saifkhan - Developer IT

Securing ClickOnce hosted with Amazon S3 Storage

- by saifkhan

Well, since my post on hosting ClickOnce with Amazon S3 Storage, I've received quite a few emails asking how to secure the deployment. At the time of this post I regret to say that there is no way to secure your ClickOnce deployment hosted with Amazon S3. The S3 storage is secured by ACL meaning that a username and password will have to be provided before access. The Amazon CloudFront, which sits on top of S3, allows you to apply security settings to your CloudFront distribution by Applying an encryption to the URL. Restricting by IP. The problem with the CloudFront is that the encryption of the URL is mandatory. ClickOnce does not provide a way to pass the "Amazon Public Key" to the CloudFront URL (you probably can if you start editing the XML and HTML files ClickOnce generate but that defeats the porpose of ClickOnce all together). What would be nice is if Amazon can allow users to restrict by IP addresses or IP Blocks. I'd sent them an email and received a response that this is something they are looking into...I won't hold my breadth though. Alternative I suggest you look at Rack Space Cloud hosting http://www.rackspacecloud.com they have very competitive pricing and recently started hosting Windows Virtual Servers. What you can do is rent a virtual server, setup IIS to host your ClickOnce applications. You can then use IIS security setting to restrict what IP/Blocks can access your ClickOnce payloads. Note: You don't really need Windows Server to host ClickOnce. Any web server can do. If you are familiar with Linux you can run that VM with rackspace for half the price of Windows. I hope you found this information helpful.

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Getting codebaseHQ SVN ChangeLog data in your application

- by saifkhan

I deploy apps via ClickOnce. After each deployment we have to review the changes made and send out an email to the users with the changes. What I decided now to do is to use CodebaseHQ’s API to access a project’s SVN repository and display the commit notes so some users who download new updates can check what was changed or updated in an app. This saves a heck of a lot of time, especially when your apps are in beta and you are making several changes daily based on feedback. You can read up on their API here Here is a sample on how to access the Repositories API from a windows app Public Sub GetLog() If String.IsNullOrEmpty(_url) Then Exit Sub Dim answer As String = String.Empty Dim myReq As HttpWebRequest = WebRequest.Create(_url) With myReq .Headers.Add("Authorization", String.Format("Basic {0}", Convert.ToBase64String(Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes("username:password")))) .ContentType = "application/xml" .Accept = "application/xml" .Method = "POST" End With Try Using response As HttpWebResponse = myReq.GetResponse() Using sr As New System.IO.StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()) answer = sr.ReadToEnd() Dim doc As XDocument = XDocument.Parse(answer) Dim commits = From commit In doc.Descendants("commit") _ Select Message = commit.Element("message").Value, _ AuthorName = commit.Element("author-name").Value, _ AuthoredDate = DateTime.Parse(commit.Element("authored-at").Value).Date grdLogData.BeginUpdate() grdLogData.DataSource = commits.ToList() grdLogData.EndUpdate() End Using End Using Catch ex As Exception MsgBox(ex.Message) End Try End Sub

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Repository and Ticket management in a Windows Environment

- by saifkhan

I’ve been using AxoSoft’s bug tracking application for a while, although and excellent piece of software I had some issues with it · It was SLOOOW (both desktop and web). I don’t care what Axosoft says, I tired multiple servers etc. I’ve been long enough in this field to tell you when something is not right with an app. · The cost! It’s not feasible for a small team. I must say though, that they have some nice features which are not commonly found on other bug tracking software. I wouldn’t go on to list any here. I would prefer you download and try their app and see for yourself. In my quest to find a replacement, I tried a few. The successor had to satisfy the following · A 99.99% Windows Environment. · Bug Tracking. · Ticket Management (power users and project managers can open tickets on projects). · Repository (I decided to merge bug tracking and repository to get my team to be more productive). · Unlimited users. · Cost. Being the head of IT security for the firm I work for, making the decision to move data offsite was a hard decision to make, but turned out to be one I am not regretting so far. My choice was down to Altassian JIRA and codebaseHQ. I ended up going with the latter… (I still love the greenhopper from Altassian…its freaking cool!) CodebaseHQ is nice and simple and has all the features I needed. I’ve been using them for a few months now and very happy. Their pricing…well, see for yourself. I was also able to get our SVN data… (Yes, SVN! I don’t go near the Visual Sourcesafe thing…it’s not that safe (pardon the pun). I am hearing some nice things about TFS 2010) over to codebaseHQ. We use VisualSVN to access repositories. …so if you are a Windows developer (or team) codebaseHQ is worth checking out!

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Unable to connect with IIS7 Manager to remote site

- by saifkhan

I was unable to connect with IIS7 manager to a remote site. I got on the phone with the hosting provider and they started troubleshooting. After a few minutes they went over all my settings, username, password...the whole shebang and I still couldn't. I then asked the support tech if any ports needed to be opened on my side and she said "ONLY PORT 80 NEEDS TO BE OPENED"... after a few more mins I decided to hop over to the IIS7 website but still couldn't find anything incicating specific ports, but I did came across a doc mentioning 8172 as a port IIS7 uses so I went to my firewall did the following OPEN PORT 8172 OUTBOUND That did the trick!...and the support tech updated her document accordingly.

Developer IT