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• iOS Support with Windows Azure Mobile Services – now with Push Notifications

  - by ScottGu

  A few weeks ago I posted about a number of improvements to Windows Azure Mobile Services. One of these was the addition of an Objective-C client SDK that allows iOS developers to easily use Mobile Services for data and authentication.  Today I'm excited to announce a number of improvement to our iOS SDK and, most significantly, our new support for Push Notifications via APNS (Apple Push Notification Services).  This makes it incredibly easy to fire push notifications to your iOS users from Windows Azure Mobile Service scripts. Push Notifications via APNS We've provided two complete tutorials that take you step-by-step through the provisioning and setup process to enable your Windows Azure Mobile Service application with APNS (Apple Push Notification Services), including all of the steps required to configure your application for push in the Apple iOS provisioning portal: Getting started with Push Notifications - iOS Push notifications to users by using Mobile Services - iOS Once you've configured your application in the Apple iOS provisioning portal and uploaded the APNS push certificate to the Apple provisioning portal, it's just a matter of uploading your APNS push certificate to Mobile Services using the Windows Azure admin portal: Clicking the “upload” within the “Push” tab of your Mobile Service allows you to browse your local file-system and locate/upload your exported certificate.  As part of this you can also select whether you want to use the sandbox (dev) or production (prod) Apple service: Now, the code to send a push notification to your clients from within a Windows Azure Mobile Service is as easy as the code below: push.apns.send(deviceToken, {      alert: 'Toast: A new Mobile Services task.',      sound: 'default' }); This will cause Windows Azure Mobile Services to connect to APNS (Apple Push Notification Service) and send a notification to the iOS device you specified via the deviceToken: Check out our reference documentation for full details on how to use the new Windows Azure Mobile Services apns object to send your push notifications. Feedback Scripts An important part of working with any PNS (Push Notification Service) is handling feedback for expired device tokens and channels. This typically happens when your application is uninstalled from a particular device and can no longer receive your notifications. With Windows Notification Services you get an instant response from the HTTP server.  Apple’s Notification Services works in a slightly different way and provides an additional endpoint you can connect to poll for a list of expired tokens. As with all of the capabilities we integrate with Mobile Services, our goal is to allow developers to focus more on building their app and less on building infrastructure to support their ideas. Therefore we knew we had to provide a simple way for developers to integrate feedback from APNS on a regular basis.  This week’s update now includes a new screen in the portal that allows you to optionally provide a script to process your APNS feedback – and it will be executed by Mobile Services on an ongoing basis: This script is invoked periodically while your service is active. To poll the feedback endpoint you can simply call the apns object's getFeedback method from within this script: push.apns.getFeedback({       success: function(results) {           // results is an array of objects with a deviceToken and time properties      } }); This returns you a list of invalid tokens that can now be removed from your database. iOS Client SDK improvements Over the last month we've continued to work with a number of iOS advisors to make improvements to our Objective-C SDK. The SDK is being developed under an open source license (Apache 2.0) and is available on github. Many of the improvements are behind the scenes to improve performance and memory usage. However, one of the biggest improvements to our iOS Client API is the addition of an even easier login method.  Below is the Objective-C code you can now write to invoke it: [client loginWithProvider:@"twitter"                     onController:self                        animated:YES                      completion:^(MSUser *user, NSError *error) {      // if no error, you are now logged in via twitter }]; This code will automatically present and dismiss our login view controller as a modal dialog on the specified controller.  This does all the hard work for you and makes login via Twitter, Google, Facebook and Microsoft Account identities just a single line of code. My colleague Josh just posted a short video demonstrating these new features which I'd recommend checking out: Summary The above features are all now live in production and are available to use immediately.  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using Mobile Services today. Visit the Windows Azure Mobile Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with Mobile Services. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• GRUB is not Booting Correctly

  - by msknapp

  I have a PC with three hard disks. Windows 7 is installed on the first, Ubuntu 14.04 is installed on the third. After I re-booted, it went straight to Windows 7. So I tried explicitly telling my PC to boot using the third hard disk, but that just takes me to the grub rescue prompt. I followed Scott Severence's instructions here to try and recover. Essentially, I updated grub, reinstalled grub, and then updated it again. After re-booting, absolutely nothing had changed. So instead I tried using the boot-repair tool. In the past it had failed for me, saying that I had programs running and it could not unmount drives, when I was running nothing. I never figured out how to solve that problem, but it went away when I bought another hard drive and used that for my Ubuntu installation, I don't know why. In any case, I ran the boot-repair tool and this time it said it was successful. First time for everything right? I re-booted, only to be taken straight to the grub rescue prompt. So I changed my BIOS settings to use the third hard disk for boot start up. That is the same hard drive where I have Ubuntu and grub installed, and the same one that the grub-repair tool told me to use. It still took me straight to the grub rescue prompt. So I went from not being able to boot Ubuntu, to not being able to boot either OS installed on my system. Thanks boot-repair! Boot repair gave me this URL for future troubleshooting: http://paste.ubuntu.com/8131669 When I try to boot from the third hard disk, this is my console: Loading Operating System ... error: attempt to read or write outside of disk 'hd0'. Entering rescue mode... grub rescue> grub rescue> set cmdpath=(hd0) prefix=(hd0,gpt2)/boot/grub root=hd0,gpt2 grub rescue> ls (hd0) (hd0,gpt3) (hd0,gpt2) (hd0,gpt1) (hd1) (hd2) (hd2,gpt2) (hd2,gpt1) (hd3) Those values look correct to me. I have also experimented with changing some of those values, but 'insmod normal' always throws the same error. Somebody please tell me how to fix this. I have tried everything, reinstalling grub, and running boot-repair. =========================== Update: I think the problem might be that the ubuntu installer did not partition my hard disk correctly. I booted from live USB and then launched gparted and looked at how it partitioned things. This is what gparted says: Partition, File System, Size, Used, Unused, Flags /dev/sda1 (!), unknown, 1.00 MiB, ---, ---, bios_grub /dev/sda2, ext4, 2.71 TiB, 47.30 GiB, 2.67 TiB, /dev/sda3, linux-swap, 16.00 GiB, 0.00 B, 16.00 GiB, So that first line looks problematic. It is supposed to be the /boot partition. However, it was given only 1 MiB? I am assuming that MiB is actually supposed to mean megabyte, no idea why that 'i' is there. It also says the file system is unknown. I read the answer by andrew here, and he says he had to do a custom install, explicitly configuring the boot partition. So I think that maybe Ubuntu's installer has a bug in it, where it does not set up the boot partition correctly if you are not installing on the first hard disk in your computer. I am going to try reinstalling with a custom partition scheme. I read elsewhere (askubuntu won't let me post another link) that I don't even need a /boot partition any more. So instead of following Andrew's instructions ver batim, I'm first going to try having just two partitions: one for /, and another for my 16GB swap space. Both as primary partitions. The first will be formatted as ext4. If that doesn't work, I may try again using /boot. ======================== So I did my custom install with no /boot partition, and it did not work. When I rebooted, I had an error message saying that some address did not exist. So for the hundredth time, I booted from the live USB, and ran boot-repair. Now I get this message GPT detected. Please create a BIOS-Boot partition (>1MB, unformatted filesystem, bios_grub flag). This can be performed via tools such as Gparted. Then try again. I feel like I'm running in circles and nobody will help me.

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• NSObjectController confusion binding to a class property. Help!

  - by scottw

  Hi, I'm teaching myself cocoa and enjoying the experience most of the time. I have been struggling all day with a simple problem that google has let me down on. I have read the Cocoa Bindings Program Topics and think I grok it but still can't solve my issue. I have a very simple class called MTSong that has various properties. I have used @synthesize to create getter/setters and can use KVC to change properties. i.e in my app controller the following works: mySong = [[MTSong alloc]init]; [mySong setValue:@"2" forKey:@"version"]; In case I am doing something noddy in my class code MTSong.h is: #import <Foundation/Foundation.h> @interface MTSong : NSObject { NSNumber *version; NSString *name; } @property(readwrite, assign) NSNumber *version; @property(readwrite, assign) NSString *name; @end and MTSong.m is: #import "MTSong.h" @implementation MTSong - (id)init { [super init]; return self; } - (void)dealloc { [super dealloc]; } @synthesize version; @synthesize name; @end In Interface Builder I have a label (NSTextField) that I want to update whenever I use KVC to change the version of the song. I do the following: Drag NSObjectController object into the doc window and in the Inspector-Attributes I set: Mode: Class Class Name: MTSong Add a key called version and another called name Go to Inspector-Bindings-Controller Content Bind To: File's Owner (Not sure this is right...) Model Key Path: version Select the cell of the label and go to Inspector Bind to: Object Controller Controller Key: mySong Model Key Path: version I have attempted changing the Model Key Path in step 2 to "mySong" which makes more sense but the compiler complains. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Scott Update Post Comments I wasn't exposing mySong property so have changed my AppController.h to be: #import <Cocoa/Cocoa.h> @class MTSong; @interface AppController : NSObject { IBOutlet NSButton *start; IBOutlet NSTextField *tf; MTSong *mySong; } -(IBAction)convertFile:(id)sender; @end I suspect File's owner was wrong as I am not using a document based application and I need to bind to the AppController, so step 2 is now: Go to Inspector-Bindings-Controller Content Bind To: App Controller Model Key Path: mySong I needed to change 3. to Select the cell of the label and go to Inspector Bind to: Object Controller Controller Key: selection Model Key Path: version All compiles and is playing nice!

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• Singleton: How should it be used

  - by Loki Astari

  Edit: From another question I provided an answer that has links to a lot of questions/answers about singeltons: More info about singletons here: So I have read the thread Singletons: good design or a crutch? And the argument still rages. I see Singletons as a Design Pattern (good and bad). The problem with Singleton is not the Pattern but rather the users (sorry everybody). Everybody and their father thinks they can implement one correctly (and from the many interviews I have done, most people can't). Also because everybody thinks they can implement a correct Singleton they abuse the Pattern and use it in situations that are not appropriate (replacing global variables with Singletons!). So the main questions that need to be answered are: When should you use a Singleton How do you implement a Singleton correctly My hope for this article is that we can collect together in a single place (rather than having to google and search multiple sites) an authoritative source of when (and then how) to use a Singleton correctly. Also appropriate would be a list of Anti-Usages and common bad implementations explaining why they fail to work and for good implementations their weaknesses. So get the ball rolling: I will hold my hand up and say this is what I use but probably has problems. I like "Scott Myers" handling of the subject in his books "Effective C++" Good Situations to use Singletons (not many): Logging frameworks Thread recycling pools /* * C++ Singleton * Limitation: Single Threaded Design * See: http://www.aristeia.com/Papers/DDJ_Jul_Aug_2004_revised.pdf * For problems associated with locking in multi threaded applications * * Limitation: * If you use this Singleton (A) within a destructor of another Singleton (B) * This Singleton (A) must be fully constructed before the constructor of (B) * is called. */ class MySingleton { private: // Private Constructor MySingleton(); // Stop the compiler generating methods of copy the object MySingleton(MySingleton const& copy); // Not Implemented MySingleton& operator=(MySingleton const& copy); // Not Implemented public: static MySingleton& getInstance() { // The only instance // Guaranteed to be lazy initialized // Guaranteed that it will be destroyed correctly static MySingleton instance; return instance; } }; OK. Lets get some criticism and other implementations together. :-)

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• Render a view as a string

  - by Dan Atkinson

  Hi all! I'm wanting to output two different views (one as a string that will be sent as an email), and the other the page displayed to a user. Is this possible in ASP.NET MVC beta? I've tried multiple examples: RenderPartial to String in ASP.NET MVC Beta If I use this example, I receive the "Cannot redirect after HTTP headers have been sent.". MVC Framework: Capturing the output of a view If I use this, I seem to be unable to do a redirectToAction, as it tries to render a view that may not exist. If I do return the view, it is completely messed up and doesn't look right at all. Does anyone have any ideas/solutions to these issues i have, or have any suggestions for better ones? Many thanks! Below is an example. What I'm trying to do is create the GetViewForEmail method: public ActionResult OrderResult(string ref) { //Get the order Order order = OrderService.GetOrder(ref); //The email helper would do the meat and veg by getting the view as a string //Pass the control name (OrderResultEmail) and the model (order) string emailView = GetViewForEmail("OrderResultEmail", order); //Email the order out EmailHelper(order, emailView); return View("OrderResult", order); } Accepted answer from Tim Scott (changed and formatted a little by me): public virtual string RenderViewToString( ControllerContext controllerContext, string viewPath, string masterPath, ViewDataDictionary viewData, TempDataDictionary tempData) { Stream filter = null; ViewPage viewPage = new ViewPage(); //Right, create our view viewPage.ViewContext = new ViewContext(controllerContext, new WebFormView(viewPath, masterPath), viewData, tempData); //Get the response context, flush it and get the response filter. var response = viewPage.ViewContext.HttpContext.Response; response.Flush(); var oldFilter = response.Filter; try { //Put a new filter into the response filter = new MemoryStream(); response.Filter = filter; //Now render the view into the memorystream and flush the response viewPage.ViewContext.View.Render(viewPage.ViewContext, viewPage.ViewContext.HttpContext.Response.Output); response.Flush(); //Now read the rendered view. filter.Position = 0; var reader = new StreamReader(filter, response.ContentEncoding); return reader.ReadToEnd(); } finally { //Clean up. if (filter != null) { filter.Dispose(); } //Now replace the response filter response.Filter = oldFilter; } } Example usage Assuming a call from the controller to get the order confirmation email, passing the Site.Master location. string myString = RenderViewToString(this.ControllerContext, "~/Views/Order/OrderResultEmail.aspx", "~/Views/Shared/Site.Master", this.ViewData, this.TempData);

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• due at midnight - program compiles but has logic error(s)

  - by Leslie Laraia

  not sure why this program isn't working. it compiles, but doesn't provide the expected output. the input file is basically just this: Smith 80000 Jones 100000 Scott 75000 Washington 110000 Duffy 125000 Jacobs 67000 Here is the program: import java.io.File; import java.io.FileNotFoundException; import java.util.Scanner; /** * * @author Leslie */ public class Election { /** * @param args the command line arguments */ public static void main(String[] args) throws FileNotFoundException { // TODO code application logic here File inputFile = new File("C:\\Users\\Leslie\\Desktop\\votes.txt"); Scanner in = new Scanner(inputFile); int x = 0; String line = ""; Scanner lineScanner = new Scanner(line); line = in.nextLine(); while (in.hasNextLine()) { line = in.nextLine(); x++; } String[] senatorName = new String[x]; int[] votenumber = new int[x]; double[] votepercent = new double[x]; System.out.printf("%44s", "Election Results for State Senator"); System.out.println(); System.out.printf("%-22s", "Candidate"); //Prints the column headings to the screen System.out.printf("%22s", "Votes Received"); System.out.printf("%22s", "%of Total Votes"); int i; for(i=0; i<x; i++) { while(in.hasNextLine()) { line = in.nextLine(); String candidateName = lineScanner.next(); String candidate = candidateName.trim(); senatorName[i] = candidate; int votevalue = lineScanner.nextInt(); votenumber[i] = votevalue; } } votepercent = percentages(votenumber, x); for (i = 0; i < x; i++) { System.out.println(); System.out.printf("%-22s", senatorName[i]); System.out.printf("%22d", votenumber[i]); System.out.printf("%22.2f", votepercent[i]); System.out.println(); } } public static double [] percentages(int[] votenumber, int z) { double [] percentage = new double [z]; double total = 0; for (double element : votenumber) { total = total + element; } for(int i=0; i < votenumber.length; i++) { int y = votenumber[i]; percentage[i] = (y/total) * 100; } return percentage; } }

