton style. The default styling shown for the red outlined pager looks like this: .pagercontainer { margin: 20px 0; background: whitesmoke; padding: 5px; } .pager { float: right; font-size: 10pt; text-align: left; } .pagerbutton,.pagerbutton-selected,.pagertext { display: block; float: left; text-align: center; border: solid 2px maroon; min-width: 18px; margin-left: 3px; text-decoration: none; padding: 4px; } .pagerbutton-selected { font-size: 130%; font-weight: bold; color: maroon; border-width: 0px; background: khaki; } .pagerbutton-first { margin-right: 12px; } .pagerbutton-last,.pagerbutton-prev { margin-left: 12px; } .pagertext { border: none; margin-left: 30px; font-weight: bold; } .pagerbutton a { text-decoration: none; } .pagerbutton:hover { background-color: maroon; color: cornsilk; } .pagerbutton-prev { background-image: url(images/prev.png); background-position: 2px center; background-repeat: no-repeat; width: 35px; padding-left: 20px; } .pagerbutton-next { background-image: url(images/next.png); background-position: 40px center; background-repeat: no-repeat; width: 35px; padding-right: 20px; margin-right: 0px; } Yup that’s a lot of styling settings although not all of them are required. The key ones are pagerbutton, pager and pager selection. The others (which are implicitly created by the control based on the pagerbutton style) are for custom markup of the ‘special’ buttons. In my apps I tend to have two kinds of pages: Those that are associated with typical ‘grid’ displays that display purely tabular data and those that have a more looser list like layout. The two pagers shown above represent these two views and the pager and gridpager styles in my standard style sheet reflect these two styles. Configuring the Pager with Code Finally lets look at what it takes to hook up the pager. As mentioned in the highlights the Pager control is completely independent of other controls so if you just want to display a pager on its own it’s as simple as dropping the control and assigning the PageSize, ActivePage and either TotalPages or TotalItems. So for this markup: <ww:Pager runat="server" id="ItemPagerManual" PageSize="5" MaxPagesToDisplay="6" /> I can use code as simple as: ItemPagerManual.PageSize = 3; ItemPagerManual.ActivePage = 4;ItemPagerManual.TotalItems = 20; Note that ActivePage is not required - it will automatically use any Page=x query string value and assign it, although you can override it as I did above. TotalItems can be any value that you retrieve from a result set or manually assign as I did above. A more realistic scenario based on a LINQ to SQL IQueryable result is even easier. In this example, I have a UserControl that contains a ListView control that renders IQueryable data. I use a User Control here because there are different views the user can choose from with each view being a different user control. This incidentally also highlights one of the nice features of the pager: Because the pager is independent of the control I can put the pager on the host page instead of into each of the user controls. IOW, there’s only one Pager control, but there are potentially many user controls/listviews that hold the actual display data. The following code demonstrates how to use the Pager with an IQueryable that loads only the records it displays: protected voidPage_Load(objectsender, EventArgs e) {     Category = Request.Params["Category"] ?? string.Empty;     IQueryable<wws_Item> ItemList = ItemRepository.GetItemsByCategory(Category);     // Update the page and filter the list down     ItemList = ItemPager.FilterIQueryable<wws_Item>(ItemList); // Render user control with a list view Control ulItemList = LoadControl("~/usercontrols/" + App.Configuration.ItemListType + ".ascx"); ((IInventoryItemListControl)ulItemList).InventoryItemList = ItemList; phItemList.Controls.Add(ulItemList); // placeholder } The code uses a business object to retrieve Items by category as an IQueryable which means that the result is only an expression tree that hasn’t execute SQL yet and can be further filtered. I then pass this IQueryable to the FilterIQueryable() helper method of the control which does two main things: Filters the IQueryable to retrieve only the data displayed on the active page Sets the Totaltems property and calculates TotalPages on the Pager and that’s it! When the Pager renders it uses those values, plus the PageSize and ActivePage properties to render the Pager. In addition to IQueryable there are also filter methods for IEnumerable<T> and DataTable, but these versions just filter the data by removing rows/items from the entire already retrieved data. Output Generated and Paging Links The output generated creates pager links as plain href links. Here’s what the output looks like: <div id="ItemPager" class="pagercontainer"> <div class="pager"> <span class="pagertext">Pages: </span><a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=1" class="pagerbutton" />1</a> <a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=2" class="pagerbutton" />2</a> <a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=3" class="pagerbutton" />3</a> <span class="pagerbutton-selected">4</span> <a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=5" class="pagerbutton" />5</a> <a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=6" class="pagerbutton" />6</a> <a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=20" class="pagerbutton