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• Visual Studio 2010 Extension Manager (and the new VS 2010 PowerCommands Extension)

  - by ScottGu

  This is the twenty-third in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. Today’s blog post covers some of the extensibility improvements made in VS 2010 – as well as a cool new "PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2010” extension that Microsoft just released (and which can be downloaded and used for free). [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] Extensibility in VS 2010 VS 2010 provides a much richer extensibility model than previous releases.  Anyone can build extensions that add, customize, and light-up the Visual Studio 2010 IDE, Code Editors, Project System and associated Designers. VS 2010 Extensions can be created using the new MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) which is built-into .NET 4.  You can learn more about how to create VS 2010 extensions from this this blog post from the Visual Studio Team Blog. VS 2010 Extension Manager Developers building extensions can distribute them on their own (via their own web-sites or by selling them).  Visual Studio 2010 also now includes a built-in “Extension Manager” within the IDE that makes it much easier for developers to find, download, and enable extensions online.  You can launch the “Extension Manager” by selecting the Tools->Extension Manager menu option: This loads an “Extension Manager” dialog which accesses an “online gallery” at Microsoft, and then populates a list of available extensions that you can optionally download and enable within your copy of Visual Studio: There are already hundreds of cool extensions populated within the online gallery.  You can browse them by category (use the tree-view on the top-left to filter them).  Clicking “download” on any of the extensions will download, install, and enable it. PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2010 This weekend Microsoft released the free PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2010 extension to the online gallery.  You can learn more about it here, and download and install it via the “Extension Manager” above (search for PowerCommands to find it). The PowerCommands download adds dozens of useful commands to Visual Studio 2010.  Below is a screen-shot of just a few of the useful commands that it adds to the Solution Explorer context menus: Below is a list of all the commands included with this weekend’s PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2010 release: Enable/Disable PowerCommands in Options dialog This feature allows you to select which commands to enable in the Visual Studio IDE. Point to the Tools menu, then click Options. Expand the PowerCommands options, then click Commands. Check the commands you would like to enable. Note: All power commands are initially defaulted Enabled. Format document on save / Remove and Sort Usings on save The Format document on save option formats the tabs, spaces, and so on of the document being saved. It is equivalent to pointing to the Edit menu, clicking Advanced, and then clicking Format Document. The Remove and sort usings option removes unused using statements and sorts the remaining using statements in the document being saved. Note: The Remove and sort usings option is only available for C# documents. Format document on save and Remove and sort usings both are initially defaulted OFF. Clear All Panes This command clears all output panes. It can be executed from the button on the toolbar of the Output window. Copy Path This command copies the full path of the currently selected item to the clipboard. It can be executed by right-clicking one of these nodes in the Solution Explorer: The solution node; A project node; Any project item node; Any folder. Email CodeSnippet To email the lines of text you select in the code editor, right-click anywhere in the editor and then click Email CodeSnippet. Insert Guid Attribute This command adds a Guid attribute to a selected class. From the code editor, right-click anywhere within the class definition, then click Insert Guid Attribute. Show All Files This command shows the hidden files in all projects displayed in the Solution Explorer when the solution node is selected. It enhances the Show All Files button, which normally shows only the hidden files in the selected project node. Undo Close This command reopens a closed document , returning the cursor to its last position. To reopen the most recently closed document, point to the Edit menu, then click Undo Close. Alternately, you can use the CtrlShiftZ shortcut. To reopen any other recently closed document, point to the View menu, click Other Windows, and then click Undo Close Window. The Undo Close window appears, typically next to the Output window. Double-click any document in the list to reopen it. Collapse Projects This command collapses a project or projects in the Solution Explorer starting from the root selected node. Collapsing a project can increase the readability of the solution. This command can be executed from three different places: solution, solution folders and project nodes respectively. Copy Class This command copies a selected class entire content to the clipboard, renaming the class. This command is normally followed by a Paste Class command, which renames the class to avoid a compilation error. It can be executed from a single project item or a project item with dependent sub items. Paste Class This command pastes a class entire content from the clipboard, renaming the class to avoid a compilation error. This command is normally preceded by a Copy Class command. It can be executed from a project or folder node. Copy References This command copies a reference or set of references to the clipboard. It can be executed from the references node, a single reference node or set of reference nodes. Paste References This command pastes a reference or set of references from the clipboard. It can be executed from different places depending on the type of project. For CSharp projects it can be executed from the references node. For Visual Basic and Website projects it can be executed from the project node. Copy As Project Reference This command copies a project as a project reference to the clipboard. It can be executed from a project node. Edit Project File This command opens the MSBuild project file for a selected project inside Visual Studio. It combines the existing Unload Project and Edit Project commands. Open Containing Folder This command opens a Windows Explorer window pointing to the physical path of a selected item. It can be executed from a project item node Open Command Prompt This command opens a Visual Studio command prompt pointing to the physical path of a selected item. It can be executed from four different places: solution, project, folder and project item nodes respectively. Unload Projects This command unloads all projects in a solution. This can be useful in MSBuild scenarios when multiple projects are being edited. This command can be executed from the solution node. Reload Projects This command reloads all unloaded projects in a solution. It can be executed from the solution node. Remove and Sort Usings This command removes and sort using statements for all classes given a project. It is useful, for example, in removing or organizing the using statements generated by a wizard. This command can be executed from a solution node or a single project node. Extract Constant This command creates a constant definition statement for a selected text. Extracting a constant effectively names a literal value, which can improve readability. This command can be executed from the code editor by right-clicking selected text. Clear Recent File List This command clears the Visual Studio recent file list. The Clear Recent File List command brings up a Clear File dialog which allows any or all recent files to be selected. Clear Recent Project List This command clears the Visual Studio recent project list. The Clear Recent Project List command brings up a Clear File dialog which allows any or all recent projects to be selected. Transform Templates This command executes a custom tool with associated text templates items. It can be executed from a DSL project node or a DSL folder node. Close All This command closes all documents. It can be executed from a document tab. How to temporarily disable extensions Extensions provide a great way to make Visual Studio even more powerful, and can help improve your overall productivity.  One thing to keep in mind, though, is that extensions run within the Visual Studio process (DevEnv.exe) and so a bug within an extension can impact both the stability and performance of Visual Studio.  If you ever run into a situation where things seem slower than they should, or if you crash repeatedly, please temporarily disable any installed extensions and see if that fixes the problem.  You can do this for extensions that were installed via the online gallery by re-running the extension manager (using the Tools->Extension Manager menu option) and by selecting the “Installed Extensions” node on the top-left of the dialog – and then by clicking “Disable” on any of the extensions within your installed list: Hope this helps, Scott

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• Git for beginners: The definitive practical guide

  - by Adam Davis

  Ok, after seeing this post by PJ Hyett, I have decided to skip to the end and go with git. So what I need is a beginners practical guide to git. "Beginner" being defined as someone who knows how to handle their compiler, understands to some level what a makefile is, and has touched source control without understanding it very well. "Practical" being defined as this person doesn't want to get into great detail regarding what git is doing in the background, and doesn't even care (or know) that it's distributed. Your answers might hint at the possibilities, but try to aim for the beginner that wants to keep a 'main' repository on a 'server' which is backed up and secure, and treat their local repository as merely a 'client' resource. Procedural note: PLEASE pick one and only one of the below topics and answer it clearly and concisely in any given answer. Don't try to jam a bunch of information into one answer. Don't just link to other resources - cut and paste with attribution if copyright allows, otherwise learn it and explain it in your own words (ie, don't make people leave this page to learn a task). Please comment on, or edit, an already existing answer unless your explanation is very different and you think the community is better served with a different explanation rather than altering the existing explanation. So: Installation/Setup How to install git How do you set up git? Try to cover linux, windows, mac, think 'client/server' mindset. Setup GIT Server with Msysgit on Windows How do you create a new project/repository? How do you configure it to ignore files (.obj, .user, etc) that are not really part of the codebase? Working with the code How do you get the latest code? How do you check out code? How do you commit changes? How do you see what's uncommitted, or the status of your current codebase? How do you destroy unwanted commits? How do you compare two revisions of a file, or your current file and a previous revision? How do you see the history of revisions to a file? How do you handle binary files (visio docs, for instance, or compiler environments)? How do you merge files changed at the "same time"? How do you undo (revert or reset) a commit? Tagging, branching, releases, baselines How do you 'mark' 'tag' or 'release' a particular set of revisions for a particular set of files so you can always pull that one later? How do you pull a particular 'release'? How do you branch? How do you merge branches? How do you resolve conflicts and complete the merge? How do you merge parts of one branch into another branch? What is rebasing? How do I track remote branches? How can I create a branch on a remote repository? Other Describe and link to a good gui, IDE plugin, etc that makes git a non-command line resource, but please list its limitations as well as its good. msysgit - Cross platform, included with git gitk - Cross platform history viewer, included with git gitnub - OS X gitx - OS X history viewer smartgit - Cross platform, commercial, beta tig - console GUI for Linux qgit - GUI for Windows, Linux Any other common tasks a beginner should know? Git Status tells you what you just did, what branch you have, and other useful information How do I work effectively with a subversion repository set as my source control source? Other git beginner's references git guide git book git magic gitcasts github guides git tutorial Progit - book by Scott Chacon Git - SVN Crash Course Delving into git Understanding git conceptually I will go through the entries from time to time and 'tidy' them up so they have a consistent look/feel and it's easy to scan the list - feel free to follow a simple "header - brief explanation - list of instructions - gotchas and extra info" template. I'll also link to the entries from the bullet list above so it's easy to find them later.

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• WCF Data Service BeginSaveChanges not saving changes in Silverlight app

  - by Enigmativity

  I'm having a hell of a time getting WCF Data Services to work within Silverlight. I'm using the VS2010 RC. I've struggled with the cross domain issue requiring the use of clientaccesspolicy.xml & crossdomain.xml files in the web server root folder, but I just couldn't get this to work. I've resorted to putting both the Silverlight Web App & the WCF Data Service in the same project to get past this issue, but any advice here would be good. But now that I can actually see my data coming from the database and being displayed in a data grid within Silverlight I thought my troubles were over - but no. I can edit the data and the in-memory entity is changing, but when I call BeginSaveChanges (with the appropriate async EndSaveChangescall) I get no errors, but no data updates in the database. Here's my WCF Data Services code: public class MyDataService : DataService<MyEntities> { public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) { config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("*", EntitySetRights.All); config.SetServiceOperationAccessRule("*", ServiceOperationRights.All); config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; } protected override void OnStartProcessingRequest(ProcessRequestArgs args) { base.OnStartProcessingRequest(args); HttpContext context = HttpContext.Current; HttpCachePolicy c = HttpContext.Current.Response.Cache; c.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.ServerAndPrivate); c.SetExpires(HttpContext.Current.Timestamp.AddSeconds(60)); c.VaryByHeaders["Accept"] = true; c.VaryByHeaders["Accept-Charset"] = true; c.VaryByHeaders["Accept-Encoding"] = true; c.VaryByParams["*"] = true; } } I've pinched the OnStartProcessingRequest code from Scott Hanselman's article Creating an OData API for StackOverflow including XML and JSON in 30 minutes. Here's my code from my Silverlight app: private MyEntities _wcfDataServicesEntities; private CollectionViewSource _customersViewSource; private ObservableCollection<Customer> _customers; private void UserControl_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { if (!System.ComponentModel.DesignerProperties.GetIsInDesignMode(this)) { _wcfDataServicesEntities = new MyEntities(new Uri("http://localhost:7156/MyDataService.svc/")); _customersViewSource = this.Resources["customersViewSource"] as CollectionViewSource; DataServiceQuery<Customer> query = _wcfDataServicesEntities.Customer; query.BeginExecute(result => { _customers = new ObservableCollection<Customer>(); Array.ForEach(query.EndExecute(result).ToArray(), _customers.Add); Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(() => { _customersViewSource.Source = _customers; }); }, null); } } private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { _wcfDataServicesEntities.BeginSaveChanges(r => { var response = _wcfDataServicesEntities.EndSaveChanges(r); string[] results = new[] { response.BatchStatusCode.ToString(), response.IsBatchResponse.ToString() }; _customers[0].FinAssistCompanyName = String.Join("|", results); }, null); } The response string I get back data binds to my grid OK and shows "-1|False". My intent is to get a proof-of-concept working here and then do the appropriate separation of concerns to turn this into a simple line-of-business app. I've spent hours and hours on this. I'm being driven insane. Any ideas how to get this working?

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• Problem with setup VPN on Ubuntu Server 12.04

  - by Yozone W.

  I have a problem with setup VPN server on my Ubuntu VPS, here is my server environments: Ubuntu Server 12.04 x86_64 xl2tpd 1.3.1+dfsg-1 pppd 2.4.5-5ubuntu1 openswan 1:2.6.38-1~precise1 After install software and configuration: ipsec verify Checking your system to see if IPsec got installed and started correctly: Version check and ipsec on-path [OK] Linux Openswan U2.6.38/K3.2.0-24-virtual (netkey) Checking for IPsec support in kernel [OK] SAref kernel support [N/A] NETKEY: Testing XFRM related proc values [OK] [OK] [OK] Checking that pluto is running [OK] Pluto listening for IKE on udp 500 [OK] Pluto listening for NAT-T on udp 4500 [OK] Checking for 'ip' command [OK] Checking /bin/sh is not /bin/dash [WARNING] Checking for 'iptables' command [OK] Opportunistic Encryption Support [DISABLED] /var/log/auth.log message: Oct 16 06:50:54 vpn pluto[3963]: packet from [My IP Address]:2251: received Vendor ID payload [RFC 3947] method set to=115 Oct 16 06:50:54 vpn pluto[3963]: packet from [My IP Address]:2251: received Vendor ID payload [draft-ietf-ipsec-nat-t-ike] meth=114, but already using method 115 Oct 16 06:50:54 vpn pluto[3963]: packet from [My IP Address]:2251: received Vendor ID payload [draft-ietf-ipsec-nat-t-ike-08] meth=113, but already using method 115 Oct 16 06:50:54 vpn pluto[3963]: packet from [My IP Address]:2251: received Vendor ID payload [draft-ietf-ipsec-nat-t-ike-07] meth=112, but already using method 115 Oct 16 06:50:54 vpn pluto[3963]: packet from [My IP Address]:2251: received Vendor ID payload [draft-ietf-ipsec-nat-t-ike-06] meth=111, but already using method 115 Oct 16 06:50:54 vpn pluto[3963]: packet from [My IP Address]:2251: received Vendor ID payload [draft-ietf-ipsec-nat-t-ike-05] meth=110, but already using method 115 Oct 16 06:50:54 vpn pluto[3963]: packet from [My IP Address]:2251: received Vendor ID payload [draft-ietf-ipsec-nat-t-ike-04] meth=109, but already using method 115 Oct 16 06:50:54 vpn pluto[3963]: packet from [My IP Address]:2251: received Vendor ID payload [draft-ietf-ipsec-nat-t-ike-03] meth=108, but already using method 115 Oct 16 06:50:54 vpn pluto[3963]: packet from [My IP Address]:2251: received Vendor ID payload [draft-ietf-ipsec-nat-t-ike-02] meth=107, but already using method 115 Oct 16 06:50:54 vpn pluto[3963]: packet from [My IP Address]:2251: received Vendor ID payload [draft-ietf-ipsec-nat-t-ike-02_n] meth=106, but already using method 115 Oct 16 06:50:54 vpn pluto[3963]: packet from [My IP Address]:2251: ignoring Vendor ID payload [FRAGMENTATION 80000000] Oct 16 06:50:54 vpn pluto[3963]: packet from [My IP Address]:2251: received Vendor ID payload [Dead Peer Detection] Oct 16 06:50:54 vpn pluto[3963]: "L2TP-PSK-NAT"[5] [My IP Address] #5: responding to Main Mode from unknown peer [My IP Address] Oct 16 06:50:54 vpn pluto[3963]: "L2TP-PSK-NAT"[5] [My IP Address] #5: transition from state STATE_MAIN_R0 to state STATE_MAIN_R1 Oct 16 06:50:54 vpn pluto[3963]: "L2TP-PSK-NAT"[5] [My IP Address] #5: STATE_MAIN_R1: sent MR1, expecting MI2 Oct 16 06:50:55 vpn pluto[3963]: "L2TP-PSK-NAT"[5] [My IP Address] #5: NAT-Traversal: Result using draft-ietf-ipsec-nat-t-ike (MacOS X): peer is NATed Oct 16 06:50:55 vpn pluto[3963]: "L2TP-PSK-NAT"[5] [My IP Address] #5: transition from state STATE_MAIN_R1 to state STATE_MAIN_R2 Oct 16 06:50:55 vpn pluto[3963]: "L2TP-PSK-NAT"[5] [My IP Address] #5: STATE_MAIN_R2: sent MR2, expecting MI3 Oct 16 06:50:55 vpn pluto[3963]: "L2TP-PSK-NAT"[5] [My IP Address] #5: ignoring informational payload, type IPSEC_INITIAL_CONTACT msgid=00000000 Oct 16 06:50:55 vpn pluto[3963]: "L2TP-PSK-NAT"[5] [My IP Address] #5: Main mode peer ID is ID_IPV4_ADDR: '192.168.12.52' Oct 16 06:50:55 vpn pluto[3963]: "L2TP-PSK-NAT"[5] [My IP Address] #5: switched from "L2TP-PSK-NAT" to "L2TP-PSK-NAT" Oct 16 06:50:55 vpn pluto[3963]: "L2TP-PSK-NAT"[6] [My IP Address] #5: deleting connection "L2TP-PSK-NAT" instance with peer [My IP Address] {isakmp=#0/ipsec=#0} Oct 16 06:50:55 vpn pluto[3963]: "L2TP-PSK-NAT"[6] [My IP Address] #5: transition from state STATE_MAIN_R2 to state STATE_MAIN_R3 Oct 16 06:50:55 vpn pluto[3963]: "L2TP-PSK-NAT"[6] [My IP Address] #5: new NAT mapping for #5, was [My IP Address]:2251, now [My IP Address]:2847 Oct 16 06:50:55 vpn pluto[3963]: "L2TP-PSK-NAT"[6] [My IP Address] #5: STATE_MAIN_R3: sent MR3, ISAKMP SA established {auth=OAKLEY_PRESHARED_KEY cipher=aes_256 prf=oakley_sha group=modp1024} Oct 16 06:50:55 vpn pluto[3963]: "L2TP-PSK-NAT"[6] [My IP Address] #5: Dead Peer Detection (RFC 3706): enabled Oct 16 06:50:56 vpn pluto[3963]: "L2TP-PSK-NAT"[6] [My IP Address] #5: the peer proposed: [My Server IP Address]/32:17/1701 -> 192.168.12.52/32:17/0 Oct 16 06:50:56 vpn pluto[3963]: "L2TP-PSK-NAT"[6] [My IP Address] #5: NAT-Traversal: received 2 NAT-OA. using first, ignoring others Oct 16 06:50:56 vpn pluto[3963]: "L2TP-PSK-NAT"[6] [My IP Address] #6: responding to Quick Mode proposal {msgid:8579b1fb} Oct 16 06:50:56 vpn pluto[3963]: "L2TP-PSK-NAT"[6] [My IP Address] #6: us: [My Server IP Address]<[My Server IP Address]>:17/1701 Oct 16 06:50:56 vpn pluto[3963]: "L2TP-PSK-NAT"[6] [My IP Address] #6: them: [My IP Address][192.168.12.52]:17/65280===192.168.12.52/32 Oct 16 06:50:56 vpn pluto[3963]: "L2TP-PSK-NAT"[6] [My IP Address] #6: transition from state STATE_QUICK_R0 to state STATE_QUICK_R1 Oct 16 06:50:56 vpn pluto[3963]: "L2TP-PSK-NAT"[6] [My IP Address] #6: STATE_QUICK_R1: sent QR1, inbound IPsec SA installed, expecting QI2 Oct 16 06:50:56 vpn pluto[3963]: "L2TP-PSK-NAT"[6] [My IP Address] #6: Dead Peer Detection (RFC 3706): enabled Oct 16 06:50:56 vpn pluto[3963]: "L2TP-PSK-NAT"[6] [My IP Address] #6: transition from state STATE_QUICK_R1 to state STATE_QUICK_R2 Oct 16 06:50:56 vpn pluto[3963]: "L2TP-PSK-NAT"[6] [My IP Address] #6: STATE_QUICK_R2: IPsec SA established transport mode {ESP=>0x08bda158 <0x4920a374 xfrm=AES_256-HMAC_SHA1 NATOA=192.168.12.52 NATD=[My IP Address]:2847 DPD=enabled} Oct 16 06:51:16 vpn pluto[3963]: "L2TP-PSK-NAT"[6] [My IP Address] #5: received Delete SA(0x08bda158) payload: deleting IPSEC State #6 Oct 16 06:51:16 vpn pluto[3963]: "L2TP-PSK-NAT"[6] [My IP Address] #5: ERROR: netlink XFRM_MSG_DELPOLICY response for flow eroute_connection delete included errno 2: No such file or directory Oct 16 06:51:16 vpn pluto[3963]: "L2TP-PSK-NAT"[6] [My IP Address] #5: received and ignored informational message Oct 16 06:51:16 vpn pluto[3963]: "L2TP-PSK-NAT"[6] [My IP Address] #5: received Delete SA payload: deleting ISAKMP State #5 Oct 16 06:51:16 vpn pluto[3963]: "L2TP-PSK-NAT"[6] [My IP Address]: deleting connection "L2TP-PSK-NAT" instance with peer [My IP Address] {isakmp=#0/ipsec=#0} Oct 16 06:51:16 vpn pluto[3963]: packet from [My IP Address]:2847: received and ignored informational message xl2tpd -D message: xl2tpd[4289]: Enabling IPsec SAref processing for L2TP transport mode SAs xl2tpd[4289]: IPsec SAref does not work with L2TP kernel mode yet, enabling forceuserspace=yes xl2tpd[4289]: setsockopt recvref[30]: Protocol not available xl2tpd[4289]: This binary does not support kernel L2TP. xl2tpd[4289]: xl2tpd version xl2tpd-1.3.1 started on vpn.netools.me PID:4289 xl2tpd[4289]: Written by Mark Spencer, Copyright (C) 1998, Adtran, Inc. xl2tpd[4289]: Forked by Scott Balmos and David Stipp, (C) 2001 xl2tpd[4289]: Inherited by Jeff McAdams, (C) 2002 xl2tpd[4289]: Forked again by Xelerance (www.xelerance.com) (C) 2006 xl2tpd[4289]: Listening on IP address [My Server IP Address], port 1701 Then it just stopped here, and have no any response. I can't connect VPN on my mac client, the /var/log/system.log message: Oct 16 15:17:36 azone-iMac.local configd[17]: SCNC: start, triggered by SystemUIServer, type L2TP, status 0 Oct 16 15:17:36 azone-iMac.local pppd[3799]: pppd 2.4.2 (Apple version 596.13) started by azone, uid 501 Oct 16 15:17:38 azone-iMac.local pppd[3799]: L2TP connecting to server 'vpn.netools.me' ([My Server IP Address])... Oct 16 15:17:38 azone-iMac.local pppd[3799]: IPSec connection started Oct 16 15:17:38 azone-iMac.local racoon[359]: Connecting. Oct 16 15:17:38 azone-iMac.local racoon[359]: IPSec Phase1 started (Initiated by me). Oct 16 15:17:38 azone-iMac.local racoon[359]: IKE Packet: transmit success. (Initiator, Main-Mode message 1). Oct 16 15:17:38 azone-iMac.local racoon[359]: IKE Packet: receive success. (Initiator, Main-Mode message 2). Oct 16 15:17:38 azone-iMac.local racoon[359]: IKE Packet: transmit success. (Initiator, Main-Mode message 3). Oct 16 15:17:38 azone-iMac.local racoon[359]: IKE Packet: receive success. (Initiator, Main-Mode message 4). Oct 16 15:17:38 azone-iMac.local racoon[359]: IKE Packet: transmit success. (Initiator, Main-Mode message 5). Oct 16 15:17:38 azone-iMac.local racoon[359]: IKEv1 Phase1 AUTH: success. (Initiator, Main-Mode Message 6). Oct 16 15:17:38 azone-iMac.local racoon[359]: IKE Packet: receive success. (Initiator, Main-Mode message 6). Oct 16 15:17:38 azone-iMac.local racoon[359]: IKEv1 Phase1 Initiator: success. (Initiator, Main-Mode). Oct 16 15:17:38 azone-iMac.local racoon[359]: IPSec Phase1 established (Initiated by me). Oct 16 15:17:39 azone-iMac.local racoon[359]: IPSec Phase2 started (Initiated by me). Oct 16 15:17:39 azone-iMac.local racoon[359]: IKE Packet: transmit success. (Initiator, Quick-Mode message 1). Oct 16 15:17:39 azone-iMac.local racoon[359]: IKE Packet: receive success. (Initiator, Quick-Mode message 2). Oct 16 15:17:39 azone-iMac.local racoon[359]: IKE Packet: transmit success. (Initiator, Quick-Mode message 3). Oct 16 15:17:39 azone-iMac.local racoon[359]: IKEv1 Phase2 Initiator: success. (Initiator, Quick-Mode). Oct 16 15:17:39 azone-iMac.local racoon[359]: IPSec Phase2 established (Initiated by me). Oct 16 15:17:39 azone-iMac.local pppd[3799]: IPSec connection established Oct 16 15:17:59 azone-iMac.local pppd[3799]: L2TP cannot connect to the server Oct 16 15:17:59 azone-iMac.local racoon[359]: IPSec disconnecting from server [My Server IP Address] Oct 16 15:17:59 azone-iMac.local racoon[359]: IKE Packet: transmit success. (Information message). Oct 16 15:17:59 azone-iMac.local racoon[359]: IKEv1 Information-Notice: transmit success. (Delete IPSEC-SA). Oct 16 15:17:59 azone-iMac.local racoon[359]: IKE Packet: transmit success. (Information message). Oct 16 15:17:59 azone-iMac.local racoon[359]: IKEv1 Information-Notice: transmit success. (Delete ISAKMP-SA). Anyone help? Thanks a million!