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• ASP.NET MVC 3 Hosting :: New Features in ASP.NET MVC 3

  - by mbridge

  Razor View Engine The Razor view engine is a new view engine option for ASP.NET MVC that supports the Razor templating syntax. The Razor syntax is a streamlined approach to HTML templating designed with the goal of being a code driven minimalist templating approach that builds on existing C#, VB.NET and HTML knowledge. The result of this approach is that Razor views are very lean and do not contain unnecessary constructs that get in the way of you and your code. ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 only supports C# Razor views which use the .cshtml file extension. VB.NET support will be enabled in later releases of ASP.NET MVC 3. For more information and examples, see Introducing “Razor” – a new view engine for ASP.NET on Scott Guthrie’s blog. Dynamic View and ViewModel Properties A new dynamic View property is available in views, which provides access to the ViewData object using a simpler syntax. For example, imagine two items are added to the ViewData dictionary in the Index controller action using code like the following: public ActionResult Index() {          ViewData["Title"] = "The Title";          ViewData["Message"] = "Hello World!"; } Those properties can be accessed in the Index view using code like this: <h2>View.Title</h2> <p>View.Message</p> There is also a new dynamic ViewModel property in the Controller class that lets you add items to the ViewData dictionary using a simpler syntax. Using the previous controller example, the two values added to the ViewData dictionary can be rewritten using the following code: public ActionResult Index() {     ViewModel.Title = "The Title";     ViewModel.Message = "Hello World!"; } “Add View” Dialog Box Supports Multiple View Engines The Add View dialog box in Visual Studio includes extensibility hooks that allow it to support multiple view engines, as shown in the following figure: Service Location and Dependency Injection Support ASP.NET MVC 3 introduces improved support for applying Dependency Injection (DI) via Inversion of Control (IoC) containers. ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 provides the following hooks for locating services and injecting dependencies: - Creating controller factories. - Creating controllers and setting dependencies. - Setting dependencies on view pages for both the Web Form view engine and the Razor view engine (for types that derive from ViewPage, ViewUserControl, ViewMasterPage, WebViewPage). - Setting dependencies on action filters. Using a Dependency Injection container is not required in order for ASP.NET MVC 3 to function properly. Global Filters ASP.NET MVC 3 allows you to register filters that apply globally to all controller action methods. Adding a filter to the global filters collection ensures that the filter runs for all controller requests. To register an action filter globally, you can make the following call in the Application_Start method in the Global.asax file: GlobalFilters.Filters.Add(new MyActionFilter()); The source of global action filters is abstracted by the new IFilterProvider interface, which can be registered manually or by using Dependency Injection. This allows you to provide your own source of action filters and choose at run time whether to apply a filter to an action in a particular request. New JsonValueProviderFactory Class The new JsonValueProviderFactory class allows action methods to receive JSON-encoded data and model-bind it to an action-method parameter. This is useful in scenarios such as client templating. Client templates enable you to format and display a single data item or set of data items by using a fragment of HTML. ASP.NET MVC 3 lets you connect client templates easily with an action method that both returns and receives JSON data. Support for .NET Framework 4 Validation Attributes and IvalidatableObject The ValidationAttribute class was improved in the .NET Framework 4 to enable richer support for validation. When you write a custom validation attribute, you can use a new IsValid overload that provides a ValidationContext instance. This instance provides information about the current validation context, such as what object is being validated. This change enables scenarios such as validating the current value based on another property of the model. The following example shows a sample custom attribute that ensures that the value of PropertyOne is always larger than the value of PropertyTwo: public class CompareValidationAttribute : ValidationAttribute {     protected override ValidationResult IsValid(object value,              ValidationContext validationContext) {         var model = validationContext.ObjectInstance as SomeModel;         if (model.PropertyOne > model.PropertyTwo) {            return ValidationResult.Success;         }         return new ValidationResult("PropertyOne must be larger than PropertyTwo");     } } Validation in ASP.NET MVC also supports the .NET Framework 4 IValidatableObject interface. This interface allows your model to perform model-level validation, as in the following example: public class SomeModel : IValidatableObject {     public int PropertyOne { get; set; }     public int PropertyTwo { get; set; }     public IEnumerable<ValidationResult> Validate(ValidationContext validationContext) {         if (PropertyOne <= PropertyTwo) {            yield return new ValidationResult(                "PropertyOne must be larger than PropertyTwo");         }     } } New IClientValidatable Interface The new IClientValidatable interface allows the validation framework to discover at run time whether a validator has support for client validation. This interface is designed to be independent of the underlying implementation; therefore, where you implement the interface depends on the validation framework in use. For example, for the default data annotations-based validator, the interface would be applied on the validation attribute. Support for .NET Framework 4 Metadata Attributes ASP.NET MVC 3 now supports .NET Framework 4 metadata attributes such as DisplayAttribute. New IMetadataAware Interface The new IMetadataAware interface allows you to write attributes that simplify how you can contribute to the ModelMetadata creation process. Before this interface was available, you needed to write a custom metadata provider in order to have an attribute provide extra metadata. This interface is consumed by the AssociatedMetadataProvider class, so support for the IMetadataAware interface is automatically inherited by all classes that derive from that class (notably, the DataAnnotationsModelMetadataProvider class). New Action Result Types In ASP.NET MVC 3, the Controller class includes two new action result types and corresponding helper methods. HttpNotFoundResult Action The new HttpNotFoundResult action result is used to indicate that a resource requested by the current URL was not found. The status code is 404. This class derives from HttpStatusCodeResult. The Controller class includes an HttpNotFound method that returns an instance of this action result type, as shown in the following example: public ActionResult List(int id) {     if (id < 0) {                 return HttpNotFound();     }     return View(); } HttpStatusCodeResult Action The new HttpStatusCodeResult action result is used to set the response status code and description. Permanent Redirect The HttpRedirectResult class has a new Boolean Permanent property that is used to indicate whether a permanent redirect should occur. A permanent redirect uses the HTTP 301 status code. Corresponding to this change, the Controller class now has several methods for performing permanent redirects: - RedirectPermanent - RedirectToRoutePermanent - RedirectToActionPermanent These methods return an instance of HttpRedirectResult with the Permanent property set to true. Breaking Changes The order of execution for exception filters has changed for exception filters that have the same Order value. In ASP.NET MVC 2 and earlier, exception filters on the controller with the same Order as those on an action method were executed before the exception filters on the action method. This would typically be the case when exception filters were applied without a specified order Order value. In MVC 3, this order has been reversed in order to allow the most specific exception handler to execute first. As in earlier versions, if the Order property is explicitly specified, the filters are run in the specified order. Known Issues When you are editing a Razor view (CSHTML file), the Go To Controller menu item in Visual Studio will not be available, and there are no code snippets.

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• Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 and WCF RIA Services Released

  - by ScottGu

  The final release of the Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 and WCF RIA Services is now available for download.  Download and Install If you already have Visual Studio 2010 installed (or the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express), then you can install both the Silverlight 4 Tooling Support as well as WCF RIA Services support by downloading and running this setup package (note: please make sure to uninstall the preview release of the Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 if you have previously installed that).  The Silverlight 4 Tools for VS 2010 package extends the Silverlight support built into Visual Studio 2010 and enables support for Silverlight 4 applications as well.  It also installs WCF RIA Services application templates and libraries: Today’s release includes the English edition of the Silverlight 4 Tooling – localized versions will be available next month for other Visual Studio languages as well. Silverlight Tooling Support Visual Studio 2010 includes rich tooling support for building Silverlight and WPF applications. It includes a WYSIWYG designer surface that enables you to easily use controls to construct UI – including the ability to take advantage of layout containers, and apply styles and resources: The VS 2010 designer enables you to leverage the rich data binding support within Silverlight and WPF, and easily wire-up bindings on controls.  The Data Sources window within Silverlight projects can be used to reference POCO objects (plain old CLR objects), WCF Services, WCF RIA Services client proxies or SharePoint Lists.  For example, let’s assume we add a “Person” class like below to our project: We could then add it to the Data Source window which will cause it to show up like below in the IDE: We can optionally customize the default UI control types that are associated for each property on the object.  For example, below we’ll default the BirthDate property to be represented by a “DatePicker” control: And then when we drag/drop the Person type from the Data Sources onto the design-surface it will automatically create UI controls that are bound to the properties of our Person class: VS 2010 allows you to optionally customize each UI binding further by selecting a control, and then right-click on any of its properties within the property-grid and pull up the “Apply Bindings” dialog: This will bring up a floating data-binding dialog that enables you to easily configure things like the binding path on the data source object, specify a format convertor, specify string-format settings, specify how validation errors should be handled, etc: In addition to providing WYSIWYG designer support for WPF and Silverlight applications, VS 2010 also provides rich XAML intellisense and code editing support – enabling a rich source editing environment. Silverlight 4 Tool Enhancements Today’s Silverlight 4 Tooling Release for VS 2010 includes a bunch of nice new features.  These include: Support for Silverlight Out of Browser Applications and Elevated Trust Applications You can open up a Silverlight application’s project properties window and click the “Enable Running Application Out of Browser” checkbox to enable you to install an offline, out of browser, version of your Silverlight 4 application.  You can then customize a number of “out of browser” settings of your application within Visual Studio: Notice above how you can now indicate that you want to run with elevated trust, with hardware graphics acceleration, as well as customize things like the Window style of the application (allowing you to build a nice polished window style for consumer applications). Support for Implicit Styles and “Go to Value Definition” Support: Silverlight 4 now allows you to define “implicit styles” for your applications.  This allows you to style controls by type (for example: have a default look for all buttons) and avoid you having to explicitly reference styles from each control.  In addition to honoring implicit styles on the designer-surface, VS 2010 also now allows you to right click on any control (or on one of it properties) and choose the “Go to Value Definition…” context menu to jump to the XAML where the style is defined, and from there you can easily navigate onward to any referenced resources.  This makes it much easier to figure out questions like “why is my button red?”: Style Intellisense VS 2010 enables you to easily modify styles you already have in XAML, and now you get intellisense for properties and their values within a style based on the TargetType of the specified control.  For example, below we have a style being set for controls of type “Button” (this is indicated by the “TargetType” property).  Notice how intellisense now automatically shows us properties for the Button control (even within the <Setter> element): Great Video - Watch the Silverlight Designer Features in Action You can see all of the above Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 features (and some more cool ones I haven’t mentioned) demonstrated in action within this 20 minute Silverlight.TV video on Channel 9: WCF RIA Services Today we also shipped the V1 release of WCF RIA Services.  It is included and automatically installed as part of the Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 setup. WCF RIA Services makes it much easier to build business applications with Silverlight.  It simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms using the power of WCF for communication.  WCF RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to data for queries, changes and custom operations. It also provides end-to-end support for common tasks such as data validation, authentication and authorization based on roles by integrating with Silverlight components on the client and ASP.NET on the mid-tier. Put simply – it makes it much easier to query data stored on a server from a client machine, optionally manipulate/modify the data on the client, and then save it back to the server.  It supports a validation architecture that helps ensure that your data is kept secure and business rules are applied consistently on both the client and middle-tiers. WCF RIA Services uses WCF for communication between the client and the server  It supports both an optimized .NET to .NET binary serialization format, as well as a set of open extensions to the ATOM format known as ODATA and an optional JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format that can be used by any client. You can hear Nikhil and Dinesh talk a little about WCF RIA Services in this 13 minutes Channel 9 video. Putting it all Together – the Silverlight 4 Training Kit Check out the Silverlight 4 Training Kit to learn more about how to build business applications with Silverlight 4, Visual Studio 2010 and WCF RIA Services. The training kit includes 8 modules, 25 videos, and several hands-on labs that explain Silverlight 4 and WCF RIA Services concepts and walks you through building an end-to-end application with them.    The training kit is available for free and is a great way to get started. Summary I’m really excited about today’s release – as they really complete the Silverlight development story and deliver a great end to end runtime + tooling story for building applications.  All of the above features are available for use both in VS 2010 as well as the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express Edition – making it really easy to get started building great solutions. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• ASP.NET MVC 3: Implicit and Explicit code nuggets with Razor

