Geekswithblogs.net

Read the Comments!

Bob Porter — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 12:18:03 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/blogofbob/archive/2013/06/18/read-the-comments.aspx

Sorry, I have been lax in posting for quite some time. Hopefully this will be the start of a renewed posting binge!

A piece of advice, if you are searching for a solution to an issue, or a recommendation, or anything else on the web, when you find a post or a forum thread do 2 things.

First, check the date on the post of thread. If it is older it may no longer be fully up to date and or inaccurate. Bear that in mind.

Second, READ THE COMMENTS! Often small omissions or other issues in the post itself are resolved in the comments. If the solution to your issue does not appear to work check the comments. There may be a step missing or something else relavent that was raised by a prior reader or the author themselves.

Cheers,

Robert Porter

BizTalk 360 Alarms, How do you configure yours?

Michael Stephenson — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:19:52 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2013/06/18/153157.aspx

Ive recently written a guest post for BizTalk 360 on their blog about how customers may configure BizTalk 360 Alarms to optimize getting the right information to the right type of support people.

This is my thoughts on how users of BTS 360 can get the best value out of BizTalk 360 alarms

http://blogs.biztalk360.com/what-are-the-different-types-of-alarms-alerts-you-should-configure-in-biztalk360/

Is It Time To Specialize?

Tim Murphy — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 01:29:41 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/tmurphy/archive/2013/06/18/is-it-time-to-specialize.aspx

Over my career I have made a living as a generalist. I have been a jack of all trades and a master of none. It has served me well in that I am able to move from one technology to the other quickly and make myself productive. Where it becomes a problem is deep knowledge. I am constantly digging for the things that aren’t basic knowledge. How do you make a product like WCF or Windows RT do more than just “Hello World”?

As an architect I need to be a jack of all trades. This is what helps me to bring the big picture of a project into focus for developers with different skills to accomplish the goals of the project. It is a key when the mix technologies crosses Windows, Unix and Mainframe with different languages and databases. The larger the company that the project is for the more likely this scenario will arise.

As a consultant and a developer I need to have specialized skills in order to get the job done efficiently. if I have a SharePoint or Windows Phone project knowing the object model details and possible roadblocks of the technology allow me to stay within budgets as well as better advise the client on technology decisions.

What is the solution? Constant learning and associating with developers who specialize in a variety of technologies is the best thing you can do. You may have thought you were done with classes when you left college, but in this industry you need to constantly be learning new products and languages. The ultimate answer is you must generally specialize. Learn as many subject areas as possible, but go deep when ever you can. Sleep is overrated. Good luck.

del.icio.us Tags: software development,software architecture,specialization,generalist

Stright Talk Nokia Lumia 920 MMS Fix

mrad — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:22:45 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/mrad/archive/2013/06/17/stright-talk-nokia-lumia-920-mms-fix.aspx

Was enjoying my Stright Talk service until receiving several MMS messages..

that showed

"Get media content now (1KB)" and then upon selecting the message would get "Media content not available"

here is the fix:

1. go to "Settings / cellular / edit mms apn" and make sure you got this

MMS APN: att.mvno
User name: leave blank
Password: leave blank
WAP gateway (URL): 66.209.11.33
WAP gateway port: 80

Btw,

here are the Interned settings for "edit internet apn"

Internet APN: att.mvno

User Name: leave blank
Password: leave blank
Proxy server (URL): proxy.mvno.tracfone.com
Proxy port: 80

video from Mark (http://thenokiablog.com)

Creating a Training Lab on Windows Azure

Michael Stephenson — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 02:19:12 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2013/06/17/153149.aspx

This week we are preparing for a training course that Alan Smith will be running for the support teams at one of my customers around Windows Azure. In order to facilitate the training lab we have a few prerequisites we need to handle. One of the biggest ones is that although the support team all have MSDN accounts the local desktops they work on are not ideal for running most of the labs as we want to give them some additional developer background training around Azure.

Some recent Azure announcements really help us in this area:

MSDN software can now be used on Azure VM
You don't pay for Azure VM's when they are no longer used

Since the support team only have limited experience of Windows Azure and the organisation also have an Enterprise Agreement we decided it would be best value for money to spin up a training lab in a subscription on the EA and then we can turn the machines off when we are done. At the same time we would be able to spin them back up when the users need to do some additional lab work once the training course is completed.

In order to achieve this I wanted to create a powershell script which would setup my training lab. The aim was to create 18 VM's which would be based on a prebuilt template with Visual Studio and the Azure development tools.

The script I used is described below

The Start & Variables

The below text will setup the powershell environment and some variables which I will use elsewhere in the script. It will also import the Azure Powershell cmdlets.

You can see below that I will need to download my publisher settings file and know some details from my Azure account. At this point I will assume you have a basic understanding of Azure & Powershell so already know how to do this.

Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

cls

$startTime = get-date

Import-Module "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Azure\PowerShell\Azure\Azure.psd1"

# Azure Publisher Settings

$azurePublisherSettings = '<Your settings file>.publishsettings'

# Subscription Details

$subscriptionName = "<Your subscription name>"

$defaultStorageAccount = "<Your default storage account>"

# Affinity Group Details

$affinityGroup = '<Your affinity group>'

$dataCenter = 'West Europe' # From Get-AzureLocation

# VM Details

$baseVMName = 'TRN'

$adminUserName = '<Your admin username>'

$password = '<Your admin password>'

$size = 'Medium'

$vmTemplate = '<The name of your VM template image>'

$rdpFilePath = '<File path to save RDP files to>'

$machineSettingsPath = '<File path to save machine info to>'

Functions

In the next section of the script I have some functions which are used to perform certain actions. The first is called CreateVM. This will do the following actions:

If the VM already exists it will be deleted
Create the cloud service
Create the VM from the template I have created
Add an endpoint so we can RDP to them all over the same port
Download the RDP file so there is a short cut the trainees can easily access the machine via
Write settings for the machine to a log file

function CreateVM($machineNo)

{

# Specify a name for the new VM

$machineName = "$baseVMName-$machineNo"

Write-Host "Creating VM: $machineName"

# Get the Azure VM Image

$myImage = Get-AzureVMImage $vmTemplate

#If the VM already exists delete and re-create it

$existingVm = Get-AzureVM -Name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName

if($existingVm -ne $null)

{

Write-Host "VM already exists so deleting it"

Remove-AzureVM -Name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName

}

"Creating Service"

$serviceName = "bupa-azure-train-$machineName"

Remove-AzureService -Force -ServiceName $serviceName

New-AzureService -Location $dataCenter -ServiceName $serviceName

Write-Host "Creating VM: $machineName"

New-AzureQuickVM -Windows -name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName -ImageName $myImage.ImageName -InstanceSize $size -AdminUsername $adminUserName -Password $password

Write-Host "Updating the RDP endpoint for $machineName"

Get-AzureVM -name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName `

| Add-AzureEndpoint -Name RDP -Protocol TCP -LocalPort 3389 -PublicPort 550 `

| Update-AzureVM

Write-Host "Get the RDP File for machine $machineName"

$machineRDPFilePath = "$rdpFilePath\$machineName.rdp"

Get-AzureRemoteDesktopFile -name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName -LocalPath "$machineRDPFilePath"

WriteMachineSettings "$machineName" "$serviceName"

}

The delete machine settings function is used to delete the log file before we start re-running the process.

function DeleteMachineSettings()

{

Write-Host "Deleting the machine settings output file"

[System.IO.File]::Delete("$machineSettingsPath");

}

The write machine settings function will get the VM and then record its details to the log file. The importance of the log file is that I can easily provide the information for all of the VM's to our infrastructure team to be able to configure access to all of the VM's

function WriteMachineSettings([string]$vmName, [string]$vmServiceName)

{

Write-Host "Writing to the machine settings output file"

$vm = Get-AzureVM -name $vmName -ServiceName $vmServiceName

$vmEndpoint = Get-AzureEndpoint -VM $vm -Name RDP

$sb = new-object System.Text.StringBuilder

$sb.Append("Service Name: ");

$sb.Append($vm.ServiceName);

$sb.Append(", ");

$sb.Append("VM: ");

$sb.Append($vm.Name);

$sb.Append(", ");

$sb.Append("RDP Public Port: ");

$sb.Append($vmEndpoint.Port);

$sb.Append(", ");

$sb.Append("Public DNS: ");

$sb.Append($vmEndpoint.Vip);

$sb.AppendLine("");

[System.IO.File]::AppendAllText($machineSettingsPath, $sb.ToString());

}

# end functions

Rest of Script

In the rest of the script it is really just the bit that orchestrates the actions we want to happen. It will load the publisher settings, select the Azure subscription and then loop around the CreateVM function and create 16 VM's

Import-AzurePublishSettingsFile $azurePublisherSettings

Set-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName $subscriptionName -CurrentStorageAccount $defaultStorageAccount

Select-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName $subscriptionName

DeleteMachineSettings

"Starting creating Bupa International Azure Training Lab"

$numberOfVMs = 16

for ($index=1; $index -le $numberOfVMs; $index++)

{

$vmNo = "$index"

CreateVM($vmNo);

}

"Finished creating Bupa International Azure Training Lab"

# Give it a Minute

Start-Sleep -s 60

$endTime = get-date

"Script run time " + ($endTime - $startTime)

Conclusion

As you can see there is nothing too fancy about this script but in our case of creating a small isolated training lab which is not connected to our corporate network then we can easily use this to provision the lab. Im sure if this is of use to anyone you can easily modify it to do other things with the lab environment too.

A couple of points to note are that there are some soft limits in Azure about the number of cores and services your subscription can use. You may need to contact the Azure support team to be able to increase this limit.

In terms of the real business value of this approach, it was not possible to use the existing desktops to do the training on, and getting some internal virtual machines would have been relatively expensive and time consuming for our ops team to do. With the Azure option we are able to spin these machines up for a temporary period during the training course and then throw them away when we are done. We expect the costing of this test lab to be very small, especially considering we have EA pricing.

As a ball park I think my 18 lab VM training environment will cost in the region of $80 per day on our EA. This is a fraction of the cost of the creation of a single VM on premise.

JQGrdi PDF Export

thanigai — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:20:15 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/thanigai/archive/2013/06/17/jqgrdi-pdf-export.aspx

JQGrid PDF Export

The aim of this article is to address the PDF export from client side grid frameworks. The solution is done using the ASP.Net MVC 4 and VisualStudio 2012. The article assumes the developer to have a fair amount of knowledge on ASP.Net MVC and C#.