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• Cleaner HTML Markup with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms - Client IDs (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series)

  - by ScottGu

  This is the sixteenth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. Today’s post is the first of a few blog posts I’ll be doing that talk about some of the important changes we’ve made to make Web Forms in ASP.NET 4 generate clean, standards-compliant, CSS-friendly markup.  Today I’ll cover the work we are doing to provide better control over the “ID” attributes rendered by server controls to the client. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] Clean, Standards-Based, CSS-Friendly Markup One of the common complaints developers have often had with ASP.NET Web Forms is that when using server controls they don’t have the ability to easily generate clean, CSS-friendly output and markup.  Some of the specific complaints with previous ASP.NET releases include: Auto-generated ID attributes within HTML make it hard to write JavaScript and style with CSS Use of tables instead of semantic markup for certain controls (in particular the asp:menu control) make styling ugly Some controls render inline style properties even if no style property on the control has been set ViewState can often be bigger than ideal ASP.NET 4 provides better support for building standards-compliant pages out of the box.  The built-in <asp:> server controls with ASP.NET 4 now generate cleaner markup and support CSS styling – and help address all of the above issues.  Markup Compatibility When Upgrading Existing ASP.NET Web Forms Applications A common question people often ask when hearing about the cleaner markup coming with ASP.NET 4 is “Great - but what about my existing applications?  Will these changes/improvements break things when I upgrade?” To help ensure that we don’t break assumptions around markup and styling with existing ASP.NET Web Forms applications, we’ve enabled a configuration flag – controlRenderingCompatbilityVersion – within web.config that let’s you decide if you want to use the new cleaner markup approach that is the default with new ASP.NET 4 applications, or for compatibility reasons render the same markup that previous versions of ASP.NET used:   When the controlRenderingCompatbilityVersion flag is set to “3.5” your application and server controls will by default render output using the same markup generation used with VS 2008 and .NET 3.5.  When the controlRenderingCompatbilityVersion flag is set to “4.0” your application and server controls will strictly adhere to the XHTML 1.1 specification, have cleaner client IDs, render with semantic correctness in mind, and have extraneous inline styles removed. This flag defaults to 4.0 for all new ASP.NET Web Forms applications built using ASP.NET 4. Any previous application that is upgraded using VS 2010 will have the controlRenderingCompatbilityVersion flag automatically set to 3.5 by the upgrade wizard to ensure backwards compatibility.  You can then optionally change it (either at the application level, or scope it within the web.config file to be on a per page or directory level) if you move your pages to use CSS and take advantage of the new markup rendering. Today’s Cleaner Markup Topic: Client IDs The ability to have clean, predictable, ID attributes on rendered HTML elements is something developers have long asked for with Web Forms (ID values like “ctl00_ContentPlaceholder1_ListView1_ctrl0_Label1” are not very popular).  Having control over the ID values rendered helps make it much easier to write client-side JavaScript against the output, makes it easier to style elements using CSS, and on large pages can help reduce the overall size of the markup generated. New ClientIDMode Property on Controls ASP.NET 4 supports a new ClientIDMode property on the Control base class.  The ClientIDMode property indicates how controls should generate client ID values when they render.  The ClientIDMode property supports four possible values: AutoID—Renders the output as in .NET 3.5 (auto-generated IDs which will still render prefixes like ctrl00 for compatibility) Predictable (Default)— Trims any “ctl00” ID string and if a list/container control concatenates child ids (example: id=”ParentControl_ChildControl”) Static—Hands over full ID naming control to the developer – whatever they set as the ID of the control is what is rendered (example: id=”JustMyId”) Inherit—Tells the control to defer to the naming behavior mode of the parent container control The ClientIDMode property can be set directly on individual controls (or within container controls – in which case the controls within them will by default inherit the setting): Or it can be specified at a page or usercontrol level (using the <%@ Page %> or <%@ Control %> directives) – in which case controls within the pages/usercontrols inherit the setting (and can optionally override it): Or it can be set within the web.config file of an application – in which case pages within the application inherit the setting (and can optionally override it): This gives you the flexibility to customize/override the naming behavior however you want. Example: Using the ClientIDMode property to control the IDs of Non-List Controls Let’s take a look at how we can use the new ClientIDMode property to control the rendering of “ID” elements within a page.  To help illustrate this we can create a simple page called “SingleControlExample.aspx” that is based on a master-page called “Site.Master”, and which has a single <asp:label> control with an ID of “Message” that is contained with an <asp:content> container control called “MainContent”: Within our code-behind we’ll then add some simple code like below to dynamically populate the Label’s Text property at runtime:   If we were running this application using ASP.NET 3.5 (or had our ASP.NET 4 application configured to run using 3.5 rendering or ClientIDMode=AutoID), then the generated markup sent down to the client would look like below: This ID is unique (which is good) – but rather ugly because of the “ct100” prefix (which is bad). Markup Rendering when using ASP.NET 4 and the ClientIDMode is set to “Predictable” With ASP.NET 4, server controls by default now render their ID’s using ClientIDMode=”Predictable”.  This helps ensure that ID values are still unique and don’t conflict on a page, but at the same time it makes the IDs less verbose and more predictable.  This means that the generated markup of our <asp:label> control above will by default now look like below with ASP.NET 4: Notice that the “ct100” prefix is gone. Because the “Message” control is embedded within a “MainContent” container control, by default it’s ID will be prefixed “MainContent_Message” to avoid potential collisions with other controls elsewhere within the page. Markup Rendering when using ASP.NET 4 and the ClientIDMode is set to “Static” Sometimes you don’t want your ID values to be nested hierarchically, though, and instead just want the ID rendered to be whatever value you set it as.  To enable this you can now use ClientIDMode=static, in which case the ID rendered will be exactly the same as what you set it on the server-side on your control.  This will cause the below markup to be rendered with ASP.NET 4: This option now gives you the ability to completely control the client ID values sent down by controls. Example: Using the ClientIDMode property to control the IDs of Data-Bound List Controls Data-bound list/grid controls have historically been the hardest to use/style when it comes to working with Web Form’s automatically generated IDs.  Let’s now take a look at a scenario where we’ll customize the ID’s rendered using a ListView control with ASP.NET 4. The code snippet below is an example of a ListView control that displays the contents of a data-bound collection — in this case, airports: We can then write code like below within our code-behind to dynamically databind a list of airports to the ListView above: At runtime this will then by default generate a <ul> list of airports like below.  Note that because the <ul> and <li> elements in the ListView’s template are not server controls, no IDs are rendered in our markup: Adding Client ID’s to Each Row Item Now, let’s say that we wanted to add client-ID’s to the output so that we can programmatically access each <li> via JavaScript.  We want these ID’s to be unique, predictable, and identifiable. A first approach would be to mark each <li> element within the template as being a server control (by giving it a runat=server attribute) and by giving each one an id of “airport”: By default ASP.NET 4 will now render clean IDs like below (no ctl001-like ids are rendered):   Using the ClientIDRowSuffix Property Our template above now generates unique ID’s for each <li> element – but if we are going to access them programmatically on the client using JavaScript we might want to instead have the ID’s contain the airport code within them to make them easier to reference.  The good news is that we can easily do this by taking advantage of the new ClientIDRowSuffix property on databound controls in ASP.NET 4 to better control the ID’s of our individual row elements. To do this, we’ll set the ClientIDRowSuffix property to “Code” on our ListView control.  This tells the ListView to use the databound “Code” property from our Airport class when generating the ID: And now instead of having row suffixes like “1”, “2”, and “3”, we’ll instead have the Airport.Code value embedded within the IDs (e.g: _CLE, _CAK, _PDX, etc): You can use this ClientIDRowSuffix approach with other databound controls like the GridView as well. It is useful anytime you want to program row elements on the client – and use clean/identified IDs to easily reference them from JavaScript code. Summary ASP.NET 4 enables you to generate much cleaner HTML markup from server controls and from within your Web Forms applications.  In today’s post I covered how you can now easily control the client ID values that are rendered by server controls.  In upcoming posts I’ll cover some of the other markup improvements that are also coming with the ASP.NET 4 release. Hope this helps, Scott

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• MVP Summit 2011 summary and thoughts: The &ldquo;I hope I don&rsquo;t cross a line and lose my MVP status&rdquo; post

  - by George Clingerman

  I've been wanting to write this post summarizing my thoughts about the MVP summit but have been dragging my feet since it's a very difficult one to write. However seeing Andy (http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/77625.aspx) and Catalin (http://www.catalinzima.com/2011/03/mvp-summit-2011/) and Chris (http://geekswithblogs.net/cwilliams/archive/2011/03/07/144229.aspx) post about it has encouraged me to finally take the plunge. I'm going to have to write carefully though because I'm going to be dancing around a ton of NDA mine fields as well as having to walk the tight-rope of not sending the wrong message or having people read too much into what I'm saying. I want to note that most of what I'm about to say is just based on my observations, they're not thoughts that Microsoft has asked me to pass along and they're not things I heard Microsoft say. It's just me sharing what I think after going to the MVP summit. Let's start off with a short imaginary question and answer session.     Has the App Hub forums and XBLIG management been rather poor by Microsoft? Yes.     Do I think we're going to see changes to that overnight? No.     Will it continue to look bad from the outside? Somewhat. Confusing right? Well that's kind of how things are right now. Lots of confusion. XNA is doing AWESOME. Like, really, really awesome. As a result of that awesomeness, XNA is on three major platforms: Xbox 360, WP7 and PC. This means that internally Microsoft is really excited and invested in the technology. That's fantastic for XNA and really should show you the future the framework has. It's here to stay. So why are Xbox LIVE Indie Game developers feeling so much pain? The ironic thing is that pain is being caused by the success of XNA. When XNA was just a small thing, there was more freedom and more focus. It was just us and them. We were an only child. Now our family has grown and everyone has and wants some time with XNA. This gets XNA pulled in all directions and as it moves onto new platforms, it plays catch up trying to get those platforms up to speed to where Xbox LIVE Indie Games has grown. Forums, documentation, educational content. They all need to be there because Xbox LIVE Indie Games has all of that and more. Along with the catch up in features/documentation/awesomeness there's the catch up that the people on the team have to play. New platforms and new areas of development mean new players and those new guys don't have the history of being around from the beginning. This leads to a lack of understanding at times just how important some things are because they seem so small and insignificant (Rich Text defaulting for new forum profiles would be one things that jumps to mind). If you're not aware that the forums have become more than just a basic Q&A, if you're not aware that they're a central hub to a very active community, then you don't understand why that small change should be prioritized over something else. New people have to get caught up and figure out how to make a framework and central forum site work for everyone it's now serving. So yeah, a lot of our pain this last year has been simply that XNA is doing well and XBLIG is doing well so the focus was shifted to catch other things up. It hurts when a parent seems to not have any time for you and they're spending some much time with your new baby brother. Growing pains. All families and in our case our product family experience it to some degree. I think as WP7 matures we'll see the team figuring out how to give everyone the right amount of attention. While we're talking about some of our growing pains, it is also important to note (although not really an excuse) that the Xbox LIVE Arcade developers complain about many of the same things that we do. If you paid attention to talks and information coming out of GDC 2011, most of the the XBLA guys were saying things that sounded eerily similar to what the XBLIG developers are saying (Scott Nichols from GayGamer.net noticed http://twitter.com/#!/NaviFairyGG/status/43540379206811650). Does this mean we should just accept the status quo since we're being treated exactly the same? No way. However it DOES show that the way we're being treated is no indication of the stability and future of the platform, it's just Microsoft dropping the communication ball on two playing fields. We're not alone and we're not even being treated worse. Not great, but also in a weird way a very good sign. Now on to a few tidbits I think I CAN share from the summit (I'm really crossing my fingers I'm not stepping over some NDA line I shouldn't be). First, I discovered that the XBLIG user base is bigger than I personally had originally estimated. I won't give the exact numbers (although we did beg Microsoft to release some of these numbers so maybe someday?) but it was much larger than my original guestimates and I was pleasantly surprised. Maybe some of you guys had the right number when you were guessing, but I know that mine was much too low. And even MORE importantly the number of users/shoppers is growing at a steady pace as well. Our market is growing! That was fantastic news and really something that I had to share. On to the community manager discussion. It was mentioned. I was mentioned. I blushed. Nothing more to report there than the blush in my cheeks was a light crimson color. If I ever see a job description posted for that position I have a resume waiting in the wings. I can't deny that I think that would be my dream job... ...so after I finished blushing, the MVPs did make it very, very clear that the communication has to improve. Community manager or not the single biggest pain point with the Xbox LIVE Indie Game community has been a lack of communication. I have seen dramatic improvement in the team responding to MVPs and I'm even seeing more communication from them on the forums so I'm hoping that's a long term change. I really think they understood the issue, the problem remains how to open that communication channel in a way that was sustainable. I think they'll get it figured out and hopefully that's sooner rather than later. During the summit, you may have seen me tweeting about how I was "that guy" (http://twitter.com/#!/clingermangw/status/42740432471470081). You also may have noticed that Andy and Catalin both mentioned me in their summit write ups. I may have come on a bit strong while I was there...went a little out of character for myself. I've been agitated for a while with the way things have been and I've been listening to you guys and hearing you guys be agitated. I'm also watching some really awesome indie game developers looking elsewhere and leaving the platform. Some of them we might not have been able to keep even with changes, but others are only leaving because of perceptions and lack of communication from Microsoft. And that pisses me off. And I let Microsoft know that I was pissed off. You made your list and I took that list and verbalized it. I verbalized the hell out of it. [It was actually mentioned that I'm a lot nicer on the forums and in email than I am in person...I felt bad about that, but I couldn't stay silent]. Hopefully it did something guys, I really did try hard to get the message across. Along with my agitation, I also brought some pride. I mentioned several things in person to the team that I was particularly proud of. From people in the community that are doing an awesome job, to the re-launch of XboxIndies that was going on that week and even gamers like Steven Hurdle (http://writingsofmassdeduction.com/) who have purchased one XBLIG every day for over 100 days now. The community is freaking rocking it and I made sure to highlight that. So in conclusion, I'd just like to say hang in there (you know, like that picture of the cat). If you've been worried about investing in Xbox LIVE Indie Games because you think it's on shaky ground. It's not. Dream Build Play being about the Xbox 360 should have helped a little to point that out. The team is really scrambling around trying to figure things out and make improvements all around. There’s quite a few new gals and guys and it's going to take them time to catch up and there are a lot of constantly shifting priorities. We all have one toy, one team and we're fighting for time with it. It's also time for the community to continue spreading our wings and going out on our own more often. The Indie Game Winter Uprising was a fantastic example of that. We took things into our own hands and it got noticed and Microsoft got behind it. They do every time we stand up and do something (look at how many Microsoft employees tweeted, wrote about the re-launch of XboxIndies.com or the support I've gotten from them for my weekly XNA Notes). XNA is here to stay, it's time for us to stop being scared of that and figure out how to make our own games the successes they should be. There's definitely a list of things that need to be fixed, things that should be improved and I think we should definitely keep vocal about that with Microsoft. Keep it short, focused and prioritized. There's also a lot of things we can do ourselves while we're waiting on them to fix and change things. Lots of ways we can compensate for particular weaknesses in the channel. The kind of stuff that we can step up and do ourselves. Do it on our own, you know, the way Indies always do. And I'm really looking forward to watching us do just that.

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• Conheça a nova Windows Azure