  - by ScottGu

  This is another in a series of posts I’m doing that cover some of the new ASP.NET MVC 3 features: New @model keyword in Razor (Oct 19th) Layouts with Razor (Oct 22nd) Server-Side Comments with Razor (Nov 12th) Razor’s @: and <text> syntax (Dec 15th) Implicit and Explicit code nuggets with Razor (today) In today’s post I’m going to discuss how Razor enables you to both implicitly and explicitly define code nuggets within your view templates, and walkthrough some code examples of each of them.  Fluid Coding with Razor ASP.NET MVC 3 ships with a new view-engine option called “Razor” (in addition to the existing .aspx view engine).  You can learn more about Razor, why we are introducing it, and the syntax it supports from my Introducing Razor blog post. Razor minimizes the number of characters and keystrokes required when writing a view template, and enables a fast, fluid coding workflow. Unlike most template syntaxes, you do not need to interrupt your coding to explicitly denote the start and end of server blocks within your HTML. The Razor parser is smart enough to infer this from your code. This enables a compact and expressive syntax which is clean, fast and fun to type. For example, the Razor snippet below can be used to iterate a collection of products and output a <ul> list of product names that link to their corresponding product pages: When run, the above code generates output like below: Notice above how we were able to embed two code nuggets within the content of the foreach loop.  One of them outputs the name of the Product, and the other embeds the ProductID within a hyperlink.  Notice that we didn’t have to explicitly wrap these code-nuggets - Razor was instead smart enough to implicitly identify where the code began and ended in both of these situations.  How Razor Enables Implicit Code Nuggets Razor does not define its own language.  Instead, the code you write within Razor code nuggets is standard C# or VB.  This allows you to re-use your existing language skills, and avoid having to learn a customized language grammar. The Razor parser has smarts built into it so that whenever possible you do not need to explicitly mark the end of C#/VB code nuggets you write.  This makes coding more fluid and productive, and enables a nice, clean, concise template syntax.  Below are a few scenarios that Razor supports where you can avoid having to explicitly mark the beginning/end of a code nugget, and instead have Razor implicitly identify the code nugget scope for you: Property Access Razor allows you to output a variable value, or a sub-property on a variable that is referenced via “dot” notation: You can also use “dot” notation to access sub-properties multiple levels deep: Array/Collection Indexing: Razor allows you to index into collections or arrays: Calling Methods: Razor also allows you to invoke methods: Notice how for all of the scenarios above how we did not have to explicitly end the code nugget.  Razor was able to implicitly identify the end of the code block for us. Razor’s Parsing Algorithm for Code Nuggets The below algorithm captures the core parsing logic we use to support “@” expressions within Razor, and to enable the implicit code nugget scenarios above: Parse an identifier - As soon as we see a character that isn't valid in a C# or VB identifier, we stop and move to step 2 Check for brackets - If we see "(" or "[", go to step 2.1., otherwise, go to step 3  Parse until the matching ")" or "]" (we track nested "()" and "[]" pairs and ignore "()[]" we see in strings or comments) Go back to step 2 Check for a "." - If we see one, go to step 3.1, otherwise, DO NOT ACCEPT THE "." as code, and go to step 4 If the character AFTER the "." is a valid identifier, accept the "." and go back to step 1, otherwise, go to step 4 Done! Differentiating between code and content Step 3.1 is a particularly interesting part of the above algorithm, and enables Razor to differentiate between scenarios where an identifier is being used as part of the code statement, and when it should instead be treated as static content: Notice how in the snippet above we have ? and ! characters at the end of our code nuggets.  These are both legal C# identifiers – but Razor is able to implicitly identify that they should be treated as static string content as opposed to being part of the code expression because there is whitespace after them.  This is pretty cool and saves us keystrokes. Explicit Code Nuggets in Razor Razor is smart enough to implicitly identify a lot of code nugget scenarios.  But there are still times when you want/need to be more explicit in how you scope the code nugget expression.  The @(expression) syntax allows you to do this: You can write any C#/VB code statement you want within the @() syntax.  Razor will treat the wrapping () characters as the explicit scope of the code nugget statement.  Below are a few scenarios where we could use the explicit code nugget feature: Perform Arithmetic Calculation/Modification: You can perform arithmetic calculations within an explicit code nugget: Appending Text to a Code Expression Result: You can use the explicit expression syntax to append static text at the end of a code nugget without having to worry about it being incorrectly parsed as code: Above we have embedded a code nugget within an <img> element’s src attribute.  It allows us to link to images with URLs like “/Images/Beverages.jpg”.  Without the explicit parenthesis, Razor would have looked for a “.jpg” property on the CategoryName (and raised an error).  By being explicit we can clearly denote where the code ends and the text begins. Using Generics and Lambdas Explicit expressions also allow us to use generic types and generic methods within code expressions – and enable us to avoid the <> characters in generics from being ambiguous with tag elements. One More Thing….Intellisense within Attributes We have used code nuggets within HTML attributes in several of the examples above.  One nice feature supported by the Razor code editor within Visual Studio is the ability to still get VB/C# intellisense when doing this. Below is an example of C# code intellisense when using an implicit code nugget within an <a> href=”” attribute: Below is an example of C# code intellisense when using an explicit code nugget embedded in the middle of a <img> src=”” attribute: Notice how we are getting full code intellisense for both scenarios – despite the fact that the code expression is embedded within an HTML attribute (something the existing .aspx code editor doesn’t support).  This makes writing code even easier, and ensures that you can take advantage of intellisense everywhere. Summary Razor enables a clean and concise templating syntax that enables a very fluid coding workflow.  Razor’s ability to implicitly scope code nuggets reduces the amount of typing you need to perform, and leaves you with really clean code. When necessary, you can also explicitly scope code expressions using a @(expression) syntax to provide greater clarity around your intent, as well as to disambiguate code statements from static markup. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Anunciando Windows Azure Mobile Services (Serviços Móveis da Windows Azure)

  - by Leniel Macaferi

  Estou animado para anunciar uma nova capacidade que estamos adicionando à Windows Azure hoje: Windows Azure Mobile Services (Serviços Móveis da Windows Azure) Os Serviços Móveis da Windows Azure tornam incrivelmente fácil conectar um backend da nuvem escalável em suas aplicações clientes e móveis. Estes serviços permitem que você facilmente armazene dados estruturados na nuvem que podem abranger dispositivos e usuários, integrando tais dados com autenticação do usuário. Você também pode enviar atualizações para os clientes através de notificações push. O lançamento de hoje permite que você adicione essas capacidades em qualquer aplicação Windows 8 em literalmente minutos, e fornece uma maneira super produtiva para que você transforme rapidamente suas ideias em aplicações. Também vamos adicionar suporte para permitir esses mesmos cenários para o Windows Phone, iOS e dispositivos Android em breve. Leia este tutorial inicial (em Inglês) que mostra como você pode construir (em menos de 5 minutos) uma simples aplicação Windows 8 "Todo List" (Lista de Tarefas) que é habilitada para a nuvem usando os Serviços Móveis da Windows Azure. Ou assista este vídeo (em Inglês) onde mostro como construí-la passo a passo. Começando Se você ainda não possui uma conta na Windows Azure, você pode se inscrever usando uma assinatura gratuita sem compromisso. Uma vez inscrito, clique na seção "preview features" logo abaixo da tab "account" (conta) no website www.windowsazure.com e ative sua conta para ter acesso ao preview dos "Mobile Services" (Serviços Móveis). Instruções sobre como ativar estes novos recursos podem ser encontradas aqui (em Inglês). Depois de habilitar os Serviços Móveis, entre no Portal da Windows Azure, clique no botão "New" (Novo) e escolha o novo ícone "Mobile Services" (Serviços Móveis) para criar o seu primeiro backend móvel. Uma vez criado, você verá uma página de início rápido como a mostrada a seguir com instruções sobre como conectar o seu serviço móvel a uma aplicação Windows 8 cliente já existente, a qual você já tenha começado a implementar, ou como criar e conectar uma nova aplicação Windows 8 cliente ao backend móvel: Leia este tutorial inicial (em Inglês) com explicações passo a passo sobre como construir (em menos de 5 minutos) uma simples aplicação Windows 8 "Todo List" (Lista de Tarefas) que armazena os dados na Windows Azure. Armazenamento Dados na Nuvem Armazenar dados na nuvem com os Serviços Móveis da Windows Azure é incrivelmente fácil. Quando você cria um Serviço Móvel da Windows Azure, nós automaticamente o associamos com um banco de dados SQL dentro da Windows Azure. O backend do Serviço Móvel da Windows Azure então fornece suporte nativo para permitir que aplicações remotas armazenem e recuperem dados com segurança através dele (usando end-points REST seguros, através de um formato OData baseado em JSON) - sem que você tenha que escrever ou implantar qualquer código personalizado no servidor. Suporte integrado para o gerenciamento do backend é fornecido dentro do Portal da Windows Azure para a criação de novas tabelas, navegação pelos dados, criação de índices, e controle de permissões de acesso. Isto torna incrivelmente fácil conectar aplicações clientes na nuvem, e permite que os desenvolvedores de aplicações desktop que não têm muito conhecimento sobre código que roda no servidor sejam produtivos desde o início. Eles podem se concentrar na construção da experiência da aplicação cliente, tirando vantagem dos Serviços Móveis da Windows Azure para fornecer os serviços de backend da nuvem que se façam necessários.  A seguir está um exemplo de código Windows 8 C#/XAML do lado do cliente que poderia ser usado para consultar os dados de um Serviço Móvel da Windows Azure. Desenvolvedores de aplicações que rodam no cliente e que usam C# podem escrever consultas como esta usando LINQ e objetos fortemente tipados POCO, os quais serão mais tarde traduzidos em consultas HTTP REST que são executadas em um Serviço Móvel da Windows Azure. Os desenvolvedores não precisam escrever ou implantar qualquer código personalizado no lado do servidor para permitir que o código do lado do cliente mostrado a seguir seja executado de forma assíncrona preenchendo a interface (UI) do cliente: Como os Serviços Móveis fazem parte da Windows Azure, os desenvolvedores podem escolher mais tarde se querem aumentar ou estender sua solução adicionando funcionalidades no lado do servidor bem como lógica de negócio mais avançada, se quiserem. Isso proporciona o máximo de flexibilidade, e permite que os desenvolvedores ampliem suas soluções para atender qualquer necessidade. Autenticação do Usuário e Notificações Push Os Serviços Móveis da Windows Azure também tornam incrivelmente fácil integrar autenticação/autorização de usuários e notificações push em suas aplicações. Você pode usar esses recursos para habilitar autenticação e controlar as permissões de acesso aos dados que você armazena na nuvem de uma maneira granular. Você também pode enviar notificações push para os usuários/dispositivos quando os dados são alterados. Os Serviços Móveis da Windows Azure suportam o conceito de "scripts do servidor" (pequenos pedaços de script que são executados no servidor em resposta a ações), os quais tornam a habilitação desses cenários muito fácil. A seguir estão links para alguns tutoriais (em Inglês) no formato passo a passo para cenários comuns de autenticação/autorização/push que você pode utilizar com os Serviços Móveis da Windows Azure e aplicações Windows 8: Habilitando Autenticação do Usuário Autorizando Usuários  Começando com Push Notifications Push Notifications para múltiplos Usuários Gerencie e Monitore seu Serviço Móvel Assim como todos os outros serviços na Windows Azure, você pode monitorar o uso e as métricas do backend de seu Serviço Móvel usando a tab "Dashboard" dentro do Portal da Windows Azure. A tab Dashboard fornece uma visão de monitoramento que mostra as chamadas de API, largura de banda e ciclos de CPU do servidor consumidos pelo seu Serviço Móvel da Windows Azure. Você também usar a tab "Logs" dentro do portal para ver mensagens de erro.  Isto torna fácil monitorar e controlar como sua aplicação está funcionando. Aumente a Capacidade de acordo com o Crescimento do Seu Negócio Os Serviços Móveis da Windows Azure agora permitem que cada cliente da Windows Azure crie e execute até 10 Serviços Móveis de forma gratuita, em um ambiente de hospedagem compartilhado com múltiplos banco de dados (onde o backend do seu Serviço Móvel será um dos vários aplicativos sendo executados em um conjunto compartilhado de recursos do servidor). Isso fornece uma maneira fácil de começar a implementar seus projetos sem nenhum custo algum (nota: cada conta gratuita da Windows Azure também inclui um banco de dados SQL de 1GB que você pode usar com qualquer número de aplicações ou Serviços Móveis da Windows Azure). Se sua aplicação cliente se tornar popular, você pode clicar na tab "Scale" (Aumentar Capacidade) do seu Serviço Móvel e mudar de "Shared" (Compartilhado) para o modo "Reserved" (Reservado). Isso permite que você possa isolar suas aplicações de maneira que você seja o único cliente dentro de uma máquina virtual. Isso permite que você dimensione elasticamente a quantidade de recursos que suas aplicações consomem - permitindo que você aumente (ou diminua) sua capacidade de acordo com o tráfego de dados: Com a Windows Azure você paga por capacidade de processamento por hora - o que te permite dimensionar para cima e para baixo seus recursos para atender apenas o que você precisa. Isso permite um modelo super flexível que é ideal para novos cenários de aplicações móveis, bem como para novas empresas que estão apenas começando. Resumo Eu só toquei na superfície do que você pode fazer com os Serviços Móveis da Windows Azure - há muito mais recursos para explorar. Com os Serviços Móveis da Windows Azure, você será capaz de construir cenários de aplicações móveis mais rápido do que nunca, permitindo experiências de usuário ainda melhores - conectando suas aplicações clientes na nuvem. Visite o centro de desenvolvimento dos Serviços Móveis da Windows Azure (em Inglês) para aprender mais, e construa sua primeira aplicação Windows 8 conectada à Windows Azure hoje. E leia este tutorial inicial (em Inglês) com explicações passo a passo que mostram como você pode construir (em menos de 5 minutos) uma simples aplicação Windows 8 "Todo List" (Lista de Tarefas) habilitada para a nuvem usando os Serviços Móveis da Windows Azure. Espero que ajude, - Scott P.S. Além do blog, eu também estou utilizando o Twitter para atualizações rápidas e para compartilhar links. Siga-me em: twitter.com/ScottGu Texto traduzido do post original por Leniel Macaferi.

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• Upgrading Windows 8 boot to VHD to Windows 8.1&ndash;Step by step guide