pagerbutton-last" />20</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=3" class="pagerbutton pagerbutton-prev" />Prev</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=5" class="pagerbutton pagerbutton-next" />Next</a></div> <br clear="all" /> </div> </div> The links point back to the current page and simply append a Page= page link into the page. When the page gets reloaded with the new page number the pager automatically detects the page number and automatically assigns the ActivePage property which results in the appropriate page to be displayed. The code shown in the previous section is all that’s needed to handle paging. Note that HTTP GET based paging is different than the Postback paging ASP.NET uses by default. Postback paging preserves modified page content when clicking on pager buttons, but this control will simply load a new page – no page preservation at this time. The advantage of not using Postback paging is that the URLs generated are plain HTML links that a search engine can follow where __doPostback() links are not. Pager with a Grid The pager also works in combination with grid controls so it’s easy to bypass the grid control’s paging features if desired. In the following example I use a gridView control and binds it to a DataTable result which is also filterable by the Pager control. The very basic plain vanilla ASP.NET grid markup looks like this: <div style="width: 600px; margin: 0 auto;padding: 20px; "> <asp:DataGrid runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="True" ID="gdItems" CssClass="blackborder" style="width: 600px;"> <AlternatingItemStyle CssClass="gridalternate" /> <HeaderStyle CssClass="gridheader" /> </asp:DataGrid> <ww:Pager runat="server" ID="Pager" CssClass="gridpager" ContainerDivCssClass="gridpagercontainer" PageLinkCssClass="gridpagerbutton" SelectedPageCssClass="gridpagerbutton-selected" PageSize="8" RenderContainerDiv="true" MaxPagesToDisplay="6" /> </div> and looks like this when rendered: using custom set of CSS styles. The code behind for this code is also very simple: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { string category = Request.Params["category"] ?? ""; busItem itemRep = WebStoreFactory.GetItem(); var items = itemRep.GetItemsByCategory(category) .Select(itm => new {Sku = itm.Sku, Description = itm.Description}); // run query into a DataTable for demonstration DataTable dt = itemRep.Converter.ToDataTable(items,"TItems"); // Remove all items not on the current page dt = Pager.FilterDataTable(dt,0); // bind and display gdItems.DataSource = dt; gdItems.DataBind(); } A little contrived I suppose since the list could already be bound from the list of elements, but this is to demonstrate that you can also bind against a DataTable if your business layer returns those. Unfortunately there’s no way to filter a DataReader as it’s a one way forward only reader and the reader is required by the DataSource to perform the bindings.  However, you can still use a DataReader as long as your business logic filters the data prior to rendering and provides a total item count (most likely as a second query). Control Creation The control itself is a pretty brute force ASP.NET control. Nothing clever about this other than some basic rendering logic and some simple calculations and update routines to determine which buttons need to be shown. You can take a look at the full code from the West Wind Web Toolkit’s Repository (note there are a few dependencies). To give you an idea how the control works here is the Render() method: /// <summary> /// overridden to handle custom pager rendering for runtime and design time /// </summary> /// <param name="writer"></param> protected override void Render(HtmlTextWriter writer) { base.Render(writer); if (TotalPages == 0 && TotalItems > 0) TotalPages = CalculateTotalPagesFromTotalItems(); if (DesignMode) TotalPages = 10; // don't render pager if there's only one page if (TotalPages < 2) return; if (RenderContainerDiv) { if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(ContainerDivCssClass)) writer.AddAttribute("class", ContainerDivCssClass); writer.RenderBeginTag("div"); } // main pager wrapper writer.WriteBeginTag("div"); writer.AddAttribute("id", this.ClientID); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(CssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", this.CssClass); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.TagRightChar + "\r\n"); // Pages Text writer.WriteBeginTag("span"); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(PagesTextCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", PagesTextCssClass); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.TagRightChar); writer.Write(this.PagesText); writer.WriteEndTag("span"); // if the base url is empty use the current URL FixupBaseUrl(); // set _startPage and _endPage ConfigurePagesToRender(); // write out first page link if (ShowFirstAndLastPageLinks && _startPage != 1) { writer.WriteBeginTag("a"); string pageUrl = StringUtils.SetUrlEncodedKey(BaseUrl, QueryStringPageField, (1).ToString()); writer.WriteAttribute("href", pageUrl); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(PageLinkCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", PageLinkCssClass + " " + PageLinkCssClass + "-first"); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.SelfClosingTagEnd); writer.Write("1"); writer.WriteEndTag("a"); writer.Write("&nbsp;"); } // write