Tools Used

Visual Studio 2012
ASP.Net MVC 4
Nuget Package Manager

JQGrid is one of the client grid framework built on top of the JQuery framework. It helps in building a beautiful grid with paging, sorting and exiting options. There are also other features available as extension plugins and developers can write their own if needed. You can download the JQgrid from the JQGrid homepage or as NUget package. I have given below the command to download the JQGrid through the package manager console. From the tools menu select “Library Package Manager” and then select “Package Manager Console”. I have given the screenshot below.

This command will pull down the latest JQGrid package and adds them in the script folder.

Once the script is downloaded and referenced in the project update the bundleconfig file to add the script reference in the pages. Bundleconfig can be found in the App_Start folder in the project structure.

bundles .Add (newStyleBundle(“~/Content/jqgrid”).Include (“~/Content/ui.jqgrid.css”));

bundles.Add( newScriptBundle( “~/bundles/jquerygrid”) .Include( “~/Scripts/jqGrid/jquery.jqGrid*”));

Once added the config’s refer the bundles to the Views/Shared/LayoutPage.cshtml. Add the following lines to the head section of the page.

@Styles.Render(“~/Content/jqgrid”)

Add the following lines to the end of the page before html close tags.

@Scripts.Render(“~/bundles/jquery”)

@Scripts.Render(“~/bundles/jqueryui”)

@Scripts.Render(“ ~/bundles/jquerygrid”)

That’s all to be done from the view perspective. Once these steps are done the developer can start coding for the JQGrid. In this example we will modify the HomeController for the demo. The index action will be the default action. We will add an argument for this index action. Let it be nullable bool. It’s just to mark the pdf request. In the Index.cshtml we will add a table tag with an id “ gridTable “. We will use this table for making the grid. Since JQGrid is an extension for the JQUery we will initialize the grid setting at the script section of the page. This script section is marked at the end of the page to improve performance. The script section is placed just below the bundle reference for JQuery and JQueryUI. This is the one of improvement factors from “ why slow” provided by yahoo.

< tableid=“gridTable”class=“scroll”></ table>

< inputtype=“button”value=“Export PDF”onclick=“exportPDF();“
/>

@section scripts

{

<scripttype=“text/javascript”>

$(document).ready(
function()
{
$(“#gridTable”).jqGrid(
{
datatype:“json”,
url:‘@Url.Action(“GetCustomerDetails”)‘,
mtype:‘GET’,
colNames:["CustomerID","CustomerName","Location","PrimaryBusiness"],
colModel:[
{name:"CustomerID",width:40,index:"CustomerID",align:"center"},{name:"CustomerName",width:40,index:"CustomerName",align:
"center"},
{name:"Location",width:40,index:"Location",align:"center"},
{name:"PrimaryBusiness",width:40,index:"PrimaryBusiness",
align:"center"},],
height:250,
autowidth:true,
sortorder:“asc”,
rowNum:10,
rowList:[5,10,15,20],
sortname:“CustomerID”,
viewrecords:true}
);});

function exportPDF (){
document . location = ‘ @ Url . Action ( “Index” ) ?pdf=true’ ; }

</ script >

}

The exportPDF methos just sets the document location to the Index action method with PDF Boolean as true just to mark for download PDF.

An inmemory list collection is used for demo purpose. The GetCustomerDetails
method is the server side action method that will provide the data as JSON list. We will see the method explanation below.

[ HttpGet]
publicJsonResultGetCustomerDetails(){

varresult=new { total=1, page=1,
records=customerList.Count(),
rows=( customerList.Select( e=>new { id=e.CustomerID, cell=new
string[]{ e.CustomerID.ToString(), e.CustomerName, e.Location, e.PrimaryBusiness}})) .ToArray()};
return
Json( result, JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);

}

JQGrid can understand the response data from server in certain format. The server method shown above is taking care of formatting the response so that JQGrid understand the data properly. The response data should contain totalpages, current page, full record count, rows of data with id and remaining columns as string array. The response is built using an anonymous object and will be sent as a MVC JsonResult. Since we are using HttpGet it’s better to mark the attribute as HttpGet and also the JSON requestbehavious as AllowGet. The inmemory list is initialized in the homecontroller constructor for reference.

Public class HomeController : Controller{

private readonly Ilist < CustomerViewModel > customerList ;
public HomeController (){

customerList=newList<CustomerViewModel>() {

newCustomerViewModel{ CustomerID=100, CustomerName=“Sundar”, Location=“Chennai”, PrimaryBusiness=“Teacing”},

new
CustomerViewModel{ CustomerID=101, CustomerName=“Sudhagar”, Location=“Chennai”, PrimaryBusiness=“Software”},

new
CustomerViewModel{ CustomerID=102, CustomerName=“Thivagar”, Location=“China”, PrimaryBusiness=“SAP”},

};

}

publicActionResultIndex( bool?pdf){

if ( !pdf.HasValue){

returnView( customerList);}

else{

stringfilePath=Server.MapPath( “Content”) +“Sample.pdf”;
ExportPDF( customerList, new string[]{ “CustomerID”, “CustomerName”, “Location”, “PrimaryBusiness” }, filePath);

return File ( filePath , “application/pdf” , “list.pdf” );

}

The index actionmethod has a Boolean argument named “pdf”. It’s used to indicate for PDF download. When the application starts this method is first hit for initial page request. For PDF operation a filename is generated and then sent to the ExportPDF method
which
will take care of generating the PDF from the datasource. The ExportPDF method is listed below.

Private static void ExportPDF<TSource>(IList<TSource>
customerList,string [] columns, string
filePath){

FontheaderFont=FontFactory.GetFont( “Verdana”, 10, Color.WHITE);

Fontrowfont=
FontFactory.GetFont( “Verdana”, 10, Color.BLUE);

Documentdocument=newDocument( PageSize.A4);

PdfWriter writer = PdfWriter . GetInstance ( document , new
FileStream ( filePath , FileMode . OpenOrCreate ));

document.Open();
PdfPTabletable=newPdfPTable( columns.Length);

foreach ( varcolumnincolumns){

PdfPCellcell=newPdfPCell( newPhrase( column, headerFont));

cell.BackgroundColor=Color.BLACK;

table.AddCell( cell);

}

foreach ( var item in customerList )

{

foreach ( varcolumnincolumns){
stringvalue=
item.GetType() .GetProperty( column) .GetValue( item) .ToString();

PdfPCellcell5=newPdfPCell( newPhrase( value, rowfont));

table.AddCell( cell5);

}

document.Add( table);

document.Close();

}

iTextSharp is one of the pioneer in PDF export. It’s an opensource library readily available as NUget library.

This command will pulldown latest available library. I am using the version 4.1.2.0. The latest version may have changed. There are three main things in this library.

Document
This is the document class which takes care of creating the document sheet with particular size. We have used A4 size. There is also an option to define the rectangle size. This document instance will be further used in next methods for reference.
PdfWriter
PdfWriter takes the filename and the document as the reference. This class enables the document class to generate the PDF content and save them in a file.
Font
Using the FONT class the developer can control the font features. Since I need a nice looking font I am giving the Verdana font.

Following this PdfPTable and PdfPCell are used for generating the normal table layout. We have created two set of fonts for header and footer.

Font headerFont=
FontFactory .GetFont(“Verdana”, 10, Color .WHITE);

Font rowfont=
FontFactory .GetFont(“Verdana”, 10, Color .BLUE);

We are getting the header columns as string array. Columns argument array is looped and header is generated. We are using the headerfont for this purpose.

PdfWriter writer=
PdfWriter .GetInstance(document, new
FileStream (filePath, FileMode.OpenOrCreate));

document.Open();
PdfPTabletable=new
PdfPTable( columns.Length);

foreach ( varcolumnincolumns){

PdfPCellcell=newPdfPCell( new
Phrase( column, headerFont));

cell.BackgroundColor=Color.BLACK;

table.AddCell( cell);

}

Then reflection is used to generate the row wise details and form the grid.

foreach (var item in customerList){

foreach ( varcolumnincolumns) {

stringvalue=
item.GetType() .GetProperty( column) .GetValue( item) .ToString();

PdfPCellcell5=newPdfPCell( newPhrase( value, rowfont));

table.AddCell( cell5);

}

document . Add ( table );
document . Close ();

Once the process id done the pdf table is added to the document and document is closed to write all the changes to the filepath given. Then the control moves to the controller which will take care of sending the response as a JSON result with a filename. If the file name is not given then the PDF will open in the same page otherwise a popup will open up asking whether to save the file or open file.

Return File(filePath, “application/pdf”,“list.pdf”);

The final result screen is shown below.

PDF file opened below to show the output.

Conclusion:

This is how the export pdf is done for JQGrid. The problem area that is addressed here is the clientside grid frameworks won’t support PDF’s export. In that time it’s better to have a fine grained control over the data and generated PDF. iTextSharp has helped us to achieve our goal.

IIS 7’s Sneaky Secret to Get COM-InterOp to Run

David Hoerster — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 08:36:25 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/DavidHoerster/archive/2013/06/17/iis-7rsquos-sneaky-secret-to-get-com-interop-to-run.aspx

If you’re like me, you don’t really do a lot with COM components these days. For me, I’ve been ‘lucky’ to stay in the managed world for the past 6 or 7 years.

Until last week.

I’m running a project to upgrade a web interface to an older COM-based application. The old web interface is all classic ASP and lots of tables, in-line styles and a bunch of other late 90’s and early 2000’s goodies. So in addition to updating the UI to be more modern looking and responsive, I decided to give the server side an update, too. So I built some COM-InterOp DLL’s (easily through VS2012’s Add Reference feature…nothing new here) and built a test console line app to make sure the COM DLL’s were actually built according to the COM spec. There’s a document management system that I’m thinking of whose COM DLLs were not proper COM DLLs and crashed and burned every time .NET tried to call them through a COM-InterOp layer.

Anyway, my test app worked like a champ and I felt confident that I could build a nice façade around the COM DLL’s and wrap some functionality internally and only expose to my users/clients what they really needed.

So I did this, built some tests and also built a test web app to make sure everything worked great. It did. It ran fine in IIS Express via Visual Studio 2012, and the timings were very close to the pure Classic ASP calls, so there wasn’t much overhead involved going through the COM-InterOp layer.

You know where this is going, don’t you?

So I deployed my test app to a DEV server running IIS 7.5. When I went to my first test page that called the COM-InterOp layer, I got this pretty message:

Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {81C08CAE-1453-11D4-BEBC-00500457076D} failed due to the following error: 80040154 Class not registered (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80040154 (REGDB_E_CLASSNOTREG)).

It worked as a console app and while running under IIS Express, so it must be permissions, right? I gave every account I could think of all sorts of COM+ rights and nothing, nada, zilch!