  - by Liam Westley

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/twickers/archive/2013/10/19/upgrading-windows-8-boot-to-vhd-to-windows-8.1ndashstep-by.aspxBoot to VHD – dual booting Windows 7 and Windows 8 became easy When Windows 8 arrived, quite a few people decided that they would still dual boot their machines, and instead of mucking about with resizing disk partitions to free up space for Windows 8 they decided to use the boot from VHD feature to create a huge hard disc image into which Windows 8 could be installed.  Scott Hanselman wrote this installation guide, while I myself used the installation guide from Ed Bott of ZD net fame. Boot to VHD is a great solution, it achieves a dual boot, can be backed up easily and had virtually no effect on the original Windows 7 partition. As a developer who has dual booted Windows operating systems for years, hacking boot.ini files, the boot to VHD was a much easier solution. Upgrade to Windows 8.1 – ah, you can’t do that on a virtual disk installation (boot to VHD) Last week the final version of Windows 8.1 arrived, and I went into the Windows Store to upgrade.  Luckily I’m on a fast download service, and use an SSD, because once the upgrade was downloaded and prepared Windows informed that This PC can’t run Windows 8.1, and provided the reason, You can’t install Windows on a virtual drive.  You can see an image of the message and discussion that sparked my search for a solution in this Microsoft Technet forum post. I was determined not to have to resize partitions yet again and fiddle with VHD to disk utilities and back again, and in the end I did succeed in upgrading to a Windows 8.1 boot to VHD partition.  It takes quite a bit of effort though … tldr; Simple steps of how you upgrade Boot into Windows 7 – make a copy of your Windows 8 VHD, to become Windows 8.1 Enable Hyper-V in your Windows 8 (the original boot to VHD partition) Create a new virtual machine, attaching the copy of your Windows 8 VHD Start the virtual machine, upgrade it via the Windows Store to Windows 8.1 Shutdown the virtual machine Boot into Windows 7 – use the bcedit tool to create a new Windows 8.1 boot to VHD option (pointing at the copy) Boot into the new Windows 8.1 option Reactivate Windows 8.1 (it will have become deactivated by running under Hyper-V) Remove the original Windows 8 VHD, and in Windows 7 use bcedit to remove it from the boot menu Things you’ll need A system that can run Hyper-V under Windows 8 (Intel i5, i7 class CPU) Enough space to have your original Windows 8 boot to VHD and a copy at the same time An ISO or DVD for Windows 8 to create a bootable Windows 8 partition Step by step guide Boot to your base o/s, the real one, Windows 7. Make a copy of the Windows 8 VHD file that you use to boot Windows 8 (via boot from VHD) – I copied it from a folder on C: called VHD-Win8 to VHD-Win8.1 on my N: drive. Reboot your system into Windows 8, and enable Hyper-V if not already present (this may require reboot) Use the Hyper-V manager , create a new Hyper-V machine, using half your system memory, and use the option to attach an existing VHD on the main IDE controller – this will be the new copy you made in Step 2. Start the virtual machine, use Connect to view it, and you’ll probably discover it cannot boot as there is no boot record If this is the case, go to Hyper-V manager, edit the Settings for the virtual machine to attach an ISO of a Windows 8 DVD to the second IDE controller. Start the virtual machine, use Connect to view it, and it should now attempt a fresh installation of Windows 8.  You should select Advanced Options and choose Repair - this will make VHD bootable When the setup reboots your virtual machine, turn off the virtual machine, and remove the ISO of the Windows 8 DVD from the virtual machine settings. Start virtual machine, use Connect to view it.  You will see the devices to be re-discovered (including your quad CPU becoming single CPU).  Eventually you should see the Windows Login screen. You may notice that your desktop background (Win+D) will have turned black as your Windows installation has become deactivate due to the hardware changes between your real PC and Hyper-V. Fortunately becoming deactivated, does not stop you using the Windows Store, where you can select the update to Windows 8.1. You can now watch the progress joy of the Windows 8 update; downloading, preparing to update, checking compatibility, gathering info, preparing to restart, and finally, confirm restart - remember that you are restarting your virtual machine sitting on the copy of the VHD, not the Windows 8 boot to VHD you are currently using to run Hyper-V (confused yet?) After the reboot you get the real upgrade messages; setting up x%, xx%, (quite slow) After a while, Getting ready Applying PC Settings x%, xx% (really slow) Updating your system (fast) Setting up a few more things x%, (quite slow) Getting ready, again Accept license terms Express settings Confirmed previous password Next, I had to set up a Microsoft account – which is possibly now required, and not optional Using the Microsoft account required a 2 factor authorization, via text message, a 7 digit code for me Finalising settings Blank screen, HI .. We're setting up things for you (similar to original Windows 8 install) 'You can get new apps from the Store', below which is ’Installing your apps’ - I had Windows Media Center which is counts as an app from the Store ‘Taking care of a few things’, below which is ‘Installing your apps’ ‘Taking care of a few things’, below ‘Don't turn off your PC’ ‘Getting your apps ready’, below ‘Don't turn off your PC’ ‘Almost ready’, below ‘Don't turn off your PC’ … finally, we get the Windows 8.1 start menu, and a quick Win+D to check the desktop confirmed all the application icons I expected, pinned items on the taskbar, and one app moaning about a missing drive At this point the upgrade is complete – you can shutdown the virtual machine Reboot from the original Windows 8 and return to Windows 7 to configure booting to the Windows 8.1 copy of the VHD In an administrator command prompt do following use the bcdedit tool (from an MSDN blog about configuring VHD to boot in Windows 7) Type bcedit to list the current boot options, so you can copy the GUID (complete with brackets/braces) for the original Windows 8 boot to VHD Create a new menu option, copy of the Windows 8 option; bcdedit /copy {originalguid} /d "Windows 8.1" Point the new Windows 8.1 option to the copy of the VHD; bcdedit /set {newguid} device vhd=[D:]\Image.vhd Point the new Windows 8.1 option to the copy of the VHD; bcdedit /set {newguid} osdevice vhd=[D:]\Image.vhd Set autodetection of the HAL (may already be set); bcdedit /set {newguid} detecthal on Reboot from Windows 7 and select the new option 'Windows 8.1' on the boot menu, and you’ll have some messages to look at, as your hardware is redetected (as you are back from 1 CPU to 4 CPUs) ‘Getting devices ready, blank then %xx, with occasional blank screen, for the graphics driver, (fast-ish) Getting Ready message (fast) You will have to suffer one final reboots, choose 'Windows 8.1' and you can now login to a lovely Windows 8.1 start screen running on non virtualized hardware via boot to VHD After checking everything is running fine, you can now choose to Activate Windows, which for me was a toll free phone call to the automated system where you type in lots of numbers to be given a whole bunch of new activation codes. Once you’re happy with your new Windows 8.1 boot to VHD, and no longer need the Windows 8 boot to VHD, feel free to delete the old one.  I do believe once you upgrade, you are no longer licensed to use it anyway. There, that was simple wasn’t it? Looking at the huge list of steps it took to perform this upgrade, you may wonder whether I think this is worth it.  Well, I think it is worth booting to VHD.  It makes backups a snap (go to Windows 7, copy the VHD, you backed up the o/s) and helps with disk management – want to move the o/s, you can move the VHD and repoint the boot menu to the new location. The downside is that Microsoft has complete neglected to support boot to VHD as an upgradable option.  Quite a poor decision in my opinion, and if you read twitter and the forums quite a few people agree with that view.  It’s a shame this got missed in the work on creating the upgrade packages for Windows 8.1.

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• Class-Level Model Validation with EF Code First and ASP.NET MVC 3

  - by ScottGu

  Earlier this week the data team released the CTP5 build of the new Entity Framework Code-First library.  In my blog post a few days ago I talked about a few of the improvements introduced with the new CTP5 build.  Automatic support for enforcing DataAnnotation validation attributes on models was one of the improvements I discussed.  It provides a pretty easy way to enable property-level validation logic within your model layer. You can apply validation attributes like [Required], [Range], and [RegularExpression] – all of which are built-into .NET 4 – to your model classes in order to enforce that the model properties are valid before they are persisted to a database.  You can also create your own custom validation attributes (like this cool [CreditCard] validator) and have them be automatically enforced by EF Code First as well.  This provides a really easy way to validate property values on your models.  I showed some code samples of this in action in my previous post. Class-Level Model Validation using IValidatableObject DataAnnotation attributes provides an easy way to validate individual property values on your model classes.  Several people have asked - “Does EF Code First also support a way to implement class-level validation methods on model objects, for validation rules than need to span multiple property values?”  It does – and one easy way you can enable this is by implementing the IValidatableObject interface on your model classes. IValidatableObject.Validate() Method Below is an example of using the IValidatableObject interface (which is built-into .NET 4 within the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace) to implement two custom validation rules on a Product model class.  The two rules ensure that: New units can’t be ordered if the Product is in a discontinued state New units can’t be ordered if there are already more than 100 units in stock We will enforce these business rules by implementing the IValidatableObject interface on our Product class, and by implementing its Validate() method like so: The IValidatableObject.Validate() method can apply validation rules that span across multiple properties, and can yield back multiple validation errors. Each ValidationResult returned can supply both an error message as well as an optional list of property names that caused the violation (which is useful when displaying error messages within UI). Automatic Validation Enforcement EF Code-First (starting with CTP5) now automatically invokes the Validate() method when a model object that implements the IValidatableObject interface is saved.  You do not need to write any code to cause this to happen – this support is now enabled by default. This new support means that the below code – which violates one of our above business rules – will automatically throw an exception (and abort the transaction) when we call the “SaveChanges()” method on our Northwind DbContext: In addition to reactively handling validation exceptions, EF Code First also allows you to proactively check for validation errors.  Starting with CTP5, you can call the “GetValidationErrors()” method on the DbContext base class to retrieve a list of validation errors within the model objects you are working with.  GetValidationErrors() will return a list of all validation errors – regardless of whether they are generated via DataAnnotation attributes or by an IValidatableObject.Validate() implementation.  Below is an example of proactively using the GetValidationErrors() method to check (and handle) errors before trying to call SaveChanges(): ASP.NET MVC 3 and IValidatableObject ASP.NET MVC 2 included support for automatically honoring and enforcing DataAnnotation attributes on model objects that are used with ASP.NET MVC’s model binding infrastructure.  ASP.NET MVC 3 goes further and also honors the IValidatableObject interface.  This combined support for model validation makes it easy to display appropriate error messages within forms when validation errors occur.  To see this in action, let’s consider a simple Create form that allows users to create a new Product: We can implement the above Create functionality using a ProductsController class that has two “Create” action methods like below: The first Create() method implements a version of the /Products/Create URL that handles HTTP-GET requests - and displays the HTML form to fill-out.  The second Create() method implements a version of the /Products/Create URL that handles HTTP-POST requests - and which takes the posted form data, ensures that is is valid, and if it is valid saves it in the database.  If there are validation issues it redisplays the form with the posted values.  The razor view template of our “Create” view (which renders the form) looks like below: One of the nice things about the above Controller + View implementation is that we did not write any validation logic within it.  The validation logic and business rules are instead implemented entirely within our model layer, and the ProductsController simply checks whether it is valid (by calling the ModelState.IsValid helper method) to determine whether to try and save the changes or redisplay the form with errors. The Html.ValidationMessageFor() helper method calls within our view simply display the error messages our Product model’s DataAnnotations and IValidatableObject.Validate() method returned.  We can see the above scenario in action by filling out invalid data within the form and attempting to submit it: Notice above how when we hit the “Create” button we got an error message.  This was because we ticked the “Discontinued” checkbox while also entering a value for the UnitsOnOrder (and so violated one of our business rules).  You might ask – how did ASP.NET MVC know to highlight and display the error message next to the UnitsOnOrder textbox?  It did this because ASP.NET MVC 3 now honors the IValidatableObject interface when performing model binding, and will retrieve the error messages from validation failures with it. The business rule within our Product model class indicated that the “UnitsOnOrder” property should be highlighted when the business rule we hit was violated: Our Html.ValidationMessageFor() helper method knew to display the business rule error message (next to the UnitsOnOrder edit box) because of the above property name hint we supplied: Keeping things DRY ASP.NET MVC and EF Code First enables you to keep your validation and business rules in one place (within your model layer), and avoid having it creep into your Controllers and Views.  Keeping the validation logic in the model layer helps ensure that you do not duplicate validation/business logic as you add more Controllers and Views to your application.  It allows you to quickly change your business rules/validation logic in one single place (within your model layer) – and have all controllers/views across your application immediately reflect it.  This help keep your application code clean and easily maintainable, and makes it much easier to evolve and update your application in the future. Summary EF Code First (starting with CTP5) now has built-in support for both DataAnnotations and the IValidatableObject interface.  This allows you to easily add validation and business rules to your models, and have EF automatically ensure that they are enforced anytime someone tries to persist changes of them to a database.  ASP.NET MVC 3 also now supports both DataAnnotations and IValidatableObject as well, which makes it even easier to use them with your EF Code First model layer – and then have the controllers/views within your web layer automatically honor and support them as well.  This makes it easy to build clean and highly maintainable applications. You don’t have to use DataAnnotations or IValidatableObject to perform your validation/business logic.  You can always roll your own custom validation architecture and/or use other more advanced validation frameworks/patterns if you want.  But for a lot of applications this built-in support will probably be sufficient – and provide a highly productive way to build solutions. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Preserving Permalinks

  - by Daniel Moth

  One of the things that gets me on a rant is websites that break permalinks. If you have posted something somewhere and there is a public URL pointing to it, that URL should never ever return a 404. You are breaking all websites that ever linked to you and you are breaking all search engine links to your content (that others will try and follow). It is a pet peeve of mine. So when I had to move my blog, obviously I would preserve the root URL (www.danielmoth.com/Blog/), but I also wanted to preserve every URL my blog has generated over the years. To be clear, our focus here is on the URL formatting, not the content migration which I'll talk about in my next post. In this post, I'll describe my solution first and then what it solves. 1. The IIS7 Rewrite Module and web.config There are a few ways you can map an old URL to a new one (so when requests to the old URL come in, they get redirected to the new one). The new blog engine I use (dasBlog) has built-in functionality to do that (Scott refers to it here). Instead, the way I chose to address the issue was to use the IIS7 rewrite module. The IIS7 rewrite module allows redirecting URLs based on pattern matching, regular expressions and, of course, hardcoded full URLs for things that don't fall into any pattern. You can configure it visually from IIS Manager using a handy dialog that allows testing patterns against input URLs. Here is what mine looked like after configuring a few rules: To learn more about this technology check out this video, the reference page and this overview blog post; all 3 pages have a collection of related resources at the bottom worth checking out too. All the visual configuration ends up in a web.config file at the root folder of your website. If you are on a shared hosting service, probably the only way you can use the Rewrite Module is by directly editing the web.config file. Next, I'll describe the URLs I had to map and how that manifested itself in the web.config file. What I did was create the rules locally using the GUI, and then took the generated web.config file and uploaded it to my live site. You can view my web.config here. 2. Monthly Archives Observe the difference between the way the two blog engines generate this type of URL Blogger: /Blog/2004_07_01_mothblog_archive.html dasBlog: /Blog/default,month,2004-07.aspx In my web.config file, the rule that deals with this is the one named "monthlyarchive_redirect". 3. Categories Observe the difference between the way the two blog engines generate this type of URL Blogger: /Blog/labels/Personal.html dasBlog: /Blog/CategoryView,category,Personal.aspx In my web.config file the rule that deals with this is the one named "category_redirect". 4. Posts Observe the difference between the way the two blog engines generate this type of URL Blogger: /Blog/2004/07/hello-world.html dasBlog: /Blog/Hello-World.aspx In my web.config file the rule that deals with this is the one named "post_redirect". Note: The decision is taken to use dasBlog URLs that do not include the date info (see the description of my Appearance settings). If we included the date info then it would have to include the day part, which blogger did not generate. This makes it impossible to redirect correctly and to have a single permalink for blog posts moving forward. An implication of this decision, is that no two blog posts can have the same title. The tool I will describe in my next post (inelegantly) deals with duplicates, but not with triplicates or higher. 5. Unhandled by a generic rule Unfortunately, the two blog engines use different rules for generating URLs for blog posts. Most of the time the conversion is as simple as the example of the previous section where a post titled "Hello World" generates a URL with the words separated by a hyphen. Some times that is not the case, for example: /Blog/2006/05/medc-wrap-up.html /Blog/MEDC-Wrapup.aspx or /Blog/2005/01/best-of-moth-2004.html /Blog/Best-Of-The-Moth-2004.aspx or /Blog/2004/11/more-windows-mobile-2005-details.html /Blog/More-Windows-Mobile-2005-Details-Emerge.aspx In short, blogger does not add words to the title beyond ~39 characters, it drops some words from the title generation (e.g. a, an, on, the), and it preserve hyphens that appear in the title. For this reason, we need to detect these and explicitly list them for redirects (no regular expression can help here because the full set of rules is not listed anywhere). In my web.config file the rule that deals with this is the one named "Redirect rule1 for FullRedirects" combined with the rewriteMap named "StaticRedirects". Note: The tool I describe in my next post will detect all the URLs that need to be explicitly redirected and will list them in a file ready for you to copy them to your web.config rewriteMap. 6. C# code doing the same as the web.config I wrote some naive code that does the same thing as the web.config: given a string it will return a new string converted according to the 3 rules above. It does not take into account the 4th case where an explicit hard-coded conversion is needed (the tool I present in the next post does take that into account). static string REGEX_post_redirect = "[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/([0-9a-z-]+).html"; static string REGEX_category_redirect = "labels/([_0-9a-z-% ]+).html"; static string REGEX_monthlyarchive_redirect = "([0-9]{4})_([0-9]{2})_[0-9]{2}_mothblog_archive.html"; static string Redirect(string oldUrl) { GroupCollection g; if (RunRegExOnIt(oldUrl, REGEX_post_redirect, 2, out g)) return string.Concat(g[1].Value, ".aspx"); if (RunRegExOnIt(oldUrl, REGEX_category_redirect, 2, out g)) return string.Concat("CategoryView,category,", g[1].Value, ".aspx"); if (RunRegExOnIt(oldUrl, REGEX_monthlyarchive_redirect, 3, out g)) return string.Concat("default,month,", g[1].Value, "-", g[2], ".aspx"); return string.Empty; } static bool RunRegExOnIt(string toRegEx, string pattern, int groupCount, out GroupCollection g) { if (pattern.Length == 0) { g = null; return false; } g = new Regex(pattern, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase | RegexOptions.Compiled).Match(toRegEx).Groups; return (g.Count == groupCount); } Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• New <%: %> Syntax for HTML Encoding Output in ASP.NET 4 (and ASP.NET MVC 2)