  - by Leniel Macaferi

  Hoje estamos lançando um grande conjunto de melhorias para a Windows Azure. A seguir está um breve resumo de apenas algumas destas melhorias: Novo Portal de Administração e Ferramentas de Linha de Comando O lançamento de hoje vem com um novo portal para a Windows Azure, o qual lhe permitirá gerenciar todos os recursos e serviços oferecidos na Windows Azure de uma forma perfeitamente integrada. O portal é muito rápido e fluido, suporta filtragem e classificação dos dados (o que o torna muito fácil de usar em implantações/instalações de grande porte), funciona em todos os navegadores, e oferece um monte de ótimos e novos recursos - incluindo suporte nativo à VM (máquina virtual), Web site, Storage (armazenamento), e monitoramento de Serviços hospedados na Nuvem. O novo portal é construído em cima de uma API de gerenciamento baseada no modelo REST dentro da Windows Azure - e tudo o que você pode fazer através do portal também pode ser feito através de programação acessando esta Web API. Também estamos lançando hoje ferramentas de linha de comando (que, igualmente ao portal, chamam as APIs de Gerenciamento REST) para tornar ainda ainda mais fácil a criação de scripts e a automatização de suas tarefas de administração. Estamos oferecendo para download um conjunto de ferramentas para o Powershell (Windows) e Bash (Mac e Linux). Como nossos SDKs, o código destas ferramentas está hospedado no GitHub sob uma licença Apache 2. Máquinas Virtuais ( Virtual Machines [ VM ] ) A Windows Azure agora suporta a capacidade de implantar e executar VMs duráveis/permanentes ??na nuvem. Você pode criar facilmente essas VMs usando uma nova Galeria de Imagens embutida no novo Portal da Windows Azure ou, alternativamente, você pode fazer o upload e executar suas próprias imagens VHD customizadas. Máquinas virtuais são duráveis ??(o que significa que qualquer coisa que você instalar dentro delas persistirá entre as reinicializações) e você pode usar qualquer sistema operacional nelas. Nossa galeria de imagens nativa inclui imagens do Windows Server (incluindo o novo Windows Server 2012 RC), bem como imagens do Linux (incluindo Ubuntu, CentOS, e as distribuições SUSE). Depois de criar uma instância de uma VM você pode facilmente usar o Terminal Server ou SSH para acessá-las a fim de configurar e personalizar a máquina virtual da maneira como você quiser (e, opcionalmente, capturar uma snapshot (cópia instantânea da imagem atual) para usar ao criar novas instâncias de VMs). Isto te proporciona a flexibilidade de executar praticamente qualquer carga de trabalho dentro da plataforma Windows Azure.   A novo Portal da Windows Azure fornece um rico conjunto de recursos para o gerenciamento de Máquinas Virtuais - incluindo a capacidade de monitorar e controlar a utilização dos recursos dentro delas.  Nosso novo suporte à Máquinas Virtuais também permite a capacidade de facilmente conectar múltiplos discos nas VMs (os quais você pode então montar e formatar como unidades de disco). Opcionalmente, você pode ativar o suporte à replicação geográfica (geo-replication) para estes discos - o que fará com que a Windows Azure continuamente replique o seu armazenamento em um data center secundário (criando um backup), localizado a pelo menos 640 quilômetros de distância do seu data-center principal. Nós usamos o mesmo formato VHD que é suportado com a virtualização do Windows hoje (o qual nós lançamos como uma especificação aberta), de modo a permitir que você facilmente migre cargas de trabalho existentes que você já tenha virtualizado na Windows Azure.  Também tornamos fácil fazer o download de VHDs da Windows Azure, o que também oferece a flexibilidade para facilmente migrar cargas de trabalho das VMs baseadas na nuvem para um ambiente local. Tudo o que você precisa fazer é baixar o arquivo VHD e inicializá-lo localmente - nenhuma etapa de importação/exportação é necessária. Web Sites A Windows Azure agora suporta a capacidade de rapidamente e facilmente implantar web-sites ASP.NET, Node.js e PHP em um ambiente na nuvem altamente escalável que te permite começar pequeno (e de maneira gratuita) de modo que você possa em seguida, adaptar/escalar sua aplicação de acordo com o crescimento do seu tráfego. Você pode criar um novo web site na Azure e tê-lo pronto para implantação em menos de 10 segundos: O novo Portal da Windows Azure oferece suporte integrado para a administração de Web sites, incluindo a capacidade de monitorar e acompanhar a utilização dos recursos em tempo real: Você pode fazer o deploy (implantação) para web-sites em segundos usando FTP, Git, TFS e Web Deploy. Também estamos lançando atualizações para as ferramentas do Visual Studio e da Web Matrix que permitem aos desenvolvedores uma fácil instalação das aplicações ASP.NET nesta nova oferta. O suporte de publicação do VS e da Web Matrix inclui a capacidade de implantar bancos de dados SQL como parte da implantação do site - bem como a capacidade de realizar a atualização incremental do esquema do banco de dados com uma implantação realizada posteriormente. Você pode integrar a publicação de aplicações web com o controle de código fonte ao selecionar os links "Set up TFS publishing" (Configurar publicação TFS) ou "Set up Git publishing" (Configurar publicação Git) que estão presentes no dashboard de um web-site: Ao fazer isso, você habilitará a integração com o nosso novo serviço online TFS (que permite um fluxo de trabalho do TFS completo - incluindo um build elástico e suporte a testes), ou você pode criar um repositório Git e referenciá-lo como um remote para executar implantações automáticas. Uma vez que você executar uma implantação usando TFS ou Git, a tab/guia de implantações/instalações irá acompanhar as implantações que você fizer, e permitirá que você selecione uma implantação mais antiga (ou mais recente) para que você possa rapidamente voltar o seu site para um estado anterior do seu código. Isso proporciona uma experiência de fluxo de trabalho muito poderosa.   A Windows Azure agora permite que você implante até 10 web-sites em um ambiente de hospedagem gratuito e compartilhado entre múltiplos usuários e bancos de dados (onde um site que você implantar será um dos vários sites rodando em um conjunto compartilhado de recursos do servidor). Isso te fornece uma maneira fácil para começar a desenvolver projetos sem nenhum custo envolvido. Você pode, opcionalmente, fazer o upgrade do seus sites para que os mesmos sejam executados em um "modo reservado" que os isola, de modo que você seja o único cliente dentro de uma máquina virtual: E você pode adaptar elasticamente a quantidade de recursos que os seus sites utilizam - o que te permite por exemplo aumentar a capacidade da sua instância reservada/particular de acordo com o aumento do seu tráfego: A Windows Azure controla automaticamente o balanceamento de carga do tráfego entre as instâncias das VMs, e você tem as mesmas opções de implantação super rápidas (FTP, Git, TFS e Web Deploy), independentemente de quantas instâncias reservadas você usar. 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. Serviços da Nuvem (Cloud Services) e Cache Distribuído (Distributed Caching) A Windows Azure também suporta a capacidade de construir serviços que rodam na nuvem que suportam ricas arquiteturas multicamadas, gerenciamento automatizado de aplicações, e que podem ser adaptados para implantações extremamente grandes. Anteriormente nós nos referíamos a esta capacidade como "serviços hospedados" - com o lançamento desta semana estamos agora rebatizando esta capacidade como "serviços da nuvem". Nós também estamos permitindo um monte de novos recursos com eles. Cache Distribuído Um dos novos recursos muito legais que estão sendo habilitados com os serviços da nuvem é uma nova capacidade de cache distribuído que te permite usar e configurar um cache distribuído de baixa latência, armazenado na memória (in-memory) dentro de suas aplicações. Esse cache é isolado para uso apenas por suas aplicações, e não possui limites de corte. Esse cache pode crescer e diminuir dinamicamente e elasticamente (sem que você tenha que reimplantar a sua aplicação ou fazer alterações no código), e suporta toda a riqueza da API do Servidor de Cache AppFabric (incluindo regiões, alta disponibilidade, notificações, cache local e muito mais). Além de suportar a API do Servidor de Cache AppFabric, esta nova capacidade de cache pode agora também suportar o protocolo Memcached - o que te permite apontar código escrito para o Memcached para o cache distribuído (sem que alterações de código sejam necessárias). O novo cache distribuído pode ser configurado para ser executado em uma de duas maneiras: 1) Utilizando uma abordagem de cache co-localizado (co-located). Nesta opção você aloca um percentual de memória dos seus roles web e worker existentes para que o mesmo seja usado ??pelo cache, e então o cache junta a memória em um grande cache distribuído.  Qualquer dado colocado no cache por uma instância do role pode ser acessado por outras instâncias do role em sua aplicação - independentemente de os dados cacheados estarem armazenados neste ou em outro role. O grande benefício da opção de cache "co-localizado" é que ele é gratuito (você não precisa pagar nada para ativá-lo) e ele te permite usar o que poderia ser de outra forma memória não utilizada dentro das VMs da sua aplicação. 2) Alternativamente, você pode adicionar "cache worker roles" no seu serviço na nuvem que são utilizados unicamente para o cache. Estes também serão unidos em um grande anel de cache distribuído que outros roles dentro da sua aplicação podem acessar. Você pode usar esses roles para cachear dezenas ou centenas de GBs de dados na memória de forma extramente eficaz - e o cache pode ser aumentado ou diminuído elasticamente durante o tempo de execução dentro da sua aplicação: Novos SDKs e Ferramentas de Suporte Nós atualizamos todos os SDKs (kits para desenvolvimento de software) da Windows Azure com o lançamento de hoje para incluir novos recursos e capacidades. Nossos SDKs estão agora disponíveis em vários idiomas, e todo o código fonte deles está publicado sob uma licença Apache 2 e é mantido em repositórios no GitHub. O SDK .NET para Azure tem em particular um monte de grandes melhorias com o lançamento de hoje, e agora inclui suporte para ferramentas, tanto para o VS 2010 quanto para o VS 2012 RC. Estamos agora também entregando downloads do SDK para Windows, Mac e Linux nos idiomas que são oferecidos em todos esses sistemas - de modo a permitir que os desenvolvedores possam criar aplicações Windows Azure usando qualquer sistema operacional durante o desenvolvimento. Muito, Muito Mais O resumo acima é apenas uma pequena lista de algumas das melhorias que estão sendo entregues de uma forma preliminar ou definitiva hoje - há muito mais incluído no lançamento de hoje. Dentre estas melhorias posso citar novas capacidades para Virtual Private Networking (Redes Privadas Virtuais), novo runtime do Service Bus e respectivas ferramentas de suporte, o preview público dos novos Azure Media Services, novos Data Centers, upgrade significante para o hardware de armazenamento e rede, SQL Reporting Services, novos recursos de Identidade, suporte para mais de 40 novos países e territórios, e muito, muito mais. Você pode aprender mais sobre a Windows Azure e se cadastrar para experimentá-la gratuitamente em http://windowsazure.com.  Você também pode assistir a uma apresentação ao vivo que estarei realizando às 1pm PDT (17:00Hs de Brasília), hoje 7 de Junho (hoje mais tarde), onde eu vou passar por todos os novos recursos. Estaremos abrindo as novas funcionalidades as quais me referi acima para uso público poucas horas após o término da apresentação. Nós estamos realmente animados para ver as grandes aplicações que você construirá com estes novos recursos. Espero que ajude, - Scott   Texto traduzido do post original por Leniel Macaferi.

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• Building a Windows Phone 7 Twitter Application using Silverlight

  - by ScottGu

  On Monday I had the opportunity to present the MIX 2010 Day 1 Keynote in Las Vegas (you can watch a video of it here).  In the keynote I announced the release of the Silverlight 4 Release Candidate (we’ll ship the final release of it next month) and the VS 2010 RC tools for Silverlight 4.  I also had the chance to talk for the first time about how Silverlight and XNA can now be used to build Windows Phone 7 applications. During my talk I did two quick Windows Phone 7 coding demos using Silverlight – a quick “Hello World” application and a “Twitter” data-snacking application.  Both applications were easy to build and only took a few minutes to create on stage.  Below are the steps you can follow yourself to build them on your own machines as well. [Note: In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] Building a “Hello World” Windows Phone 7 Application First make sure you’ve installed the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP – this includes the Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone development tool (which will be free forever and is the only thing you need to develop and build Windows Phone 7 applications) as well as an add-on to the VS 2010 RC that enables phone development within the full VS 2010 as well. After you’ve downloaded and installed the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP, launch the Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone that it installs or launch the VS 2010 RC (if you have it already installed), and then choose “File”->”New Project.”  Here, you’ll find the usual list of project template types along with a new category: “Silverlight for Windows Phone”. The first CTP offers two application project templates. The first is the “Windows Phone Application” template - this is what we’ll use for this example. The second is the “Windows Phone List Application” template - which provides the basic layout for a master-details phone application: After creating a new project, you’ll get a view of the design surface and markup. Notice that the design surface shows the phone UI, letting you easily see how your application will look while you develop. For those familiar with Visual Studio, you’ll also find the familiar ToolBox, Solution Explorer and Properties pane. For our HelloWorld application, we’ll start out by adding a TextBox and a Button from the Toolbox. Notice that you get the same design experience as you do for Silverlight on the web or desktop. You can easily resize, position and align your controls on the design surface. Changing properties is easy with the Properties pane. We’ll change the name of the TextBox that we added to username and change the page title text to “Hello world.” We’ll then write some code by double-clicking on the button and create an event handler in the code-behind file (MainPage.xaml.cs). We’ll start out by changing the title text of the application. The project template included this title as a TextBlock with the name textBlockListTitle (note that the current name incorrectly includes the word “list”; that will be fixed for the final release.)  As we write code against it we get intellisense showing the members available.  Below we’ll set the Text property of the title TextBlock to “Hello “ + the Text property of the TextBox username: We now have all the code necessary for a Hello World application.  We have two choices when it comes to deploying and running the application. We can either deploy to an actual device itself or use the built-in phone emulator: Because the phone emulator is actually the phone operating system running in a virtual machine, we’ll get the same experience developing in the emulator as on the device. For this sample, we’ll just press F5 to start the application with debugging using the emulator.  Once the phone operating system loads, the emulator will run the new “Hello world” application exactly as it would on the device: Notice that we can change several settings of the emulator experience with the emulator toolbar – which is a floating toolbar on the top right.  This includes the ability to re-size/zoom the emulator and two rotate buttons.  Zoom lets us zoom into even the smallest detail of the application: The orientation buttons allow us easily see what the application looks like in landscape mode (orientation change support is just built into the default template): Note that the emulator can be reused across F5 debug sessions - that means that we don’t have to start the emulator for every deployment. We’ve added a dialog that will help you from accidentally shutting down the emulator if you want to reuse it.  Launching an application on an already running emulator should only take ~3 seconds to deploy and run. Within our Hello World application we’ll click the “username” textbox to give it focus.  This will cause the software input panel (SIP) to open up automatically.  We can either type a message or – since we are using the emulator – just type in text.  Note that the emulator works with Windows 7 multi-touch so, if you have a touchscreen, you can see how interaction will feel on a device just by pressing the screen. We’ll enter “MIX 10” in the textbox and then click the button – this will cause the title to update to be “Hello MIX 10”: We provide the same Visual Studio experience when developing for the phone as other .NET applications. This means that we can set a breakpoint within the button event handler, press the button again and have it break within the debugger: Building a “Twitter” Windows Phone 7 Application using Silverlight Rather than just stop with “Hello World” let’s keep going and evolve it to be a basic Twitter client application. We’ll return to the design surface and add a ListBox, using the snaplines within the designer to fit it to the device screen and make the best use of phone screen real estate.  We’ll also rename the Button “Lookup”: We’ll then return to the Button event handler in Main.xaml.cs, and remove the original “Hello World” line of code and take advantage of the WebClient networking class to asynchronously download a Twitter feed. This takes three lines of code in total: (1) declaring and creating the WebClient, (2) attaching an event handler and then (3) calling the asynchronous DownloadStringAsync method. In the DownloadStringAsync call, we’ll pass a Twitter Uri plus a query string which pulls the text from the “username” TextBox. This feed will pull down the respective user’s most frequent posts in an XML format. When the call completes, the DownloadStringCompleted event is fired and our generated event handler twitter_DownloadStringCompleted will be called: The result returned from the Twitter call will come back in an XML based format.  To parse this we’ll use LINQ to XML. LINQ to XML lets us create simple queries for accessing data in an xml feed. To use this library, we’ll first need to add a reference to the assembly (right click on the References folder in the solution explorer and choose “Add Reference): We’ll then add a “using System.Xml.Linq” namespace reference at the top of the code-behind file at the top of Main.xaml.cs file: We’ll then add a simple helper class called TwitterItem to our project. TwitterItem has three string members – UserName, Message and ImageSource: We’ll then implement the twitter_DownloadStringCompleted event handler and use LINQ to XML to parse the returned XML string from Twitter.  What the query is doing is pulling out the three key pieces of information for each Twitter post from the username we passed as the query string. These are the ImageSource for their profile image, the Message of their tweet and their UserName. For each Tweet in the XML, we are creating a new TwitterItem in the IEnumerable<XElement> returned by the Linq query.  We then assign the generated TwitterItem sequence to the ListBox’s ItemsSource property: We’ll then do one more step to complete the application. In the Main.xaml file, we’ll add an ItemTemplate to the ListBox. For the demo, I used a simple template that uses databinding to show the user’s profile image, their tweet and their username. <ListBox Height="521" HorizonalAlignment="Left" Margin="0,131,0,0" Name="listBox1" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="476"> <ListBox.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal" Height="132"> <Image Source="{Binding ImageSource}" Height="73" Width="73" VerticalAlignment="Top" Margin="0,10,8,0"/> <StackPanel Width="370"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding UserName}" Foreground="#FFC8AB14" FontSize="28" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Message}" TextWrapping="Wrap" FontSize="24" /> </StackPanel> </StackPanel> </DataTemplate> </ListBox.ItemTemplate> </ListBox> Now, pressing F5 again, we are able to reuse the emulator and re-run the application. Once the application has launched, we can type in a Twitter username and press the  Button to see the results. Try my Twitter user name (scottgu) and you’ll get back a result of TwitterItems in the Listbox: Try using the mouse (or if you have a touchscreen device your finger) to scroll the items in the Listbox – you should find that they move very fast within the emulator.  This is because the emulator is hardware accelerated – and so gives you the same fast performance that you get on the actual phone hardware. Summary Silverlight and the VS 2010 Tools for Windows Phone (and the corresponding Expression Blend Tools for Windows Phone) make building Windows Phone applications both really easy and fun.  At MIX this week a number of great partners (including Netflix, FourSquare, Seesmic, Shazaam, Major League Soccer, Graphic.ly, Associated Press, Jackson Fish and more) showed off some killer application prototypes they’ve built over the last few weeks.  You can watch my full day 1 keynote to see them in action. I think they start to show some of the promise and potential of using Silverlight with Windows Phone 7.  I’ll be doing more blog posts in the weeks and months ahead that cover that more. Hope this helps, Scott

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• Anunciando: Grandes Melhorias para Web Sites da Windows Azure

  - by Leniel Macaferi

  Estou animado para anunciar algumas grandes melhorias para os Web Sites da Windows Azure que introduzimos no início deste verão.  As melhorias de hoje incluem: uma nova opção de hospedagem adaptável compartilhada de baixo custo, suporte a domínios personalizados para websites hospedados em modo compartilhado ou em modo reservado usando registros CNAME e A-Records (o último permitindo naked domains), suporte para deployment contínuo usando tanto CodePlex e GitHub, e a extensibilidade FastCGI. Todas essas melhorias estão agora online em produção e disponíveis para serem usadas imediatamente. Nova Camada Escalonável "Compartilhada" A Windows Azure permite que você implante e hospede até 10 websites em um ambiente gratuito e compartilhado com múltiplas aplicações. Você pode começar a desenvolver e testar websites sem nenhum custo usando este modo compartilhado (gratuito). O modo compartilhado suporta a capacidade de executar sites que servem até 165MB/dia de conteúdo (5GB/mês). Todas as capacidades que introduzimos em Junho com esta camada gratuita permanecem inalteradas com a atualização de hoje. Começando com o lançamento de hoje, você pode agora aumentar elasticamente seu website para além desta capacidade usando uma nova opção "shared" (compartilhada) de baixo custo (a qual estamos apresentando hoje), bem como pode usar a opção "reserved instance" (instância reservada) - a qual suportamos desde Junho. Aumentar a capacidade de qualquer um desses modos é fácil. Basta clicar na aba "scale" (aumentar a capacidade) do seu website dentro do Portal da Windows Azure, escolher a opção de modo de hospedagem que você deseja usar com ele, e clicar no botão "Salvar". Mudanças levam apenas alguns segundos para serem aplicadas e não requerem nenhum código para serem alteradas e também não requerem que a aplicação seja reimplantada/reinstalada: A seguir estão mais alguns detalhes sobre a nova opção "shared" (compartilhada), bem como a opção existente "reserved" (reservada): Modo Compartilhado Com o lançamento de hoje, estamos introduzindo um novo modo de hospedagem de baixo custo "compartilhado" para Web Sites da Windows Azure. Um website em execução no modo compartilhado é implantado/instalado em um ambiente de hospedagem compartilhado com várias outras aplicações. Ao contrário da opção de modo free (gratuito), um web-site no modo compartilhado não tem quotas/limite máximo para a quantidade de largura de banda que o mesmo pode servir. Os primeiros 5 GB/mês de banda que você servir com uma website compartilhado é grátis, e então você passará a pagar a taxa padrão "pay as you go" (pague pelo que utilizar) da largura de banda de saída da Windows Azure quando a banda de saída ultrapassar os 5 GB. Um website em execução no modo compartilhado agora também suporta a capacidade de mapear múltiplos nomes de domínio DNS personalizados, usando ambos CNAMEs e A-records para tanto. O novo suporte A-record que estamos introduzindo com o lançamento de hoje oferece a possibilidade para você suportar "naked domains" (domínios nús - sem o www) com seus web-sites (por exemplo, http://microsoft.com além de http://www.microsoft.com). Nós também, no futuro, permitiremos SSL baseada em SNI como um recurso nativo nos websites que rodam em modo compartilhado (esta funcionalidade não é suportada com o lançamento de hoje - mas chagará mais tarde ainda este ano, para ambos as opções de hospedagem - compartilhada e reservada). Você paga por um website no modo compartilhado utilizando o modelo padrão "pay as you go" que suportamos com outros recursos da Windows Azure (ou seja, sem custos iniciais, e você só paga pelas horas nas quais o recurso estiver ativo). Um web-site em execução no modo compartilhado custa apenas 1,3 centavos/hora durante este período de preview (isso dá uma média de $ 9.36/mês ou R$ 19,00/mês - dólar a R$ 2,03 em 17-Setembro-2012) Modo Reservado Além de executar sites em modo compartilhado, também suportamos a execução dos mesmos dentro de uma instância reservada. Quando rodando em modo de instância reservada, seus sites terão a garantia de serem executados de maneira isolada dentro de sua própria VM (virtual machine - máquina virtual) Pequena, Média ou Grande (o que significa que, nenhum outro cliente da Windows azure terá suas aplicações sendo executadas dentro de sua VM. Somente as suas aplicações). Você pode executar qualquer número de websites dentro de uma máquina virtual, e não existem quotas para limites de CPU ou memória. Você pode executar seus sites usando uma única VM de instância reservada, ou pode aumentar a capacidade tendo várias instâncias (por exemplo, 2 VMs de médio porte, etc.). Dimensionar para cima ou para baixo é fácil - basta selecionar a VM da instância "reservada" dentro da aba "scale" no Portal da Windows Azure, escolher o tamanho da VM que você quer, o número de instâncias que você deseja executar e clicar em salvar. As alterações têm efeito em segundos: Ao contrário do modo compartilhado, não há custo por site quando se roda no modo reservado. Em vez disso, você só paga pelas instâncias de VMs reservadas que você usar - e você pode executar qualquer número de websites que você quiser dentro delas, sem custo adicional (por exemplo, você pode executar um único site dentro de uma instância de VM reservada ou 100 websites dentro dela com o mesmo custo). VMs de instâncias reservadas têm um custo inicial de $ 8 cents/hora ou R$ 16 centavos/hora para uma pequena VM reservada. Dimensionamento Elástico para Cima/para Baixo Os Web Sites da Windows Azure permitem que você dimensione para cima ou para baixo a sua capacidade dentro de segundos. Isso permite que você implante um site usando a opção de modo compartilhado, para começar, e em seguida, dinamicamente aumente a capacidade usando a opção de modo reservado somente quando você precisar - sem que você tenha que alterar qualquer código ou reimplantar sua aplicação. Se o tráfego do seu site diminuir, você pode diminuir o número de instâncias reservadas que você estiver usando, ou voltar para a camada de modo compartilhado - tudo em segundos e sem ter que mudar o código, reimplantar a aplicação ou ajustar os mapeamentos de DNS. Você também pode usar o "Dashboard" (Painel de Controle) dentro do Portal da Windows Azure para facilmente monitorar a carga do seu site em tempo real (ele mostra não apenas as solicitações/segundo e a largura de banda consumida, mas também estatísticas como a utilização de CPU e memória). Devido ao modelo de preços "pay as you go" da Windows Azure, você só paga a capacidade de computação que você usar em uma determinada hora. Assim, se o seu site está funcionando a maior parte do mês em modo compartilhado (a $ 1.3 cents/hora ou R$ 2,64 centavos/hora), mas há um final de semana em que ele fica muito popular e você decide aumentar sua capacidade colocando-o em modo reservado para que seja executado em sua própria VM dedicada (a $ 8 cents/hora ou R$ 16 centavos/hora), você só terá que pagar os centavos/hora adicionais para as horas em que o site estiver sendo executado no modo reservado. Você não precisa pagar nenhum custo inicial para habilitar isso, e uma vez que você retornar seu site para o modo compartilhado, você voltará a pagar $ 1.3 cents/hora ou R$ 2,64 centavos/hora). Isto faz com que essa opção seja super flexível e de baixo custo. Suporte Melhorado para Domínio Personalizado Web sites em execução no modo "compartilhado" ou no modo "reservado" suportam a habilidade de terem nomes personalizados (host names) associados a eles (por exemplo www.mysitename.com). Você pode associar múltiplos domínios personalizados para cada Web Site da Windows Azure. Com o lançamento de hoje estamos introduzindo suporte para registros A-Records (um recurso muito pedido pelos usuários). Com o suporte a A-Record, agora você pode associar domínios 'naked' ao seu Web Site da Windows Azure - ou seja, em vez de ter que usar www.mysitename.com você pode simplesmente usar mysitename.com (sem o prefixo www). Tendo em vista que você pode mapear vários domínios para um único site, você pode, opcionalmente, permitir ambos domínios (com www e a versão 'naked') para um site (e então usar uma regra de reescrita de URL/redirecionamento (em Inglês) para evitar problemas de SEO). Nós também melhoramos a interface do usuário para o gerenciamento de domínios personalizados dentro do Portal da Windows Azure como parte do lançamento de hoje. Clicando no botão "Manage Domains" (Gerenciar Domínios) na bandeja na parte inferior do portal agora traz uma interface de usuário personalizada que torna fácil gerenciar/configurar os domínios: Como parte dessa atualização nós também tornamos significativamente mais suave/mais fácil validar a posse de domínios personalizados, e também tornamos mais fácil alternar entre sites/domínios existentes para Web Sites da Windows Azure, sem que o website fique fora do ar. Suporte a Deployment (Implantação) contínua com Git e CodePlex ou GitHub Um dos recursos mais populares que lançamos no início deste verão foi o suporte para a publicação de sites diretamente para a Windows Azure usando sistemas de controle de código como TFS e Git. Esse recurso fornece uma maneira muito poderosa para gerenciar as implantações/instalações da aplicação usando controle de código. É realmente fácil ativar este recurso através da página do dashboard de um web site: A opção TFS que lançamos no início deste verão oferece uma solução de implantação contínua muito rica que permite automatizar os builds e a execução de testes unitários a cada vez que você atualizar o repositório do seu website, e em seguida, se os testes forem bem sucedidos, a aplicação é automaticamente publicada/implantada na Windows Azure. Com o lançamento de hoje, estamos expandindo nosso suporte Git para também permitir cenários de implantação contínua integrando esse suporte com projetos hospedados no CodePlex e no GitHub. Este suporte está habilitado para todos os web-sites (incluindo os que usam o modo "free" (gratuito)). A partir de hoje, quando você escolher o link "Set up Git publishing" (Configurar publicação Git) na página do dashboard de um website, você verá duas opções adicionais quando a publicação baseada em Git estiver habilitada para o web-site: Você pode clicar em qualquer um dos links "Deploy from my CodePlex project" (Implantar a partir do meu projeto no CodePlex) ou "Deploy from my GitHub project"  (Implantar a partir do meu projeto no GitHub) para seguir um simples passo a passo para configurar uma conexão entre o seu website e um repositório de código que você hospeda no CodePlex ou no GitHub. Uma vez que essa conexão é estabelecida, o CodePlex ou o GitHub automaticamente notificará a Windows Azure a cada vez que um checkin ocorrer. Isso fará com que a Windows Azure faça o download do código e compile/implante a nova versão da sua aplicação automaticamente.  Os dois vídeos a seguir (em Inglês) mostram quão fácil é permitir esse fluxo de trabalho ao implantar uma app inicial e logo em seguida fazer uma alteração na mesma: Habilitando Implantação Contínua com os Websites da Windows Azure e CodePlex (2 minutos) Habilitando Implantação Contínua com os Websites da Windows Azure e GitHub (2 minutos) Esta abordagem permite um fluxo de trabalho de implantação contínua realmente limpo, e torna muito mais fácil suportar um ambiente de desenvolvimento em equipe usando Git: Nota: o lançamento de hoje suporta estabelecer conexões com repositórios públicos do GitHub/CodePlex. Suporte para repositórios privados será habitado em poucas semanas. Suporte para Múltiplos Branches (Ramos de Desenvolvimento) Anteriormente, nós somente suportávamos implantar o código que estava localizado no branch 'master' do repositório Git. Muitas vezes, porém, os desenvolvedores querem implantar a partir de branches alternativos (por exemplo, um branch de teste ou um branch com uma versão futura da aplicação). Este é agora um cenário suportado - tanto com projetos locais baseados no git, bem como com projetos ligados ao CodePlex ou GitHub. Isto permite uma variedade de cenários úteis. Por exemplo, agora você pode ter dois web-sites - um em "produção" e um outro para "testes" - ambos ligados ao mesmo repositório no CodePlex ou no GitHub. Você pode configurar um dos websites de forma que ele sempre baixe o que estiver presente no branch master, e que o outro website sempre baixe o que estiver no branch de testes. Isto permite uma maneira muito limpa para habilitar o teste final de seu site antes que ele entre em produção. Este vídeo de 1 minuto (em Inglês) demonstra como configurar qual branch usar com um web-site. Resumo Os recursos mostrados acima estão agora ao vivo em produção e disponíveis para uso imediato. Se você ainda não tem uma conta da Windows Azure, você pode inscrever-se em um teste gratuito para começar a usar estes recursos hoje mesmo. Visite o O Centro de Desenvolvedores da Windows Azure (em Inglês) para saber mais sobre como criar aplicações para serem usadas na nuvem. Nós teremos ainda mais novos recursos e melhorias chegando nas próximas semanas - incluindo suporte para os recentes lançamentos do Windows Server 2012 e .NET 4.5 (habilitaremos novas imagens de web e work roles com o Windows Server 2012 e NET 4.5 no próximo mês). Fique de olho no meu blog para detalhes assim que esses novos recursos ficarem disponíveis. 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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• Understanding LINQ to SQL (11) Performance