Then I came across this question on Experts Exchange, and at the bottom of the page, someone mentioned that the app pool should be running to allow 32-bit apps to run. Oh yeah, my machine is 64-bit; these COM DLL’s I’m using are old and are definitely 32-bit. I didn’t check for that and didn’t even think about that. But I went ahead and looked at the app pool that my web site was running under and what did I see? Yep, select your app pool in IIS 7.x, click on Advanced Settings and check for “Enable 32-bit Applications”.

I went ahead and set it to True and my test application suddenly worked.

Hope this helps somebody out there from pulling out your hair.

Announcement: Employee Info Starter Kit (v6.0–ASP.NET MVC Edition) is Released

Mohammad Ashraful Alam — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 04:07:37 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/joycsharp/archive/2013/06/16/announcement-employee-info-starter-kit-v6.0asp.net-mvc-edition-is-released.aspx

After a long wait, the next version of Employee Info Starter Kit is released! This starter kit is basically a project template that contains code samples targeting a specific technology, such as ASP.NET Web Form, ASP.NET MVC etc.

Since its first release, this open source project gained a huge popularity in the developer community and had 250K+ combined downloads. This starter kit is honored to be placed at the official ASP.NET site, along with other asp.net starter kits, which all are being considered as the “best” ASP.NET coding standards, recommended by Microsoft. EISK is showcased in Microsoft’s Channel 9’s Weekly Show, as well.

The ASP.NET MVC Edition of the new version 6.0 bundles most of the greatest and successful platforms, frameworks and technologies together, to enable web developers to learn and build manageable and high performance web applications with rich user experience effectively and quickly.

User End Specifications

Creating a new employee record
Read existing employee records
Update an existing employee record
Delete existing employee records
Role based security model

Key Technology Areas

ASP.NET MVC 4
Entity Framework 4.3.1
Sql Server Compact Edition 4
Visual Studio 2012

QuickStart Guide

Getting started with EISK 6.0 ASP.NET is pretty easy. Once you've Visual Studio 2012 installed, then just follow the steps as provided below:

Download the EISK 6.0 MVC version.
Extract the file. From the extracted folder, click the solution file "Eisk.MVC-VS2012.sln". Right click the "Eisk.MVC" project node and select "Select set as StartUp Project".
Hit Ctrl+F5 and explore!

Architectural Overview

Overall architecture is based on Model-View-Controller pattern
Support for desktop & mobile browsers.
Usage of Domain Model, Repository and Unit of Work pattern from Domain Driven Development approach
Usage of Data Annotations in model (entity) classes to centralize basic validation mechanism that facilitates DRY principle
Usage of IValidatableObject interface in model (entity) classes that isolates custom business logic from application layer
Usage of OOP inheritance and Value Object pattern in model (entity) classes that provides reusability in application architecture
Usage of View Model, Editor Model pattern that provides mechanism for testable view rendering logic
Several helper classes and extension methods to enable developers build application with reduced code

If you want to learn more about it in details, just check the following links:

Getting Started - Hands on Coding Walkthrough – Technology Stack - Design & Architecture

Enjoy!

LINQ to Twitter Maintenance Feedback

Joe Mayo — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 07:43:42 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/WinAZ/archive/2013/06/16/linq-to-twitter-maintenance-feedback.aspx

It’s always fun to receive positive feedback on your work. If you receive a sufficient amount of positive feedback, you know you’re doing something right. Sometimes, people provide negative feedback too. There are a couple ways to handle it: come back fighting or engage for clarification. The way you handle the negative feedback depends on what your goals are.

Feedback Approaches

If you know the feedback is incorrect and you need to promote your idea or product, you might want to come back fighting. The feedback might just be comments by a troll or competitor wanting to spread FUD. However, this could be the totally wrong approach if you misjudge the source and intentions of the feedback.

In a lot of cases, feedback is a golden opportunity. Sometimes, a problem exists that you either don’t know about or don’t realize the true impact of the problem. If you decide to come back fighting, you might loose the opportunity to learn something new. However, if you engage the person providing the feedback, looking for clarification, you might learn something very important. Negative feedback and it’s clarification can lead to the collection of useful and actionable data.

In my case, something that prompted this blog post, I noticed someone who tweeted a negative comment about LINQ to Twitter. Normally, any less than stellar comments are usually from folks that need help – so I help if I can. This was different. I was like “Don’t use LINQ to Twitter”. This is an open source project, the comment didn’t come from a competing project, and sounded more like an expression of frustration. So I engaged. Not only did the person respond, but I got some decent quality feedback. What’s also interesting is a couple other side conversations sprouted on the subject, which gave me more useful data.

LINQ to Twitter Thread

Actions

Essentially, this particular issue centered around maintenance. There are actually several sub-issues at play here: dependencies, error handling, debugging, and visibility. I’ll describe each one and my interpretation.

Dependencies

Dependencies are where a library has references to other libraries. This means that when you build your application, you need DLLs for the entire dependency graph for your application. There are several potential problems with this that include more libraries for configuration management, potential versioning mismatches, and lack of cross-platform support.

In the early days of LINQ to Twitter, I allowed developers to contribute and add dependencies, but it became very problematic (for reasons stated). It was like a ball and chain that kept me from moving forward. So, I refactored and pulled other open-source into my project to eliminate external dependencies. This lets me fix the code in my project without relying on someone else to upgrade or fix their DLL. The motivation for this was from early negative feedback that translated as important data and acted on it. Today, LINQ to Twitter has zero dependencies.

Note: Rejecting good code from community members who worked hard to make your project better is a painful experience in itself. I have to point out that any contribution was not in vain because they had a positive influence on my subsequent refactoring that resulted in a better developer experience.

Error Handling

Error handling has been a problem in the past. I have this combination of supporting both synchronous and asynchronous (APM) processing that can be complex at times. Within the last 6 months, I did a fair amount of refactoring to detect errors and process them properly. I also refactored TwitterQueryException so it includes important data from Twitter. During this refactoring, I’ve made breaking changes that I felt would improve the development experience (small things like renaming a callback property to Exception, rather than Error). I think the async error handling is much better than it was a year ago.

For all the work I’ve done, there is more to do. I think that a combination of more error handling support, e.g. improving semantics, and education through documentation and samples will improve the error handling story. Because of what I’ve done so far, it isn’t bad, but I see opportunities for improvement.

Debugging

Debugging can be painful. Here’s why: you have multiple layers of technology to navigate and figure out where the real problem is – Twitter API, Security, HTTP, LINQ to Twitter, and application. You can probably add your own nuances to that list, but the point is that debugging in this environment can be complex.

I think that my plans for error handling will contribute to making the debugging process easier. However, there’s more I can do in the way of documentation and guidance. Some of the questions to be answered revolve around when something goes wrong, how does the developer figure out that there is a problem, what the problem is, and what to do about it.

One example that has gone a long way to helping LINQ to Twitter developers is the 401 FAQ. A 401 Unauthorized is the error that the Twitter API returns when a use isn’t able to authenticate and is one of the most difficult problems faced by LINQ to Twitter developers. What I did was read guidance from Twitter and collect techniques from my own development and actions helping other developers to compile an extensive list of reasons for the 401 and ways to fix the problem. At one time, over half of the questions I answered in the forums were to help solve 401 issues. After publishing the 401 FAQ, I rarely get a 401 question and it’s because the person didn’t know about the FAQ. If the person is too lazy to read the FAQ, that’s not my issue, but the results in support issues have been dramatic.

I think debugging can benefit from the education and documentation approach, but I’m always open to suggestions on whatever else I can do.

Visibility

Visibility is a nuance of the error handling/debugging discussion but is deeply rooted in comfort and control. The questions to ask in this area are what is happening as my code runs and how testable is the code.

In support of these areas, LINQ to Twitter does have logging and TwitterContext properties that help see what’s happening on requests. The logging functionality allows any developer to connect a TextWriter to the Log property of TwitterContext to see what’s happening. Further, TwitterContext has a Headers property to see the headers Twitter returns and a RawResults property to show the Json string Twitter returns. From a testing perspective, I’ve been able to write hundreds of unit tests, over 600 when this post is published, and growing.

If you write your own library, you have full control over all of these aspects. The tradeoff here is that while you have access to the LINQ to Twitter source code and modify it for all the visibility, LINQ to Twitter *will* change (which is good) and you will have to figure out how to merge that with your changes (which is hard). The fact is that this is a limitation of any 3rd party library, not just LINQ to Twitter. So, it’s a design decision where the tradeoff is between control and productivity.

That said, there are things I can do with LINQ to Twitter to make the visibility story more compelling. I think there are opportunities to improve diagnostics. This would be a ton of work because it would need to provide multi-level logging that can be tuned for production and support any logging provider you want to attach. I’ve considered approaches such as how the new Semantic Logging application block connects to Windows Error Reporting as a potential target. Whatever I do would need to be extensible without creating native external dependencies. e.g. how many 3rd party libraries force a dependency on a logging framework that you don’t use. So, this won’t be an easy feat, but I believe it can be part of the roadmap.

I think that a lot of developers are unaware of existing visibility features, so the first step would be to provide more documentation and guidance. My thought are that this would lead to more feedback that will help improve this area.

Summary

Recent feedback highlights some of items that are important to LINQ to Twitter developers, such as dependencies, error handling, debugging, and visibility. I know that there are maintenance issues that have been problems for LINQ to Twitter developers in the past. I’ve done a lot of work in this area, such as improving error handling, adding visibility features, and providing extensive API documentation. That said, there is more to be done to make LINQ to Twitter the best Twitter API experience available for .NET developers and I welcome anyone’s thoughts on what I’ve written here or new improvements.

@JoeMayo

Data Binding to Attached Properties

Chris Gardner — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 08:17:59 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/freestylecoding/archive/2013/06/14/data-binding-to-attached-properties.aspx

When I was working on my C#/XAML game framework, I discovered I wanted to try to data bind my sprites to background objects. That way, I could update my objects and the draw functionality would take care of the work for me. After a little experimenting and web searching, it appeared this concept was an impossible dream.

Of course, when has that ever stopped me?

In my typical way, I started to massively dive down the rabbit hole. I created a sprite on a canvas, and I bound it to a background object.