out all the page links for (int i = _startPage; i < _endPage + 1; i++) { if (i == ActivePage) { writer.WriteBeginTag("span"); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(SelectedPageCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", SelectedPageCssClass); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.TagRightChar); writer.Write(i.ToString()); writer.WriteEndTag("span"); } else { writer.WriteBeginTag("a"); string pageUrl = StringUtils.SetUrlEncodedKey(BaseUrl, QueryStringPageField, i.ToString()).TrimEnd('&'); writer.WriteAttribute("href", pageUrl); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(PageLinkCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", PageLinkCssClass); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.SelfClosingTagEnd); writer.Write(i.ToString()); writer.WriteEndTag("a"); } writer.Write("\r\n"); } // write out last page link if (ShowFirstAndLastPageLinks && _endPage < TotalPages) { writer.WriteBeginTag("a"); string pageUrl = StringUtils.SetUrlEncodedKey(BaseUrl, QueryStringPageField, TotalPages.ToString()); writer.WriteAttribute("href", pageUrl); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(PageLinkCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", PageLinkCssClass + " " + PageLinkCssClass + "-last"); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.SelfClosingTagEnd); writer.Write(TotalPages.ToString()); writer.WriteEndTag("a"); } // Previous link if (ShowPreviousNextLinks && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(PreviousText) && ActivePage > 1) { writer.Write("&nbsp;"); writer.WriteBeginTag("a"); string pageUrl = StringUtils.SetUrlEncodedKey(BaseUrl, QueryStringPageField, (ActivePage - 1).ToString()); writer.WriteAttribute("href", pageUrl); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(PageLinkCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", PageLinkCssClass + " " + PageLinkCssClass + "-prev"); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.SelfClosingTagEnd); writer.Write(PreviousText); writer.WriteEndTag("a"); } // Next link if (ShowPreviousNextLinks && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(NextText) && ActivePage < TotalPages) { writer.Write("&nbsp;"); writer.WriteBeginTag("a"); string pageUrl = StringUtils.SetUrlEncodedKey(BaseUrl, QueryStringPageField, (ActivePage + 1).ToString()); writer.WriteAttribute("href", pageUrl); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(PageLinkCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", PageLinkCssClass + " " + PageLinkCssClass + "-next"); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.SelfClosingTagEnd); writer.Write(NextText); writer.WriteEndTag("a"); } writer.WriteEndTag("div"); if (RenderContainerDiv) { if (RenderContainerDivBreak) writer.Write("<br clear=\"all\" />\r\n"); writer.WriteEndTag("div"); } } As I said pretty much brute force rendering based on the control’s property settings of which there are quite a few: You can also see the pager in the designer above. unfortunately the VS designer (both 2010 and 2008) fails to render the float: left CSS styles properly and starts wrapping after margins are applied in the special buttons. Not a big deal since VS does at least respect the spacing (the floated elements overlay). Then again I’m not using the designer anyway :-}. Filtering Data What makes the Pager easy to use is the filter methods built into the control. While this functionality is clearly not the most politically correct design choice as it violates separation of concerns, it’s very useful for typical pager operation. While I actually have filter methods that do something similar in my business layer, having it exposed on the control makes the control a lot more useful for typical databinding scenarios. Of course these methods are optional – if you have a business layer that can provide filtered page queries for you can use that instead and assign the TotalItems property manually. There are three filter method types available for IQueryable, IEnumerable and for DataTable which tend to be the most common use cases in my apps old and new. The IQueryable version is pretty simple as it can simply rely on on .Skip() and .Take() with LINQ: /// <summary> /// <summary> /// Queries the database for the ActivePage applied manually /// or from the Request["page"] variable. This routine /// figures out and sets TotalPages, ActivePage and /// returns a filtered subset IQueryable that contains /// only the items from the ActivePage. /// </summary> /// <param name="query"></param> /// <param name="activePage"> /// The page you want to display. Sets the ActivePage property when passed. /// Pass 0 or smaller to use ActivePage setting. /// </param> /// <returns></returns> public IQueryable<T> FilterIQueryable<T>(IQueryable<T> query, int activePage) where T : class, new() { ActivePage = activePage < 1 ? ActivePage : activePage; if (ActivePage < 1) ActivePage = 1; TotalItems = query.Count(); if (TotalItems <= PageSize) { ActivePage = 1; TotalPages = 1; return query; } int skip = ActivePage - 1; if (skip > 0) query = query.Skip(skip * PageSize); _TotalPages = CalculateTotalPagesFromTotalItems(); return query.Take(PageSize); } The IEnumerable<T> version simply  converts the IEnumerable to an IQuerable and calls back into this method for filtering. The DataTable version requires a little more work to manually parse and filter records (I didn’t want to add the Linq DataSetExtensions assembly just for this): /// <summary> /// Filters a data table for an ActivePage. /// /// Note: Modifies the data set permanently by remove DataRows /// </summary> /// <param name="dt">Full result DataTable</param> /// <param name="activePage">Page to display. 