  - by ScottGu

  [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] This is the nineteenth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. Today’s post covers a small, but very useful, new syntax feature being introduced with ASP.NET 4 – which is the ability to automatically HTML encode output within code nuggets.  This helps protect your applications and sites against cross-site script injection (XSS) and HTML injection attacks, and enables you to do so using a nice concise syntax. HTML Encoding Cross-site script injection (XSS) and HTML encoding attacks are two of the most common security issues that plague web-sites and applications.  They occur when hackers find a way to inject client-side script or HTML markup into web-pages that are then viewed by other visitors to a site.  This can be used to both vandalize a site, as well as enable hackers to run client-script code that steals cookie data and/or exploits a user’s identity on a site to do bad things. One way to help mitigate against cross-site scripting attacks is to make sure that rendered output is HTML encoded within a page.  This helps ensures that any content that might have been input/modified by an end-user cannot be output back onto a page containing tags like <script> or <img> elements.  ASP.NET applications (especially those using ASP.NET MVC) often rely on using <%= %> code-nugget expressions to render output.  Developers today often use the Server.HtmlEncode() or HttpUtility.Encode() helper methods within these expressions to HTML encode the output before it is rendered.  This can be done using code like below: While this works fine, there are two downsides of it: It is a little verbose Developers often forget to call the HtmlEncode method New <%: %> Code Nugget Syntax With ASP.NET 4 we are introducing a new code expression syntax (<%:  %>) that renders output like <%= %> blocks do – but which also automatically HTML encodes it before doing so.  This eliminates the need to explicitly HTML encode content like we did in the example above.  Instead you can just write the more concise code below to accomplish the same thing: We chose the <%: %> syntax so that it would be easy to quickly replace existing instances of <%= %> code blocks.  It also enables you to easily search your code-base for <%= %> elements to find and verify any cases where you are not using HTML encoding within your application to ensure that you have the correct behavior. Avoiding Double Encoding While HTML encoding content is often a good best practice, there are times when the content you are outputting is meant to be HTML or is already encoded – in which case you don’t want to HTML encode it again.  ASP.NET 4 introduces a new IHtmlString interface (along with a concrete implementation: HtmlString) that you can implement on types to indicate that its value is already properly encoded (or otherwise examined) for displaying as HTML, and that therefore the value should not be HTML-encoded again.  The <%: %> code-nugget syntax checks for the presence of the IHtmlString interface and will not HTML encode the output of the code expression if its value implements this interface.  This allows developers to avoid having to decide on a per-case basis whether to use <%= %> or <%: %> code-nuggets.  Instead you can always use <%: %> code nuggets, and then have any properties or data-types that are already HTML encoded implement the IHtmlString interface. Using ASP.NET MVC HTML Helper Methods with <%: %> For a practical example of where this HTML encoding escape mechanism is useful, consider scenarios where you use HTML helper methods with ASP.NET MVC.  These helper methods typically return HTML.  For example: the Html.TextBox() helper method returns markup like <input type=”text”/>.  With ASP.NET MVC 2 these helper methods now by default return HtmlString types – which indicates that the returned string content is safe for rendering and should not be encoded by <%: %> nuggets.  This allows you to use these methods within both <%= %> code nugget blocks: As well as within <%: %> code nugget blocks: In both cases above the HTML content returned from the helper method will be rendered to the client as HTML – and the <%: %> code nugget will avoid double-encoding it. This enables you to default to always using <%: %> code nuggets instead of <%= %> code blocks within your applications.  If you want to be really hardcore you can even create a build rule that searches your application looking for <%= %> usages and flags any cases it finds as an error to enforce that HTML encoding always takes place. Scaffolding ASP.NET MVC 2 Views When you use VS 2010 (or the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express) you’ll find that the views that are scaffolded using the “Add View” dialog now by default always use <%: %> blocks when outputting any content.  For example, below I’ve scaffolded a simple “Edit” view for an article object.  Note the three usages of <%: %> code nuggets for the label, textbox, and validation message (all output with HTML helper methods): Summary The new <%: %> syntax provides a concise way to automatically HTML encode content and then render it as output.  It allows you to make your code a little less verbose, and to easily check/verify that you are always HTML encoding content throughout your site.  This can help protect your applications against cross-site script injection (XSS) and HTML injection attacks.  Hope this helps, Scott

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• Routing Issue in ASP.NET MVC 3 RC 2

  - by imran_ku07

       Introduction:             Two weeks ago, ASP.NET MVC team shipped the ASP.NET MVC 3 RC 2 release. This release includes some new features and some performance optimization. This release also fixes most of the bugs but still some minor issues are present in this release. Some of these issues are already discussed by Scott Guthrie at Update on ASP.NET MVC 3 RC2 (and a workaround for a bug in it). In addition to these issues, I have found another issue in this release regarding routing. In this article, I will show you the issue regarding routing and a simple workaround for this issue.       Description:             The easiest way to understand an issue is to reproduce it in the application. So create a MVC 2 application and a MVC 3 RC 2 application. Then in both applications, just open global.asax file and update the default route as below,     routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}"); routes.MapRoute( "Default", // Route name "{controller}/{action}/{id1}/{id2}", // URL with parameters new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id1 = UrlParameter.Optional, id2 = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults );              Then just open Index View and add the following lines,    <%@ Page Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage" %> <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="TitleContent" runat="server"> Home Page </asp:Content> <asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server"> <% Html.RenderAction("About"); %> </asp:Content>             The above view will issue a child request to About action method. Now run both applications. ASP.NET MVC 2 application will run just fine. But ASP.NET MVC 3 RC 2 application will throw an exception as shown below,                  You may think that this is a routing issue but this is not the case here as both ASP.NET MVC 2 and ASP.NET MVC  3 RC 2 applications(created above) are built with .NET Framework 4.0 and both will use the same routing defined in System.Web. Something is wrong in ASP.NET MVC 3 RC 2. So after digging into ASP.NET MVC source code, I have found that the UrlParameter class in ASP.NET MVC 3 RC 2 overrides the ToString method which simply return an empty string.     public sealed class UrlParameter { public static readonly UrlParameter Optional = new UrlParameter(); private UrlParameter() { } public override string ToString() { return string.Empty; } }             In MVC 2 the ToString method was not overridden. So to quickly fix the above problem just replace UrlParameter.Optional default value with a different value other than null or empty(for example, a single white space) or replace UrlParameter.Optional default value with a new class object containing the same code as UrlParameter class have except the ToString method is not overridden (or with a overridden ToString method that return a string value other than null or empty). But by doing this you will loose the benefit of ASP.NET MVC 2 Optional URL Parameters. There may be many different ways to fix the above problem and not loose the benefit of optional parameters. Here I will create a new class MyUrlParameter with the same code as UrlParameter class have except the ToString method is not overridden. Then I will create a base controller class which contains a constructor to remove all MyUrlParameter route data parameters, same like ASP.NET MVC doing with UrlParameter route data parameters early in the request.     public class BaseController : Controller { public BaseController() { if (System.Web.HttpContext.Current.CurrentHandler is MvcHandler) { RouteValueDictionary rvd = ((MvcHandler)System.Web.HttpContext.Current.CurrentHandler).RequestContext.RouteData.Values; string[] matchingKeys = (from entry in rvd where entry.Value == MyUrlParameter.Optional select entry.Key).ToArray(); foreach (string key in matchingKeys) { rvd.Remove(key); } } } } public class HomeController : BaseController { public ActionResult Index(string id1) { ViewBag.Message = "Welcome to ASP.NET MVC!"; return View(); } public ActionResult About() { return Content("Child Request Contents"); } }     public sealed class MyUrlParameter { public static readonly MyUrlParameter Optional = new MyUrlParameter(); private MyUrlParameter() { } }     routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}"); routes.MapRoute( "Default", // Route name "{controller}/{action}/{id1}/{id2}", // URL with parameters new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id1 = MyUrlParameter.Optional, id2 = MyUrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults );             MyUrlParameter class is a copy of UrlParameter class except that MyUrlParameter class not overrides the ToString method. Note that the default route is modified to use MyUrlParameter.Optional instead of UrlParameter.Optional. Also note that BaseController class constructor is removing MyUrlParameter parameters from the current request route data so that the model binder will not bind these parameters with action method parameters. Now just run the ASP.NET MVC 3 RC 2 application again, you will find that it runs just fine.             In case if you are curious to know that why ASP.NET MVC 3 RC 2 application throws an exception if UrlParameter class contains a ToString method which returns an empty string, then you need to know something about a feature of routing for url generation. During url generation, routing will call the ParsedRoute.Bind method internally. This method includes a logic to match the route and build the url. During building the url, ParsedRoute.Bind method will call the ToString method of the route values(in our case this will call the UrlParameter.ToString method) and then append the returned value into url. This method includes a logic after appending the returned value into url that if two continuous returned values are empty then don't match the current route otherwise an incorrect url will be generated. Here is the snippet from ParsedRoute.Bind method which will prove this statement.       if ((builder2.Length > 0) && (builder2[builder2.Length - 1] == '/')) { return null; } builder2.Append("/"); ........................................................... ........................................................... ........................................................... ........................................................... if (RoutePartsEqual(obj3, obj4)) { builder2.Append(UrlEncode(Convert.ToString(obj3, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture))); continue; }             In the above example, both id1 and id2 parameters default values are set to UrlParameter object and UrlParameter class include a ToString method that returns an empty string. That's why this route will not matched.            Summary:             In this article I showed you the issue regarding routing and also showed you how to workaround this problem. I explained this issue with an example by creating a ASP.NET MVC 2 and a ASP.NET MVC 3 RC 2 application. Finally I also explained the reason for this issue. Hopefully you will enjoy this article too.   SyntaxHighlighter.all()

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• Windows 7 Boot to VHD using a VHD clone of the system drive

  - by daveh551

  This seems like a not too difficult problem, and, after several hurdles, I'm maddeningly close. But I can't quite get there. I'm running Windows 7 in development shop. I want to start using VS2010 to work on some stuff that won't be released for awhile. My boss said no beta code on the production machine, but I could run VS2010 for this project IF I could do it in an isolated environment, like a virtual PC. Well, I've used the beta and RC of Win7 on VPC's before, and it was painfully slow because of the VPC environment. But everyone has been singing the praises of Windows 7's boot-to-VHD capability, where only the disk is virtualized, and you're actually running on the hardware. Supposed to be little slower, but nowhere near the speed penalty of VPC. I've spent a fair amount of time getting everything installed the way I want it. So I figured, I'll just clone my system drive using Disk2VHD, and boot off of that, and then install VS2010 onto that. (I keep most of my user data, including all my projects, in a separate partition, so that wouldn't have to be duplicated and would still be available.) Well, I had some difficulties with that, owing mainly to the fact that I was using an old version of Disk2VHD - (get the latest if you're going to try it.) But I did finally get it to boot. (Scott Hanselman has a good blog post on boot to VHD). But it wasn't exactly what I was expecting or hoping for. What I expected was that the VHD would become the C: drive, and the original (physical) C: drive would be either hidden or mounted under a different letter, and thus isolated and protected from any changes. What you actually get is that the VHD becomes the D: drive AND you boot from the D: drive, BUT your original C: drive is still there. Which is sort of okay EXCEPT that the Registry on the VHD is a clone of the Registry on C: drive, and includes many hard-coded references to C:. So the result is that some things come from (and modify) D: (the VHD), but some things come from (and modify) C:. (If you open a cmd prompt and do a SET to look at your environment variables, you will see a mixture of D:\ and C:\ paths.) So I don't really have an isolated environment. Most importantly, %ProgramFiles% is still set to C:\Program Files. What I really need is a tool that can access the registry files on the mounted VHD AS FILES, not as registry entries, and do a global search and replace on all the C:\ in strings to D:. I haven't found such a program. (I've tried to do it with a program called Registry Replace, but, even when running as Administrator, there are certain entries that the Registry won't let you change.) Does anyone know of one? Or any other solution to my problem (other than starting from scratch with a clean VHD and installing Win7 and all my programs on it.)?

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• VS 2010 Debugger Improvements (BreakPoints, DataTips, Import/Export)