</Canvas>

Now, we wire the UI item to the background item.

public MainPage() {

this.InitializeComponent();

this.Loaded += StartGame;

}

void StartGame( object sender, RoutedEventArgs e ) {

BindingPlayer _Player = new BindingPlayer();
_Player.X = Window.Current.Bounds.Height - PlayerSprite.Height;
_Player.X = ( Window.Current.Bounds.Width - PlayerSprite.Width ) / 2.0;

}

Of course, now we need to actually have our background object.

public class BindingPlayer : INotifyPropertyChanged {

private double m_X;

public double X {

get { return m_X; }

set {

m_X = value;

NotifyPropertyChanged();

}

private double m_Y;

public double Y {

get { return m_Y; }

set {

m_Y = value;

NotifyPropertyChanged();

}

public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged;

protected void NotifyPropertyChanged( [CallerMemberName] string p_PropertyName = null ) {

if( PropertyChanged != null )

PropertyChanged( this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs( p_PropertyName ) );

}

I fired this baby up, and my sprite was correctly positioned on the screen. Maybe the sky wasn't falling after all.

Wouldn't it be great if that was the case?

I created some code to allow me to move the sprite, but nothing happened. This seems odd. So, I start debugging the application and stepping through code. Everything appears to be working. Time to dig a little deeper.

After much profanity was spewed, I stumbled upon a breakthrough. The code only looked like it was working. What was really happening is that there was an exception being thrown in the background thread that I never saw. Apparently, the key call was the one to PropertyChanged. If PropertyChanged is not called on the UI thread, the UI thread ignores the call.

Actually, it throws an exception and the background thread silently crashes. Of course, you'll never see this unless you're looking REALLY carefully.

This seemed to be a simple problem. I just need to marshal this to the UI thread. Unfortunately, this object has no knowledge of this mythical UI Thread in which we speak. So, I had to pull the UI Thread out of thin air.

Let's change our PropertyChanged call to look this.

public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged;

protected void NotifyPropertyChanged( [CallerMemberName] string p_PropertyName = null ) {

if( PropertyChanged != null )

Windows.ApplicationModel.Core.CoreApplication.MainView.CoreWindow.Dispatcher.RunAsync( Windows.UI.Core.CoreDispatcherPriority.Normal, new Windows.UI.Core.DispatchedHandler( () => {

PropertyChanged( this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs( p_PropertyName ) );

} ) );

}

Now, we raised our notification on the UI thread. Everything is fine, people are happy, and the world moves on.

You may have noticed that I didn't await my call to the dispatcher. This was intentional. If I am trying to update a slew of sprites, I don't want thread being hung while I wait my turn. Thus, I send the message and move on.

It is worth nothing that this is NOT the most efficient way to do this for game programming. We'll get to that in another blog post. However, it is perfectly acceptable for a business app that is running a background task that would like to notify the UI thread of progress on a periodic basis.

It is worth noting that this code was written for a Windows Store App. You can do the same thing with WP8 and WPF. The call to the marshaler changes, but it is the same idea.

NDC Oslo

Alan Smith — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 07:20:58 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/asmith/archive/2013/06/14/153136.aspx

2013 has been a hectic year for conference presentations so far, NDC in Oslo has been the 6th conference I have attended, and my session there was my 11th conference presentation this year. I have been meaning to make the short trip over from Stockholm to NDC for a few years, and this was the first time I made it. I have heard a lot of great things about the event, and was impressed with the location, the sessions, and most of all the atmosphere around the event boots and during the party on Thursday evening.

The session I was delivering was my “Grid Computing with 256 Windows Azure Worker Roles & Kinect” demo, which I have delivered at many events over the past 12 months. The demo went fine. I’m always a little nervous when I try to scale out the application to 256 worker roles, it almost always works well and the application will scale in minutes, but very occasionally there can be a longer delay due to the provisioning process in the Windows Azure data centers. This would not be an issue for many scenarios, but when standing on stage in front of a room full of developers you really want things to run smoothly.

A number of people have suggested that I should pre-provision an environment so that it is guaranteed to be there when I run the demo during a session. For me the aim has always been to show the rapid scalability on cloud-based platforms live on stage. Pre-provisioning an environment may make for a more reliable demo but to me that would be cheating, and not half as much fun!

Yet Another “Why Waterfall Doesn’t Work” Post

Tim Murphy — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 01:25:36 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/tmurphy/archive/2013/06/14/yet-another-ldquowhy-waterfall-doesnrsquot-workrdquo-post.aspx

Lately I have been plunged back into an extreme waterfall project and it is eating away at my soul. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t really believe in a soul and I have never done a text book agile project, but the longer I’m on this project the more I feel like I’m in an infinite loop. Document. Review. Document. Review. At some point we may do some coding.

The biggest problem with waterfall projects is that you can always add more detail to design documents. I have actually seen some documentation which had pseudo code for almost every line that the developer needs to type. Of course these are extreme cases, but they put a spotlight on the issue.

All of this would be less costly to refactor as we code than it would be to continue to refine the design document. A minimum of documentation to make sure we hit all the key requirements and make sure that the overall architecture is sound is really what a project needs. Spend your time finding the problems by writing code instead of theorizing and discussing.

Moral: Waterfalls are pretty to look at, not run projects with.

del.icio.us Tags: Software Architecture,Agile,Waterfall,software design

Preparing For BUILD 2013

Tim Murphy — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 09:14:27 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/tmurphy/archive/2013/06/13/preparing-for-build-2012.aspx

Going to conferences is a great way to keep up with the industry and recharge the batteries. As of the writing of this post there are less than two weeks until the start of BUILD 2012. While I haven’t been to BUILD before the other conferences that I have been to TechEd and Dev Connections in the past give me some expectations. Normally I would be spending the last couple of weeks going through the session schedule to see which ones I want to attend. BUILD is a little different. It doesn’t look like we will get the session list until we get to the registration table so it is going to be a mystery meatloaf of technology.

So what do we know? Windows 8.1 is going to to take center stage. Not only will the preview bits be available, but there should be plenty of sessions on what new and wonderful things we can build with it. I expect that there will be a fair amount of Windows Phone sessions, but I haven’t seen any good rumors about the Blue release yet to have an idea what the focus will be. What isn’t in an area that I have put any thought into is the new XBox One. There are a lot of people who are hoping for XBox One development sessions.

So what to bring with. Win8 Laptop. Windows Phone 8. Lots of enthusiasm. This is a week that is really going to rock. See everyone there.

del.icio.us Tags: BUILD 2012,conferences,Windows 8.1,Windows Phone,XBox One

Chainable Property Pattern

PhubarBaz — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 03:47:08 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/PhubarBaz/archive/2013/06/13/chainable-property-pattern.aspx

Here's a pattern I use a lot to encapsulate properties in JavaScript objects. I call it the Chainable Property Pattern because it is used to define get/set operations for properties that can be chained together into one statement.

We start with an object with a private variable.

function MyObject()
{
var count = 0;

Next we create a public property accessor method.

this.count = function(newCount)
{
if (arguments.length)
{
count = newCount;
return this;
}
return count;
}
}

Let's take a look at how this works. First we use arguments.length to determine if a parameter was passed to the method. If so the user is setting the value of the property. So we set the private variable to the new value and return "this". Returning "this" is what allows us to chain calls together. If no variables were passed in the user wants to get the value of the property so we simply return its value.

Now we can set and get the property like this:

var obj = new MyObject();
obj.count(3); // set count to 3
console.log(obj.count()); // get count

Now let's say we have an object with many different properties. We can set them all in one chained call.

var obj = new MyObject().count(3).someOtherProperty(5);

Since every set property call returns a pointer to the object we can call the methods one after the other. We can even call them off the constructor and still get the new object's reference.

Ready? Steady? SCVMM!

Waclaw Chrabaszcz — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 02:57:28 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Wchrabaszcz/archive/2013/06/13/ready-steady-scvmm.aspx

SCVMM 2012 plays a key role in Microsoft Private Cloud concept. Mixed with SCOM, SCSM and Orchestrator offers you end2end solution when we talking about the Private Cloud. Let's install one. In this case manual installation will be better choice than automation. To pass all prerequisites I would recommend Windows Server 2012 (with PorweShell 3.0), SQL Server 2012 SP1 and ADK. My goal is to install SCVVM and enable PRO tips. For non-SCVMM guys: PRO tips requires SCOM server in the environment and offers DRS-like features especially Hyper-V cluster auto balancing.

In the first step in need to install SQL server
In the second ADK (Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit)
Let's install SCVMM

provide a License key
accept or not CEIP
turn On/Off Microsoft update

of course separate service account is recommended to run VMM service, it is recommended to store Distributed Key in AD,

don't forget to add your SCVMM service account into server local admins

review the summary and GO !
Once SCVMM will be installed it would be good to perform some configuration touch. I haven't scripting yet? Time to fix it J

#Create Host Group
New-SCVMHostGroup -name "TESTDOMAIN"

#add Hyper-V host to SCVMM
$credential = Get-Credential
$hostGroup = Get-SCVMHostGroup -Name "TESTDOMAIN"
Add-SCVMHost -ComputerName "SCVMM.TESTDOMAIN.net" -RunAsynchronously -VMHostGroup $hostGroup -Credential $credential -LiveStorageMigrationMaximum "2"

#add Library Server
Add-SCLibraryServer -ComputerName "dc.TESTDOMAIN.net" -Description "" -Credential $credential
Add-SCLibraryShare -Description "" -SharePath \\dc01.TESTDOMAIN.net\VMMLibrary

#add SCOM and enable PRO tips
New-SCRunAsAccount -Name "TESTDOMAIN\Administrator" -Credential $credential
$opsMgrServerCredential = Get-SCRunAsAccount -Name "TESTDOMAIN\Administrator"
New-SCOpsMgrConnection -EnablePRO $true -EnableMaintenanceModeIntegration $true -OpsMgrServer "SCOM" -RunAsynchronously -VMMServerCredential $credential -OpsMgrServerCredential $opsMgrServerCredential

How to Design Bullet list (ul >li ) in Html ,css ?

Anirudha — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 09:54:15 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/anirugu/archive/2013/06/12/how-to-design-bullet-list-ul-gtli--in-html.aspx

in HTML there is too many option to accomplish a small task. Every kind of option make a different result. In this post I will show you how you can design ul li better way

<ul>

</ul>

Here is a some ~~guideline~~ proper Guideline using list-style-type property you can show the circle, disk square shape just before the list item. This is nice way.

If you have icon instead of shape that html provided then you need to use list-style-image If this thing not fit with your requirement then you need to set it to none and use non-repeated images (Through background-image) that will be shown at the position whichever you want through Background position

If you have the theme of page in your mind (Everything is ready and you just need to write html to make it finish) then setting icon is good choice. Remember that You can’t change the color of image (icon in this context) by using any property in css. Image is static which not allowed you to change their color by any css property.

in case of PNG some cased allowed you to modify the background color of image but maybe This implementation going buggy in old browser.

In this case I would like to set the icon through content property in Css and change the color whenever we want through color property in css.