  - by Dixin

  [LINQ via C# series] LINQ to SQL has a lot of great features like strong typing query compilation deferred execution declarative paradigm etc., which are very productive. Of course, these cannot be free, and one price is the performance. O/R mapping overhead Because LINQ to SQL is based on O/R mapping, one obvious overhead is, data changing usually requires data retrieving:private static void UpdateProductUnitPrice(int id, decimal unitPrice) { using (NorthwindDataContext database = new NorthwindDataContext()) { Product product = database.Products.Single(item => item.ProductID == id); // SELECT... product.UnitPrice = unitPrice; // UPDATE... database.SubmitChanges(); } } Before updating an entity, that entity has to be retrieved by an extra SELECT query. This is slower than direct data update via ADO.NET:private static void UpdateProductUnitPrice(int id, decimal unitPrice) { using (SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection( "Data Source=localhost;Initial Catalog=Northwind;Integrated Security=True")) using (SqlCommand command = new SqlCommand( @"UPDATE [dbo].[Products] SET [UnitPrice] = @UnitPrice WHERE [ProductID] = @ProductID", connection)) { command.Parameters.Add("@ProductID", SqlDbType.Int).Value = id; command.Parameters.Add("@UnitPrice", SqlDbType.Money).Value = unitPrice; connection.Open(); command.Transaction = connection.BeginTransaction(); command.ExecuteNonQuery(); // UPDATE... command.Transaction.Commit(); } } The above imperative code specifies the “how to do” details with better performance. For the same reason, some articles from Internet insist that, when updating data via LINQ to SQL, the above declarative code should be replaced by:private static void UpdateProductUnitPrice(int id, decimal unitPrice) { using (NorthwindDataContext database = new NorthwindDataContext()) { database.ExecuteCommand( "UPDATE [dbo].[Products] SET [UnitPrice] = {0} WHERE [ProductID] = {1}", id, unitPrice); } } Or just create a stored procedure:CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[UpdateProductUnitPrice] ( @ProductID INT, @UnitPrice MONEY ) AS BEGIN BEGIN TRANSACTION UPDATE [dbo].[Products] SET [UnitPrice] = @UnitPrice WHERE [ProductID] = @ProductID COMMIT TRANSACTION END and map it as a method of NorthwindDataContext (explained in this post):private static void UpdateProductUnitPrice(int id, decimal unitPrice) { using (NorthwindDataContext database = new NorthwindDataContext()) { database.UpdateProductUnitPrice(id, unitPrice); } } As a normal trade off for O/R mapping, a decision has to be made between performance overhead and programming productivity according to the case. In a developer’s perspective, if O/R mapping is chosen, I consistently choose the declarative LINQ code, unless this kind of overhead is unacceptable. Data retrieving overhead After talking about the O/R mapping specific issue. Now look into the LINQ to SQL specific issues, for example, performance in the data retrieving process. The previous post has explained that the SQL translating and executing is complex. Actually, the LINQ to SQL pipeline is similar to the compiler pipeline. It consists of about 15 steps to translate an C# expression tree to SQL statement, which can be categorized as: Convert: Invoke SqlProvider.BuildQuery() to convert the tree of Expression nodes into a tree of SqlNode nodes; Bind: Used visitor pattern to figure out the meanings of names according to the mapping info, like a property for a column, etc.; Flatten: Figure out the hierarchy of the query; Rewrite: for SQL Server 2000, if needed Reduce: Remove the unnecessary information from the tree. Parameterize Format: Generate the SQL statement string; Parameterize: Figure out the parameters, for example, a reference to a local variable should be a parameter in SQL; Materialize: Executes the reader and convert the result back into typed objects. So for each data retrieving, even for data retrieving which looks simple: private static Product[] RetrieveProducts(int productId) { using (NorthwindDataContext database = new NorthwindDataContext()) { return database.Products.Where(product => product.ProductID == productId) .ToArray(); } } LINQ to SQL goes through above steps to translate and execute the query. Fortunately, there is a built-in way to cache the translated query. Compiled query When such a LINQ to SQL query is executed repeatedly, The CompiledQuery can be used to translate query for one time, and execute for multiple times:internal static class CompiledQueries { private static readonly Func<NorthwindDataContext, int, Product[]> _retrieveProducts = CompiledQuery.Compile((NorthwindDataContext database, int productId) => database.Products.Where(product => product.ProductID == productId).ToArray()); internal static Product[] RetrieveProducts( this NorthwindDataContext database, int productId) { return _retrieveProducts(database, productId); } } The new version of RetrieveProducts() gets better performance, because only when _retrieveProducts is first time invoked, it internally invokes SqlProvider.Compile() to translate the query expression. And it also uses lock to make sure translating once in multi-threading scenarios. Static SQL / stored procedures without translating Another way to avoid the translating overhead is to use static SQL or stored procedures, just as the above examples. Because this is a functional programming series, this article not dive into. For the details, Scott Guthrie already has some excellent articles: LINQ to SQL (Part 6: Retrieving Data Using Stored Procedures) LINQ to SQL (Part 7: Updating our Database using Stored Procedures) LINQ to SQL (Part 8: Executing Custom SQL Expressions) Data changing overhead By looking into the data updating process, it also needs a lot of work: Begins transaction Processes the changes (ChangeProcessor) Walks through the objects to identify the changes Determines the order of the changes Executes the changings LINQ queries may be needed to execute the changings, like the first example in this article, an object needs to be retrieved before changed, then the above whole process of data retrieving will be went through If there is user customization, it will be executed, for example, a table’s INSERT / UPDATE / DELETE can be customized in the O/R designer It is important to keep these overhead in mind. Bulk deleting / updating Another thing to be aware is the bulk deleting:private static void DeleteProducts(int categoryId) { using (NorthwindDataContext database = new NorthwindDataContext()) { database.Products.DeleteAllOnSubmit( database.Products.Where(product => product.CategoryID == categoryId)); database.SubmitChanges(); } } The expected SQL should be like:BEGIN TRANSACTION exec sp_executesql N'DELETE FROM [dbo].[Products] AS [t0] WHERE [t0].[CategoryID] = @p0',N'@p0 int',@p0=9 COMMIT TRANSACTION Hoverer, as fore mentioned, the actual SQL is to retrieving the entities, and then delete them one by one:-- Retrieves the entities to be deleted: exec sp_executesql N'SELECT [t0].[ProductID], [t0].[ProductName], [t0].[SupplierID], [t0].[CategoryID], [t0].[QuantityPerUnit], [t0].[UnitPrice], [t0].[UnitsInStock], [t0].[UnitsOnOrder], [t0].[ReorderLevel], [t0].[Discontinued] FROM [dbo].[Products] AS [t0] WHERE [t0].[CategoryID] = @p0',N'@p0 int',@p0=9 -- Deletes the retrieved entities one by one: BEGIN TRANSACTION exec sp_executesql N'DELETE FROM [dbo].[Products] WHERE ([ProductID] = @p0) AND ([ProductName] = @p1) AND ([SupplierID] IS NULL) AND ([CategoryID] = @p2) AND ([QuantityPerUnit] IS NULL) AND ([UnitPrice] = @p3) AND ([UnitsInStock] = @p4) AND ([UnitsOnOrder] = @p5) AND ([ReorderLevel] = @p6) AND (NOT ([Discontinued] = 1))',N'@p0 int,@p1 nvarchar(4000),@p2 int,@p3 money,@p4 smallint,@p5 smallint,@p6 smallint',@p0=78,@p1=N'Optimus Prime',@p2=9,@p3=$0.0000,@p4=0,@p5=0,@p6=0 exec sp_executesql N'DELETE FROM [dbo].[Products] WHERE ([ProductID] = @p0) AND ([ProductName] = @p1) AND ([SupplierID] IS NULL) AND ([CategoryID] = @p2) AND ([QuantityPerUnit] IS NULL) AND ([UnitPrice] = @p3) AND ([UnitsInStock] = @p4) AND ([UnitsOnOrder] = @p5) AND ([ReorderLevel] = @p6) AND (NOT ([Discontinued] = 1))',N'@p0 int,@p1 nvarchar(4000),@p2 int,@p3 money,@p4 smallint,@p5 smallint,@p6 smallint',@p0=79,@p1=N'Bumble Bee',@p2=9,@p3=$0.0000,@p4=0,@p5=0,@p6=0 -- ... COMMIT TRANSACTION And the same to the bulk updating. This is really not effective and need to be aware. Here is already some solutions from the Internet, like this one. The idea is wrap the above SELECT statement into a INNER JOIN:exec sp_executesql N'DELETE [dbo].[Products] FROM [dbo].[Products] AS [j0] INNER JOIN ( SELECT [t0].[ProductID], [t0].[ProductName], [t0].[SupplierID], [t0].[CategoryID], [t0].[QuantityPerUnit], [t0].[UnitPrice], [t0].[UnitsInStock], [t0].[UnitsOnOrder], [t0].[ReorderLevel], [t0].[Discontinued] FROM [dbo].[Products] AS [t0] WHERE [t0].[CategoryID] = @p0) AS [j1] ON ([j0].[ProductID] = [j1].[[Products])', -- The Primary Key N'@p0 int',@p0=9 Query plan overhead The last thing is about the SQL Server query plan. Before .NET 4.0, LINQ to SQL has an issue (not sure if it is a bug). LINQ to SQL internally uses ADO.NET, but it does not set the SqlParameter.Size for a variable-length argument, like argument of NVARCHAR type, etc. So for two queries with the same SQL but different argument length:using (NorthwindDataContext database = new NorthwindDataContext()) { database.Products.Where(product => product.ProductName == "A") .Select(product => product.ProductID).ToArray(); // The same SQL and argument type, different argument length. database.Products.Where(product => product.ProductName == "AA") .Select(product => product.ProductID).ToArray(); } Pay attention to the argument length in the translated SQL:exec sp_executesql N'SELECT [t0].[ProductID] FROM [dbo].[Products] AS [t0] WHERE [t0].[ProductName] = @p0',N'@p0 nvarchar(1)',@p0=N'A' exec sp_executesql N'SELECT [t0].[ProductID] FROM [dbo].[Products] AS [t0] WHERE [t0].[ProductName] = @p0',N'@p0 nvarchar(2)',@p0=N'AA' Here is the overhead: The first query’s query plan cache is not reused by the second one:SELECT sys.syscacheobjects.cacheobjtype, sys.dm_exec_cached_plans.usecounts, sys.syscacheobjects.[sql] FROM sys.syscacheobjects INNER JOIN sys.dm_exec_cached_plans ON sys.syscacheobjects.bucketid = sys.dm_exec_cached_plans.bucketid; They actually use different query plans. Again, pay attention to the argument length in the [sql] column (@p0 nvarchar(2) / @p0 nvarchar(1)). Fortunately, in .NET 4.0 this is fixed:internal static class SqlTypeSystem { private abstract class ProviderBase : TypeSystemProvider { protected int? GetLargestDeclarableSize(SqlType declaredType) { SqlDbType sqlDbType = declaredType.SqlDbType; if (sqlDbType <= SqlDbType.Image) { switch (sqlDbType) { case SqlDbType.Binary: case SqlDbType.Image: return 8000; } return null; } if (sqlDbType == SqlDbType.NVarChar) { return 4000; // Max length for NVARCHAR. } if (sqlDbType != SqlDbType.VarChar) { return null; } return 8000; } } } In this above example, the translated SQL becomes:exec sp_executesql N'SELECT [t0].[ProductID] FROM [dbo].[Products] AS [t0] WHERE [t0].[ProductName] = @p0',N'@p0 nvarchar(4000)',@p0=N'A' exec sp_executesql N'SELECT [t0].[ProductID] FROM [dbo].[Products] AS [t0] WHERE [t0].[ProductName] = @p0',N'@p0 nvarchar(4000)',@p0=N'AA' So that they reuses the same query plan cache: Now the [usecounts] column is 2.

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• Announcing ASP.NET MVC 3 (Release Candidate 2)

  - by ScottGu

  Earlier today the ASP.NET team shipped the final release candidate (RC2) for ASP.NET MVC 3.  You can download and install it here. Almost there… Today’s RC2 release is the near-final release of ASP.NET MVC 3, and is a true “release candidate” in that we are hoping to not make any more code changes with it.  We are publishing it today so that people can do final testing with it, let us know if they find any last minute “showstoppers”, and start updating their apps to use it.  We will officially ship the final ASP.NET MVC 3 “RTM” build in January. Works with both VS 2010 and VS 2010 SP1 Beta Today’s ASP.NET MVC 3 RC2 release works with both the shipping version of Visual Studio 2010 / Visual Web Developer 2010 Express, as well as the newly released VS 2010 SP1 Beta.  This means that you do not need to install VS 2010 SP1 (or the SP1 beta) in order to use ASP.NET MVC 3.  It works just fine with the shipping Visual Studio 2010.  I’ll do a blog post next week, though, about some of the nice additional feature goodies that come with VS 2010 SP1 (including IIS Express and SQL CE support within VS) which make the dev experience for both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC even better. Bugs and Perf Fixes Today’s ASP.NET MVC 3 RC2 build contains many bug fixes and performance optimizations.  Our latest performance tests indicate that ASP.NET MVC 3 is now faster than ASP.NET MVC 2, and that existing ASP.NET MVC applications will experience a slight performance increase when updated to run using ASP.NET MVC 3. Final Tweaks and Fit-N-Finish In addition to bug fixes and performance optimizations, today’s RC2 build contains a number of last-minute feature tweaks and “fit-n-finish” changes for the new ASP.NET MVC 3 features.  The feedback and suggestions we’ve received during the public previews has been invaluable in guiding these final tweaks, and we really appreciate people’s support in sending this feedback our way.  Below is a short-list of some of the feature changes/tweaks made between last month’s ASP.NET MVC 3 RC release and today’s ASP.NET MVC 3 RC2 release: jQuery updates and addition of jQuery UI The default ASP.NET MVC 3 project templates have been updated to include jQuery 1.4.4 and jQuery Validation 1.7.  We are also excited to announce today that we are including jQuery UI within our default ASP.NET project templates going forward.  jQuery UI provides a powerful set of additional UI widgets and capabilities.  It will be added by default to your project’s \scripts folder when you create new ASP.NET MVC 3 projects. Improved View Scaffolding The T4 templates used for scaffolding views with the Add-View dialog now generates views that use Html.EditorFor instead of helpers such as Html.TextBoxFor. This change enables you to optionally annotate models with metadata (using data annotation attributes) to better customize the output of your UI at runtime. The Add View scaffolding also supports improved detection and usage of primary key information on models (including support for naming conventions like ID, ProductID, etc).  For example: the Add View dialog box uses this information to ensure that the primary key value is not scaffold as an editable form field, and that links between views are auto-generated correctly with primary key information. The default Edit and Create templates also now include references to the jQuery scripts needed for client validation.  Scaffold form views now support client-side validation by default (no extra steps required).  Client-side validation with ASP.NET MVC 3 is also done using an unobtrusive javascript approach – making pages fast and clean. [ControllerSessionState] –> [SessionState] ASP.NET MVC 3 adds support for session-less controllers.  With the initial RC you used a [ControllerSessionState] attribute to specify this.  We shortened this in RC2 to just be [SessionState]: Note that in addition to turning off session state, you can also set it to be read-only (which is useful for webfarm scenarios where you are reading but not updating session state on a particular request). [SkipRequestValidation] –> [AllowHtml] ASP.NET MVC includes built-in support to protect against HTML and Cross-Site Script Injection Attacks, and will throw an error by default if someone tries to post HTML content as input.  Developers need to explicitly indicate that this is allowed (and that they’ve hopefully built their app to securely support it) in order to enable it. With ASP.NET MVC 3, we are also now supporting a new attribute that you can apply to properties of models/viewmodels to indicate that HTML input is enabled, which enables much more granular protection in a DRY way.  In last month’s RC release this attribute was named [SkipRequestValidation].  With RC2 we renamed it to [AllowHtml] to make it more intuitive: Setting the above [AllowHtml] attribute on a model/viewmodel will cause ASP.NET MVC 3 to turn off HTML injection protection when model binding just that property. Html.Raw() helper method The new Razor view engine introduced with ASP.NET MVC 3 automatically HTML encodes output by default.  This helps provide an additional level of protection against HTML and Script injection attacks. With RC2 we are adding a Html.Raw() helper method that you can use to explicitly indicate that you do not want to HTML encode your output, and instead want to render the content “as-is”: ViewModel/View –> ViewBag ASP.NET MVC has (since V1) supported a ViewData[] dictionary within Controllers and Views that enables developers to pass information from a Controller to a View in a late-bound way.  This approach can be used instead of, or in combination with, a strongly-typed model class.  The below code demonstrates a common use case – where a strongly typed Product model is passed to the view in addition to two late-bound variables via the ViewData[] dictionary: With ASP.NET MVC 3 we are introducing a new API that takes advantage of the dynamic type support within .NET 4 to set/retrieve these values.  It allows you to use standard “dot” notation to specify any number of additional variables to be passed, and does not require that you create a strongly-typed class to do so.  With earlier previews of ASP.NET MVC 3 we exposed this API using a dynamic property called “ViewModel” on the Controller base class, and with a dynamic property called “View” within view templates.  A lot of people found the fact that there were two different names confusing, and several also said that using the name ViewModel was confusing in this context – since often you create strongly-typed ViewModel classes in ASP.NET MVC, and they do not use this API.  With RC2 we are exposing a dynamic property that has the same name – ViewBag – within both Controllers and Views.  It is a dynamic collection that allows you to pass additional bits of data from your controller to your view template to help generate a response.  Below is an example of how we could use it to pass a time-stamp message as well as a list of all categories to our view template: Below is an example of how our view template (which is strongly-typed to expect a Product class as its model) can use the two extra bits of information we passed in our ViewBag to generate the response.  In particular, notice how we are using the list of categories passed in the dynamic ViewBag collection to generate a dropdownlist of friendly category names to help set the CategoryID property of our Product object.  The above Controller/View combination will then generate an HTML response like below.    Output Caching Improvements ASP.NET MVC 3’s output caching system no longer requires you to specify a VaryByParam property when declaring an [OutputCache] attribute on a Controller action method.  MVC3 now automatically varies the output cached entries when you have explicit parameters on your action method – allowing you to cleanly enable output caching on actions using code like below: In addition to supporting full page output caching, ASP.NET MVC 3 also supports partial-page caching – which allows you to cache a region of output and re-use it across multiple requests or controllers.  The [OutputCache] behavior for partial-page caching was updated with RC2 so that sub-content cached entries are varied based on input parameters as opposed to the URL structure of the top-level request – which makes caching scenarios both easier and more powerful than the behavior in the previous RC. @model declaration does not add whitespace In earlier previews, the strongly-typed @model declaration at the top of a Razor view added a blank line to the rendered HTML output. This has been fixed so that the declaration does not introduce whitespace. Changed "Html.ValidationMessage" Method to Display the First Useful Error Message The behavior of the Html.ValidationMessage() helper was updated to show the first useful error message instead of simply displaying the first error. During model binding, the ModelState dictionary can be populated from multiple sources with error messages about the property, including from the model itself (if it implements IValidatableObject), from validation attributes applied to the property, and from exceptions thrown while the property is being accessed. When the Html.ValidationMessage() method displays a validation message, it now skips model-state entries that include an exception, because these are generally not intended for the end user. Instead, the method looks for the first validation message that is not associated with an exception and displays that message. If no such message is found, it defaults to a generic error message that is associated with the first exception. RemoteAttribute “Fields” -> “AdditionalFields” ASP.NET MVC 3 includes built-in remote validation support with its validation infrastructure.  This means that the client-side validation script library used by ASP.NET MVC 3 can automatically call back to controllers you expose on the server to determine whether an input element is indeed valid as the user is editing the form (allowing you to provide real-time validation updates). You can accomplish this by decorating a model/viewmodel property with a [Remote] attribute that specifies the controller/action that should be invoked to remotely validate it.  With the RC this attribute had a “Fields” property that could be used to specify additional input elements that should be sent from the client to the server to help with the validation logic.  To improve the clarity of what this property does we have renamed it to “AdditionalFields” with today’s RC2 release. ViewResult.Model and ViewResult.ViewBag Properties The ViewResult class now exposes both a “Model” and “ViewBag” property off of it.  This makes it easier to unit test Controllers that return views, and avoids you having to access the Model via the ViewResult.ViewData.Model property. Installation Notes You can download and install the ASP.NET MVC 3 RC2 build here.  It can be installed on top of the previous ASP.NET MVC 3 RC release (it should just replace the bits as part of its setup). The one component that will not be updated by the above setup (if you already have it installed) is the NuGet Package Manager.  If you already have NuGet installed, please go to the Visual Studio Extensions Manager (via the Tools –> Extensions menu option) and click on the “Updates” tab.  You should see NuGet listed there – please click the “Update” button next to it to have VS update the extension to today’s release. If you do not have NuGet installed (and did not install the ASP.NET MVC RC build), then NuGet will be installed as part of your ASP.NET MVC 3 setup, and you do not need to take any additional steps to make it work. Summary We are really close to the final ASP.NET MVC 3 release, and will deliver the final “RTM” build of it next month.  It has been only a little over 7 months since ASP.NET MVC 2 shipped, and I’m pretty amazed by the huge number of new features, improvements, and refinements that the team has been able to add with this release (Razor, Unobtrusive JavaScript, NuGet, Dependency Injection, Output Caching, and a lot, lot more).  I’ll be doing a number of blog posts over the next few weeks talking about many of them in more depth. 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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• Special thanks to everyone that helped me in 2010.