0 to use ActivePage property </param> /// <returns></returns> public DataTable FilterDataTable(DataTable dt, int activePage) { ActivePage = activePage < 1 ? ActivePage : activePage; if (ActivePage < 1) ActivePage = 1; TotalItems = dt.Rows.Count; if (TotalItems <= PageSize) { ActivePage = 1; TotalPages = 1; return dt; } int skip = ActivePage - 1; if (skip > 0) { for (int i = 0; i < skip * PageSize; i++ ) dt.Rows.RemoveAt(0); } while(dt.Rows.Count > PageSize) dt.Rows.RemoveAt(PageSize); return dt; } Using the Pager Control The pager as it is is a first cut I built a couple of weeks ago and since then have been tweaking a little as part of an internal project I’m working on. I’ve replaced a bunch of pagers on various older pages with this pager without any issues and have what now feels like a more consistent user interface where paging looks and feels the same across different controls. As a bonus I’m only loading the data from the database that I need to display a single page. With the preset class tags applied too adding a pager is now as easy as dropping the control and adding the style sheet for styling to be consistent – no fuss, no muss. Schweet. Hopefully some of you may find this as useful as I have or at least as a baseline to build ontop of… Resources The Pager is part of the West Wind Web & Ajax Toolkit Pager.cs Source Code (some toolkit dependencies) Westwind.css base stylesheet with .pager and .gridpager styles Pager Example Page © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  

    Read the article

  • 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

    Read the article

  • Using FiddlerCore to capture HTTP Requests with .NET

    - by Rick Strahl
    Over the last few weeks I’ve been working on my Web load testing utility West Wind WebSurge. One of the key components of a load testing tool is the ability to capture URLs effectively so that you can play them back later under load. One of the options in WebSurge for capturing URLs is to use its built-in capture tool which acts as an HTTP proxy to capture any HTTP and HTTPS traffic from most Windows HTTP clients, including Web Browsers as well as standalone Windows applications and services. To make this happen, I used Eric Lawrence’s awesome FiddlerCore library, which provides most of the functionality of his desktop Fiddler application, all rolled into an easy to use library that you can plug into your own applications. FiddlerCore makes it almost too easy to capture HTTP content! For WebSurge I needed to capture all HTTP traffic in order to capture the full HTTP request – URL, headers and any content posted by the client. The result of what I ended up creating is this semi-generic capture form: In this post I’m going to demonstrate how easy it is to use FiddlerCore to build this HTTP Capture Form.  If you want to jump right in here are the links to get Telerik’s Fiddler Core and the code for the demo provided here. FiddlerCore Download FiddlerCore on NuGet Show me the Code (WebSurge Integration code from GitHub) Download the WinForms Sample Form West Wind Web Surge (example implementation in live app) Note that FiddlerCore is bound by a license for commercial usage – see license.txt in the FiddlerCore distribution for details. Integrating FiddlerCore FiddlerCore is a library that simply plugs into your application. You can download it from the Telerik site and manually add the assemblies to your project, or you can simply install the NuGet package via:       PM> Install-Package FiddlerCore The library consists of the FiddlerCore.dll as well as a couple of support libraries (CertMaker.dll and BCMakeCert.dll) that are used for installing SSL certificates. I’ll have more on SSL captures and certificate installation later in this post. But first let’s see how easy it is to use FiddlerCore to capture HTTP content by looking at how to build the above capture form. Capturing HTTP Content Once the library is installed it’s super easy to hook up Fiddler functionality. Fiddler includes a number of static class methods on the FiddlerApplication object that can be called to hook up callback events as well as actual start monitoring HTTP URLs. In the following code directly lifted from WebSurge, I configure a few filter options on Form level object, from the user inputs shown on the form by assigning it to a capture options object. In the live application these settings are persisted configuration values, but in the demo they are one time values initialized and set on the form. Once these options are set, I hook up the AfterSessionComplete event to capture every URL that passes through the proxy after the request is completed and start up the Proxy service:void Start() { if (tbIgnoreResources.Checked) CaptureConfiguration.IgnoreResources = true; else CaptureConfiguration.IgnoreResources = false; string strProcId = txtProcessId.Text; if (strProcId.Contains('-')) strProcId = strProcId.Substring(strProcId.IndexOf('-') + 1).Trim(); strProcId = strProcId.Trim(); int procId = 0; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(strProcId)) { if (!int.TryParse(strProcId, out procId)) procId = 0; } CaptureConfiguration.ProcessId = procId; CaptureConfiguration.CaptureDomain = txtCaptureDomain.Text; FiddlerApplication.AfterSessionComplete += FiddlerApplication_AfterSessionComplete; FiddlerApplication.Startup(8888, true, true, true); } The key lines for FiddlerCore are just the last two lines of code that include the event hookup code as well as the Startup() method call. Here I only hook up to the AfterSessionComplete event but there are a number of other events that hook various stages of the HTTP request cycle you can also hook into. Other events include BeforeRequest, BeforeResponse, RequestHeadersAvailable, ResponseHeadersAvailable and so on. In my case I want to capture the request data and I actually have several options to capture this data. AfterSessionComplete is the last event that fires in the request sequence and it’s the most common choice to capture all request and response data. I could have used several other events, but AfterSessionComplete is one place where you can look both at the request and response data, so this will be the most common place to hook into if you’re capturing content. The implementation of AfterSessionComplete is responsible for capturing all HTTP request headers and it looks something like this:private void FiddlerApplication_AfterSessionComplete(Session sess) { // Ignore HTTPS connect requests if (sess.RequestMethod == "CONNECT") return; if (CaptureConfiguration.ProcessId > 0) { if (sess.LocalProcessID != 0 && sess.LocalProcessID != CaptureConfiguration.ProcessId) return; } if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(CaptureConfiguration.CaptureDomain)) { if (sess.hostname.ToLower() != CaptureConfiguration.CaptureDomain.Trim().ToLower()) return; } if (CaptureConfiguration.IgnoreResources) { string url = sess.fullUrl.ToLower(); var extensions = CaptureConfiguration.ExtensionFilterExclusions; foreach (var ext in extensions) { if (url.Contains(ext)) return; } var filters = CaptureConfiguration.UrlFilterExclusions; foreach (var urlFilter in filters) { if (url.Contains(urlFilter)) return; } } if (sess == null || sess.oRequest == null || sess.oRequest.headers == null) return; string headers = sess.oRequest.headers.ToString(); var reqBody = sess.GetRequestBodyAsString(); // if you wanted to capture the response //string respHeaders = session.oResponse.headers.ToString(); //var respBody = session.GetResponseBodyAsString(); // replace the HTTP line to inject full URL string firstLine = sess.RequestMethod + " " + sess.fullUrl + " " + sess.oRequest.headers.HTTPVersion; int at = headers.IndexOf("\r\n"); if (at < 0) return; headers = firstLine + "\r\n" + headers.Substring(at + 1); string output = headers + "\r\n" + (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(reqBody) ? reqBody + "\r\n" : string.Empty) + Separator + "\r\n\r\n"; BeginInvoke(new Action<string>((text) => { txtCapture.AppendText(text); UpdateButtonStatus(); }), output); } The code starts by filtering out some requests based on the CaptureOptions I set before the capture is started. These options/filters are applied when requests actually come in. This is very useful to help narrow down the requests that are captured for playback based on options the user picked. I find it useful to limit requests to a certain domain for captures, as well as filtering out some request types like static resources – images, css, scripts etc. This is of course optional, but I think it’s a common scenario and WebSurge makes good use of this feature. AfterSessionComplete like other FiddlerCore events, provides a Session object parameter which contains all the request and response details. There are oRequest and oResponse objects to hold their respective data. In my case I’m interested in the raw request headers and body only, as you can see in the commented code you can also retrieve the response headers and body. Here the code captures the request headers and body and simply appends the output to the textbox on the screen. Note that the Fiddler events are asynchronous, so in order to display the content in the UI they have to be marshaled back the UI thread with BeginInvoke, which here simply takes the generated headers and appends it to the existing textbox test on the form. As each request is processed, the headers are captured and appended to the bottom of the textbox resulting in a Session HTTP capture in the format that Web Surge internally supports, which is basically raw request headers with a customized 1st HTTP Header line that includes the full URL rather than a server relative URL. When the capture is done the user can either copy the raw HTTP session to the clipboard, or directly save it to file. This raw capture format is the same format WebSurge and also Fiddler use to import/export request data. While this code is application specific, it demonstrates the kind of logic that you can easily apply to the request capture process, which is one of the reasonsof why FiddlerCore is so powerful. You get to choose what content you want to look up as part of your own application logic and you can then decide how to capture or use that data as part of your application. The actual captured data in this case is only a string. The user can edit the data by hand or in the the case of WebSurge, save it to disk and automatically open the captured session as a new load