This thing going something as

li:before{

content:”xyz”;

color:red;

}

Remember that xyz is utf8 based entity character which can be a pretty looking UTF8 icon shown before li. You can modified the color of this thing whenever you want.

For better example suppose you have font which contain a lot of pretty icon. Now you can use them in your web-apps through HTML5 features which allowed you to embedded the custom fonts (font-face , cufon)

This way you can implement the typography you like to implement in your web-apps. For example see a nice example called Font-awesome which provide a lot of icon.

in Font-awesome you need to tried thing like

in this li you have shown the expand alternative icon in the list-item. If you have write a lot of li then this code is not looking good.

You can tried it also this way

li:before{

content:”myiconcode”;

font-family:”Fontawesome”;

}

Now open the firebug and copy the content value for the icon you have set and replace it with “myiconcode”. Now you not need to write I with icon class anymore. this way you code look some more beautiful.

As fontawesome use their own font we can implement our own fonts (or whatever we can do). Now remember that this thing have one more benefit . The benefit is setting color on anytime is possible. You can increase the font size to make icon bigger and smaller.

Thanks for read this post. The information I post in this blog-post is thing I learned from other people. The title of this post is about list-icon but you can applied the font-icon using x:before on any element like <div> , <span>.

Cheers

ServiceStack dynamic Route Attribute creator

Jon Canning — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 12:17:19 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Nettuce/archive/2013/06/12/servicestack-dynamic-route-attribute-creator.aspx

public class RouteFor<T>
    {
        readonly string path;
        string verbs;
 
        public static string Path
        {
            get
            {
                return GetRouteAttribute().Path;
            }
        }
 
        public static string Verbs
        {
            get
            {
                return GetRouteAttribute().Verbs;
            }
        }
 
        static RouteAttribute GetRouteAttribute()
        {
            var routeAttribute = TypeDescriptor.GetAttributes(typeof(T)).OfType<RouteAttribute>().SingleOrDefault();
            if (routeAttribute == null)
                throw new NullReferenceException(string.Format("Route not defined for {0}", typeof(T).Name));
            return routeAttribute;
        }
 
        RouteFor(string path)
        {
            this.path = path;
            AndVerbs(HttpMethods.AllVerbs.ToArray());
            AddOrUpdateAttribute();
        }
 
        public static RouteFor<T> WithDefaultPath()
        {
            return new RouteFor<T>("/" + typeof(T).Name);
        }
 
        public static RouteFor<T> WithPath(string path)
        {
            return new RouteFor<T>(path);
        }
 
        public static RouteFor<T> WithPath(string path, params Expression<Func<T, object>>[] expressions)
        {
            return WithPath(FormatRoute(path, expressions));
        }
 
        static string FormatRoute(string path, params Expression<Func<T, object>>[] propertyExpressions)
        {
            path = Regex.Replace(path, "({\\D*})", "{${1}}");
            var properties = propertyExpressions.Select(x => string.Format("{{{0}}}", x.PropertyName())).ToArray();
            return string.Format(path, properties);
        }
 
        public RouteFor<T> AndVerbs(params string[] verbs)
        {
            this.verbs = string.Join(",", verbs);
            AddOrUpdateAttribute();
            return this;
        }
 
        void AddOrUpdateAttribute()
        {
 
            var attribute = TypeDescriptor.GetAttributes(typeof(T)).OfType<RouteAttribute>().SingleOrDefault();
            if (attribute == null)
                TypeDescriptor.AddAttributes(typeof(T), new RouteAttribute(path, verbs));
            else
            {
                attribute.Path = path;
                attribute.Verbs = verbs;
            }
        }
 
        public void Create()
        {
            if (EndpointHostConfig.Instance.ServiceManager != null)
                EndpointHostConfig.Instance.ServiceManager.ServiceController.RegisterRestPaths(typeof(T));
        }

        static string PropertyName(this LambdaExpression expression)
        {
            return (expression.Body is UnaryExpression ?
                expression.Body.CastTo<UnaryExpression>().Operand.CastTo<MemberExpression>() :
                expression.Body.CastTo<MemberExpression>()).Member.Name;
        }
    }

Using decimals in Ordered Lists

Pankaj Tahiliani — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 07:33:07 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/ptahiliani/archive/2013/06/12/using-decimals-in-ordered-lists.aspx

<html>
<head>
    <style type="text/css">
        .foo
        {
            counter-reset: foo;
        }
        .foo li
        {
            list-style-type: none;
        }
        .foo li::before
        {
            counter-increment: foo;
            content: "2." counter(foo) " ";
        }
    </style>
</head>
<body>
    <ol class="foo">
        <li>Lorem Lipsum</li>
        <li>Lorem Lipsum</li>
        <li>Lorem Lipsum</li>
        <li>Lorem Lipsum</li>
    </ol>
</body>
</html>

RavenDB GetAll extension method

Jon Canning — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 06:45:35 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Nettuce/archive/2013/06/12/ravendb-getall-extension-method.aspx

        public static IEnumerable<T> GetAll<T>(this IDocumentStore documentStore)
        {
            var results = new List<T>();
            var documentSession = documentStore.OpenSession();
            RavenQueryStatistics ravenQueryStatistics = null;
            Func<IDocumentSession> getDocumentSession = () => documentSession.Advanced.NumberOfRequests == 30 ? documentSession = documentStore.OpenSession() : documentSession;
            while (ravenQueryStatistics == null || results.Count < ravenQueryStatistics.TotalResults)
                results.AddRange(getDocumentSession().Query<T>().Statistics(out ravenQueryStatistics).Take(1024).Skip(results.Count).ToArray());
            return results;
        }

When to set ws2007FederationHttpBinding establishSecurityContext to false

Aligned — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 04:26:17 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Aligned/archive/2013/06/12/when-to-set-ws2007federationhttpbinding-establishsecuritycontext-to-false.aspx

Turning the establishSecurityContext off (it’s on by default) was recommended in the IAC course on Pluralsight by Dominick Baier in the Security Best Practices module, State Management when making lots of short calls.

“Other protocols like the WS 2007 Federation HttpBinding, they support state and unfortunately it’s turned on by default…. [uses] WS-Secure Conversation which is kind of heavy handed. It is quite complex as well and it has some performance implications.” ~ Pluralsight video

http://www.code-magazine.com/article.aspx?quickid=0611051&page=2 also mentions turning it off for if you are making a single call.

“If you are using the WSHttpBinding and do not need to establish a secure session, set the EstablishSecurityContext property to false.” TransportWithMessageCredential “uses the transport layer to secure the message transfer, while every message includes the rich credentials other services need. This combines the performance advantage of transport security with the rich credentials advantage of message security. This is available with the following bindings: BasicHttpBinding, WSFederationHttpBinding, NetPeerTcpBinding, and WSHttpBinding.”~http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms731925.aspx

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1683724/what-are-the-impacts-of-setting-establishsecuritycontext-false-if-i-use-

From http://forums.asp.net/t/1760793.aspx/1?establishSecurityContext+false+ ~ “What are the disadvantages of setting establishedSecurityContext= "false"” Answer: “Actually, if you set establishSecurityContext to false, key exchange and validation must be done per call instead of being done once and cached for the session… The use of security tokens is good when the client is expected to make several/many calls in a row because you don't have to do key exchange and validation every call. Note that you have to keep the WCF connection (channel) open to benefit from enabling this setting.”

http://leastprivilege.com/2012/06/19/session-token-support-for-asp-net-web-api/ ~ it’s not necessarily for WebApi

<system.serviceModel> 
 <bindings>       
  <ws2007FederationHttpBinding>             
    <binding>                 
      <security mode="TransportWithMessageCredential">                     
        <message establishSecurityContext="false" />                 
      </security>             
    </binding>         
  </ws2007FederationHttpBinding>     
 </bindings>
</system.serviceModel>

So my take on if you should turn this off is that it depends on your situation. I would use WSHttpBinding and turn it off or have SSL on the communication. I’m still not sure if it affects WebApi and if I would benefit from turning this off in my MVC application that makes multiple calls to WebApi through the jQuery get and post, but I’m going to turn it off for now.

Free Xbox 360 Games If You Have Xbox Live Gold Subscription

deadlydog — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 11:05:05 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/deadlydog/archive/2013/06/12/free-xbox-360-games-if-you-have-xbox-live-gold.aspx

I know this isn’t programming related (and thus doesn’t quite go with the theme of my blog), but I thought I’d share anyways. Pass this along to anybody you know that has an Xbox 360.

At E3 Microsoft announced that it would start giving away 2 free games a month to Xbox Live Gold subscribers.

On July 1^st Assassin’s Creed 2 and Halo 3 will be available to download for free.

Right now you can go download Fable 3 for free. I downloaded it last night, so it’s legit.

To download the games, from your 360 dashboard go to:

Version 1.7 of Christian Radio Locator available on the App Store

Tim Hibbard — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 03:08:09 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/thibbard/archive/2013/06/12/version-1.7-of-christian-radio-locator-available-on-the-app.aspx

The latest version of Christian Radio Locator is now available as an update on the App Store. As discussed, this version adds support for Driving Mode.

Favorites are great, but a recent road trip showed just how annoying it can be to have all your favorites at the top of the screen. With that in mind, we added Driving Mode. Go to Settings, and toggle on driving mode to have nearby stations display before the favorites. It also changes the long press behavior to show the station on a map (with its range) and your GPS location. That way you know if the static is because you are coming or going into the station’s range. Once you get back home, toggle Driver Mode to Off and your favorites will be back on top where they belong.

Driving Mode is another example of a great feature that is only available after an in-app purchase of $0.99 for the Pro version. The Pro version also includes the ability to mark a station as a favorite and syncs hidden and favorite stations with iCloud keeping all your iOS devices in sync.

Here is a sneak peek of the app running iOS 7:

Goodbye Twitter API v1.0

Joe Mayo — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 02:22:40 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/WinAZ/archive/2013/06/12/goodbye-twitter-api-v1.0.aspx

Hello Twitter API v1.1! Actually, Twitter API v1.1 has been around since September 2012. That’s when Twitter deprecated v1.0. Yesterday, Twitter shut down v1.0. You can read more details of yesterday’s events in on the Twitter API blog at API v1 Retirement is Complete - Use API v1.1.

Soon after Twitter API v1.1 was available, LINQ to Twitter upgraded to Twitter API v1.1 and changed its version from 2.0 to 2.1. You can download the latest version of LINQ to Twitter, which is v2.1.06 as I write this, and have full support for Twitter API v1.1.