  - by ScottGu

  This is the twenty-first in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the VS 2010 and .NET 4 release.  Today’s blog post covers a few of the nice usability improvements coming with the VS 2010 debugger.  The VS 2010 debugger has a ton of great new capabilities.  Features like Intellitrace (aka historical debugging), the new parallel/multithreaded debugging capabilities, and dump debuging support typically get a ton of (well deserved) buzz and attention when people talk about the debugging improvements with this release.  I’ll be doing blog posts in the future that demonstrate how to take advantage of them as well.  With today’s post, though, I thought I’d start off by covering a few small, but nice, debugger usability improvements that were also included with the VS 2010 release, and which I think you’ll find useful. Breakpoint Labels VS 2010 includes new support for better managing debugger breakpoints.  One particularly useful feature is called “Breakpoint Labels” – it enables much better grouping and filtering of breakpoints within a project or across a solution.  With previous releases of Visual Studio you had to manage each debugger breakpoint as a separate item. Managing each breakpoint separately can be a pain with large projects and for cases when you want to maintain “logical groups” of breakpoints that you turn on/off depending on what you are debugging.  Using the new VS 2010 “breakpoint labeling” feature you can now name these “groups” of breakpoints and manage them as a unit. Grouping Multiple Breakpoints Together using a Label Below is a screen-shot of the breakpoints window within Visual Studio 2010.  This lists all of the breakpoints defined within my solution (which in this case is the ASP.NET MVC 2 code base): The first and last breakpoint in the list above breaks into the debugger when a Controller instance is created or released by the ASP.NET MVC Framework. Using VS 2010, I can now select these two breakpoints, right-click, and then select the new “Edit labels…” menu command to give them a common label/name (making them easier to find and manage): Below is the dialog that appears when I select the “Edit labels” command.  We can use it to create a new string label for our breakpoints or select an existing one we have already defined.  In this case we’ll create a new label called “Lifetime Management” to describe what these two breakpoints cover: When we press the OK button our two selected breakpoints will be grouped under the newly created “Lifetime Management” label: Filtering/Sorting Breakpoints by Label We can use the “Search” combobox to quickly filter/sort breakpoints by label.  Below we are only showing those breakpoints with the “Lifetime Management” label: Toggling Breakpoints On/Off by Label We can also toggle sets of breakpoints on/off by label group.  We can simply filter by the label group, do a Ctrl-A to select all the breakpoints, and then enable/disable all of them with a single click: Importing/Exporting Breakpoints VS 2010 now supports importing/exporting breakpoints to XML files – which you can then pass off to another developer, attach to a bug report, or simply re-load later.  To export only a subset of breakpoints, you can filter by a particular label and then click the “Export breakpoint” button in the Breakpoints window: Above I’ve filtered my breakpoint list to only export two particular breakpoints (specific to a bug that I’m chasing down).  I can export these breakpoints to an XML file and then attach it to a bug report or email – which will enable another developer to easily setup the debugger in the correct state to investigate it on a separate machine.  Pinned DataTips Visual Studio 2010 also includes some nice new “DataTip pinning” features that enable you to better see and track variable and expression values when in the debugger.  Simply hover over a variable or expression within the debugger to expose its DataTip (which is a tooltip that displays its value)  – and then click the new “pin” button on it to make the DataTip always visible: You can “pin” any number of DataTips you want onto the screen.  In addition to pinning top-level variables, you can also drill into the sub-properties on variables and pin them as well.  Below I’ve “pinned” three variables: “category”, “Request.RawUrl” and “Request.LogonUserIdentity.Name”.  Note that these last two variable are sub-properties of the “Request” object.   Associating Comments with Pinned DataTips Hovering over a pinned DataTip exposes some additional UI within the debugger: Clicking the comment button at the bottom of this UI expands the DataTip - and allows you to optionally add a comment with it: This makes it really easy to attach and track debugging notes: Pinned DataTips are usable across both Debug Sessions and Visual Studio Sessions Pinned DataTips can be used across multiple debugger sessions.  This means that if you stop the debugger, make a code change, and then recompile and start a new debug session - any pinned DataTips will still be there, along with any comments you associate with them.  Pinned DataTips can also be used across multiple Visual Studio sessions.  This means that if you close your project, shutdown Visual Studio, and then later open the project up again – any pinned DataTips will still be there, along with any comments you associate with them. See the Value from Last Debug Session (Great Code Editor Feature) How many times have you ever stopped the debugger only to go back to your code and say: $#@! – what was the value of that variable again??? One of the nice things about pinned DataTips is that they keep track of their “last value from debug session” – and you can look these values up within the VB/C# code editor even when the debugger is no longer running.  DataTips are by default hidden when you are in the code editor and the debugger isn’t running.  On the left-hand margin of the code editor, though, you’ll find a push-pin for each pinned DataTip that you’ve previously setup: Hovering your mouse over a pinned DataTip will cause it to display on the screen.  Below you can see what happens when I hover over the first pin in the editor - it displays our debug session’s last values for the “Request” object DataTip along with the comment we associated with them: This makes it much easier to keep track of state and conditions as you toggle between code editing mode and debugging mode on your projects. Importing/Exporting Pinned DataTips As I mentioned earlier in this post, pinned DataTips are by default saved across Visual Studio sessions (you don’t need to do anything to enable this). VS 2010 also now supports importing/exporting pinned DataTips to XML files – which you can then pass off to other developers, attach to a bug report, or simply re-load later. Combined with the new support for importing/exporting breakpoints, this makes it much easier for multiple developers to share debugger configurations and collaborate across debug sessions. Summary Visual Studio 2010 includes a bunch of great new debugger features – both big and small.  Today’s post shared some of the nice debugger usability improvements. All of the features above are supported with the Visual Studio 2010 Professional edition (the Pinned DataTip features are also supported in the free Visual Studio 2010 Express Editions)  I’ll be covering some of the “big big” new debugging features like Intellitrace, parallel/multithreaded debugging, and dump file analysis in future blog posts.  Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Announcing Windows Azure Mobile Services

  - by ScottGu

  I’m excited to announce a new capability we are adding to Windows Azure today: Windows Azure Mobile Services Windows Azure Mobile Services makes it incredibly easy to connect a scalable cloud backend to your client and mobile applications.  It allows you to easily store structured data in the cloud that can span both devices and users, integrate it with user authentication, as well as send out updates to clients via push notifications. Today’s release enables you to add these capabilities to any Windows 8 app in literally minutes, and provides a super productive way for you to quickly build out your app ideas.  We’ll also be adding support to enable these same scenarios for Windows Phone, iOS, and Android devices soon. Read this getting started tutorial to walkthrough how you can build (in less than 5 minutes) a simple Windows 8 “Todo List” app that is cloud enabled using Windows Azure Mobile Services.  Or watch this video of me showing how to do it step by step. Getting Started If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign up for a no-obligation Free Trial.  Once you are signed-up, click the “preview features” section under the “account” tab of the www.windowsazure.com website and enable your account to support the “Mobile Services” preview.   Instructions on how to enable this can be found here. Once you have the mobile services preview enabled, log into the Windows Azure Portal, click the “New” button and choose the new “Mobile Services” icon to create your first mobile backend.  Once created, you’ll see a quick-start page like below with instructions on how to connect your mobile service to an existing Windows 8 client app you have already started working on, or how to create and connect a brand-new Windows 8 client app with it: Read this getting started tutorial to walkthrough how you can build (in less than 5 minutes) a simple Windows 8 “Todo List” app  that stores data in Windows Azure. Storing Data in the Cloud Storing data in the cloud with Windows Azure Mobile Services is incredibly easy.  When you create a Windows Azure Mobile Service, we automatically associate it with a SQL Database inside Windows Azure.  The Windows Azure Mobile Service backend then provides built-in support for enabling remote apps to securely store and retrieve data from it (using secure REST end-points utilizing a JSON-based ODATA format) – without you having to write or deploy any custom server code.  Built-in management support is provided within the Windows Azure portal for creating new tables, browsing data, setting indexes, and controlling access permissions. This makes it incredibly easy to connect client applications to the cloud, and enables client developers who don’t have a server-code background to be productive from the very beginning.  They can instead focus on building the client app experience, and leverage Windows Azure Mobile Services to provide the cloud backend services they require.  Below is an example of client-side Windows 8 C#/XAML code that could be used to query data from a Windows Azure Mobile Service.  Client-side C# developers can write queries like this using LINQ and strongly typed POCO objects, which are then translated into HTTP REST queries that run against a Windows Azure Mobile Service.   Developers don’t have to write or deploy any custom server-side code in order to enable client-side code below to execute and asynchronously populate their client UI: Because Mobile Services is part of Windows Azure, developers can later choose to augment or extend their initial solution and add custom server functionality and more advanced logic if they want.  This provides maximum flexibility, and enables developers to grow and extend their solutions to meet any needs. User Authentication and Push Notifications Windows Azure Mobile Services also make it incredibly easy to integrate user authentication/authorization and push notifications within your applications.  You can use these capabilities to enable authentication and fine grain access control permissions to the data you store in the cloud, as well as to trigger push notifications to users/devices when the data changes.  Windows Azure Mobile Services supports the concept of “server scripts” (small chunks of server-side script that executes in response to actions) that make it really easy to enable these scenarios. Below are some tutorials that walkthrough common authentication/authorization/push scenarios you can do with Windows Azure Mobile Services and Windows 8 apps: Enabling User Authentication Authorizing Users  Get Started with Push Notifications Push Notifications to multiple Users Manage and Monitor your Mobile Service Just like with every other service in Windows Azure, you can monitor usage and metrics of your mobile service backend using the “Dashboard” tab within the Windows Azure Portal. The dashboard tab provides a built-in monitoring view of the API calls, Bandwidth, and server CPU cycles of your Windows Azure Mobile Service.   You can also use the “Logs” tab within the portal to review error messages.  This makes it easy to monitor and track how your application is doing. Scale Up as Your Business Grows Windows Azure Mobile Services now allows every Windows Azure customer to create and run up to 10 Mobile Services in a free, shared/multi-tenant hosting environment (where your mobile backend will be one of multiple apps running on a shared set of server resources).  This provides an easy way to get started on projects at no cost beyond the database you connect your Windows Azure Mobile Service to (note: each Windows Azure free trial account also includes a 1GB SQL Database that you can use with any number of apps or Windows Azure Mobile Services). If your client application becomes popular, you can click the “Scale” tab of your Mobile Service and switch from “Shared” to “Reserved” mode.  Doing so allows you to isolate your apps so that you are the only customer within a virtual machine.  This allows you to elastically scale the amount of resources your apps use – allowing you to scale-up (or scale-down) your capacity as your traffic grows: With Windows Azure you pay for compute capacity on a per-hour basis – which allows you to scale up and down your resources to match only what you need.  This enables a super flexible model that is ideal for new mobile app scenarios, as well as startups who are just getting going.  Summary I’ve only scratched the surface of what you can do with Windows Azure Mobile Services – there are a lot more features to explore.  With Windows Azure Mobile Services you’ll be able to build mobile app experiences faster than ever, and enable even better user experiences – by connecting your client apps to the cloud. Visit the Windows Azure Mobile Services development center to learn more, and build your first Windows 8 app connected with Windows Azure today.  And read this getting started tutorial to walkthrough how you can build (in less than 5 minutes) a simple Windows 8 “Todo List” app that is cloud enabled using Windows Azure Mobile Services. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• FTP Publishing with the new Windows Azure Release

  - by Harish Ranganathan

  There is a good chance you might have stumbled upon the new Windows Azure Release that we made on June 6th.  Scott Guthrie’s Post quite summarizes the overall new features. One of my favorite features is the Windows Azure Websites and the ability to do publish files to Azure using your FTP Client. Windows Azure Websites offers low cost (free upto 10 websites) web hosting where you can deploy any website that can run on IIS 7.0, quickly. The earlier releases of Azure SDKs and the Azure platform support .NET 3.5 & above for running your applications.  This was a constraint for many since there are/were a lot of ASP.NET 2.0 applications built over time and simply to put it on Azure, many of you were skeptical to migrate it to .NET 4. Windows Azure Websites offer the flexibility of running IIS 7.0 supported .NET Versions which means you can run .NET 1.1, 2.0, 3.5 and .NET 4.  Not just that! You can also run classic ASP Applications. Windows Azure Websites don’t need you to go through the complexity of adding the Cloud Project Template and then publishing the Configuration Files.  Lets take a step by step understanding of Websites and publishing using FTP. I downloaded the Club Website Starter Kit from http://www.asp.net/downloads/starter-kits/club It also requires a database and I downloaded the SQL Scripts and created a SQL Server Database called Club. This installs a Web Site Project Template.  Note that I am running Windows 8 Release Preview and Visual Studio 2012 RC.  After installing the template, select File – New – Website and don’t forget to choose the Framework version as .NET 2.0 You can see the “Club Website Starter Kit” .  Once you select the Website gets created.  You would encounter a warning indicating that the Club Website Starter Kit uses SQL Express and the recommended database is LocalDB Express.  Click ok to continue.  Once the Website is created open up the Web.config and locate the “ClubSiteDB” connection string.  By default, it points to a SQL Express Database.  Instead configure it to use your local SQL Server. Also, open up Global.asax and comment out the following line if (!Roles.RoleExists("Administrators")) Roles.CreateRole("Administrators"); There seems to be an issue in the code that doesn’t create the role.  Post that, hit CTRL+F5 and you should be able to see the Website Running, as below So, now we have the Club Starter Kit site up running locally.  Moving to Azure Visit http://manage.windowsazure.com/ and sign up for a trial account.  This allows you to host up to 10 websites for free and a host of other benefits.  The free Websites can be extended to an year without any charge.  Once you have signed up, sign in to the portal using the Live ID used for sign up. After signing in, you would be presented with the “All Items” listing page which lists, Websites, Cloud Services, Databases etc.,  If this is the first time, you wouldn’t find anything. Click on the “Websites” link from the left menu.  Click on “New” in the bottom and it should show up a dialog.  In the same, select Website and click on “Quick Create” and in the URL Textbox, specify “MyFirstDemo” and click the “Create Web Site” link below. It should take a few seconds to create the Website.  Once the Website is created, click on the listing and it should open up the Dashboard.  Since we haven’t done anything yet, there shouldn’t be any statistics Click on the “Download publish profile” link in the right bottom.  This file has the FTP publishing settings. Also, if you scroll down you can see the FTP URL for this site.  It should typically start ftp://waws-xxxx-xxx-xxxx In the downloaded publish profile file, you can also find the ftp URL.  Pick the following from this file publishUrl (the 2nd one, the one that features after publishMethod =”FTP”) and the userName and userPWD that follows. Note that we have everything required to publish the files.  But since the Club Starter Kit uses Databases, we need to have the Database running on SQL Azure.  Go back to the Main Menu and click on “New” in the bottom but this time select “SQL Database” and provide “Club” as Database name for “Quick Create” If this is the first time a Server would be created.  Otherwise, it would pickup the existing server name. Once the database is created, you can use the SQL Azure Migration Wizard http://sqlazuremw.codeplex.com/ and provide the credentials to connect to local database and then the SQL Azure database for migrating the “Club” database.  The migration wizard UI hasn’t changed much and is the same as explained by me in one my posts earlier http://geekswithblogs.net/ranganh/archive/2009/09/29/taking-your-northwind-database-to-sql-azure-and-binding-it.aspx Once the database is migrated, come back to the main screen and click on the Database base in the Azure Management Portal.  It opens up the dashboard of the database.  Click on “Show connection Strings” and it would popup a list of connection string formats.  Choose the ADO.NET connection string and after editing the password with the password that you provided when creating the database server in the Azure Portal, paste it into the config file of the Club Starter Kit Website.  Just to reiterate, the connection string key is ClubSiteDB. Try running the Website once to ensure that the application though running locally could connect to the SQL Database running on Azure. Once you are able to run the website successfully, we are all set to do the FTP Publishing. Download your favorite FTP tool.  I use http://filezilla-project.org/ In the Host Textbox, paste the FTP URL that you picked up from the publish profile file and also paste the username and password.  Click on “QuickConnect”.  If everything is fine, you should be able to connect to the remote server.  If it is successfully connected, you can see the wwwroot folder of the Website, running in Azure Make sure on the “Local Site” in the left, you choose the path to the folder of your Website.  Open up the Website folder on the left such that it lists all the files and folders inside.  Select all of them and click select “Upload” or simply drag and drop all the files to the root folder that is listed above.  Once the publishing is done, you should be able to hit the SiteURL that you can find the dashboard page of the website.  In our case, it would be http://MyFirstDemo.azurewebsites.net That’s it, we have now done FTP publishing in Azure and that too we are running a .NET 2.0 Website on Azure. Cheers !!!