test. Stopping the FiddlerCore Proxy Finally to stop capturing requests you simply disconnect the event handler and call the FiddlerApplication.ShutDown() method:void Stop() { FiddlerApplication.AfterSessionComplete -= FiddlerApplication_AfterSessionComplete; if (FiddlerApplication.IsStarted()) FiddlerApplication.Shutdown(); } As you can see, adding HTTP capture functionality to an application is very straight forward. FiddlerCore offers tons of features I’m not even touching on here – I suspect basic captures are the most common scenario, but a lot of different things can be done with FiddlerCore’s simple API interface. Sky’s the limit! The source code for this sample capture form (WinForms) is provided as part of this article. Adding Fiddler Certificates with FiddlerCore One of the sticking points in West Wind WebSurge has been that if you wanted to capture HTTPS/SSL traffic, you needed to have the full version of Fiddler and have HTTPS decryption enabled. Essentially you had to use Fiddler to configure HTTPS decryption and the associated installation of the Fiddler local client certificate that is used for local decryption of incoming SSL traffic. While this works just fine, requiring to have Fiddler installed and then using a separate application to configure the SSL functionality isn’t ideal. Fortunately FiddlerCore actually includes the tools to register the Fiddler Certificate directly using FiddlerCore. Why does Fiddler need a Certificate in the first Place? Fiddler and FiddlerCore are essentially HTTP proxies which means they inject themselves into the HTTP conversation by re-routing HTTP traffic to a special HTTP port (8888 by default for Fiddler) and then forward the HTTP data to the original client. Fiddler injects itself as the system proxy in using the WinInet Windows settings  which are the same settings that Internet Explorer uses and that are configured in the Windows and Internet Explorer Internet Settings dialog. Most HTTP clients running on Windows pick up and apply these system level Proxy settings before establishing new HTTP connections and that’s why most clients automatically work once Fiddler – or FiddlerCore/WebSurge are running. For plain HTTP requests this just works – Fiddler intercepts the HTTP requests on the proxy port and then forwards them to the original port (80 for HTTP and 443 for SSL typically but it could be any port). For SSL however, this is not quite as simple – Fiddler can easily act as an HTTPS/SSL client to capture inbound requests from the server, but when it forwards the request to the client it has to also act as an SSL server and provide a certificate that the client trusts. This won’t be the original certificate from the remote site, but rather a custom local certificate that effectively simulates an SSL connection between the proxy and the client. If there is no custom certificate configured for Fiddler the SSL request fails with a certificate validation error. The key for this to work is that a custom certificate has to be installed that the HTTPS client trusts on the local machine. For a much more detailed description of the process you can check out Eric Lawrence’s blog post on Certificates. If you’re using the desktop version of Fiddler you can install a local certificate into the Windows certificate store. Fiddler proper does this from the Options menu: This operation does several things: It installs the Fiddler Root Certificate It sets trust to this Root Certificate A new client certificate is generated for each HTTPS site monitored Certificate Installation with FiddlerCore You can also provide this same functionality using FiddlerCore which includes a CertMaker class. Using CertMaker is straight forward to use and it provides an easy way to create some simple helpers that can install and uninstall a Fiddler Root certificate:public static bool InstallCertificate() { if (!CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.createRootCert()) return false; if (!CertMaker.trustRootCert()) return false; } return true; } public static bool UninstallCertificate() { if (CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.removeFiddlerGeneratedCerts(true)) return false; } return true; } InstallCertificate() works by first checking whether the root certificate is already installed and if it isn’t goes ahead and creates a new one. The process of creating the certificate is a two step process – first the actual certificate is created and then it’s moved into the certificate store to become trusted. I’m not sure why you’d ever split these operations up since a cert created without trust isn’t going to be of much value, but there are two distinct steps. When you trigger the trustRootCert() method, a message box will pop up on the desktop that lets you know that you’re about to trust a local private certificate. This is a security feature to ensure that you really want to trust the Fiddler root since you are essentially installing a man in the middle certificate. It’s quite safe to use this generated root certificate, because it’s been specifically generated for your machine and thus is not usable from external sources, the only way to use this certificate in a trusted way is from the local machine. IOW, unless somebody has physical access to your machine, there’s no useful way to hijack this certificate and use it for nefarious purposes (see Eric’s post for more details). Once