  - by mbcrump

  2010 has been a very good year for me and I wanted to create a list and thank everyone for what they have done for me.  I also wanted to thank everyone for reading and subscribing to my blog. It is hard to believe that people actually want to read what I write. I feel like I owe a huge thanks to everyone listed below. Looking back upon 2010, I feel that I’ve grown as a developer and you are part of that reason. Sometimes we get caught up in day to day work and forget to give thanks to those that helped us along the way. The list below is mine, it includes people and companies. This list is obviously not going to include everyone that has helped, just those that have stood out in my mind. When I think back upon 2010, their names keep popping up in my head. So here goes, in no particular order.  People Dave Campbell – For everything he has done for the Silverlight Community with his Silverlight Cream blog. I can’t think of a better person to get recognition at the Silverlight FireStarter event. I also wanted to thank him for spending several hours of his time helping me track down a bug in my feedburner account. Victor Gaudioso – For his large collection of video tutorials on his blog and the passion and enthusiasm he has for Silverlight. We have talked on the phone and I’ve never met anyone so fired up for Silverlight. Kunal Chowdhury – Kunal has always been available for me to bounce ideas off of. Kunal has also answered a lot of questions that stumped me. His blog and CodeProject article have green a great help to me and the Silverlight Community. Glen Gordon – I was looking frantically for a Windows Phone 7 several months before release and Glen found one for me. This allowed me to start a blog series on the Windows Phone 7 hardware and developing an application from start to finish that Scott Guthrie retweeted.  Jeff Blankenburg – For listening to my complaints in the early stages of Windows Phone 7. Jeff was always very polite and gave me his cell phone number to talk it over. He also walked me through several problems that I was having early on. Pete Brown – For writing Silverlight 4 in Action. This book is definitely a labor of love. I followed Pete on Twitter as he was writing it and he spent a lot of late nights and weekends working on it. I felt a lot smarter after reading it the first time. The second time was even better. John Papa – For all of his work on the Silverlight Firestarter and the Silverlight community in general. He has also helped me on a personal level with several things. Daniel Heisler – For putting up with me the past year while we worked on many .NET projects together in 2010. Alvin Ashcraft – For publishing a daily blog post on the best of .NET links. He has linked to my site many times and I really appreciate what he does for the community. Chris Alcock – For publishing the Morning Brew every weekday. I remember when I first appeared on his site, I started getting hundreds of hits on my site and wondered if I was getting a DOS attack or something. It was great to find out that Chris had linked to one of my articles. Joel Cochran – For spending a week teaching “Blend-O-Rama”. This was my one of my favorite sessions of this year. I learned a lot about Expression Blend from it and the best part was that it was free and during lunchtime. Jeremy Likness – Jeremy is smart – very smart. I have learned a lot from Jeremy over the past year. He is also involved in the Silverlight community in every way possible, from forums to blog post to screencast to open source. It goes on and on. The people that I met at VSLive Orlando 2010. I had a great time chatting with Walt Ritscher, Wallace McClure, Tim Huckabee and David Platt. Also a special thanks to all of my friends on Twitter like @wilhil, @DBVaughan, @DataArtist, @wbm, @DirkStrauss and @rsringeri and many many more. Software Companies / Events / May of gave me FREE stuff. =) Microsoft (3) – I was sent a free coupon code by Microsoft to take the Silverlight 4 Beta Exam. I jumped on the offer and took the exam. It was great being selected to try out the exam before it goes public even though Microsoft eventually published a universal coupon code for everyone. I am still waiting to find out if I passed the exam. My fingers are crossed. Microsoft reaching out to me with some questions regarding the .NET Community. I’ve never had a company contact me with such interest in the community. Having a contest where 75 people could win a $100 gift certificate and a T-Shirt for submitting a Windows Phone 7 app. I submitted my app and won. All of the free launch events this year (Windows Phone 7, Visual Studio 2010, ASP.NET MVC). Wintellect – For providing an awesome day of free technical training called T.E.N. Where else can you get free training from some of the best programmers in the world? I also won a contest from them that included a NETAdvantage Ultimate License from Infragistics. VSLive – I attended the Orlando 2010 Conference and it was the best developer’s conference that I have ever attended. I got to know a lot of people at this conference and hang out with many wonderful speakers. I live tweeted the event and while it may have annoyed some, the organizers of VSLive loved it. I won the contest on Twitter and they invited me back to the 2011 session of my choice. This is a very nice gift and I really appreciate the generosity. BarcodeLib.com – For providing free barcode generating tools for a Non-Profit ASP.NET project that I was working on. Their third party controls really made this a breeze compared to my existing solution. NDepend – It is absolutely the best tool to improve code quality. The product is extremely large and I would recommend heading over to their site to check it out. Silverlight Spy – I was writing a blog post on Silverlight Spy and Koen Zwikstra provided a FREE license to me. If you ever wanted to peek inside of a Silverlight Application then this is the tool for you. He is also working on a version that will support OOB and Windows Phone 7. I would recommend checking out his site. Birmingham .NET Users Group / Silverlight Nights User Group – It takes a lot of time to put together a user group meeting every month yet it always seems to happen. I don’t want to name names for fear of leaving someone out but both of these User Groups are excellent if you live in the Birmingham, Alabama area. Publishing Companies Manning Publishing – For giving me early access to Silverlight 4 in Action by Pete Brown. It was really nice to be able to read this awesome book while Pete was writing it. I was also one of the first people to publish a review of the book. Sams Publishing and DZone – For providing a copy of Silverlight 4 Unleashed by Laurent Bugnion for me to review for their site. The review is coming in January 2011. Special Shoutout to the following 3rd Party Silverlight Controls It has been a great pleasure to work with the following companies on 3rd Party Control Giveaways every month. It always amazes me how every 3rd Party Control company is so eager to help out the community. I’ve never been turned down by any of these companies! These giveaways have sparked a lot of interest in Silverlight and hopefully I can continue giving away a new set every month. If you are a 3rd Party Control company and are interested in participating in these giveaways then please email me at mbcrump29[at]gmail[d0t].com. The companies below have already participated in my giveaways: Infragistics (December 2010) - Win a set of Infragistics Silverlight Controls with Data Visualization!  Mindscape (November 2010) - Mindscape Silverlight Controls + Free Mega Pack Contest Telerik (October 2010) - Win Telerik RadControls for Silverlight! ($799 Value) Again, I just wanted to say Thanks to everyone for helping me grow as a developer.  Subscribe to my feed

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• New Bundling and Minification Support (ASP.NET 4.5 Series)

  - by ScottGu

  This is the sixth in a series of blog posts I'm doing on ASP.NET 4.5. The next release of .NET and Visual Studio include a ton of great new features and capabilities.  With ASP.NET 4.5 you'll see a bunch of really nice improvements with both Web Forms and MVC - as well as in the core ASP.NET base foundation that both are built upon. Today’s post covers some of the work we are doing to add built-in support for bundling and minification into ASP.NET - which makes it easy to improve the performance of applications.  This feature can be used by all ASP.NET applications, including both ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web Forms solutions. Basics of Bundling and Minification As more and more people use mobile devices to surf the web, it is becoming increasingly important that the websites and apps we build perform well with them. We’ve all tried loading sites on our smartphones – only to eventually give up in frustration as it loads slowly over a slow cellular network.  If your site/app loads slowly like that, you are likely losing potential customers because of bad performance.  Even with powerful desktop machines, the load time of your site and perceived performance can make an enormous customer perception. Most websites today are made up of multiple JavaScript and CSS files to separate the concerns and keep the code base tight. While this is a good practice from a coding point of view, it often has some unfortunate consequences for the overall performance of the website.  Multiple JavaScript and CSS files require multiple HTTP requests from a browser – which in turn can slow down the performance load time.  Simple Example Below I’ve opened a local website in IE9 and recorded the network traffic using IE’s built-in F12 developer tools. As shown below, the website consists of 5 CSS and 4 JavaScript files which the browser has to download. Each file is currently requested separately by the browser and returned by the server, and the process can take a significant amount of time proportional to the number of files in question. Bundling ASP.NET is adding a feature that makes it easy to “bundle” or “combine” multiple CSS and JavaScript files into fewer HTTP requests. This causes the browser to request a lot fewer files and in turn reduces the time it takes to fetch them.   Below is an updated version of the above sample that takes advantage of this new bundling functionality (making only one request for the JavaScript and one request for the CSS): The browser now has to send fewer requests to the server. The content of the individual files have been bundled/combined into the same response, but the content of the files remains the same - so the overall file size is exactly the same as before the bundling.   But notice how even on a local dev machine (where the network latency between the browser and server is minimal), the act of bundling the CSS and JavaScript files together still manages to reduce the overall page load time by almost 20%.  Over a slow network the performance improvement would be even better. Minification The next release of ASP.NET is also adding a new feature that makes it easy to reduce or “minify” the download size of the content as well.  This is a process that removes whitespace, comments and other unneeded characters from both CSS and JavaScript. The result is smaller files, which will download and load in a browser faster.  The graph below shows the performance gain we are seeing when both bundling and minification are used together: Even on my local dev box (where the network latency is minimal), we now have a 40% performance improvement from where we originally started.  On slow networks (and especially with international customers), the gains would be even more significant. Using Bundling and Minification inside ASP.NET The upcoming release of ASP.NET makes it really easy to take advantage of bundling and minification within projects and see performance gains like in the scenario above. The way it does this allows you to avoid having to run custom tools as part of your build process –  instead ASP.NET has added runtime support to perform the bundling/minification for you dynamically (caching the results to make sure perf is great).  This enables a really clean development experience and makes it super easy to start to take advantage of these new features. Let’s assume that we have a simple project that has 4 JavaScript files and 6 CSS files: Bundling and Minifying the .css files Let’s say you wanted to reference all of the stylesheets in the “Styles” folder above on a page.  Today you’d have to add multiple CSS references to get all of them – which would translate into 6 separate HTTP requests: The new bundling/minification feature now allows you to instead bundle and minify all of the .css files in the Styles folder – simply by sending a URL request to the folder (in this case “styles”) with an appended “/css” path after it.  For example:    This will cause ASP.NET to scan the directory, bundle and minify the .css files within it, and send back a single HTTP response with all of the CSS content to the browser.  You don’t need to run any tools or pre-processor to get this behavior.  This enables you to cleanly separate your CSS into separate logical .css files and maintain a very clean development experience – while not taking a performance hit at runtime for doing so.  The Visual Studio designer will also honor the new bundling/minification logic as well – so you’ll still get a WYSWIYG designer experience inside VS as well. Bundling and Minifying the JavaScript files Like the CSS approach above, if we wanted to bundle and minify all of our JavaScript into a single response we could send a URL request to the folder (in this case “scripts”) with an appended “/js” path after it:   This will cause ASP.NET to scan the directory, bundle and minify the .js files within it, and send back a single HTTP response with all of the JavaScript content to the browser.  Again – no custom tools or builds steps were required in order to get this behavior.  And it works with all browsers. Ordering of Files within a Bundle By default, when files are bundled by ASP.NET they are sorted alphabetically first, just like they are shown in Solution Explorer. Then they are automatically shifted around so that known libraries and their custom extensions such as jQuery, MooTools and Dojo are loaded before anything else. So the default order for the merged bundling of the Scripts folder as shown above will be: Jquery-1.6.2.js Jquery-ui.js Jquery.tools.js a.js By default, CSS files are also sorted alphabetically and then shifted around so that reset.css and normalize.css (if they are there) will go before any other file. So the default sorting of the bundling of the Styles folder as shown above will be: reset.css content.css forms.css globals.css menu.css styles.css The sorting is fully customizable, though, and can easily be changed to accommodate most use cases and any common naming pattern you prefer.  The goal with the out of the box experience, though, is to have smart defaults that you can just use and be successful with. Any number of directories/sub-directories supported In the example above we just had a single “Scripts” and “Styles” folder for our application.  This works for some application types (e.g. single page applications).  Often, though, you’ll want to have multiple CSS/JS bundles within your application – for example: a “common” bundle that has core JS and CSS files that all pages use, and then page specific or section specific files that are not used globally. You can use the bundling/minification support across any number of directories or sub-directories in your project – this makes it easy to structure your code so as to maximize the bunding/minification benefits.  Each directory by default can be accessed as a separate URL addressable bundle.  Bundling/Minification Extensibility ASP.NET’s bundling and minification support is built with extensibility in mind and every part of the process can be extended or replaced. Custom Rules In addition to enabling the out of the box - directory-based - bundling approach, ASP.NET also supports the ability to register custom bundles using a new programmatic API we are exposing.  The below code demonstrates how you can register a “customscript” bundle using code within an application’s Global.asax class.  The API allows you to add/remove/filter files that go into the bundle on a very granular level:     The above custom bundle can then be referenced anywhere within the application using the below <script> reference:     Custom Processing You can also override the default CSS and JavaScript bundles to support your own custom processing of the bundled files (for example: custom minification rules, support for Saas, LESS or Coffeescript syntax, etc). In the example below we are indicating that we want to replace the built-in minification transforms with a custom MyJsTransform and MyCssTransform class. They both subclass the CSS and JavaScript minifier respectively and can add extra functionality:     The end result of this extensibility is that you can plug-into the bundling/minification logic at a deep level and do some pretty cool things with it. 2 Minute Video of Bundling and Minification in Action Mads Kristensen has a great 90 second video that shows off using the new Bundling and Minification feature.  You can watch the 90 second video here. Summary The new bundling and minification support within the next release of ASP.NET will make it easier to build fast web applications.  It is really easy to use, and doesn’t require major changes to your existing dev workflow.  It is also supports a rich extensibility API that enables you to customize it however you want. You can easily take advantage of this new support within ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET Web Pages based applications. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I use Twitter to-do quick posts and share links. My Twitter handle is: @scottgu

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• Does HTML 5 &ldquo;Rich vs. Reach&rdquo; a False Choice?

  - by andrewbrust

  The competition between the Web and proprietary rich platforms, including Windows, Mac OS, iPhone/iPad, Adobe’s Flash/AIR and Microsoft’s Silverlight, is not new. But with the emergence of HTML 5 and imminent support for it in the next release of the major Web browsers, the battle is heating up. And with the announcements made Wednesday at Google's I/O conference, it's getting kicked up yet another notch. The impact of this platform battle on companies in the media and advertising world, and the developers who serve them, is significant. The most prominent question is whether video and rich media online will shift towards pure HTML and away from plug-ins like Flash and Silverlight. In fact, certain features in HTML 5 make it suitable for development for line of business applications as well, further threatening those plug-in technologies. So what's the deal? Is this real or hype? To answer that question, I've done my own research into HTML 5's features and talked to several media-focused, New York area developers to get their opinions. I present my findings to you in this post. Before bearing down into HTML 5 specifics and practitioners’ quotes, let's set the context. To understand what HTML 5 can do, take a look at this video of Sports Illustrated’s HTML 5 prototype. This should start to get you bought into the idea that HTML 5 could be a game-changer. Next, if you happen to have installed the beta version of Google's Chrome 5 browser, take a look at the page linked to below, and in that page, click on any of the game thumbnails to see what's possible, without a plug-in, in this brave new world. (Note, although the instructions for each game tell you to press the A key to start, press the Z key instead.). Here's the link: http://www.kesiev.com/akihabara As an adjunct to what's enabled by HTML 5, consider the various transforms that are part of CSS 3. If you're running Safari as your browser, the following link will showcase this live; if not, you'll see a bitmap that will give you an idea of what's possible: http://webkit.org/blog/386/3d-transforms Are you starting to get the picture (literally)? What has up until now required browser plug-ins and other patches to HTML, most typically Flash, will soon be renderable, natively, in all major browsers. Moreover, it's looking likely that developers will be able to deliver such content and experiences in these browsers using one base of markup and script code (using straight JavaScript and/or jQuery), without resorting to browser-specific code and workarounds. If you're skeptical of this, I wouldn't blame you, especially with respect to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. However, i can tell you with confidence that even Microsoft is dedicated to full-on HTML 5 support in version 9 of that browser, which is currently under development. So what’s new in HTML 5, specifically, that makes sites like this possible?  The specification documents go into deep detail, and there’s no sense in rehashing them here, but a summary is probably in order.   Here is a non-authoritative, but useful, list of the major new feature areas in HTML 5: 2D drawing capabilities and 3D transforms. 2D drawing instructions can be embedded statically into a Web page; application interactivity and animation can be achieved through script.  As mentioned above, 3D transforms are technically part of version 3 of the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) spec, rather than HTML 5, but they can nonetheless be thought of as part of the bundle.  They allow for rendering of 3D images and animations that, together with 2D drawing, make HTML-based games much more feasible than they are presently, as the links above demonstrate. Embedded audio and video. A media player can appear directly in a rendered Web page, using HTML markup and no plug-ins. Alternately, player controls can be hidden and the content can play automatically. Major enhancements to form-based input. This includes such things as specification of required fields, embedding of text “hints” into a control, limiting valid input on a field to dates, email addresses or a list of values.  There’s more to this, but the gist is that line-of-business applications, with complicated input and data validation, are supported directly Offline caching, local storage and client-side SQL database. These facilities allow Web applications to function more like native apps, even if no internet connection is available. User-defined data. Data (or metadata – data about data) can easily be embedded statically and/or retrieved and updated with Javascript code. This avoids having to embed that data in a separate file, or within script code. Taken together, these features position HTML to compete with, and perhaps overtake, Adobe’s Flash/AIR (and Microsoft’s Silverlight) as a viable Web platform for media, RIAs (rich internet applications – apps that function more like desktop software than Web sites) and interactive Web content, including games. What do players in the media world think about this?  From the embedded video above, we know what Sports Illustrated (and, therefore, Time Warner) think.  Hulu, the major Internet site for broadcast TV content, is on record as saying HTML5 video does not pass muster with them, at least not yet.  YouTube, on the other hand, already has an experimental HTML 5-based version of their site.  TechCrunch has reported that NetFlix is flirting with HTML 5 too, especially as it pertains to embedded browsers in TV-based devices.  And the New York Times’ Web site now embeds some video clips without resorting to Flash.  They have to – otherwise iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad users couldn’t see them in the Mobile Safari browser. What do media-focused developers think about all this?  I talked to several to get their opinions. Michael Pinto is CEO and Founder of Very Memorable Design whose primary focus has been to help marketing directors get traction online.  The firm’s client roster includes the likes Time, Inc., Scholastic and PBS.  Pinto predicts that “More and more microsites that were done entirely in Flash will be done more and more using jQuery. I can also see slideshows and video now being done without Flash. However if you needed to create a game or highly interactive activity Flash would still be the way to go for the web.” A dissenting view comes from Jesse Erlbaum, CEO of The Erlbaum Group, LLC, which serves numerous clients in the magazine publishing sector.  When I asked Erlbaum whether he thought HTML 5 and jQuery/JavaScript would steal significant market share from Flash, he responded “Not at all!  In particular, not for media and advertising customers!  These sectors are not generally in the business of making highly functional applications, which is the one place where HTML5/jQuery/etc really shines.” Ironically, Pinto’s firm is a heavy user of Flash for its projects and Erlbaum’s develops atop the “LAMP” (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl) stack.  For whatever reason, each firm seems to see the other’s toolset as a more viable choice.  But both agree that the developer tool story around HTML 5 is deficient.  Pinto explains “What’s lost with [HTML 5 and Javascript] techniques is that there isn’t a single widely favored easy-to-use tool of choice for authoring. So with Flash you can get up and running right away and not worry about what is different from one browser to the next.“  Erlbaum agrees, saying: “HTML5/Javascript lacks a sophisticated integrated development environment (IDE) which is an essential part of Flash.  If what someone is trying to make is primarily animation, it's a waste of time…to do this in Javascript.  It can be done much more easily in Flash, and with greater cross-browser compatibility and consistency due to the ubiquity of Flash.” Adobe (maker of Flash since its 2005 acquisition of Macromedia) likely agrees.  And for better or worse, they’ve decided to address this shortcoming of HTML 5, even at risk of diminishing their Flash platfrom. Yesterday Adobe announced that their hugely popular Deamweaver Web design authoring tool would directly support HTML 5 and CSS 3 development.  In fact, the Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 HTML5 Pack is downloadable now from Adobe Labs. Maybe Adobe is bowing to pressure from ardent Web professionals like Scott Kellum, Lead Designer at Channel V Media,  a digital and offline branding firm, serving the media and marketing sectors, among others.  Kellum told me that HTML 5 “…will definitely move people away from Flash. It has many of the same functionalities with faster load times and better accessibility. HTML5 will help Flash as well: with the new caching methods you can now even run Flash apps offline.” Although all three Web developers I interviewed would agree that Flash is still required for more sophisticated applications, Kellum seems to have put his finger on why HTML 5 may nonetheless dominate.  In his view, much of the Web development out there has little need for high-end capabilities: “Most people want to add a little punch to a navigation bar or some video and now you can get the biggest bang for your buck with HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript.” I’ve already mentioned that Google’s ongoing I/O conference, at the Moscone West center in San Francisco, is driving the HTML 5 news cycle, big time.  And Google made many announcements of their own, including the open sourcing of their VP8 video codec, new enterprise-oriented capabilities for its App Engine cloud offering, and the creation of the Chrome Web Store, which the company says will make it easier to find and “install” Web applications, in a fashion similar to  the way users procure native apps on various mobile platforms. HTML 5 looks to be disruptive, especially to the media world.  And even if the technology ends up disappointing, the chatter around it alone is causing big changes in the technology world.  If the richness it promises delivers, then magazine publishers and non-text digital advertisers may indeed have a platform for creating compelling content that loads quickly, is standards-based and will render identically in (the newest versions of) all major Web browsers.  Can this development in the digital arena save the titans of the print world?  I can’t predict, but it’s going to be fun to watch, and the competitive innovation from all players in both industries will likely be immense.

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• Windows 8 Will be Here Tomorrow; but Should Silverlight be Gone Today?