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• Announcing: Improvements to the Windows Azure Portal

  - by ScottGu

  Earlier today we released a number of enhancements to the new Windows Azure Management Portal.  These new capabilities include: Service Bus Management and Monitoring Support for Managing Co-administrators Import/Export support for SQL Databases Virtual Machine Experience Enhancements Improved Cloud Service Status Notifications Media Services Monitoring Support Storage Container Creation and Access Control Support All of these improvements are now live in production and available to start using immediately.  Below are more details on them: Service Bus Management and Monitoring The new Windows Azure Management Portal now supports Service Bus management and monitoring. Service Bus provides rich messaging infrastructure that can sit between applications (or between cloud and on-premise environments) and allow them to communicate in a loosely coupled way for improved scale and resiliency. With the new Service Bus experience, you can now create and manage Service Bus Namespaces, Queues, Topics, Relays and Subscriptions. You can also get rich monitoring for Service Bus Queues, Topics and Subscriptions. To create a Service Bus namespace, you can now select the “Service Bus” tab in the Windows Azure portal and then simply select the CREATE command: Doing so will bring up a new “Create a Namespace” dialog that allows you to name and create a new Service Bus Namespace: Once created, you can obtain security credentials associated with the Namespace via the ACCESS KEY command. This gives you the ability to obtain the connection string associated with the service namespace. You can copy and paste these values into any application that requires these credentials: It is also now easy to create Service Bus Queues and Topics via the NEW experience in the portal drawer.  Simply click the NEW command and navigate to the “App Services” category to create a new Service Bus entity: Once you provision a new Queue or Topic it can be managed in the portal.  Clicking on a namespace will display all queues and topics within it: Clicking on an item in the list will allow you to drill down into a dashboard view that allows you to monitor the activity and traffic within it, as well as perform operations on it. For example, below is a view of an “orders” queue – note how we now surface both the incoming and outgoing message flow rate, as well as the total queue length and queue size: To monitor pub/sub subscriptions you can use the ADD METRICS command within a topic and select a specific subscription to monitor. Support for Managing Co-Administrators You can now add co-administrators for your Windows Azure subscription using the new Windows Azure Portal. This allows you to share management of your Windows Azure services with other users. Subscription co-administrators share the same administrative rights and permissions that service administrator have - except a co-administrator cannot change or view billing details about the account, nor remove the service administrator from a subscription. In the SETTINGS section, click on the ADMINISTRATORS tab, and select the ADD button to add a co-administrator to your subscription: To add a co-administrator, you specify the email address for a Microsoft account (formerly Windows Live ID) or an organizational account, and choose the subscription you want to add them to: You can later update the subscriptions that the co-administrator has access to by clicking on the EDIT button, and then select or deselect the subscriptions to which they belong. Import/Export Support for SQL Databases The Windows Azure administration portal now supports importing and exporting SQL Databases to/from Blob Storage.  Databases can be imported/exported to blob storage using the same BACPAC file format that is supported with SQL Server 2012.  Among other benefits, this makes it easy to copy and migrate databases between on-premise and cloud environments. SQL Databases now have an EXPORT command in the bottom drawer that when pressed will prompt you to save your database to a Windows Azure storage container: The UI allows you to choose an existing storage account or create a new one, as well as the name of the BACPAC file to persist in blob storage: You can also now import and create a new SQL Database by using the NEW command.  This will prompt you to select the storage container and file to import the database from: The Windows Azure Portal enables you to monitor the progress of import and export operations. If you choose to log out of the portal, you can come back later and check on the status of all of the operations in the new history tab of the SQL Database server – this shows your entire import and export history and the status (success/fail) of each: Enhancements to the Virtual Machine Experience One of the common pain-points we have heard from customers using the preview of our new Virtual Machine support has been the inability to delete the associated VHDs when a VM instance (or VM drive) gets deleted. Prior to today’s release the VHDs would continue to be in your storage account and accumulate storage charges. You can now navigate to the Disks tab within the Virtual Machine extension, select a VM disk to delete, and click the DELETE DISK command: When you click the DELETE DISK button you have the option to delete the disk + associated .VHD file (completely clearing it from storage).  Alternatively you can delete the disk but still retain a .VHD copy of it in storage. Improved Cloud Service Status Notifications The Windows Azure portal now exposes more information of the health status of role instances.  If any of the instances are in a non-running state, the status at the top of the dashboard will summarize the status (and update automatically as the role health changes): Clicking the instance hyperlink within this status summary view will navigate you to a detailed role instance view, and allow you to get more detailed health status of each of the instances.  The portal has been updated to provide more specific status information within this detailed view – giving you better visibility into the health of your app: Monitoring Support for Media Services Windows Azure Media Services allows you to create media processing jobs (for example: encoding media files) in your Windows Azure Media Services account. In the Windows Azure Portal, you can now monitor the number of encoding jobs that are queued up for processing as well as active, failed and queued tasks for encoding jobs. On your media services account dashboard, you can visualize the monitoring data for last 6 hours, 24 hours or 7 days. Storage Container Creation and Access Control Support You can now create Windows Azure Storage storage containers from within the Windows Azure Portal.  After selecting a storage account, you can navigate to the CONTAINERS tab and click the ADD CONTAINER command: This will display a dialog that lets you name the new container and control access to it: You can also update the access setting as well as container metadata of existing containers by selecting one and then using the new EDIT CONTAINER command: This will then bring up the edit container dialog that allows you to change and save its settings: In addition to creating and editing containers, you can click on them within the portal to drill-in and view blobs within them.  Summary The above features are all now live in production and available to use immediately.  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using them today.  Visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. We’ll have even more new features and enhancements coming later this month – including support for the recent Windows Server 2012 and .NET 4.5 releases (we will enable new web and worker role images with Windows Server 2012 and .NET 4.5, and support .NET 4.5 with Websites).  Keep an eye out on my blog for details as these new features become available. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• More Great Improvements to the Windows Azure Management Portal

  - by ScottGu

  Over the last 3 weeks we’ve released a number of enhancements to the new Windows Azure Management Portal.  These new capabilities include: Localization Support for 6 languages Operation Log Support Support for SQL Database Metrics Virtual Machine Enhancements (quick create Windows + Linux VMs) Web Site Enhancements (support for creating sites in all regions, private github repo deployment) Cloud Service Improvements (deploy from storage account, configuration support of dedicated cache) Media Service Enhancements (upload, encode, publish, stream all from within the portal) Virtual Networking Usability Enhancements Custom CNAME support with Storage Accounts All of these improvements are now live in production and available to start using immediately.  Below are more details on them: Localization Support The Windows Azure Portal now supports 6 languages – English, German, Spanish, French, Italian and Japanese. You can easily switch between languages by clicking on the Avatar bar on the top right corner of the Portal: Selecting a different language will automatically refresh the UI within the portal in the selected language: Operation Log Support The Windows Azure Portal now supports the ability for administrators to review the “operation logs” of the services they manage – making it easy to see exactly what management operations were performed on them.  You can query for these by selecting the “Settings” tab within the Portal and then choosing the “Operation Logs” tab within it.  This displays a filter UI that enables you to query for operations by date and time: As of the most recent release we now show logs for all operations performed on Cloud Services and Storage Accounts.  You can click on any operation in the list and click the “Details” button in the command bar to retrieve detailed status about it.  This now makes it possible to retrieve details about every management operation performed. In future updates you’ll see us extend the operation log capability to apply to all Windows Azure Services – which will enable great post-mortem and audit support. Support for SQL Database Metrics You can now monitor the number of successful connections, failed connections and deadlocks in your SQL databases using the new “Dashboard” view provided on each SQL Database resource: Additionally, if the database is added as a “linked resource” to a Web Site or Cloud Service, monitoring metrics for the linked SQL database are shown along with the Web Site or Cloud Service metrics in the dashboard. This helps with viewing and managing aggregated information across both resources in your application. Enhancements to Virtual Machines The most recent Windows Azure Portal release brings with it some nice usability improvements to Virtual Machines: Integrated Quick Create experience for Windows and Linux VMs Creating a new Windows or Linux VM is now easy using the new “Quick Create” experience in the Portal: In addition to Windows VM templates you can also now select Linux image templates in the quick create UI: This makes it incredibly easy to create a new Virtual Machine in only a few seconds. Enhancements to Web Sites Prior to this past month’s release, users were forced to choose a single geographical region when creating their first site.  After that, subsequent sites could only be created in that same region.  This restriction has now been removed, and you can now create sites in any region at any time and have up to 10 free sites in each supported region: One of the new regions we’ve recently opened up is the “East Asia” region.  This allows you to now deploy sites to North America, Europe and Asia simultaneously.  Private GitHub Repository Support This past week we also enabled Git based continuous deployment support for Web Sites from private GitHub and BitBucket repositories (previous to this you could only enable this with public repositories).  Enhancements to Cloud Services Experience The most recent Windows Azure Portal release brings with it some nice usability improvements to Cloud Services: Deploy a Cloud Service from a Windows Azure Storage Account The Windows Azure Portal now supports deploying an application package and configuration file stored in a blob container in Windows Azure Storage. The ability to upload an application package from storage is available when you custom create, or upload to, or update a cloud service deployment. To upload an application package and configuration, create a Cloud Service, then select the file upload dialog, and choose to upload from a Windows Azure Storage Account: To upload an application package from storage, click the “FROM STORAGE” button and select the application package and configuration file to use from the new blob storage explorer in the portal. Configure Windows Azure Caching in a caching enabled cloud service If you have deployed the new dedicated cache within a cloud service role, you can also now configure the cache settings in the portal by navigating to the configuration tab of for your Cloud Service deployment. The configuration experience is similar to the one in Visual Studio when you create a cloud service and add a caching role.  The portal now allows you to add or remove named caches and change the settings for the named caches – all from within the Portal and without needing to redeploy your application. Enhancements to Media Services You can now upload, encode, publish, and play your video content directly from within the Windows Azure Portal.  This makes it incredibly easy to get started with Windows Azure Media Services and perform common tasks without having to write any code. Simply navigate to your media service and then click on the “Content” tab.  All of the media content within your media service account will be listed here: Clicking the “upload” button within the portal now allows you to upload a media file directly from your computer: This will cause the video file you chose from your local file-system to be uploaded into Windows Azure.  Once uploaded, you can select the file within the content tab of the Portal and click the “Encode” button to transcode it into different streaming formats: The portal includes a number of pre-set encoding formats that you can easily convert media content into: Once you select an encoding and click the ok button, Windows Azure Media Services will kick off an encoding job that will happen in the cloud (no need for you to stand-up or configure a custom encoding server).  When it’s finished, you can select the video in the “Content” tab and then click PUBLISH in the command bar to setup an origin streaming end-point to it: Once the media file is published you can point apps against the public URL and play the content using Windows Azure Media Services – no need to setup or run your own streaming server.  You can also now select the file and click the “Play” button in the command bar to play it using the streaming endpoint directly within the Portal: This makes it incredibly easy to try out and use Windows Azure Media Services and test out an end-to-end workflow without having to write any code.  Once you test things out you can of course automate it using script or code – providing you with an incredibly powerful Cloud Media platform that you can use. Enhancements to Virtual Network Experience Over the last few months, we have received feedback on the complexity of the Virtual Network creation experience. With these most recent Portal updates, we have added a Quick Create experience that makes the creation experience very simple. All that an administrator now needs to do is to provide a VNET name, choose an address space and the size of the VNET address space. They no longer need to understand the intricacies of the CIDR format or walk through a 4-page wizard or create a VNET / subnet. This makes creating virtual networks really simple: The portal also now has a “Register DNS Server” task that makes it easy to register DNS servers and associate them with a virtual network. Enhancements to Storage Experience The portal now lets you register custom domain names for your Windows Azure Storage Accounts.  To enable this, select a storage resource and then go to the CONFIGURE tab for a storage account, and then click MANAGE DOMAIN on the command bar: Clicking “Manage Domain” will bring up a dialog that allows you to register any CNAME you want: Summary The above features are all now live in production and available to use immediately.  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using them today.  Visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. One of the other cool features that is now live within the portal is our new Windows Azure Store – which makes it incredibly easy to try and purchase developer services from a variety of partners.  It is an incredibly awesome new capability – and something I’ll be doing a dedicated post about shortly. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Rebuilding CoasterBuzz, Part III: The architecture using the "Web stack of love"

  - by Jeff

  This is the third post in a series about rebuilding one of my Web sites, which has been around for 12 years. I hope to relaunch in the next month or two. More: Part I: Evolution, and death to WCF Part II: Hot data objects I finally hit a point in the re-do of CoasterBuzz where I feel like the major pieces are in place... rewritten, ported and what not, so that I can focus now on front-end design and more interesting creative problems. I've been asked on more than one occasion (OK, just twice) what's going on under the covers, so I figure this might be a good time to explain the overall architecture. As it turns out, I'm using a whole lof of the "Web stack of love," as Scott Hanselman likes to refer to it. Oh that Hanselman. First off, at the center of it all, is BizTalk. Just kidding. That's "enterprise architecture" humor, where every discussion starts with how they'll use BizTalk. Here are the bigger moving parts: It's fairly straight forward. A common library lives in a number of Web apps, all of which are (or will be) powered by ASP.NET MVC 4. They all talk to the same database. There is the main Web site, which also has the endpoint for the Silverlight-based Feed app. The cstr.bz site handles redirects, which are generated when news items are published and sent to Twitter. Facebook publishing is handled via the RSS Graffiti Facebook app. The API site handles requests from the Windows Phone app. The main site depends very heavily on POP Forums, the open source, MVC-based forum I maintain. It serves a number of functions, primarily handling users. These user objects serve in non-forum roles to handle things like news and database contributions, maintaining track records (coaster nerd for "list of rides I've been on") and, perhaps most importantly, paid club memberships. Before I get into more specifics, note that the "glue" for everything is Ninject, the dependency injection framework. I actually prefer StructureMap these days, but I started with Ninject in POP Forums a long time ago. POP Forums has a static class, PopForumsActivation, that new's up an instance of the container, and you can call it from where ever. The downside is that the forums require Ninject in your MVC app as the default dependency resolver. At some point, I'll decouple it, but for now it's not in the way. In the general sense, the entire set of apps follow a repository-service-controller-view pattern. Repos just do data access, service classes do business logic, controllers compose and route, views view. The forum also provides Scoring Game functionality. The Scoring Game is a reasonably abstract framework to award users points based on certain actions, and then award achievements when a certain number of point events happen. For example, the forum already awards a point when someone plus-one's a post you made. You can set up an achievement that says, "Give the user an award when they've had 100 posts plus'd." It also does zero-point entries into the ledger, so if you make a post, you could award an achievement based on 100 posts made. Wiring in the scoring game to CoasterBuzz functionality is just a matter of going to the Ninject container and getting an instance of the event publisher, and passing it events. Forum adapters were introduced into POP Forums a few versions ago, and they can intercept the model generated for forum topic lists and threads and designate an alternate view. These are used to make the "Day in Pictures" forum, where users can upload photos as frame-by-frame photo threads. Another adapter adds an association UI, so users can associate specific amusement parks with their trip report posts. The Silverlight-based Feed app talks to a simple JSON endpoint in the main app. This uses an underlying library I wrote ages ago, simply called Feeds, that aggregates event information. You inherit from a base class that creates instances of a publisher interface, and then use that class to send it an event type and any number of data fields. Feeds has two publishers: One is to the database, and that's used for the endpoint that talks to the Silverlight app. The second publisher publishes to Twitter, if the event is of the type "news." The wiring is a little strange, because for the new posts and topics events, I'm actually pulling out the forum repository classes from the Ninject container and replacing them with overridden methods to publish. I should probably be doing this at the service class level, but whatever. It's my mess. cstr.bz doesn't do anything interesting. It looks up the path, and if it has a match, does a 301 redirect to the long URL. The API site just serves up JSON for the Windows Phone app. The Windows Phone app is Silverlight, of course, and there isn't much to it. It does use the control toolkit, but beyond that, it relies on a simple class that creates a Webclient and calls the server for JSON to deserialize. The same class is now used by the Feed app, which used to use WCF. Simple is better. Data access in POP Forums is all straight SQL, because a lot of it was ported from the ASP.NET version. Most CoasterBuzz data access is handled by the Entity Framework, using the code-first model. The context class in this case does a lot of work to make sure that the table and key mapping works, since much of it breaks from the normal conventions of EF. One of the more powerful things you can do with EF, once you understand the little gotchas, is split tables by row into different entities. For example, a roller coaster photo has everything in the same row, including the metadata, the thumbnail bytes and the image itself. Obviously, if you want to get a list of photos to iterate over in a view, you don't want to get the image data. The use of navigation properties makes it easier to get just what you want. The front end includes Razor views in MVC, and jQuery is used for client-side goodness. I'm also using jQuery UI in a few places, for tabs, a dialog box and autocomplete. I'm also, tentatively, using jQuery Mobile. I've already ported most forum views to Mobile, but they need some work as v1.1 isn't finished yet. I'm not sure if I'll ship CoasterBuzz with mobile views or not yet. It's on the radar, but not something in my delivery criteria. That covers all of the big frameworks in play. Next time I hope to talk more about the front-end experience, which to me is where most of the fun is these days. Hoping to launch in the next month or two. Getting tired of looking at the old site!