the Root certificate has been installed, FiddlerCore/Fiddler create new certificates for each site that is connected to with HTTPS. You can end up with quite a few temporary certificates in your certificate store. To uninstall you can either use Fiddler and simply uncheck the Decrypt HTTPS traffic option followed by the remove Fiddler certificates button, or you can use FiddlerCore’s CertMaker.removeFiddlerGeneratedCerts() which removes the root cert and any of the intermediary certificates Fiddler created. Keep in mind that when you uninstall you uninstall the certificate for both FiddlerCore and Fiddler, so use UninstallCertificate() with care and realize that you might affect the Fiddler application’s operation by doing so as well. When to check for an installed Certificate Note that the check to see if the root certificate exists is pretty fast, while the actual process of installing the certificate is a relatively slow operation that even on a fast machine takes a few seconds. Further the trust operation pops up a message box so you probably don’t want to install the certificate repeatedly. Since the check for the root certificate is fast, you can easily put a call to InstallCertificate() in any capture startup code – in which case the certificate installation only triggers when a certificate is in fact not installed. Personally I like to make certificate installation explicit – just like Fiddler does, so in WebSurge I use a small drop down option on the menu to install or uninstall the SSL certificate:   This code calls the InstallCertificate and UnInstallCertificate functions respectively – the experience with this is similar to what you get in Fiddler with the extra dialog box popping up to prompt confirmation for installation of the root certificate. Once the cert is installed you can then capture SSL requests. There’s a gotcha however… Gotcha: FiddlerCore Certificates don’t stick by Default When I originally tried to use the Fiddler certificate installation I ran into an odd problem. I was able to install the certificate and immediately after installation was able to capture HTTPS requests. Then I would exit the application and come back in and try the same HTTPS capture again and it would fail due to a missing certificate. CertMaker.rootCertExists() would return false after every restart and if re-installed the certificate a new certificate would get added to the certificate store resulting in a bunch of duplicated root certificates with different keys. What the heck? CertMaker and BcMakeCert create non-sticky CertificatesI turns out that FiddlerCore by default uses different components from what the full version of Fiddler uses. Fiddler uses a Windows utility called MakeCert.exe to create the Fiddler Root certificate. FiddlerCore however installs the CertMaker.dll and BCMakeCert.dll assemblies, which use a different crypto library (Bouncy Castle) for certificate creation than MakeCert.exe which uses the Windows Crypto API. The assemblies provide support for non-windows operation for Fiddler under Mono, as well as support for some non-Windows certificate platforms like iOS and Android for decryption. The bottom line is that the FiddlerCore provided bouncy castle assemblies are not sticky by default as the certificates created with them are not cached as they are in Fiddler proper. To get certificates to ‘stick’ you have to explicitly cache the certificates in Fiddler’s internal preferences. A cache aware version of InstallCertificate looks something like this:public static bool InstallCertificate() { if (!CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.createRootCert()) return false; if (!CertMaker.trustRootCert()) return false; App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert = FiddlerApplication.Prefs.GetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.cert", null); App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Key = FiddlerApplication.Prefs.GetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.key", null); } return true; } public static bool UninstallCertificate() { if (CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.removeFiddlerGeneratedCerts(true)) return false; } App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert = null; App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Key = null; return true; } In this code I store the Fiddler cert and private key in an application configuration settings that’s stored with the application settings (App.Configuration.UrlCapture object). These settings automatically persist when WebSurge is shut down. The values are read out of Fiddler’s internal preferences store which is set after a new certificate has been created. Likewise I clear out the configuration settings when the certificate is uninstalled. In order for these setting to be used you have to also load the configuration settings into the Fiddler preferences *before* a call to rootCertExists() is made. I do this in the capture form’s constructor:public FiddlerCapture(StressTestForm form) { InitializeComponent(); CaptureConfiguration = App.Configuration.UrlCapture; MainForm = form; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert)) { FiddlerApplication.Prefs.SetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.key", App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Key); FiddlerApplication.Prefs.SetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.cert", App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert); }} This