  - by andrewbrust

  The software industry lives within an interesting paradox. IT in the enterprise moves slowly and cautiously, upgrading only when safe and necessary.  IT interests intentionally live in the past.  On the other hand, developers, and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) not only want to use the latest and greatest technologies, but this constituency prides itself on gauging tech’s future, and basing its present-day strategy upon it.  Normally, we as an industry manage this paradox with a shrug of the shoulder and musings along the lines of “it takes all kinds.”  Different subcultures have different tendencies.  So be it. Microsoft, with its Windows operating system (OS), can’t take such a laissez-faire view of the world though.  Redmond relies on IT to deploy Windows and (at the very least) influence its procurement, but it also relies on developers to build software for Windows, especially software that has a dependency on features in new versions of the OS.  It must indulge and nourish developers’ fetish for an early birthing of the next generation of software, even as it acknowledges the IT reality that the next wave will arrive on-schedule in Redmond and will travel very slowly to end users. With the move to Windows 8, and the corresponding shift in application development models, this paradox is certainly in place. On the one hand, the next version of Windows is widely expected sometime in 2012, and its full-scale deployment will likely push into 2014 or even later.  Meanwhile, there’s a technology that runs on today’s Windows 7, will continue to run in the desktop mode of Windows 8 (the next version’s codename), and provides absolutely the best architectural bridge to the Windows 8 Metro-style application development stack.  That technology is Silverlight.  And given what we now know about Windows 8, one might think, as I do, that Microsoft ecosystem developers should be flocking to it. But because developers are trying to get a jump on the future, and since many of them believe the impending v5.0 release of Silverlight will be the technology’s last, not everyone is flocking to it; in fact some are fleeing from it.  Is this sensible?  Is it not unprecedented?  What options does it lead to?  What’s the right way to think about the situation? Is v5.0 really the last major version of the technology called Silverlight?  We don’t know.  But Scott Guthrie, the “father” and champion of the technology, left the Developer Division of Microsoft months ago to work on the Windows Azure team, and he took his people with him.  John Papa, who was a very influential Redmond-based evangelist for Silverlight (and is a Visual Studio Magazine author), left Microsoft completely.  About a year ago, when initial suspicion of Silverlight’s demise reached significant magnitude, Papa interviewed Guthrie on video and their discussion served to dispel developers’ fears; but now they’ve moved on. So read into that what you will and let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, speculation that Silverlight’s days of major revision and iteration are over now is correct.  Let’s assume the shine and glimmer has dimmed.  Let’s assume that any Silverlight application written today, and that therefore any investment of financial and human resources made in Silverlight development today, is destined for rework and extra investment in a few years, if the application’s platform needs to stay current. Is this really so different from any technology investment we make?  Every framework, language, runtime and operating system is subject to change, to improvement, to flux and, yes, to obsolescence.  What differs from project to project, is how near-term that obsolescence is and how disruptive the change will be.  The shift from .NET 1.1. to 2.0 was incremental.  Some of the further changes were too.  But the switch from Windows Forms to WPF was major, and the change from ASP.NET Web Services (asmx) to Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) was downright fundamental. Meanwhile, the transition to the .NET development model for Windows 8 Metro-style applications is actually quite gentle.  The finer points of this subject are covered nicely in Magenic’s excellent white paper “Assessing the Windows 8 Development Platform.” As the authors of that paper (including Rocky Lhotka)  point out, Silverlight code won’t just “port” to Windows 8.  And, no, Silverlight user interfaces won’t either; Metro always supports XAML, but that relationship is not commutative.  But the concepts, the syntax, the architecture and developers’ skills map from Silverlight to Windows 8 Metro and the Windows Runtime (WinRT) very nicely.  That’s not a coincidence.  It’s not an accident.  This is a protected transition.  It’s not a slap in the face. There are few things that are unnerving about this transition, which make it seem markedly different from others: The assumed end of the road for Silverlight is something many think they can see.  Instead of being ignorant of the technology’s expiration date, we believe we know it.  If ignorance is bliss, it would seem our situation lacks it. The new technology involving WinRT and Metro involves a name change from Silverlight. .NET, which underlies both Silverlight and the XAML approach to WinRT development, has just about reached 10 years of age.  That’s equivalent to 80 in human years, or so many fear. My take is that the combination of these three factors has contributed to what for many is a psychologically compelling case that Silverlight should be abandoned today and HTML 5 (the agnostic kind, not the Windows RT variety) should be embraced in its stead.  I understand the logic behind that.  I appreciate the preemptive, proactive, vigilant conscientiousness involved in its calculus.  But for a great many scenarios, I don’t agree with it.  HTML 5 clients, no matter how impressive their interactivity and the emulation of native application interfaces they present may be, are still second-class clients.  They are getting better, especially when hardware acceleration and fast processors are involved.  But they still lag.  They still feel like they’re emulating something, like they’re prototypes, like they’re not comfortable in their own skins.  They are based on compromise, and they feel compromised too. HTML 5/JavaScript development tools are getting better, and will get better still, but they are not as productive as tools for other environments, like Flash, like Silverlight or even more primitive tooling for iOS or Android.  HTML’s roots as a document markup language, rather than an application interface, create a disconnect that impedes productivity.  I do not necessarily think that problem is insurmountable, but it’s here today. If you’re building line-of-business applications, you need a first-class client and you need productivity.  Lack of productivity increases your costs and worsens your backlog.  A second class client will erode user satisfaction, which is never good.  Worse yet, this erosion will be inconspicuous, rather than easily identified and diagnosed, because the inferiority of an HTML 5 client over a native one is hard to identify and, notably, doing so at this juncture in the industry is unpopular.  Why would you fault a technology that everyone believes is revolutionary?  Instead, user disenchantment will remain latent and yet will add to the malaise caused by slower development. If you’re an ISV and you’re coveting the reach of running multi-platform, it’s a different story.  You’ve likely wanted to move to HTML 5 already, and the uncertainty around Silverlight may be the only remaining momentum or pretext you need to make the shift.  You’re deploying many more copies of your application than a line-of-business developer is anyway; this makes the economic hit from lower productivity less impactful, and the wider potential installed base might even make it profitable. But no matter who you are, it’s important to take stock of the situation and do it accurately.  Continued, but merely incremental changes in a development model lead to conservatism and general lack of innovation in the underlying platform.  Periods of stability and equilibrium are necessary, but permanence in that equilibrium leads to loss of platform relevance, market share and utility.  Arguably, that’s already happened to Windows.  The change Windows 8 brings is necessary and overdue.  The marked changes in using .NET if we’re to build applications for the new OS are inevitable.  We will ultimately benefit from the change, and what we can reasonably hope for in the interim is a migration path for our code and skills that is navigable, logical and conceptually comfortable. That path takes us to a place called WinRT, rather than a place called Silverlight.  But considering everything that is changing for the good, the number of disruptive changes is impressively minimal.  The name may be changing, and there may even be some significance to that in terms of Microsoft’s internal management of products and technologies.  But as the consumer, you should care about the ingredients, not the name.  Turkish coffee and Greek coffee are much the same. Although you’ll find plenty of interested parties who will find the names significant, drinkers of the beverage should enjoy either one.  It’s all coffee, it’s all sweet, and you can tell your fortune from the grounds that are left at the end.  Back on the software side, it’s all XAML, and C# or VB .NET, and you can make your fortune from the product that comes out at the end.  Coffee drinkers wouldn’t switch to tea.  Why should XAML developers switch to HTML?

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• Scope quandary with namespaces, function templates, and static data

  - by Adrian McCarthy

  This scoping problem seems like the type of C++ quandary that Scott Meyers would have addressed in one of his Effective C++ books. I have a function, Analyze, that does some analysis on a range of data. The function is called from a few places with different types of iterators, so I have made it a template (and thus implemented it in a header file). The function depends on a static table of data, AnalysisTable, that I don't want to expose to the rest of the code. My first approach was to make the table a static const inside Analysis. namespace MyNamespace { template <typename InputIterator> int Analyze(InputIterator begin, InputIterator end) { static const int AnalysisTable[] = { /* data */ }; ... // implementation uses AnalysisTable return result; } } // namespace MyNamespace It appears that the compiler creates a copy of AnalysisTable for each instantiation of Analyze, which is wasteful of space (and, to a small degree, time). So I moved the table outside the function like this: namespace MyNamespace { const int AnalysisTable[] = { /* data */ }; template <typename InputIterator> int Analyze(InputIterator begin, InputIterator end) { ... // implementation uses AnalysisTable return result; } } // namespace MyNamespace There's only one copy of the table now, but it's exposed to the rest of the code. I'd rather keep this implementation detail hidden, so I introduced an unnamed namespace: namespace MyNamespace { namespace { // unnamed to hide AnalysisTable const int AnalysisTable[] = { /* data */ }; } // unnamed namespace template <typename InputIterator> int Analyze(InputIterator begin, InputIterator end) { ... // implementation uses AnalysisTable return result; } } // namespace MyNamespace But now I again have multiple copies of the table, because each compilation unit that includes this header file gets its own. If Analyze weren't a template, I could move all the implementation detail out of the header file. But it is a template, so I seem stuck. My next attempt was to put the table in the implementation file and to make an extern declaration within Analyze. // foo.h ------ namespace MyNamespace { template <typename InputIterator> int Analyze(InputIterator begin, InputIterator end) { extern const int AnalysisTable[]; ... // implementation uses AnalysisTable return result; } } // namespace MyNamespace // foo.cpp ------ #include "foo.h" namespace MyNamespace { const int AnalysisTable[] = { /* data */ }; } This looks like it should work, and--indeed--the compiler is satisfied. The linker, however, complains, "unresolved external symbol AnalysisTable." Drat! (Can someone explain what I'm missing here?) The only thing I could think of was to give the inner namespace a name, declare the table in the header, and provide the actual data in an implementation file: // foo.h ----- namespace MyNamespace { namespace PrivateStuff { extern const int AnalysisTable[]; } // unnamed namespace template <typename InputIterator> int Analyze(InputIterator begin, InputIterator end) { ... // implementation uses PrivateStuff::AnalysisTable return result; } } // namespace MyNamespace // foo.cpp ----- #include "foo.h" namespace MyNamespace { namespace PrivateStuff { const int AnalysisTable[] = { /* data */ }; } } Once again, I have exactly one instance of AnalysisTable (yay!), but other parts of the program can access it (boo!). The inner namespace makes it a little clearer that they shouldn't, but it's still possible. Is it possible to have one instance of the table and to move the table beyond the reach of everything but Analyze?

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• Windows Azure Mobile Services: New support for iOS apps, Facebook/Twitter/Google identity, Emails, SMS, Blobs, Service Bus and more

  - by ScottGu

  A few weeks ago I blogged about Windows Azure Mobile Services - a new capability in Windows Azure that makes it incredibly easy to connect your client and mobile applications to a scalable cloud backend. Earlier today we delivered a number of great improvements to Windows Azure Mobile Services.  New features include: iOS support – enabling you to connect iPhone and iPad apps to Mobile Services Facebook, Twitter, and Google authentication support with Mobile Services Blob, Table, Queue, and Service Bus support from within your Mobile Service Sending emails from your Mobile Service (in partnership with SendGrid) Sending SMS messages from your Mobile Service (in partnership with Twilio) Ability to deploy mobile services in the West US region All of these improvements are now live in production and available to start using immediately. Below are more details on them: iOS Support This week we delivered initial support for connecting iOS based devices (including iPhones and iPads) to Windows Azure Mobile Services.  Like the rest of our Windows Azure SDK, we are delivering the native iOS libraries to enable this under an open source (Apache 2.0) license on GitHub.  We’re excited to get your feedback on this new library through our forum and GitHub issues list, and we welcome contributions to the SDK. To create a new iOS app or connect an existing iOS app to your Mobile Service, simply select the “iOS” tab within the Quick Start view of a Mobile Service within the Windows Azure Portal – and then follow either the “Create a new iOS app” or “Connect to an existing iOS app” link below it: Clicking either of these links will expand and display step-by-step instructions for how to build an iOS application that connects with your Mobile Service: Read this getting started tutorial to walkthrough how you can build (in less than 5 minutes) a simple iOS “Todo List” app that stores data in Windows Azure.  Then follow the below tutorials to explore how to use the iOS client libraries to store data and authenticate users. Get Started with data in Mobile Services for iOS Get Started with authentication in Mobile Services for iOS Facebook, Twitter, and Google Authentication Support Our initial preview of Mobile Services supported the ability to authenticate users of mobile apps using Microsoft Accounts (formerly called Windows Live ID accounts).  This week we are adding the ability to also authenticate users using Facebook, Twitter, and Google credentials.  These are now supported with both Windows 8 apps as well as iOS apps (and a single app can support multiple forms of identity simultaneously – so you can offer your users a choice of how to login). The below tutorials walkthrough how to register your Mobile Service with an identity provider: How to register your app with Microsoft Account How to register your app with Facebook How to register your app with Twitter How to register your app with Google The tutorials above walkthrough how to obtain a client ID and a secret key from the identity provider. You can then click on the “Identity” tab of your Mobile Service (within the Windows Azure Portal) and save these values to enable server-side authentication with your Mobile Service: You can then write code within your client or mobile app to authenticate your users to the Mobile Service.  For example, below is the code you would write to have them login to the Mobile Service using their Facebook credentials: Windows Store App (using C#): var user = await App.MobileService                     .LoginAsync(MobileServiceAuthenticationProvider.Facebook); iOS app (using Objective C): UINavigationController *controller = [self.todoService.client     loginViewControllerWithProvider:@"facebook"     completion:^(MSUser *user, NSError *error) {        //... }]; Learn more about authenticating Mobile Services using Microsoft Account, Facebook, Twitter, and Google from these tutorials: Get started with authentication in Mobile Services for Windows Store (C#) Get started with authentication in Mobile Services for Windows Store (JavaScript) Get started with authentication in Mobile Services for iOS Using Windows Azure Blob, Tables and ServiceBus with your Mobile Services Mobile Services provide a simple but powerful way to add server logic using server scripts. These scripts are associated with the individual CRUD operations on your mobile service’s tables. Server scripts are great for data validation, custom authorization logic (e.g. does this user participate in this game session), augmenting CRUD operations, sending push notifications, and other similar scenarios.   Server scripts are written in JavaScript and are executed in a secure server-side scripting environment built using Node.js.  You can edit these scripts and save them on the server directly within the Windows Azure Portal: In this week’s release we have added the ability to work with other Windows Azure services from your Mobile Service server scripts.  This is supported using the existing “azure” module within the Windows Azure SDK for Node.js.  For example, the below code could be used in a Mobile Service script to obtain a reference to a Windows Azure Table (after which you could query it or insert data into it):     var azure = require('azure');     var tableService = azure.createTableService("<< account name >>",                                                 "<< access key >>"); Follow the tutorials on the Windows Azure Node.js dev center to learn more about working with Blob, Tables, Queues and Service Bus using the azure module. Sending emails from your Mobile Service In this week’s release we have also added the ability to easily send emails from your Mobile Service, building on our partnership with SendGrid. Whether you want to add a welcome email upon successful user registration, or make your app alert you of certain usage activities, you can do this now by sending email from Mobile Services server scripts. To get started, sign up for SendGrid account at http://sendgrid.com . Windows Azure customers receive a special offer of 25,000 free emails per month from SendGrid. To sign-up for this offer, or get more information, please visit http://www.sendgrid.com/azure.html . One you signed up, you can add the following script to your Mobile Service server scripts to send email via SendGrid service:     var sendgrid = new SendGrid('<< account name >>', '<< password >>');       sendgrid.send({         to: '<< enter email address here >>',         from: '<< enter from address here >>',         subject: 'New to-do item',         text: 'A new to-do was added: ' + item.text     }, function (success, message) {         if (!success) {             console.error(message);         }     }); Follow the Send email from Mobile Services with SendGrid tutorial to learn more. Sending SMS messages from your Mobile Service SMS is a key communication medium for mobile apps - it comes in handy if you want your app to send users a confirmation code during registration, allow your users to invite their friends to install your app or reach out to mobile users without a smartphone. Using Mobile Service server scripts and Twilio’s REST API, you can now easily send SMS messages to your app.  To get started, sign up for Twilio account. Windows Azure customers receive 1000 free text messages when using Twilio and Windows Azure together. Once signed up, you can add the following to your Mobile Service server scripts to send SMS messages:     var httpRequest = require('request');     var account_sid = "<< account SID >>";     var auth_token = "<< auth token >>";       // Create the request body     var body = "From=" + from + "&To=" + to + "&Body=" + message;       // Make the HTTP request to Twilio     httpRequest.post({         url: "https://" + account_sid + ":" + auth_token +              "@api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/Accounts/" + account_sid + "/SMS/Messages.json",         headers: { 'content-type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded' },         body: body     }, function (err, resp, body) {         console.log(body);     }); I’m excited to be speaking at the TwilioCon conference this week, and will be showcasing some of the cool scenarios you can now enable with Twilio and Windows Azure Mobile Services. Mobile Services availability in West US region Our initial preview of Windows Azure Mobile Services was only supported in the US East region of Windows Azure.  As with every Windows Azure service, overtime we will extend Mobile Services to all Windows Azure regions. With this week’s preview update we’ve added support so that you can now create your Mobile Service in the West US region as well: 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. We’ll have even more new features and enhancements coming later this week – including .NET 4.5 support for Windows Azure Web Sites.  Keep an eye out on my blog for details as 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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• New Big Data Appliance Security Features

  - by mgubar

  The Oracle Big Data Appliance (BDA) is an engineered system for big data processing.  It greatly simplifies the deployment of an optimized Hadoop Cluster – whether that cluster is used for batch or real-time processing.  The vast majority of BDA customers are integrating the appliance with their Oracle Databases and they have certain expectations – especially around security.  Oracle Database customers have benefited from a rich set of security features:  encryption, redaction, data masking, database firewall, label based access control – and much, much more.  They want similar capabilities with their Hadoop cluster.    Unfortunately, Hadoop wasn’t developed with security in mind.  By default, a Hadoop cluster is insecure – the antithesis of an Oracle Database.  Some critical security features have been implemented – but even those capabilities are arduous to setup and configure.  Oracle believes that a key element of an optimized appliance is that its data should be secure.  Therefore, by default the BDA delivers the “AAA of security”: authentication, authorization and auditing. Security Starts at Authentication A successful security strategy is predicated on strong authentication – for both users and software services.  Consider the default configuration for a newly installed Oracle Database; it’s been a long time since you had a legitimate chance at accessing the database using the credentials “system/manager” or “scott/tiger”.  The default Oracle Database policy is to lock accounts thereby restricting access; administrators must consciously grant access to users. Default Authentication in Hadoop By default, a Hadoop cluster fails the authentication test. For example, it is easy for a malicious user to masquerade as any other user on the system.  Consider the following scenario that illustrates how a user can access any data on a Hadoop cluster by masquerading as a more privileged user.  In our scenario, the Hadoop cluster contains sensitive salary information in the file /user/hrdata/salaries.txt.  When logged in as the hr user, you can see the following files.  Notice, we’re using the Hadoop command line utilities for accessing the data: $ hadoop fs -ls /user/hrdataFound 1 items-rw-r--r--   1 oracle supergroup         70 2013-10-31 10:38 /user/hrdata/salaries.txt$ hadoop fs -cat /user/hrdata/salaries.txtTom Brady,11000000Tom Hanks,5000000Bob Smith,250000Oprah,300000000 User DrEvil has access to the cluster – and can see that there is an interesting folder called “hrdata”.  $ hadoop fs -ls /user Found 1 items drwx------   - hr supergroup          0 2013-10-31 10:38 /user/hrdata However, DrEvil cannot view the contents of the folder due to lack of access privileges: $ hadoop fs -ls /user/hrdata ls: Permission denied: user=drevil, access=READ_EXECUTE, inode="/user/hrdata":oracle:supergroup:drwx------ Accessing this data will not be a problem for DrEvil. He knows that the hr user owns the data by looking at the folder’s ACLs. To overcome this challenge, he will simply masquerade as the hr user. On his local machine, he adds the hr user, assigns that user a password, and then accesses the data on the Hadoop cluster: $ sudo useradd hr $ sudo passwd $ su hr $ hadoop fs -cat /user/hrdata/salaries.txt Tom Brady,11000000 Tom Hanks,5000000 Bob Smith,250000 Oprah,300000000 Hadoop has not authenticated the user; it trusts that the identity that has been presented is indeed the hr user. Therefore, sensitive data has been easily compromised. Clearly, the default security policy is inappropriate and dangerous to many organizations storing critical data in HDFS. Big Data Appliance Provides Secure Authentication The BDA provides secure authentication to the Hadoop cluster by default – preventing the type of masquerading described above. It accomplishes this thru Kerberos integration. Figure 1: Kerberos Integration The Key Distribution Center (KDC) is a server that has two components: an authentication server and a ticket granting service. The authentication server validates the identity of the user and service. Once authenticated, a client must request a ticket from the ticket granting service – allowing it to access the BDA’s NameNode, JobTracker, etc. At installation, you simply point the BDA to an external KDC or automatically install a highly available KDC on the BDA itself. Kerberos will then provide strong authentication for not just the end user – but also for important Hadoop services running on the appliance. You can now guarantee that users are who they claim to be – and rogue services (like fake data nodes) are not added to the system. It is common for organizations to want to leverage existing LDAP servers for common user and group management. Kerberos integrates with LDAP servers – allowing the principals and encryption keys to be stored in the common repository. This simplifies the deployment and administration of the secure environment. Authorize Access to Sensitive Data Kerberos-based authentication ensures secure access to the system and the establishment of a trusted identity – a prerequisite for any authorization scheme. Once this identity is established, you need to authorize access to the data. HDFS will authorize access to files using ACLs with the authorization specification applied using classic Linux-style commands like chmod and chown (e.g. hadoop fs -chown oracle:oracle /user/hrdata changes the ownership of the /user/hrdata folder to oracle). Authorization is applied at the user or group level – utilizing group membership found in the Linux environment (i.e. /etc/group) or in the LDAP server. For SQL-based data stores – like Hive and Impala – finer grained access control is required. Access to databases, tables, columns, etc. must be controlled. And, you want to leverage roles to facilitate administration. Apache Sentry is a new project that delivers fine grained access control; both Cloudera and Oracle are the project’s founding members. Sentry satisfies the following three authorization requirements: Secure Authorization:  the ability to control access to data and/or privileges on data for authenticated users. Fine-Grained Authorization:  the ability to give users access to a subset of the data (e.g. column) in a database Role-Based Authorization:  the ability to create/apply template-based privileges based on functional roles. With Sentry, “all”, “select” or “insert” privileges are granted to an object. The descendants of that object automatically inherit that privilege. A collection of privileges across many objects may be aggregated into a role – and users/groups are then assigned that role. This leads to simplified administration of security across the system. Figure 2: Object Hierarchy – granting a privilege on the database object will be inherited by its tables and views. Sentry is currently used by both Hive and Impala – but it is a framework that other data sources can leverage when offering fine-grained authorization. For example, one can expect Sentry to deliver authorization capabilities to Cloudera Search in the near future. Audit Hadoop Cluster Activity Auditing is a critical component to a secure system and is oftentimes required for SOX, PCI and other regulations. The BDA integrates with Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall – tracking different types of activity taking place on the cluster: Figure 3: Monitored Hadoop services. At the lowest level, every operation that accesses data in HDFS is captured. The HDFS audit log identifies the user who accessed the file, the time that file was accessed, the type of access (read, write, delete, list, etc.) and whether or not that file access was successful. The other auditing features include: MapReduce:  correlate the MapReduce job that accessed the file Oozie:  describes who ran what as part of a workflow Hive:  captures changes were made to the Hive metadata The audit data is captured in the Audit Vault Server – which integrates audit activity from a variety of sources, adding databases (Oracle, DB2, SQL Server) and operating systems to activity from the BDA. Figure 4: Consolidated audit data across the enterprise.  Once the data is in the Audit Vault server, you can leverage a rich set of prebuilt and custom reports to monitor all the activity in the enterprise. In addition, alerts may be defined to trigger violations of audit policies. Conclusion Security cannot be considered an afterthought in big data deployments. Across most organizations, Hadoop is managing sensitive data that must be protected; it is not simply crunching publicly available information used for search applications. The BDA provides a strong security foundation – ensuring users are only allowed to view authorized data and that data access is audited in a consolidated framework.