Here’s a summary of important changes:

Rate Limits apply per API, as opposed to every API call. Statistically, this works out to a better rate limit overall, but it also means that you might need to adjust your design on how it scales to match the new policies. You can get rate limits with a HelpType.RateLimits query.
Json is now the only available response format. Generally, this doesn’t change your code because LINQ to Twitter deserializes most queries into entities. However, if you use Streaming, Raw commands/queries, or reading the TwitterContext.RawResults property, and you were working with XML, you’ll need to deserialize Json instead. The good news is that your application performs and scales better because queries and commands execute more quickly and use less bandwidth.
You must authenticate for all API calls. I know this is painful if you’ve used Search or another unauthenticated API. The good news is that LINQ to Twitter has extensive support for all Twitter OAuth options, so you don’t have to write your own OAuth code.
Search merged with the main API and is more consistent. LINQ to Twitter’s Search option also changed extensively. Primarily, search results and Status entities, which are the same type as Status query results. Though it requires a code change, it adds consistency to the API and improves the development experience.

As the Twitter API matures and moves forward, so will LINQ to Twitter. Thanks to all the people who have contributed code, submitted pull requests, and made constructive changes over the years.

@JoeMayo

Getting Started with Behavior Driven Development

Aligned — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 03:18:03 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Aligned/archive/2013/06/11/getting-started-with-behavior-driven-development.aspx

In this post, I wanted to share some thoughts and resources that I’ve collected since learning about Behavior Driven Development (BDD) (as of June 2013). Thinking in BDD terms has really helped me in improving my software development and thinking through problems. I remember a day when it clicked. It was an exciting time for me and I don’t planning on going back to the old approach. My tendency is to dive into the code before thinking through things and that gets me into trouble. I’m also an optimistic developer and don’t always spend enough time testing the UI. BDD specification tests (Jasmine or in C#) let me write re-runnable tests and I spend less time clicking through complex scenarios, and slows me down and forces me to think. I still need to spend time in the UI, but not every time I change code. I’m also able to squash bugs found once and for awhile and be confident that they won’t return.

There is a lot to BDD (it’s an extension of Test Driven Development and describes who we can communicate with users, tests, managers, developers using the Given… When… Then (GWT) or When x, it should do y). You can see my BDD posts which I hope to add to in the future.I first learned about BDD at the Heartland Developer’s Conference in Omaha, NE from Lee Brandt. Check out his blog for good information about BDD.

It’s definitely a learning process. You’ll have to learn how to write testable code (I highly recommend Roy Osherove’s The Art of Unit Testing as a starting place, then look into Dependency Injection, FakeItEasy, Jasmine for JavaScript tests, and just start doing it. You’ll get better as you practice more.), how to think through problems with the GWT syntax, how to communicate with less technical people and get it to work, how to get others (managers, project owners, other developers, testers) to start using BDD in their thought process as well.

I plan on adding more posts on more benefits of BDD, how I’ve been using it and what I’ve been learning.

Tips an Tricks of Developing on Windows Azure China

Shaun — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 09:46:02 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/shaunxu/archive/2013/06/10/tips-an-tricks-of-developing-on-windows-azure-china.aspx

On 2nd May, 2013 Microsoft announced that the Windows Azure had been landed at China by Steven Ballmer. Currently there are two Windows Azure data centers in China, Beijing and Shanghai, which geo-replication each other.

The code name of Windows Azure in China was “Mooncake”, which is a famous food in Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival. Hence in the coming up posts when I said Mooncake, or MC, or MC Azure, normally it means the Windows Azure China.

It was also announced that from 6th June, the public beta registration will be opened and till now within 24 hours it had received thousands of requests. In the coming few weeks Microsoft will evaluate these requests and start to ship the accounts. This means, developers, partners and customers mainly in China (and in worldwide as well) would be able to develop, deploy and test their applications and services on Windows Azure China.

If you are familiar with Windows Azure platform, you will find the services and functionalities are almost same between worldwide Azure and Azure China. But there are something different when developing application against MC rather than worldwide Azure (a.k.a. WW Azure). Most of them are endpoints of vary azure services such as Cloud Service DNS name, SQL Database endpoint, Storage endpoints and Management API endpoint, etc.. In this post I’d like talk about these different so that we can develop and migrate application on MC Azure more smoothly.

This post will only focus on the different points between worldwide Azure and MC Azure. If you are new to windows azure platform, I highly recommended you to have a look on the documents on MC Azure and worldwide Azure here and here, before deeply read this post as I will NOT describe the functions/features in Azure.

Portal and Services

The first different point is the Windows Azure Portal. The WW Azure portal is http://www.windowsazure.com/ regardless which data center it’s. But the portal of MC is http://www.windowsazure.cn/, and it only for Windows Azure China.

Since the portal is deferent, the develop portal is changed to https://manage.windowsazure.cn/ as well, where we can login and manage our azure services.

Once logged in, we will find that currently there are seven services provided in MC Azure, which are Virtual Machine, Cloud Service, SQL Database, Storage, Virtual Network, Service Bus and Active Directory. Other services will be available before the MC Azure was GA, such as Media Service, Mobile Service, HDInsight, SQL Reporting, etc..

First Cloud Service on MC

Now let’s create a new Cloud Service with one ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Role and deploy to MC. First of all we need to create the project in Visual Studio 2012 with Windows Azure SDK 2.0. As you know, we can deploy our project to azure by uploading the package, but in this post I’d like to demonstrate how to deploy it in MC Azure through Visual Studio.

Since we want to deploy the project from Visual Studio, we need to upload a new certificate to the portal for management. This is same as what we did for WW Azure. Clicked “SETTING” from the left hand side navigate bar and upload our management certificate. Then back to Visual Studio, click the Deploy context menu item and here we need to add a new subscription for our MC account. Click “Manage”.

Create a new subscription and select the certificate I had uploaded through the management portal, paste the subscription ID and the name in the dialog. Then we need to change the service management URL, since it’s different between WW Azure and MC Azure. If you are working on MC Azure, the URL of Windows Azure Management API should be https://management.core.chinacloudapi.cn.

Then we can select the Cloud Services we wanted to deploy in this subscription, the environment (Production or Staging), build configuration, service configuration (Cloud or Local) and the storage we will upload our package to and then press Publish.

If the management URL we specified was correct we can see Visual Studio started to upload our project to MC Azure and it should be ready after few minutes.

Below is the MC portal after I deployed my project. As you can see it’s same as what we saw at WW Azure.

Below is my first cloud service running on MC Azure. The public URL was http://shx.chinacloudapp.cn/. This is another different point in MC Azure, the cloud service DNS name is *.chinacloudapp.cn, while in WW Azure is *.cloudapp.com.

Once it had been deployed we can review the status of this service through Visual Studio. Open the Server Explorer window and expand the Windows Azure Compute we can see our cloud service had been listed there with one instance running under the production environment.

Storage

Since we had created a new subscription information in Visual Studio in previous step, we can now easily manage our storage account through Visual Studio as well. Open the Server Explorer and add a new storage account.

In the popup windows we will select the subscription we had just added, then Visual Studio will populate all storage account under this subscription. Once we select the account we want to manage the endpoints will be shown automatically at the bottom of this windows. As you can see, the storage endpoints were *.blob.core.chinacloudapi.cn, *.queue.core.chinacloudapi.cn, *.table.core.chinacloudapi.cn, while in WW Azure the storage endpoints are *.blob.core.windows.net, *.queue.core.windows.net, *.table.core.windows.net.

If we added this account in Visual Studio Server Explorer we would be able to manage it in the same way as what we did for WW Azure. The screenshot below shows when I created a blob container and uploaded some pictures into my storage account located in MC Azure Beijing.

Next, let’s add some code to use the storage service I created. For example, I will add some codes in my ASP.NET MVC website to list all blobs in my container. This is not a huge work but will show you what needs to be changed when using MC Azure. First I need to specify the storage account connection string in the cloud service setting window. As we had added our MC Azure subscription we can select the storage account we want by selecting the subscription and storage name.

Alternatively you can specify the storage endpoints manually. Just need to pay attention that we must select “custom endpoints” and specify the blob, table and queue endpoints for MC Azure.

That’s all. Now we can use the Azure SDK to operate our storage service same as what we did against WW Azure. Below the code I created to retrieve all blobs from my container.

   1: public ActionResult Index()   2: {   3:     ViewBag.Message = "Modify this template to jump-start your ASP.NET MVC application.";   4:     5:     var connectionString = Microsoft.WindowsAzure.CloudConfigurationManager.GetSetting("StorageConnection");   6:     var account = Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage.CloudStorageAccount.Parse(connectionString);   7:     var client = account.CreateCloudBlobClient();   8:     var container = client.GetContainerReference("samples");   9:     var blobs = container.ListBlobs().Select(b => b.Uri.AbsoluteUri).ToList();  10:    11:     ViewBag.Blobs = blobs;  12:    13:     return View();  14: }

And this is the website once I deployed to MC Azure which lists the blobs in my storage account in the same datacenter (Beijing).

SQL Database

Windows Azure SQL Database (a.k.a. WASD) is another resource we always use when building application. The WASD in MC Azure has a different base address, *.database.chinacloudapi.cn, the WW Azure WASD base address is *.database.windows.net. But the connection string format and login format are all the same.

For example, if I created a new WASD and updated its firewall setting then I can connect to this database located in MC Azure through any SQL Server management tools. Below is the WASD connection string I created in MC. The format is same but only different base address.

We can use SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to manage our WASD from local machine, same as what we did for WW Azure.

Let’s execute the script below to create a new table with some data into this database.