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• Refactoring FizzBuzz

  - by MarkPearl

  A few years ago I blogger about FizzBuzz, at the time the post was prompted by Scott Hanselman who had podcasted about how surprized he was that some programmers could not even solve the FizzBuzz problem within a reasonable period of time during a job interview. At the time I thought I would give the problem a go in F# and sure enough the solution was fairly simple – I then also did a basic solution in C# but never posted it. Since then I have learned that being able to solve a problem and how you solve the problem are two totally different things. Today I decided to give the problem a retry and see if I had learnt anything new in the last year or so. Here is how my solution looked after refactoring… Solution 1 – Cheap and Nasty public class FizzBuzzCalculator { public string NumberFormat(int number) { var numDivisibleBy3 = (number % 3) == 0; var numDivisibleBy5 = (number % 5) == 0; if (numDivisibleBy3 && numDivisibleBy5) return String.Format("{0} FizzBuz", number); else if (numDivisibleBy3) return String.Format("{0} Fizz", number); else if (numDivisibleBy5) return String.Format("{0} Buz", number); return number.ToString(); } } class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { var fizzBuzz = new FizzBuzzCalculator(); for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) { Console.WriteLine(fizzBuzz.NumberFormat(i)); } } } My first attempt I just looked at solving the problem – it works, and could be an acceptable solution but tonight I thought I would see how far  I could refactor it… The section I decided to focus on was the mass of if..else code in the NumberFormat method. Solution 2 – Replacing If…Else with a Dictionary public class FizzBuzzCalculator { private readonly Dictionary<Tuple<bool, bool>, string> _mappings; public FizzBuzzCalculator(Dictionary<Tuple<bool, bool>, string> mappings) { _mappings = mappings; } public string NumberFormat(int number) { var numDivisibleBy3 = (number % 3) == 0; var numDivisibleBy5 = (number % 5) == 0; var mappedKey = new Tuple<bool, bool>(numDivisibleBy3, numDivisibleBy5); return String.Format("{0} {1}", number, _mappings[mappedKey]); } } class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { var mappings = new Dictionary<Tuple<bool, bool>, string> { { new Tuple<bool, bool>(true, true), "- FizzBuzz"}, { new Tuple<bool, bool>(true, false), "- Fizz"}, { new Tuple<bool, bool>(false, true), "- Buzz"}, { new Tuple<bool, bool>(false, false), ""} }; var fizzBuzz = new FizzBuzzCalculator(mappings); for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) { Console.WriteLine(fizzBuzz.NumberFormat(i)); } Console.ReadLine(); } } In my second attempt I looked at removing the if else in the NumberFormat method. A dictionary proved to be useful for this – I added a constructor to the class and injected the dictionary mapping. One could argue that this is totally overkill, but if I was going to use this code in a large system an approach like this makes it easy to put this data in a configuration file, which would up its OC (Open for extensibility, closed for modification principle). I could of course take the OC principle even further – the check for divisibility by 3 and 5 is tightly coupled to this class. If I wanted to make it 4 instead of 3, I would need to adjust this class. This introduces my third refactoring. Solution 3 – Introducing Delegates and Injecting them into the class public delegate bool FizzBuzzComparison(int number); public class FizzBuzzCalculator { private readonly Dictionary<Tuple<bool, bool>, string> _mappings; private readonly FizzBuzzComparison _comparison1; private readonly FizzBuzzComparison _comparison2; public FizzBuzzCalculator(Dictionary<Tuple<bool, bool>, string> mappings, FizzBuzzComparison comparison1, FizzBuzzComparison comparison2) { _mappings = mappings; _comparison1 = comparison1; _comparison2 = comparison2; } public string NumberFormat(int number) { var mappedKey = new Tuple<bool, bool>(_comparison1(number), _comparison2(number)); return String.Format("{0} {1}", number, _mappings[mappedKey]); } } class Program { private static bool DivisibleByNum(int number, int divisor) { return number % divisor == 0; } public static bool Divisibleby3(int number) { return number % 3 == 0; } public static bool Divisibleby5(int number) { return number % 5 == 0; } static void Main(string[] args) { var mappings = new Dictionary<Tuple<bool, bool>, string> { { new Tuple<bool, bool>(true, true), "- FizzBuzz"}, { new Tuple<bool, bool>(true, false), "- Fizz"}, { new Tuple<bool, bool>(false, true), "- Buzz"}, { new Tuple<bool, bool>(false, false), ""} }; var fizzBuzz = new FizzBuzzCalculator(mappings, Divisibleby3, Divisibleby5); for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) { Console.WriteLine(fizzBuzz.NumberFormat(i)); } Console.ReadLine(); } } I have taken this one step further and introduced delegates that are injected into the FizzBuzz Calculator class, from an OC principle perspective it has probably made it more compliant than the previous Solution 2, but there seems to be a lot of noise. Anonymous Delegates increase the readability level, which is what I have done in Solution 4. Solution 4 – Anon Delegates public delegate bool FizzBuzzComparison(int number); public class FizzBuzzCalculator { private readonly Dictionary<Tuple<bool, bool>, string> _mappings; private readonly FizzBuzzComparison _comparison1; private readonly FizzBuzzComparison _comparison2; public FizzBuzzCalculator(Dictionary<Tuple<bool, bool>, string> mappings, FizzBuzzComparison comparison1, FizzBuzzComparison comparison2) { _mappings = mappings; _comparison1 = comparison1; _comparison2 = comparison2; } public string NumberFormat(int number) { var mappedKey = new Tuple<bool, bool>(_comparison1(number), _comparison2(number)); return String.Format("{0} {1}", number, _mappings[mappedKey]); } } class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { var mappings = new Dictionary<Tuple<bool, bool>, string> { { new Tuple<bool, bool>(true, true), "- FizzBuzz"}, { new Tuple<bool, bool>(true, false), "- Fizz"}, { new Tuple<bool, bool>(false, true), "- Buzz"}, { new Tuple<bool, bool>(false, false), ""} }; var fizzBuzz = new FizzBuzzCalculator(mappings, (n) => n % 3 == 0, (n) => n % 5 == 0); for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) { Console.WriteLine(fizzBuzz.NumberFormat(i)); } Console.ReadLine(); } }   Using the anonymous delegates I think the noise level has now been reduced. This is where I am going to end this post, I have gone through 4 iterations of the code from the initial solution using If..Else to delegates and dictionaries. I think each approach would have it’s pro’s and con’s and depending on the intention of where the code would be used would be a large determining factor. If you can think of an alternative way to do FizzBuzz, add a comment!

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• Cannot log into Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g: ORA-28001

  - by Álvaro G. Vicario

  I can no longer log into Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g. I get this error message: ORA-28001: the password has expired (DBD ERROR: OCISessionBegin) I could log into the server using SQL*Plus. I warned me that the password was going to expire in 7 days (which is not the same as being already expired). Following advice from several documents, I ran these commands from SQL*Plus: ALTER USER sys IDENTIFIED BY new_password; ALTER USER system IDENTIFIED BY new_password; SQL*Plus no longer warns about passwords, but I still cannot use the Enterprise Manager. Then I followed this to remove password expiration: ALTER PROFILE default LIMIT password_life_time UNLIMITED And I've also restarted the Oracle services. In case it was using cached credentials, I've tried to connect from several browsers in several computers. No way: I still get ORA-28001 in Enterprise Manager. What am I missing? Update: Some more info SQL> select username,ACCOUNT_STATUS,EXPIRY_DATE from dba_users; USERNAME ACCOUNT_STATUS EXPIRY_D ------------------------------ -------------------------------- -------- MGMT_VIEW OPEN SYS OPEN SYSTEM OPEN [...] DBSNMP EXPIRED 24/05/10 SYSMAN EXPIRED 24/05/10 OUTLN EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 FLOWS_FILES EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 USERNAME ACCOUNT_STATUS EXPIRY_D ------------------------------ -------------------------------- -------- MDSYS EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 ORDSYS EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 EXFSYS EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 WMSYS EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 WKSYS EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 WK_TEST EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 CTXSYS EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 ANONYMOUS EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 XDB EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 WKPROXY EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 ORDPLUGINS EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 USERNAME ACCOUNT_STATUS EXPIRY_D ------------------------------ -------------------------------- -------- FLOWS_030000 EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 OWBSYS EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 SI_INFORMTN_SCHEMA EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 OLAPSYS EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 SCOTT EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 ORACLE_OCM EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 TSMSYS EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 XS$NULL EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 BI EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 PM EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 MDDATA EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 USERNAME ACCOUNT_STATUS EXPIRY_D ------------------------------ -------------------------------- -------- IX EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 SH EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 DIP EXPIRED & LOCKED OE EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 APEX_PUBLIC_USER EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 HR EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 SPATIAL_CSW_ADMIN_USR EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 SPATIAL_WFS_ADMIN_USR EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09

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• Entity Framework 6: Alpha2 Now Available

  - by ScottGu

  The Entity Framework team recently announced the 2nd alpha release of EF6.   The alpha 2 package is available for download from NuGet. Since this is a pre-release package make sure to select “Include Prereleases” in the NuGet package manager, or execute the following from the package manager console to install it: PM> Install-Package EntityFramework -Pre This week’s alpha release includes a bunch of great improvements in the following areas: Async language support is now available for queries and updates when running on .NET 4.5. Custom conventions now provide the ability to override the default conventions that Code First uses for mapping types, properties, etc. to your database. Multi-tenant migrations allow the same database to be used by multiple contexts with full Code First Migrations support for independently evolving the model backing each context. Using Enumerable.Contains in a LINQ query is now handled much more efficiently by EF and the SQL Server provider resulting greatly improved performance. All features of EF6 (except async) are available on both .NET 4 and .NET 4.5. This includes support for enums and spatial types and the performance improvements that were previously only available when using .NET 4.5. Start-up time for many large models has been dramatically improved thanks to improved view generation performance. Below are some additional details about a few of the improvements above: Async Support .NET 4.5 introduced the Task-Based Asynchronous Pattern that uses the async and await keywords to help make writing asynchronous code easier. EF 6 now supports this pattern. This is great for ASP.NET applications as database calls made through EF can now be processed asynchronously – avoiding any blocking of worker threads. This can increase scalability on the server by allowing more requests to be processed while waiting for the database to respond. The following code shows an MVC controller that is querying a database for a list of location entities:     public class HomeController : Controller     {         LocationContext db = new LocationContext();           public async Task<ActionResult> Index()         {             var locations = await db.Locations.ToListAsync();               return View(locations);         }     } Notice above the call to the new ToListAsync method with the await keyword. When the web server reaches this code it initiates the database request, but rather than blocking while waiting for the results to come back, the thread that is processing the request returns to the thread pool, allowing ASP.NET to process another incoming request with the same thread. In other words, a thread is only consumed when there is actual processing work to do, allowing the web server to handle more concurrent requests with the same resources. A more detailed walkthrough covering async in EF is available with additional information and examples. Also a walkthrough is available showing how to use async in an ASP.NET MVC application. Custom Conventions When working with EF Code First, the default behavior is to map .NET classes to tables using a set of conventions baked into EF. For example, Code First will detect properties that end with “ID” and configure them automatically as primary keys. However, sometimes you cannot or do not want to follow those conventions and would rather provide your own. For example, maybe your primary key properties all end in “Key” instead of “Id”. Custom conventions allow the default conventions to be overridden or new conventions to be added so that Code First can map by convention using whatever rules make sense for your project. The following code demonstrates using custom conventions to set the precision of all decimals to 5. As with other Code First configuration, this code is placed in the OnModelCreating method which is overridden on your derived DbContext class:         protected override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder)         {             modelBuilder.Properties<decimal>()                 .Configure(x => x.HasPrecision(5));           } But what if there are a couple of places where a decimal property should have a different precision? Just as with all the existing Code First conventions, this new convention can be overridden for a particular property simply by explicitly configuring that property using either the fluent API or a data annotation. A more detailed description of custom code first conventions is available here. Community Involvement I blogged a while ago about EF being released under an open source license.  Since then a number of community members have made contributions and these are included in EF6 alpha 2. Two examples of community contributions are: AlirezaHaghshenas contributed a change that increases the startup performance of EF for larger models by improving the performance of view generation. The change means that it is less often necessary to use of pre-generated views. UnaiZorrilla contributed the first community feature to EF: the ability to load all Code First configuration classes in an assembly with a single method call like the following: protected override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder) {        modelBuilder.Configurations            .AddFromAssembly(typeof(LocationContext).Assembly); } This code will find and load all the classes that inherit from EntityTypeConfiguration<T> or ComplexTypeConfiguration<T> in the assembly where LocationContext is defined. This reduces the amount of coupling between the context and Code First configuration classes, and is also a very convenient shortcut for large models. Other upcoming features coming in EF 6 Lots of information about the development of EF6 can be found on the EF CodePlex site, including a roadmap showing the other features that are planned for EF6. One of of the nice upcoming features is connection resiliency, which will automate the process of retying database operations on transient failures common in cloud environments and with databases such as the Windows Azure SQL Database. Another often requested feature that will be included in EF6 is the ability to map stored procedures to query and update operations on entities when using Code First. Summary EF6 is the first open source release of Entity Framework being developed in CodePlex. The alpha 2 preview release of EF6 is now available on NuGet, and contains some really great features for you to try. The EF team are always looking for feedback from developers - especially on the new features such as custom Code First conventions and async support. To provide feedback you can post a comment on the EF6 alpha 2 announcement post, start a discussion or file a bug on the CodePlex site. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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