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• Announcing: Great Improvements to Windows Azure Web Sites

  - by ScottGu

  I’m excited to announce some great improvements to the Windows Azure Web Sites capability we first introduced earlier this summer.  Today’s improvements include: a new low-cost shared mode scaling option, support for custom domains with shared and reserved mode web-sites using both CNAME and A-Records (the later enabling naked domains), continuous deployment support using both CodePlex and GitHub, and FastCGI extensibility.  All of these improvements are now live in production and available to start using immediately. New “Shared” Scaling Tier Windows Azure allows you to deploy and host up to 10 web-sites in a free, shared/multi-tenant hosting environment. You can start out developing and testing web sites at no cost using this free shared mode, and it supports the ability to run web sites that serve up to 165MB/day of content (5GB/month).  All of the capabilities we introduced in June with this free tier remain the same with today’s update. Starting with today’s release, you can now elastically scale up your web-site beyond this capability using a new low-cost “shared” option (which we are introducing today) as well as using a “reserved instance” option (which we’ve supported since June).  Scaling to either of these modes is easy.  Simply click on the “scale” tab of your web-site within the Windows Azure Portal, choose the scaling option you want to use with it, and then click the “save” button.  Changes take only seconds to apply and do not require any code to be changed, nor the app to be redeployed: Below are some more details on the new “shared” option, as well as the existing “reserved” option: Shared Mode With today’s release we are introducing a new low-cost “shared” scaling mode for Windows Azure Web Sites.  A web-site running in shared mode is deployed in a shared/multi-tenant hosting environment.  Unlike the free tier, though, a web-site in shared mode has no quotas/upper-limit around the amount of bandwidth it can serve.  The first 5 GB/month of bandwidth you serve with a shared web-site is free, and then you pay the standard “pay as you go” Windows Azure outbound bandwidth rate for outbound bandwidth above 5 GB. A web-site running in shared mode also now supports the ability to map multiple custom DNS domain names, using both CNAMEs and A-records, to it.  The new A-record support we are introducing with today’s release provides the ability for you to support “naked domains” with your web-sites (e.g. http://microsoft.com in addition to http://www.microsoft.com).  We will also in the future enable SNI based SSL as a built-in feature with shared mode web-sites (this functionality isn’t supported with today’s release – but will be coming later this year to both the shared and reserved tiers). You pay for a shared mode web-site using the standard “pay as you go” model that we support with other features of Windows Azure (meaning no up-front costs, and you pay only for the hours that the feature is enabled).  A web-site running in shared mode costs only 1.3 cents/hr during the preview (so on average $9.36/month). Reserved Instance Mode In addition to running sites in shared mode, we also support scaling them to run within a reserved instance mode.  When running in reserved instance mode your sites are guaranteed to run isolated within your own Small, Medium or Large VM (meaning no other customers run within it).  You can run any number of web-sites within a VM, and there are no quotas on CPU or memory limits. You can run your sites using either a single reserved instance VM, or scale up to have multiple instances of them (e.g. 2 medium sized VMs, etc).  Scaling up or down is easy – just select the “reserved” instance VM within the “scale” tab of the Windows Azure Portal, choose the VM size you want, the number of instances of it you want to run, and then click save.  Changes take effect in seconds: Unlike shared mode, there is no per-site cost when running in reserved mode.  Instead you pay only for the reserved instance VMs you use – and you can run any number of web-sites you want within them at no extra cost (e.g. you could run a single site within a reserved instance VM or 100 web-sites within it for the same cost).  Reserved instance VMs start at 8 cents/hr for a small reserved VM.  Elastic Scale-up/down Windows Azure Web Sites allows you to scale-up or down your capacity within seconds.  This allows you to deploy a site using the shared mode option to begin with, and then dynamically scale up to the reserved mode option only when you need to – without you having to change any code or redeploy your application. If your site traffic starts to drop off, you can scale back down the number of reserved instances you are using, or scale down to the shared mode tier – all within seconds and without having to change code, redeploy, or adjust DNS mappings.  You can also use the “Dashboard” view within the Windows Azure Portal to easily monitor your site’s load in real-time (it shows not only requests/sec and bandwidth but also stats like CPU and memory usage). Because of Windows Azure’s “pay as you go” pricing model, you only pay for the compute capacity you use in a given hour.  So if your site is running most of the month in shared mode (at 1.3 cents/hr), but there is a weekend when it gets really popular and you decide to scale it up into reserved mode to have it run in your own dedicated VM (at 8 cents/hr), you only have to pay the additional pennies/hr for the hours it is running in the reserved mode.  There is no upfront cost you need to pay to enable this, and once you scale back down to shared mode you return to the 1.3 cents/hr rate.  This makes it super flexible and cost effective. Improved Custom Domain Support Web sites running in either “shared” or “reserved” mode support the ability to associate custom host names to them (e.g. www.mysitename.com).  You can associate multiple custom domains to each Windows Azure Web Site.  With today’s release we are introducing support for A-Records (a big ask by many users). With the A-Record support, you can now associate ‘naked’ domains to your Windows Azure Web Sites – meaning instead of having to use www.mysitename.com you can instead just have mysitename.com (with no sub-name prefix).  Because you can map multiple domains to a single site, you can optionally enable both a www and naked domain for a site (and then use a URL rewrite rule/redirect to avoid SEO problems). We’ve also enhanced the UI for managing custom domains within the Windows Azure Portal as part of today’s release.  Clicking the “Manage Domains” button in the tray at the bottom of the portal now brings up custom UI that makes it easy to manage/configure them: As part of this update we’ve also made it significantly smoother/easier to validate ownership of custom domains, and made it easier to switch existing sites/domains to Windows Azure Web Sites with no downtime. Continuous Deployment Support with Git and CodePlex or GitHub One of the more popular features we released earlier this summer was support for publishing web sites directly to Windows Azure using source control systems like TFS and Git.  This provides a really powerful way to manage your application deployments using source control.  It is really easy to enable this from a website’s dashboard page: The TFS option we shipped earlier this summer provides a very rich continuous deployment solution that enables you to automate builds and run unit tests every time you check in your web-site, and then if they are successful automatically publish to Azure. With today’s release we are expanding our Git support to also enable continuous deployment scenarios and integrate with projects hosted on CodePlex and GitHub.  This support is enabled with all web-sites (including those using the “free” scaling mode). Starting today, when you choose the “Set up Git publishing” link on a website’s “Dashboard” page you’ll see two additional options show up when Git based publishing is enabled for the web-site: You can click on either the “Deploy from my CodePlex project” link or “Deploy from my GitHub project” link to walkthrough a simple workflow to configure a connection between your website and a source repository you host on CodePlex or GitHub.  Once this connection is established, CodePlex or GitHub will automatically notify Windows Azure every time a checkin occurs.  This will then cause Windows Azure to pull the source and compile/deploy the new version of your app automatically.  The below two videos walkthrough how easy this is to enable this workflow and deploy both an initial app and then make a change to it: Enabling Continuous Deployment with Windows Azure Websites and CodePlex (2 minutes) Enabling Continuous Deployment with Windows Azure Websites and GitHub (2 minutes) This approach enables a really clean continuous deployment workflow, and makes it much easier to support a team development environment using Git: Note: today’s release supports establishing connections with public GitHub/CodePlex repositories.  Support for private repositories will be enabled in a few weeks. Support for multiple branches Previously, we only supported deploying from the git ‘master’ branch.  Often, though, developers want to deploy from alternate branches (e.g. a staging or future branch). This is now a supported scenario – both with standalone git based projects, as well as ones linked to CodePlex or GitHub.  This enables a variety of useful scenarios.  For example, you can now have two web-sites - a “live” and “staging” version – both linked to the same repository on CodePlex or GitHub.  You can configure one of the web-sites to always pull whatever is in the master branch, and the other to pull what is in the staging branch.  This enables a really clean way to enable final testing of your site before it goes live. This 1 minute video demonstrates how to configure which branch to use with a web-site. 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 in the weeks ahead – 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 next month).  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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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, July 28, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, July 28, 2013Popular ReleasesMedia Companion: Media Companion MC3.574b: Some good bug fixes been going on with the new XBMC-Link function. Thanks to all who were able to do testing and gave feedback. New:* Added some adhoc extra General movie filters, one of which is Plot = Outline (see fixes above). To see the filters, add the following line to your config.xml: <ShowExtraMovieFilters>True</ShowExtraMovieFilters>. The others are: Imdb in folder name, Imdb in not folder name & Imdb not in folder name & year mismatch. * Movie - display <tag> list on browser tab ...Outlook 2013 Backup Add-In: Outlook Backup Add-In 1.0: Users who don't care about compiling the sources on his/her own can download the compiled version. Requirements: - .Net Framework 4.5 - Visual Studio 2010 Tools for Office Runtime see: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=39290 - Installed Outlook 2013OfflineBrowser: Preview Release with Search: I've added search to this release.Dynamics CRM 2011 EasyPlugins: EasyPlugins-1.2.3.0-managed: v1.2.3.0 - Bug Fix : Twice plugins execution. - New Abort action - Depth Plugin Execution management on each action - Turn On/Off EasyPlugins feature (can be useful in some cases of imports) ----------------------------- v1.2.0.0 Associate / Disassociate actions are now available Import / Export features Better management of Lookups Trigger NamingMemory Teaser Game: Full Release 1.1.0: -> Fixed Memory leak issue. -> Restart game button issue. -> Added Splash screen. -> Changed Release Icon. This is the version 1.1.0.0VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.46: changes FIXED LoginFIM 2010 GoogleApps MA: GoogleAppsMA1.1.2: Fixed bug during import. - Fixed following bug. - In some condition, 'dn is missing' error occur.Install Verify Tool: Install Verify Tool V 1.0 With Client: Use a windows service to do a remote validation work. QA can use this tool to verify daily build installation.C# Intellisense for Notepad++: 'Namespace resolution' release: Auto-Completion from "empty spot" Add missing "using" statementsOpen Source SAAS Job board: Version X3: Full version of job board, didn't have monies to fund it so it's free.DSeX DragonSpeak eXtended Editor: Version 1.0.116.0726: Cleaned up Wizard Interface Added Functionality for RTF UndoRedo IE Inserting Text from Wizard output to the Tabbed Editor Added Sanity Checks to Search/Replace Dialog to prevent crashes Fixed Template and Paste undoredo Fix Undoredo Blank spots Added New_FileTag Const = "(New FIle)" Added Filename to Modified FileClose queries (Thanks Lothus Marque)Math.NET Numerics: Math.NET Numerics v2.6.0: What's New in Math.NET Numerics 2.6 - Announcement, Explanations and Sample Code. New: Linear Curve Fitting Linear least-squares fitting (regression) to lines, polynomials and linear combinations of arbitrary functions. Multi-dimensional fitting. Also works well in F# with the F# extensions. New: Root Finding Brent's method. ~Candy Chiu, Alexander Täschner Bisection method. ~Scott Stephens, Alexander Täschner Broyden's method, for multi-dimensional functions. ~Alexander Täschner ...AJAX Control Toolkit: July 2013 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - July 2013 Release Version 7.0725July 2013 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4.5 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 3.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 3.5 and sample site (Recommended). Notes: - Instructions for using the AJAX Control Toolkit with ASP.NET 4.5 can be found at...MJP's DirectX 11 Samples: Specular Antialiasing Sample: Sample code to complement my presentation that's part of the Physically Based Shading in Theory and Practice course at SIGGRAPH 2013, entitled "Crafting a Next-Gen Material Pipeline for The Order: 1886". Demonstrates various methods of preventing aliasing from specular BRDF's when using high-frequency normal maps. The zip file contains source code as well as a pre-compiled x64 binary.Kartris E-commerce: Kartris v2.5003: This fixes an issue where search engines appear to identify as IE and so trigger the noIE page if there is not a non-responsive skin specified.GoAgent GUI: GoAgent GUI 1.3.5 Alpha (20130723): ????????Alpha?，???????????，?????????????。 ??????????GoAgent???（???phus lu?GitHub??????GoAgent??????，??????????????????） ????????????????????????Bug ?????????。??????????????。 ????issue????，????????，????????????????。LogicCircuit: LogicCircuit 2.13.07.22: Logic Circuit - is educational software for designing and simulating logic circuits. Intuitive graphical user interface, allows you to create unrestricted circuit hierarchy with multi bit buses, debug circuits behavior with oscilloscope, and navigate running circuits hierarchy. Changes of this versionYou can make visual elements of the circuit been visible on its symbols. This way you can build composite displays, keyboards and reuse them. Please read about displays for more details http://ww...Microsoft .NET SDK For Hadoop: v 0.9.4951.25594: Bug fixesLINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter v2.1.08: Supports .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, .NET 4.5, Silverlight 4.0, Windows Phone 7.1, Windows Phone 8, Client Profile, Windows 8, and Windows Azure. 100% Twitter API coverage. Also supports Twitter API v1.1! Also on NuGet.AcDown?????: AcDown????? v4.4.3: ??●AcDown??????????、??、??、???????。????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。 ●??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ??v4.4.3 ?? ??Bilibili????????????? ???????????? ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ???? 32??64? ???Linux ????(1)????????Windows XP???，????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? (2)???????????Linux???，????????Mono?? ??2.10?...New ProjectsAM2013: Unexpected GameChekad: This is a simple small project.DataBaseSchema: DataBase Schema Management!edirAuth: edirAuth is a .NET library for LDAP authentication to NetIQ (formerly Novell©) eDirectory. If you are a NetIQ Identity Management user you are probably using Gimme Rainbows: This is a simple project that can be used to generate Rainbow table from a given dictionary and given salt file. Hashes of various formats can be generated.Heavy Bomber: Heavy Bomber XNA GameIRIS Toolbox [I Rest, IRIS Solves...]: IRIS is a Matlab toolbox for macroeconomic modeling.OpenZapper: OpenZapper is an open source Zapper project. It is mainly a Frequency generator.Sponge - SharePoint Framework: Sponge is a SharePoint Frameworks that contains centralized logging and configuration, as well as other useful Controls, Web Parts and Application Pages.wangyexin: ?????wupantest: atwelltestYemek Menusu: Yemek Menusu

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, July 29, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, July 29, 2013Popular ReleasesGIS Raster Tile Normalizer for GeoServer: V110 Extended to tile DEMs: 1) Now imports large DEM datasets. They are stored as 3.25 degree tiles in GeoTIFF 32 bit single band tiles ready to be used by GeoServer. Also, parallel colorized hillshade tiles are optionally created for easy visualization in GeoServer. 2) No longer uses FWTools, but the more recent 32 bit Windows 1.9 GDAL installation from Tamas at http://www.gisinternals.com/sdk/. Also required is Python 2.7, the GDAL Python Bindings from Tamas, and the Numpy python libraries. This is because we use th...R.NET: R.NET 1.5: The major changes in v1.5 are: Initialize method must be called before using R. Settings should be passed to the method. EagerEvaluate method renamed to Evaluate (use Defer method when you want old version of Evaluate).TX264: 0.9.7: --0.9.7 -Added: Encoding time will be shown in the log -Added: 64bit FLAC.exe -Added: Tx264 will now write version info file to its own folder -Added: Option to set encoder priorties (thx to XanaMuui&Ruriko) -Fixed: A possible error where source files were deleted -Updated: x264 to rev2345 -Updated: MediaInfo to 0.7.64 -Updated: MkvToolNix to 6.3.0 -Updated: FLAC to 1.3.0 -Updated: AlphaControls to 8.42 Stable -Updated: QAAC to 2.19 -Updated: SoX build with unicode by Lord_MulderMedia Companion: Media Companion MC3.574b: Some good bug fixes been going on with the new XBMC-Link function. Thanks to all who were able to do testing and gave feedback. New:* Added some adhoc extra General movie filters, one of which is Plot = Outline (see fixes above). To see the filters, add the following line to your config.xml: <ShowExtraMovieFilters>True</ShowExtraMovieFilters>. The others are: Imdb in folder name, Imdb in not folder name & Imdb not in folder name & year mismatch. * Movie - display <tag> list on browser tab ...OfflineBrowser: Preview Release with Search: I've added search to this release.VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.46: changes FIXED LoginMath.NET Numerics: Math.NET Numerics v2.6.0: What's New in Math.NET Numerics 2.6 - Announcement, Explanations and Sample Code. New: Linear Curve Fitting Linear least-squares fitting (regression) to lines, polynomials and linear combinations of arbitrary functions. Multi-dimensional fitting. Also works well in F# with the F# extensions. New: Root Finding Brent's method. ~Candy Chiu, Alexander Täschner Bisection method. ~Scott Stephens, Alexander Täschner Broyden's method, for multi-dimensional functions. ~Alexander Täschner ...AJAX Control Toolkit: July 2013 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - July 2013 Release Version 7.0725July 2013 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4.5 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 3.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 3.5 and sample site (Recommended). Notes: - Instructions for using the AJAX Control Toolkit with ASP.NET 4.5 can be found at...MJP's DirectX 11 Samples: Specular Antialiasing Sample: Sample code to complement my presentation that's part of the Physically Based Shading in Theory and Practice course at SIGGRAPH 2013, entitled "Crafting a Next-Gen Material Pipeline for The Order: 1886". Demonstrates various methods of preventing aliasing from specular BRDF's when using high-frequency normal maps. The zip file contains source code as well as a pre-compiled x64 binary.English Practice Helper: English Practice Helper Demo v1.1: Fix some bug in sentences compareKartris E-commerce: Kartris v2.5003: This fixes an issue where search engines appear to identify as IE and so trigger the noIE page if there is not a non-responsive skin specified.Blue Mercs Data Gateway: Blue Mercs Data Gateway 2.0: Changes made for major release v2.0 build in support for Microsoft Access Database build in logging support (with optional stopwatch duration) implemented thread DbContext that can be referenced to share context accross layers implented 'having' sql keyword implemented 'top(n)' and 'first' sql keywords implemented 'distinct' sql keyword implemented sql column expressions implemented CTE (common table expressions) joins are refactored allow auto join on keys when using entiti...Wix Test: WIX Test Bootstrapper (Burn): WIX Test Bootstrapper and MSI setup files. Alfa versions.ScriptZilla: ScriptZilla 1.2.5.1: New Programming Languages(C++ too !) and An Better Editor.SSISConnectionBuilder: Alpha 2: Removed SSIS SDK dependencies.VBDownloader: VBDownloader 1.0: VBDownloader v1.0 The open source solution for downloads First releasemysqllib: mysqllib 1.5: La nuova versione 1.5 vede espandersi questa libreria con nuovi metodi e nuove caratteristiche interessanti. Ecco i cambiamenti: (NEW) Aggiunta classe MySqlTable per visualizzare tutti i dettagli della tabella, tra cui una lista di dettagli delle colonne (NEW) Aggiunta classe MySqlColumn per visualizzare tutti i dettagli della colonna, tra cui una lista dei valori della colonna (NEW) Nuovi metodi GetTable(...) e GetColumn(...) per risultati dettagliati di tabelle e colonne (NEW) Nuovi met...GoAgent GUI: GoAgent GUI 1.3.5 Alpha (20130723): ????????Alpha?，???????????，?????????????。 ??????????GoAgent???（???phus lu?GitHub??????GoAgent??????，??????????????????） ????????????????????????Bug ?????????。??????????????。 ????issue????，????????，????????????????。LogicCircuit: LogicCircuit 2.13.07.22: Logic Circuit - is educational software for designing and simulating logic circuits. Intuitive graphical user interface, allows you to create unrestricted circuit hierarchy with multi bit buses, debug circuits behavior with oscilloscope, and navigate running circuits hierarchy. Changes of this versionYou can make visual elements of the circuit been visible on its symbols. This way you can build composite displays, keyboards and reuse them. Please read about displays for more details http://ww...LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter v2.1.08: Supports .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, .NET 4.5, Silverlight 4.0, Windows Phone 7.1, Windows Phone 8, Client Profile, Windows 8, and Windows Azure. 100% Twitter API coverage. Also supports Twitter API v1.1! Also on NuGet.New Projects#Zyan Drench, a game for Android: Zyan Drench is a simple yet very entertaining game for Android phones developed using Zyan Communication Framework: http://zyan.com.de Crzy Game Launcher: All in one game launcher and updater. Keep your game up-to-date with this simple to use launcher.Ecobee API: This project is a portable .NET Library wrapping the Ecobee Thermostat API.Fire-Fighting Kinect Game: Fire-Fighting Kinect Game A fire-fighting game that uses Vizard virtual reality software and the Microsoft Kinect to allow the player to put out virtual fires.Fish Atlantis: This is our homework.FreeBee 900 Pro - Open Source XBee® Pro Alternative: https://hg.codeplex.com/freebee900proFuelRex: FuelRex foi feito pra lhe ajudar em seu dia a dia. Facilite seus cálculos e obtenha números reais sobre o gasto de combustíveis, em um aplicativo totalmente.KbdPlayground: A collection of .NET helpers and experimentsMailChimpNET: MailChimpNET provides a .NET PCL based wrapper around the mailchimp.com web API.MVC Generator: Addin for Visual Studio that generates MVC from Entity Framework files. A Rapid Scaffolder with options.One More ENgine project: OMEN projet (One More ENgine) main objective is to provide a simple application container.Orchard Podcasts: The Orchard Podcasting module allows users to create and publish a podcast feed (Yahoo Media RSS) for consumption by users using Orchard v1.6+.Outlook 2013 Backup Add-In: Automatically backups psd-files after closing Outlook. This plugin is compatible with Outlook 2013 32/64 Bit Version. Project Emilie: A little help to make your WinRT XAML projects truly fast and fluid, based on work from two of the top Windows 8 applications.Search WPF: A small utility to browse the WPF classes and interfaces.sGaming: Silverlight 3D EngineTelerik Connect: Simple ASP.NET Project aiming to build a copy of the LinkedIn website functionality.Testing The Unittesting Tools in Visual Studio: This project is a collection of testprograms for verifying the different test adapters available for Visual Studio. TvLinks Torrent Searcher: Easy way to search Torrents for TV Series.xnaGaming: XNA game engine

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• Meet the New Windows Azure