is kind of a drag to do and not documented anywhere that I could find, so hopefully this will save you some grief if you want to work with the stock certificate logic that installs with FiddlerCore. MakeCert provides sticky Certificates and the same functionality as Fiddler But there’s actually an easier way. If you want to skip the above Fiddler preference configuration code in your application you can choose to distribute MakeCert.exe instead of certmaker.dll and bcmakecert.dll. When you use MakeCert.exe, the certificates settings are stored in Windows so they are available without any custom configuration inside of your application. It’s easier to integrate and as long as you run on Windows and you don’t need to support iOS or Android devices is simply easier to deal with. To integrate into your project, you can remove the reference to CertMaker.dll (and the BcMakeCert.dll assembly) from your project. Instead copy MakeCert.exe into your output folder. To make sure MakeCert.exe gets pushed out, include MakeCert.exe in your project and set the Build Action to None, and Copy to Output Directory to Copy if newer. Note that the CertMaker.dll reference in the project has been removed and on disk the files for Certmaker.dll, as well as the BCMakeCert.dll files on disk. Keep in mind that these DLLs are resources of the FiddlerCore NuGet package, so updating the package may end up pushing those files back into your project. Once MakeCert.exe is distributed FiddlerCore checks for it first before using the assemblies so as long as MakeCert.exe exists it’ll be used for certificate creation (at least on Windows). Summary FiddlerCore is a pretty sweet tool, and it’s absolutely awesome that we get to plug in most of the functionality of Fiddler right into our own applications. A few years back I tried to build this sort of functionality myself for an app and ended up giving up because it’s a big job to get HTTP right – especially if you need to support SSL. FiddlerCore now provides that functionality as a turnkey solution that can be plugged into your own apps easily. The only downside is FiddlerCore’s documentation for more advanced features like certificate installation which is pretty sketchy. While for the most part FiddlerCore’s feature set is easy to work with without any documentation, advanced features are often not intuitive to gleam by just using Intellisense or the FiddlerCore help file reference (which is not terribly useful). While Eric Lawrence is very responsive on his forum and on Twitter, there simply isn’t much useful documentation on Fiddler/FiddlerCore available online. If you run into trouble the forum is probably the first place to look and then ask a question if you can’t find the answer. The best documentation you can find is Eric’s Fiddler Book which covers a ton of functionality of Fiddler and FiddlerCore. The book is a great reference to Fiddler’s feature set as well as providing great insights into the HTTP protocol. The second half of the book that gets into the innards of HTTP is an excellent read for anybody who wants to know more about some of the more arcane aspects and special behaviors of HTTP – it’s well worth the read. While the book has tons of information in a very readable format, it’s unfortunately not a great reference as it’s hard to find things in the book and because it’s not available online you can’t electronically search for the great content in it. But it’s hard to complain about any of this given the obvious effort and love that’s gone into this awesome product for all of these years. A mighty big thanks to Eric Lawrence  for having created this useful tool that so many of us use all the time, and also to Telerik for picking up Fiddler/FiddlerCore and providing Eric the resources to support and improve this wonderful tool full time and keeping it free for all. Kudos! Resources FiddlerCore Download FiddlerCore NuGet Fiddler Capture Sample Form Fiddler Capture Form in West Wind WebSurge (GitHub) Eric Lawrence’s Fiddler Book© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in .NET  HTTP   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

    Read the article

  • Configuring IIS7 404 page when using IIS7 urlrewrite module

    - by Peter
    I've got custom errors to work for .aspx page like: www.domain.com/whateverdfdgdfg.aspx But, when no .aspx url is requested, (like http://www.domain.com/hfdkfdh4545) it results in an error: HTTP Error 404.0 - Not Found The resource you are looking for has been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable. I have this in my web.config: <customErrors mode="On" defaultRedirect="/error/1" redirectMode="ResponseRedirect"> <error statusCode="404" redirect="/404.aspx" /> </customErrors> 404.aspx exists, since the above DOES work when requesting non-existent .aspx pages... I also configured the errorpages in IIS7: Status code: 404 Path: /404.aspx Type: Execute URL Entry type: Local My websites application pool setting is "ASP.NET v4.0" Now why is this still not working?

    Read the article

facebook twitter digg google delicious technorati stumbleupon myspace wordpress linkedin gmail igoogle windows live tumblr viadeo yahoo buzz yahoo mail yahoo bookmarks favorites email print

< Previous Page | 475 476 477 478 479 480 481 482 483 484 485 486  | Next Page >