   1: /****** Object:  Table [dbo].[Resource]    Script Date: 9/4/2012 3:47:14 PM ******/   2: SET ANSI_NULLS ON   3: GO   4: SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON   5: GO   6: CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Resource](   7:     [Key] [varchar](256) NOT NULL,   8:     [Culture] [varchar](8) NOT NULL,   9:     [Value] [nvarchar](4000) NOT NULL,  10:  CONSTRAINT [PK_Resource] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED   11: (  12:     [Key] ASC,  13:     [Culture] ASC  14: )WITH (STATISTICS_NORECOMPUTE = OFF, IGNORE_DUP_KEY = OFF)  15: )  16:    17: GO  18: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'Controller_HomeAbout_Message', N'en-US', N'Your app description page.')  19: GO  20: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'Controller_HomeAbout_Message', N'zh-CN', N'???????')  21: GO  22: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'Controller_HomeContact_Message', N'en-US', N'Your contact page.')  23: GO  24: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'Controller_HomeContact_Message', N'zh-CN', N'?????????')  25: GO  26: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'Controller_HomeIndex_Message', N'en-US', N'Modify this template to jump-start your ASP.NET MVC application.')  27: GO  28: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'Controller_HomeIndex_Message', N'zh-CN', N'??????,??????ASP.NET MVC?????')  29: GO  30: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'Model_AccountModels_LoginModel_Password_Display', N'en-US', N'Password')  31: GO  32: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'Model_AccountModels_LoginModel_Password_Display', N'zh-CN', N'??')  33: GO  34: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'Model_AccountModels_LoginModel_Password_Required', N'en-US', N'Please input {0}.')  35: GO  36: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'Model_AccountModels_LoginModel_Password_Required', N'zh-CN', N'???{0}?')  37: GO  38: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'Model_AccountModels_LoginModel_RememberMe_Display', N'en-US', N'Remember me?')  39: GO  40: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'Model_AccountModels_LoginModel_RememberMe_Display', N'zh-CN', N'???????')  41: GO  42: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'Model_AccountModels_LoginModel_UserName_Display', N'en-US', N'User Name')  43: GO  44: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'Model_AccountModels_LoginModel_UserName_Display', N'zh-CN', N'???')  45: GO  46: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'Model_AccountModels_LoginModel_UserName_Required', N'en-US', N'Please input the {0}.')  47: GO  48: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'Model_AccountModels_LoginModel_UserName_Required', N'zh-CN', N'???{0}?')  49: GO  50: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'Model_AccountModels_RegisterModel_ConfirmPassword_Compare', N'en-US', N'The password and confirmation password do not match.')  51: GO  52: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'Model_AccountModels_RegisterModel_ConfirmPassword_Compare', N'zh-CN', N'???????????')  53: GO  54: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'Model_AccountModels_RegisterModel_ConfirmPassword_Display', N'en-US', N'Confirm password')  55: GO  56: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'Model_AccountModels_RegisterModel_ConfirmPassword_Display', N'zh-CN', N'??????')  57: GO  58: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'Model_AccountModels_RegisterModel_Password_StringLength', N'en-US', N'The {0} must be at least {2} characters long.')  59: GO  60: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'Model_AccountModels_RegisterModel_Password_StringLength', N'zh-CN', N'{0}?????')  61: GO  62: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_AccountLogin_ExtenalAccount', N'en-US', N'Use another service to log in.')  63: GO  64: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_AccountLogin_ExtenalAccount', N'zh-CN', N'?????????')  65: GO  66: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_AccountLogin_LocalAccount', N'en-US', N'Use a local account to log in.')  67: GO  68: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_AccountLogin_LocalAccount', N'zh-CN', N'?????????')  69: GO  70: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_AccountLogin_RegisterIfNoAccount', N'en-US', N'{0} if you don''t have an account.')  71: GO  72: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_AccountLogin_RegisterIfNoAccount', N'zh-CN', N'??????,?{0}?')  73: GO  74: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_AccountRegister_Message', N'en-US', N'Create a new account.')  75: GO  76: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_AccountRegister_Message', N'zh-CN', N'????????')  77: GO  78: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_ExternalLoginsListPartial_MessageInfo', N'en-US', N'There are no external authentication services configured. See <a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=252166">this article</a> for details on setting up this ASP.NET application to support logging in via external services.')  79: GO  80: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_ExternalLoginsListPartial_MessageInfo', N'zh-CN', N'???????????????????ASP.NET?????????????????,????<a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=252166">??</a>?')  81: GO  82: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_ExternalLoginsListPartial_SocialLoginList', N'en-US', N'Log in using another service')  83: GO  84: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_ExternalLoginsListPartial_SocialLoginList', N'zh-CN', N'?????????')  85: GO  86: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_HomeAbout_Title', N'en-US', N'About')  87: GO  88: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_HomeAbout_Title', N'zh-CN', N'??')  89: GO  90: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_HomeContact_Title', N'en-US', N'Contact')  91: GO  92: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_HomeContact_Title', N'zh-CN', N'????')  93: GO  94: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_HomeIndex_Title', N'en-US', N'Home Page')  95: GO  96: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_HomeIndex_Title', N'zh-CN', N'??')  97: GO  98: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_HomIndex_Featured', N'en-US', N'To learn more about ASP.NET MVC visit <a href="http://asp.net/mvc" title="ASP.NET MVC Website">http://asp.net/mvc</a>. The page features <mark>videos, tutorials, and samples</mark> to help you get the most from ASP.NET MVC. If you have any questions about ASP.NET MVC visit <a href="http://forums.asp.net/1146.aspx/1?MVC" title="ASP.NET MVC Forum">our forums</a>.')  99: GO 100: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_HomIndex_Featured', N'zh-CN', N'???????ASP.NET MVC??????<a href="http://asp.net/mvc" title="ASP.NET MVC??">http://asp.net/mvc</a>??????<mark>??,?????</mark>,??????????ASP.NET MVC???????????ASP.NET MVC???,??????<a href="http://forums.asp.net/1146.aspx/1?MVC" title="ASP.NET MVC??">??</a>?') 101: GO 102: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_HomIndex_Suggest', N'en-US', N'We suggest the following:') 103: GO 104: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_HomIndex_Suggest', N'zh-CN', N'????:') 105: GO 106: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_HomIndex_Suggest_1_Title', N'en-US', N'Getting Started') 107: GO 108: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_HomIndex_Suggest_1_Title', N'zh-CN', N'??') 109: GO 110: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_HomIndex_Suggest_1_Val', N'en-US', N'ASP.NET MVC gives you a powerful, patterns-based way to build dynamic websites that enables a clean separation of concerns and that gives you full control over markup for enjoyable, agile development. ASP.NET MVC includes many features that enable fast, TDD-friendly development for creating sophisticated applications that use the latest web standards. <a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=245151">Learn more...</a>') 111: GO 112: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_HomIndex_Suggest_1_Val', N'zh-CN', N'ASP.NET MVC?????????????????????????,???????????,????,?????????????? ASP.NET MVC???????,????????????,?????Web??,TDD??????<a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=245151">????…</a>') 113: GO 114: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_HomIndex_Suggest_2_Title', N'en-US', N'Add NuGet packages and jump-start your coding') 115: GO 116: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_HomIndex_Suggest_2_Title', N'zh-CN', N'??NuGet???,??????') 117: GO 118: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_HomIndex_Suggest_2_Val', N'en-US', N'NuGet makes it easy to install and update free libraries and tools. <a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=245153">Learn more...</a>') 119: GO 120: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_HomIndex_Suggest_2_Val', N'zh-CN', N'NuGet??????????????????????<a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=245153">????…</a>') 121: GO 122: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_HomIndex_Suggest_3_Title', N'en-US', N'Find Web Hosting') 123: GO 124: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_HomIndex_Suggest_3_Title', N'zh-CN', N'??????') 125: GO 126: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_HomIndex_Suggest_3_Val', N'en-US', N'You can easily find a web hosting company that offers the right mix of features and price for your applications. <a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=245157">Learn more...</a>') 127: GO 128: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_HomIndex_Suggest_3_Val', N'zh-CN', N'???????????Web????,?????????????????????<a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=245157">????…</a>') 129: GO 130: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_Layout_LogoHere', N'en-US', N'your logo here') 131: GO 132: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_Layout_LogoHere', N'zh-CN', N'???????') 133: GO 134: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_Layout_Title', N'en-US', N'My ASP.NET MVC Application') 135: GO 136: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_Layout_Title', N'zh-CN', N'??ASP.NET MVC????') 137: GO 138: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_LoginPartial_Login', N'en-US', N'Log in') 139: GO 140: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_LoginPartial_Login', N'zh-CN', N'??') 141: GO 142: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_LoginPartial_Logoff', N'en-US', N'Log off') 143: GO 144: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_LoginPartial_Logoff', N'zh-CN', N'??') 145: GO 146: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_LoginPartial_Register', N'en-US', N'Register') 147: GO 148: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_LoginPartial_Register', N'zh-CN', N'??') 149: GO 150: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_PageName_About', N'en-US', N'About') 151: GO 152: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_PageName_About', N'zh-CN', N'??') 153: GO 154: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_PageName_Contact', N'en-US', N'Contact') 155: GO 156: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_PageName_Contact', N'zh-CN', N'????') 157: GO 158: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_PageName_Home', N'en-US', N'Home') 159: GO 160: INSERT [dbo].[Resource] ([Key], [Culture], [Value]) VALUES (N'View_PageName_Home', N'zh-CN', N'??') 161: GO

Then back to Visual Studio to add some codes to retrieve data from our WASD on MC Azure. First of all we need to specify the WASD connection string. Copy the connection string from MC Azure portal and add into our cloud service configuration through Visual Studio.

Next, paste code into HomeController.cs so that it will retrieve all data from our database on the home page.

   1: public ActionResult Index()   2: {   3:     ViewBag.Message = "Modify this template to jump-start your ASP.NET MVC application.";   4:     5:     // retrieve blobs from storage   6:     var connectionString = Microsoft.WindowsAzure.CloudConfigurationManager.GetSetting("StorageConnection");   7:     var account = Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage.CloudStorageAccount.Parse(connectionString);   8:     var client = account.CreateCloudBlobClient();   9:     var container = client.GetContainerReference("samples");  10:     var blobs = container.ListBlobs().Select(b => b.Uri.AbsoluteUri).ToList();  11:     ViewBag.Blobs = blobs;  12:    13:     // retrieve records from sql database  14:     var records = new List<KeyValuePair<string, string>>();  15:     using (var conn = new SqlConnection(Microsoft.WindowsAzure.CloudConfigurationManager.GetSetting("SqlConnection")))  16:     {  17:         var cmd = conn.CreateCommand();  18:         cmd.CommandText = "SELECT [Key], [Value] FROM [RESOURCE] ORDER BY [Key]";  19:         conn.Open();  20:         using (var reader = cmd.ExecuteReader())  21:         {  22:             while (reader.Read())  23:             {  24:                 records.Add(new KeyValuePair<string, string>((string)reader["Key"], (string)reader["Value"]));  25:             }  26:         }  27:     }  28:     ViewBag.Records = records;  29:    30:     return View();  31: }

Then publish the application to MC Azure, below is the result of the home page.

Summary

From the functionality perspective, Windows Azure China (MC Azure) is exactly same as the existing Windows Azure in worldwide (WW Azure). But MC Azure has some different endpoints. When developing against MC, we need to pay attention to the endpoints listed below.