  - by ScottGu

  Today we are releasing a major set of improvements to Windows Azure.  Below is a short-summary of just a few of them: New Admin Portal and Command Line Tools Today’s release comes with a new Windows Azure portal that will enable you to manage all features and services offered on Windows Azure in a seamless, integrated way.  It is very fast and fluid, supports filtering and sorting (making it much easier to use for large deployments), works on all browsers, and offers a lot of great new features – including built-in VM, Web site, Storage, and Cloud Service monitoring support. The new portal is built on top of a REST-based management API within Windows Azure – and everything you can do through the portal can also be programmed directly against this Web API. We are also today releasing command-line tools (which like the portal call the REST Management APIs) to make it even easier to script and automate your administration tasks.  We are offering both a Powershell (for Windows) and Bash (for Mac and Linux) set of tools to download.  Like our SDKs, the code for these tools is hosted on GitHub under an Apache 2 license. Virtual Machines Windows Azure now supports the ability to deploy and run durable VMs in the cloud.  You can easily create these VMs using a new Image Gallery built-into the new Windows Azure Portal, or alternatively upload and run your own custom-built VHD images. Virtual Machines are durable (meaning anything you install within them persists across reboots) and you can use any OS with them.  Our built-in image gallery includes both Windows Server images (including the new Windows Server 2012 RC) as well as Linux images (including Ubuntu, CentOS, and SUSE distributions).  Once you create a VM instance you can easily Terminal Server or SSH into it in order to configure and customize the VM however you want (and optionally capture your own image snapshot of it to use when creating new VM instances).  This provides you with the flexibility to run pretty much any workload within Windows Azure.   The new Windows Azure Portal provides a rich set of management features for Virtual Machines – including the ability to monitor and track resource utilization within them.  Our new Virtual Machine support also enables the ability to easily attach multiple data-disks to VMs (which you can then mount and format as drives).  You can optionally enable geo-replication support on these – which will cause Windows Azure to continuously replicate your storage to a secondary data-center at least 400 miles away from your primary data-center as a backup. We use the same VHD format that is supported with Windows virtualization today (and which we’ve released as an open spec), which enables you to easily migrate existing workloads you might already have virtualized into Windows Azure.  We also make it easy to download VHDs from Windows Azure, which also provides the flexibility to easily migrate cloud-based VM workloads to an on-premise environment.  All you need to do is download the VHD file and boot it up locally, no import/export steps required. Web Sites Windows Azure now supports the ability to quickly and easily deploy ASP.NET, Node.js and PHP web-sites to a highly scalable cloud environment that allows you to start small (and for free) and then scale up as your traffic grows.  You can create a new web site in Azure and have it ready to deploy to in under 10 seconds: The new Windows Azure Portal provides built-in administration support for Web sites – including the ability to monitor and track resource utilization in real-time: You can deploy to web-sites in seconds using FTP, Git, TFS and Web Deploy.  We are also releasing tooling updates today for both Visual Studio and Web Matrix that enable developers to seamlessly deploy ASP.NET applications to this new offering.  The VS and Web Matrix publishing support includes the ability to deploy SQL databases as part of web site deployment – as well as the ability to incrementally update database schema with a later deployment. You can integrate web application publishing with source control by selecting the “Set up TFS publishing” or “Set up Git publishing” links on a web-site’s dashboard: Doing do will enable integration with our new TFS online service (which enables a full TFS workflow – including elastic build and testing support), or create a Git repository that you can reference as a remote and push deployments to.  Once you push a deployment using TFS or Git, the deployments tab will keep track of the deployments you make, and enable you to select an older (or newer) deployment and quickly redeploy your site to that snapshot of the code.  This provides a very powerful DevOps workflow experience.   Windows Azure now allows you to deploy up to 10 web-sites into a free, shared/multi-tenant hosting environment (where a site you deploy will be one of multiple sites running on a shared set of server resources).  This provides an easy way to get started on projects at no cost. You can then optionally upgrade your sites to run in a “reserved mode” that isolates them so that you are the only customer within a virtual machine: And you can elastically scale the amount of resources your sites use – allowing you to increase your reserved instance capacity as your traffic scales: Windows Azure automatically handles load balancing traffic across VM instances, and you get the same, super fast, deployment options (FTP, Git, TFS and Web Deploy) regardless of how many reserved instances you use. 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. Cloud Services and Distributed Caching Windows Azure also supports the ability to build cloud services that support rich multi-tier architectures, automated application management, and scale to extremely large deployments.  Previously we referred to this capability as “hosted services” – with this week’s release we are now referring to this capability as “cloud services”.  We are also enabling a bunch of new features with them. Distributed Cache One of the really cool new features being enabled with cloud services is a new distributed cache capability that enables you to use and setup a low-latency, in-memory distributed cache within your applications.  This cache is isolated for use just by your applications, and does not have any throttling limits. This cache can dynamically grow and shrink elastically (without you have to redeploy your app or make code changes), and supports the full richness of the AppFabric Cache Server API (including regions, high availability, notifications, local cache and more).  In addition to supporting the AppFabric Cache Server API, it also now supports the Memcached protocol – allowing you to point code written against Memcached at it (no code changes required). The new distributed cache can be setup to run in one of two ways: 1) Using a co-located approach.  In this option you allocate a percentage of memory in your existing web and worker roles to be used by the cache, and then the cache joins the memory into one large distributed cache.  Any data put into the cache by one role instance can be accessed by other role instances in your application – regardless of whether the cached data is stored on it or another role.  The big benefit with the “co-located” option is that it is free (you don’t have to pay anything to enable it) and it allows you to use what might have been otherwise unused memory within your application VMs. 2) Alternatively, you can add “cache worker roles” to your cloud service that are used solely for caching.  These will also be joined into one large distributed cache ring that other roles within your application can access.  You can use these roles to cache 10s or 100s of GBs of data in-memory very effectively – and the cache can be elastically increased or decreased at runtime within your application: New SDKs and Tooling Support We have updated all of the Windows Azure SDKs with today’s release to include new features and capabilities.  Our SDKs are now available for multiple languages, and all of the source in them is published under an Apache 2 license and and maintained in GitHub repositories. The .NET SDK for Azure has in particular seen a bunch of great improvements with today’s release, and now includes tooling support for both VS 2010 and the VS 2012 RC. We are also now shipping Windows, Mac and Linux SDK downloads for languages that are offered on all of these systems – allowing developers to develop Windows Azure applications using any development operating system. Much, Much More The above is just a short list of some of the improvements that are shipping in either preview or final form today – there is a LOT more in today’s release.  These include new Virtual Private Networking capabilities, new Service Bus runtime and tooling support, the public preview of the new Azure Media Services, new Data Centers, significantly upgraded network and storage hardware, SQL Reporting Services, new Identity features, support within 40+ new countries and territories, and much, much more. You can learn more about Windows Azure and sign-up to try it for free at http://windowsazure.com.  You can also watch a live keynote I’m giving at 1pm June 7th (later today) where I’ll walk through all of the new features.  We will be opening up the new features I discussed above for public usage a few hours after the keynote concludes.  We are really excited to see the great applications you build with them. Hope this helps, Scott

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, July 27, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, July 27, 2013Popular ReleasesSharpCompress - a fully native C# library for RAR, 7Zip, Zip, Tar, GZip, BZip2: SharpCompress 0.10: - Added support for RAR Decryption (thanks to https://github.com/hrasyid) - Embedded some BouncyCastle crypto classes to allow RAR Decryption and Winzip AES Decryption in Portable and Windows Store DLLs - Built in Release (I think)Memory Teaser Game: Full Release 1.1.0: -> Fixed Memory leak issue. -> Restart game button issue. -> Added Splash screen. -> Changed Release Icon. This is the version 1.1.0.0VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.46: changes FIXED LoginOfflineBrowser: Preview Release: This is a preview release so that others can help me find bugs. This should be pretty stable, but any bugs found should be reported here as an Issue.Home Access Plus+: v9.4.0727: Released to allow you to disable secure LDAP queriesOpen Source Job board: Version X3: Full version of job board, didn't have monies to fund it so it's free.DSeX DragonSpeak eXtended Editor: Version 1.0.116.0726: Cleaned up Wizard Interface Added Functionality for RTF UndoRedo IE Inserting Text from Wizard output to the Tabbed Editor Added Sanity Checks to Search/Replace Dialog to prevent crashes Fixed Template and Paste undoredo Fix Undoredo Blank spots Added New_FileTag Const = "(New FIle)" Added Filename to Modified FileClose queries (Thanks Lothus Marque)Math.NET Numerics: Math.NET Numerics v2.6.0: What's New in Math.NET Numerics 2.6 - Announcement, Explanations and Sample Code. New: Linear Curve Fitting Linear least-squares fitting (regression) to lines, polynomials and linear combinations of arbitrary functions. Multi-dimensional fitting. Also works well in F# with the F# extensions. New: Root Finding Brent's method. ~Candy Chiu, Alexander Täschner Bisection method. ~Scott Stephens, Alexander Täschner Broyden's method, for multi-dimensional functions. ~Alexander Täschner ...Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer: .NET Gadgeteer Core 2.43.800: The .NET Gadgeteer Core installer includes the core libraries and end user project templates for Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer. This is a prerequisite for end users to build and deploy .NET Gadgeteer projects. It includes a project template wizard in the New Project dialog in Visual Studio 2012 or 2010 (or express versions) under the Gadgeteer tab - ".NET Gadgeteer Application". This template uses a graphical designer built for Visual Studio which allows end users to visually configure .NET Gadget...FogBugzPd - Project Dashboard For FogBugz: 1.0: First public release of FogBugzPd. Zip File includes web application. Requires: IIS 7+ Sql Server 2008/2012 or Sql Server Express 2012 .NET 4.5Open Url Rewriter for DotNetNuke: Open Url Rewriter Core 0.4.3 (Beta): bug fix for removing home page New Tab with rules count for each Portal with memory use estimation OpenUrlRewriter_00.04.03_Install.zip : for dnn 6.01 to 7.06 OpenUrlRewriter71_00.04.03_Install.zip : for dnn 7.1KerbalAlarmClock: v2.5.0.0 Release: Version 2.5.0.0 Recompiled it for 0.21 Fixed some issues with Hyperbolic orbits and AN/DN NodesAJAX Control Toolkit: July 2013 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - July 2013 Release Version 7.0725July 2013 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4.5 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 3.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 3.5 and sample site (Recommended). Notes: - Instructions for using the AJAX Control Toolkit with ASP.NET 4.5 can be found at...MJP's DirectX 11 Samples: Specular Antialiasing Sample: Sample code to complement my presentation that's part of the Physically Based Shading in Theory and Practice course at SIGGRAPH 2013, entitled "Crafting a Next-Gen Material Pipeline for The Order: 1886". Demonstrates various methods of preventing aliasing from specular BRDF's when using high-frequency normal maps. The zip file contains source code as well as a pre-compiled x64 binary.Kartris E-commerce: Kartris v2.5003: This fixes an issue where search engines appear to identify as IE and so trigger the noIE page if there is not a non-responsive skin specified.GoAgent GUI: GoAgent GUI 1.3.5 Alpha (20130723): ????????Alpha?，???????????，?????????????。 ??????????GoAgent???（???phus lu?GitHub??????GoAgent??????，??????????????????） ????????????????????????Bug ?????????。??????????????。 ????issue????，????????，????????????????。LogicCircuit: LogicCircuit 2.13.07.22: Logic Circuit - is educational software for designing and simulating logic circuits. Intuitive graphical user interface, allows you to create unrestricted circuit hierarchy with multi bit buses, debug circuits behavior with oscilloscope, and navigate running circuits hierarchy. Changes of this versionYou can make visual elements of the circuit been visible on its symbols. This way you can build composite displays, keyboards and reuse them. Please read about displays for more details http://ww...LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter v2.1.08: Supports .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, .NET 4.5, Silverlight 4.0, Windows Phone 7.1, Windows Phone 8, Client Profile, Windows 8, and Windows Azure. 100% Twitter API coverage. Also supports Twitter API v1.1! Also on NuGet.AcDown?????: AcDown????? v4.4.3: ??●AcDown??????????、??、??、???????。????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。 ●??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ??v4.4.3 ?? ??Bilibili????????????? ???????????? ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ???? 32??64? ???Linux ????(1)????????Windows XP???，????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? (2)???????????Linux???，????????Mono?? ??2.10?...Magick.NET: Magick.NET 6.8.6.601: Magick.NET linked with ImageMagick 6.8.6.6. These zip files are also available as a NuGet package: https://nuget.org/profiles/dlemstra/New Projectsagree grammar engineering environment: agree is a concurrent parse/generation engine, a .NET implementation of the DELPH-IN joint reference formalism for natural language analysis. AWF's Utility Library: A collection of awf utilities C# chat client with server: Newest chat with client and server.Charming components for Windows Phone: Build Charming apps for Windows Phone. Adds ready-made Search, Share and Settings functionality to Windows Phone. Share more code across platforms.Darkorbit Configuration Manager: config manager dark orbit darkorbit eltepvpers heaven 'Heaven. configuration manager configurationmanagerDarkorbit MultiTool: dark orbit darkorbit multi tool mulitool heaven 'Heaven. elitepvpers awesome skylab bot trade bot techcenter bot multiaccount diabind: Python binding of DIA (Debug Interface Access) SDKDoodle .Net Connector: This library allows an easy access to the Doodle REST API.DssCECB Version 2.0: aaaeCommunity: e-communityEFDemo: This is a demo for Entity frameworkEmployee Directory Webpart in SharePoint 2010: Employee Directory for SharePoint 2010EntityContext: A lightweight wrapper around Entity Framework allowing for accessing some internals of the framework, as well as, some functionality usually required.EwsRelentless: This is a sample application which demonstrates you might place a heavy load of EWS calls against an Exchange server in order to test performance. FogBugzPd - Project Dashboard For FogBugz: This tool helps PMs, Tech Leads and Executives to see actual progress on the projects tracked in FogBugz.HP Battery Health Scan Script: Silently runs HP Battery Check Utility and saves result to an Access DB.I am following: Users can follow nearly everything in SharePoint 2013. This solution provides a list of followed contend where ever you need it in you SharePoint.Image Viewer: Simple image viewer written for academic purposes LIBRERIA PRISA: sistema de ventasLiduv: Facilitate teachers daily work including creating marks and lesson drafts, curricula and calculating marks for written tests etc.Maze Builder Library: A builder for random maze generationPayPal Express Checkout for nopCommerce: nopCommerce plugin to allow for PayPal Express Checkout. Full integration with shipping options.PsTest - UnitTesting for PowerShell: PsTest is a lightweight UnitTesting Module for use in PowerShell. It lets PowerShell users create, discover and run UnitTests in PowerShell.SIGE: sistema integral gestion educativaSql Mass Dumper: Sql Mass Dumper. A simple project to dump all the data in your SQL Server in XML or in JSON format.SSIS Wait Task: A SSIS task which suspends execution for a time period or until a specific time. Additionally a sql statement can be defined that can also delay execution.Tactical Combat - Unity3d Game: A first person shooter! The main character is Billy Hills, need a story plot.The open source customer relation and billing software.: Memtem in a open source customer relation and billing software written in C#.NET.Tridion Gateway Service: WCF Support for the Tridion TOM COM APIWINJS CTK: WinJS Control kit is a set of custom WINJS controls that are not supported by Windows 8.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, July 30, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, July 30, 2013Popular ReleasesnopCommerce. Open source shopping cart (ASP.NET MVC): nopCommerce 3.10: Highlight features & improvements: • Performance optimization. • New more user-friendly product/product-variant logic. Now we'll have only products (simple and grouped). • Bundle products support added. • Allow a store owner to associate product image for product variant attribute values. To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes page (http://www.nopCommerce.com/releasenotes.aspx).Small Tools: Helpers 1.01: Fix params count issue Fix STAThread issue Add support for exe.config filesExtJS based ASP.NET Controls: FineUI v3.3.1: ??FineUI ?? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET ???。 FineUI??? ?? No JavaScript，No CSS，No UpdatePanel，No ViewState，No WebServices ???????。 ?????? IE 7.0、Firefox 3.6、Chrome 3.0、Opera 10.5、Safari 3.0+ ???? Apache License v2.0 ?：ExtJS ?? GPL v3 ?????(http://www.sencha.com/license)。 ???? ??：http://fineui.com/bbs/ ??：http://fineui.com/demo/ ??：http://fineui.com/doc/ ??：http://fineui.codeplex.com/ FineUI ???? ExtJS ????????，???? ExtJS ?，???????????ExtJS?： 1. ????? FineUI ? ExtJS ?：http://fineui.com/bbs/fo...AutoNLayered - Domain Oriented N-Layered .NET 4.5: AutoNLayered v1.0.5: - Fix Dtos. Abstract collections replaced by concrete (correct serialization WCF). - OrderBy in navigation properties. - Unit Test with Fakes. - Map of entities/dto moved to application services. - Libraries updated. Warning using Fakes: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/782031/visual-studio-2012-add-fakes-assembly-does-not-add-all-needed-referencesPath Copy Copy: 11.1: Minor release with two new features: Submenu's contextual menu item now has an icon next to it Added reference to JavaScript regular expression format in Settings application Since this release does not have any glaring bug fixes, it is more of an optional update for existing users. It depends on whether you want to be able to spot the Path Copy Copy submenu more easily. I recommend you install it to see if the icon makes sense. As always, please don't hesitate to leave feedback via Discus...CMake Tools for Visual Studio: CMake Tools for Visual Studio 1.0 RC3: This is the third release candidate of CMake Tools for Visual Studio 1.0, which contains the following bug fixes: Opening a CMake file from Windows Explorer while Visual Studio is already open will no start a new instance of Visual Studio. Typing a symbol while the IntelliSense list box is visible and the text typed so far does not match any item in the list will dismiss the list box and insert the symbol typed.R.NET: R.NET 1.5: The major changes in v1.5 are: Initialize method must be called before using R. Settings should be passed to the method. EagerEvaluate method renamed to Evaluate (use Defer method when you want old version of Evaluate).Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.574b: Some good bug fixes been going on with the new XBMC-Link function. Thanks to all who were able to do testing and gave feedback. New:* Added some adhoc extra General movie filters, one of which is Plot = Outline (see fixes above). To see the filters, add the following line to your config.xml: <ShowExtraMovieFilters>True</ShowExtraMovieFilters>. The others are: Imdb in folder name, Imdb in not folder name & Imdb not in folder name & year mismatch. * Movie - display <tag> list on browser tab ...OfflineBrowser: Preview Release with Search: I've added search to this release.VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.46: changes FIXED LoginMath.NET Numerics: Math.NET Numerics v2.6.0: What's New in Math.NET Numerics 2.6 - Announcement, Explanations and Sample Code. New: Linear Curve Fitting Linear least-squares fitting (regression) to lines, polynomials and linear combinations of arbitrary functions. Multi-dimensional fitting. Also works well in F# with the F# extensions. New: Root Finding Brent's method. ~Candy Chiu, Alexander Täschner Bisection method. ~Scott Stephens, Alexander Täschner Broyden's method, for multi-dimensional functions. ~Alexander Täschner ...AJAX Control Toolkit: July 2013 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - July 2013 Release Version 7.0725July 2013 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4.5 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 3.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 3.5 and sample site (Recommended). Notes: - Instructions for using the AJAX Control Toolkit with ASP.NET 4.5 can be found at...MJP's DirectX 11 Samples: Specular Antialiasing Sample: Sample code to complement my presentation that's part of the Physically Based Shading in Theory and Practice course at SIGGRAPH 2013, entitled "Crafting a Next-Gen Material Pipeline for The Order: 1886". Demonstrates various methods of preventing aliasing from specular BRDF's when using high-frequency normal maps. The zip file contains source code as well as a pre-compiled x64 binary.EXCEL??、??、????????：DataPie（??MSSQL 2008、ORACLE、ACCESS 2007）: DataPieV3.6.1: ????csv????，???sql??，??csv????Qibla Compass for Windows Phone: Qibla Compass for Windows Phone: This release is in open beta version. You can always download and provide your feedback. Since it was just developed to give users an idea of Qibla Direction and its mapping therefore you might not see major releases in future.Event Scavenger: Version 5: I've decided to do a full (recommended) release of version 5. I've been running it myself for months and did not have any issues with it yet. This release just contains the installs. The web site's documentation has not been updated yet and reflects the previous version details. If you have an issue with this version then you can happily switch back to 4.x. Version 5 can run side-by-side with earlier versions (service) as it has a new service and database.wpadk: WPadk_WP8???: ???：V1.1 ??wp???????????????wp8???????StockSharp: StockSharp 4.1.16: ?????? ????????? - http://stocksharp.com/forum/yaf_postsm28239_S--API-4-1.aspx#post28239GeoTransformer: GeoTransformer 4.5: Extensions can now be installed and uninstalled from the application. The extensions update the same way as the application - silently and automatically. Added ability to search for caches by pressing CTRL+F in the table views. (Thanks to JanisU for implementing this request) Added ability to remove edited customizations for multiple caches at once (use SHIFT or CTRL to select multiple lines in the table). A new experimental version for Windows 8 RT (on ARM processor) is also made availa...Kartris E-commerce: Kartris v2.5003: This fixes an issue where search engines appear to identify as IE and so trigger the noIE page if there is not a non-responsive skin specified.New ProjectsBus Booking System: Bus Booking systemC#??????: ????C#??????????????。Cotizav 2.0: Este proyecto es para el soporte de Cotizaciones.DeferredShading: deferred shading rendererIVR Junction: IVR Junction connects an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system to cloud services such as YouTube, Facebook and other social media.Mac Address Changer: It's a quite and easy tool to change your mac addressmotokraft user control: user control for motokraftSingle Reference JavaScript Pattern: This is very simple pattern. In here you need to only refer one script in a page. I'm sure it is saving your development time as well as maintenance timeSocial_Life_Time: This is social network that people can communicate with each otherThe Ironic Text Based MMORPG: Modern MMORPGs have become highly interactive, complex systems of skills, stats, and action combat. This game introduces a new level of text based immersion!Timeline Year Control: Timeline Year Control An ASP.Net year indicator timeline control.winrtsock: winsock façade for Windows Runtime for porting bsd socket code to Windows RuntimeZker: No summary?????: C#?????

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• ASP.NET MVC 3 embrace dynamic type - CSDN.NET - CSDN Software Development Channel

  - by user559071

  About a decade ago, Microsoft will all bet on the WebForms and static types. With the complete package from scattered to the continuous development, and now almost every page can be viewed as its own procedure. Subsequent years, the industry continued to move in another direction, love is better than separation package, better than the late binding early binding to the idea. This leads to two very interesting questions. The first is the problem of terminology. Consider the original Smalltalk MVC model, view and controller is not only tightly coupled together, and usually in pairs. Most of the framework is that Microsoft, including the classic VB, WinForms, WebForms, WPF and Silverlight, they both use the code behind file to store the controller logic. But said "MVC" usually refers to the view and controller are loosely coupled framework. This is especially true for the Web framework, HTML form submission mechanism allows any views submitted to any of the controller. Since this article was mainly talking about Web technologies, so we need to use the modern definition. The second question is "If you're Microsoft, how to change orbit without causing too much pressure to the developer?" So far, the answer is: new releases each year, until the developers meet up. ASP.NET MVC's first product was released last March. Released in March this year, ASP.NET MVC 2.0. 3.0 RC 2 is currently in phase, expected to be released next March. December 10, Microsoft released ASP.NET MVC 3.0 Release Candidate 2. RC 2 is built on top of Microsoft's commitment to the jQuery: The default project template into jQuery 1.4.4, jQuery Validation 1.7 and jQuery UI. Although people think that Microsoft will focus shifted away from server-side controls to be a joke, but the introduction of Microsoft's jQuery UI is that this is the real thing. For those worried about the scalability of the developers, there are many excellent control can replace the session state. With SessionState property, you can tell the controller session state is read-only, read-write, or can be completely ignored in the. This site is no single server, but if a server needs to access another server session state, then this approach can provide a great help. MVC 3 contains Razor view engine. By default, the engine will be encoded HTML output, so that we can easily output on the screen the text of the original. HTML injection attacks even without the risk of encoded text can not easily prevent the page rendering. For many C # developers in the end do what is most shocking that MVC 3 for the controller and view and embrace the dynamic type. ViewBag property will open a dynamic object, developers can run on top of the object to add attributes. In general, it is used to send the view from the controller non-mode data. Scott Guthrie provides state of the sample contains text (such as the current time) and used to assemble the list box entries. Asked Link: http://www.infoq.com/cn/news/2010/12/ASPNET-MVC-3-RC-2; jsessionid = 3561C3B7957F1FB97848950809AD9483

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