Service Type	Windows Azure Worldwide	Windows Azure China
General	*.windows.net	*.chinacloudapi.cn
Compute	*.cloudapp.net	*.chinacloudapp.cn
Storage	.blob.core.windows.net .queue.core.windows.net *.table.core.windows.net	.blob.core.chinacloudapi.cn .queue.core.chinacloudapi.cn *.table.core.chinacloudapi.cn
SQL Database	*.database.windows.net	*.database.chinacloudapi.cn
Management API	https://management.core.windows.net	https://management.core.chinacloudapi.cn
Portal	http://manage.windowsazure.com	http://manage.windows.cn

Some of them are easy to remember, but some may related with other function. For example, for diagnostic monitor and cache role, it needs to specify a storage account which should use MC storage endpoints. And some 3rd party component such as the Enterprise Library AutoScaling Application Block relies on the Management API, we need to check that the reference endpoint is correct to MC Azure. Some management tools, for example the Windows Azure Storage Explorer, we are willing them to add the functionality to specify the endpoints manually.

After all, MC Azure is the first worldwide public cloud computing landed in China and it’s also the first time Microsoft running Windows Azure with different endpoints and with a operating partner. It needs time to make the service getting better and it should be true that when Windows Azure China GA all services running on Worldwide Azure should be available on Windows Azure China, even though with some different endpoints but much better bandwidth and network connectivity to all developers and customers in China.

Hope this helps,

Shaun

All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind.
Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

APP MASHUP Leveraging Meetup, Twitter & Facebook APIs – Free Webcast

Michael Cummings — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 10:22:27 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Mathoms/archive/2013/06/10/app-mashup-leveraging-meetup-twitter-amp-facebook-apis-ndash-free.aspx

Wednesday, June 12, 12:00 – 1:00 EDT ONLINE

LEVEL: Beginner to Expert – all experience levels welcome

In this one-hour online workshop you will learn how to develop Windows 8 apps using the Twitter, Meetup and Facebook APIs. Twitter, Meetup and Facebook are the premier social networking sites and their API’s provide access to Tweets, Meetups and Friends. What a great combination! We will cover how to access the Twitter, Meetup and Facebook web service API’s from code, deserialize the response into a set of runtime objects that you can bind to Windows 8 UX Controls such as the GridView and the ListView. You will also receive instructions on how to submit your app to the Windows 8 store. This workshop is great for students, hobbyists and professional developers who want to learn the basics of app development and publish their first app to the store.

Don't forget to check out the "Keep the Cash Rewards" offer to see how you can get $100 for publishing your app(s) in the Windows Store and/or Windows Phone Store. Publish your app before June 30, 2013 and you can get a $100 virtual Visa card for every qualified app you enter (up to $2000*). Learn more.

Securing WebAPI and stopping CSRF requests

Aligned — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 03:43:25 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Aligned/archive/2013/06/10/securing-webapi-and-stopping-csrf-requests.aspx

I just read this article in the June MSDN magazine by Peter Vogel and thought it needed to be highlighted. If you're using WebAPI you should think about Cross-Site Request Forgeries. It also applies to the 70-487 test.

"ASP.NET doesn’t automatically protect you against Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF/XSRF) attacks (more on that later)."

"When a user accesses an ASP.NET site using Forms Authentication, ASP.NET generates a cookie that stipulates the user is authenticated. The browser will continue to send that cookie on every subsequent request to the site, no matter from where that request originates. This opens your site to CSRF attacks, as does any authentication scheme where the browser automatically sends authentication information previously received. If, after your site provides the browser with the security cookie, the user visits some malicious site, then that site can send requests to your service, piggy-backing on the authentication cookie the browser received earlier.

To prevent CSRF attacks, you’ll need to generate antiforgery tokens at the server and embed them in the page to be used in your client-side calls. Microsoft provides the AntiForgery class with a GetToken method that will generate tokens specific to the user who made the request (who may, of course, be the anonymous user)." (continue reading for code examples and more information.

He also shows how to do custom authentication using an HTTPModule or MessageHandler by inheriting from DelegatingHandler.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dn201748.aspx

NOTE: Preventing Cross Site Scripting Attacks in ASP.NET MVC 4 is related, but for MVC 4.

Released LINQ to Twitter v2.1.06

Joe Mayo — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 02:28:00 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/WinAZ/archive/2013/06/10/released-linq-to-twitter-v2.1.06.aspx

Released LINQ to Twitter v2.1.06: http://bit.ly/11CHNdb.

Here are a few highlights of this release:

Updated MVC sample (in source code) to MVC 4.0.
Added support for Symbol Entities.
Added StallWarning param to Streaming APIs.
Caught up adding all missing parameters for all APIs (could be a few breaking changes with modified overloads – e.g. trimUser for UpdateStatus).
Changed cache_age on StatusType.OEmbed response to integer to fix unannounced breaking change in Twitter API.
Deprecated old/unused TwitterContext constructors.
Added constructor for SL/WP/Win8 apps to support custom IWebRequestCreate, allowing 3rd party providers. Also enables GZip support on WP7.1/8 through 3rd party providers, such as SharpGIS.WebRequestCreator.GZip.
Refactored TwitterContext arrangements in Unit Tests.

@JoeMayo

Visualize Your Callstacks Via Flame Graphs

Alois Kraus — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 15:02:34 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/akraus1/archive/2013/06/10/153104.aspx

I have found Bruce Dawson blog where he discusses the uses of Flame Graphs. Brendan Greg a Linux performance tool developer has created a nice perl script to render call stacks from a plain text file as a svg which can be viewed in all modern browsers. Bruce has used xperf with some undocumented switches to create a text extract of all call stacks. Then he used a python script to post process the generated file to make it compatible with the flamegraph perl script. I decided to make my own managed version of stack compressor which employs the TraceEvent library from Vance Morrison which gives you a powerful etl file parser. Below is an example of the generated graph after the perl script did post process it.

The x axis has no order but the width of the methods is proportional to the amount of used CPU time. The vertical axis shows the stack depth. If you hover with your mouse over the methods you get the full method name displayed. This is quite handy to get a different view of deeply nested stacks with many threads and or processes involved. The graph here makes it obvious that opening a file which is quite costly but closing the FileStream is also not cheap. Reading from the file is even cheaper than opening or closing it! This was a small sample app that did open and close one small file in an endless loop to get some interesting call stacks.

My TraceParser executable does take an etl file and prints out the call stacks from all processes from the complete etl file. You can limit the time range as well as the time range and a substring match which stacks are you interested in. To get from process 5200 all stacks you need to do:

TraceParser.exe C:\Users\Alois\AppData\Local\Temp\combined.etl * * 5200 > stacks.txt

flamegraph.pl stacks.txt > stacks.svg

It did take some time to get used to the TraceEvent library which is very powerful but also not so easy to use. I was constantly struggling with incomplete call stacks until I found that the default symbol resolver does only resolve some kernel symbols instead of everything.

 public TraceLogOptions()
        {
            // These are the default modules to look up symbolically.  
            ShouldResolveSymbols = delegate(string moduleFilePath)
            {
                string moduleName = Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(moduleFilePath);
                if (string.Compare(moduleName, "ntdll") == 0 ||
                    string.Compare(moduleName, "kernel32") == 0 ||
                    string.Compare(moduleName, "ntkrnlpa") == 0 ||
                    string.Compare(moduleName, "ntoskrnl") == 0)
                    return true;
                return false;
            };
        }

This was definitely not what I wanted. But ShouldResolveSymbols = (s) => true did the job. If you have problems with symbol loading you need to uncomment

ConversionLog = Console.Out

to see file and symbol loading in action on the console. I do read from an etl file only the profile events which do contain a full call stack of a specific process and print the call stack with a weight of one to the console. When you download TraceEvent from Codeplex you need to get msdia100.dll for your target platform. You can make your life easy and simply copy the one provided by PerfView which is unpacked into your user profile at e.g. %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\PerfMonitor\VER.2013-01-09.06.49.30.000\x86 or the one provided by Visual Studio for x86. You need to deploy it besides TraceEvent.dll to enable it to pick it up.

Initially I did try to extract the stacks for a specific process with

var log = TraceLog.OpenOrConvert(file,
    new TraceLogOptions
    {
        AlwaysResolveSymbols = false,
        //   ConversionLog = Console.Out,
        ShouldResolveSymbols = (s) => true,
    });
Log = log;
var source = log.CPUStacks(null, false, (ev) => ev.ProcessId = xxxx);
source.ProduceSamples( (Diagnostics.Tracing.StackSources.StackSourceSample stack) =>
        {
            if (stack.StackIndex > 0 && (int)stack.StackIndex < Log.CallStacks.MaxCallStackIndex)
            {
                DumpCallStack(Log.CallStacks[(CallStackIndex)stack.StackIndex]);
            }
        });

But this did not filter the call stacks for a specific process out. I am not sure if I did miss anything but the many different enum types which are convertible or not into each other make it rather hard to switch from one object model (StackSample) to the CallStacks collection. In the end I did the filtering all by myself and it did work out quite nicely. Below is the final result of my experiment. The next step would be to visualize non profile events as well like context switch events. I am not sure yet how I can calculate from a context switch event (CSwitchTraceData) the CPU consumption. I only do see the wait time but what about the other time? The Flame graphs do provide a nice way to visualize CPU consumption across many call stacks at once. This could help in performance regression tests to identify changes in application logic which does consume more CPU than before. Wait times are unfortunately not captured but I am not sure if this would be very useful. With TPL we do tend to get quite wasteful with threads where many worker threads are waiting for work to arrive. When I visualize the wait times then I do see mainly the idle worker threads which is not useful.

What could be useful is to visualize the thread interaction and with ready events across the timeline. In principle it should be possible to create a logic chain why thread x did sleep for x ms and which thread did wake it up and to trace in the other thread back who did wake it up to get a sophisticated wait chain analysis how the threads do interact with each other. Not sure how reliable this would be but it certainly could be interesting. When one thread holds a lock and releases it while another thread was waiting for it it is immediately scheduled for execution by the OS scheduler. The likelihood that the ReadyThread is really the one which did wake my thread up is quite good but we would need to employ some other heuristics (like wait time and other hints) to see if we could print a thread interaction chart. The best thing would be of course that stuff like Flame Graphs and thread interaction visualization is already backed into WPT so we can all use it.

class Program
{
    TraceLog Log;
    int MinMs = 0;
    int MaxMs = int.MaxValue;
    int[] Pids = null;
    string[] Args;
    string CallStackSubstring = null;

    static void Main(string[] Args)
    {
        new Program(Args).Run();
    }

    public Program(string[] Args)
    {
        this.Args = Args;
    }

    private void Run()
    {
        if (Args.Length == 0)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("(c) by Alois 2013");
            Console.WriteLine("TraceParser does parse the full call stacks of all profile events to stdout which can be consumed");
            Console.WriteLine("by flamegraph.pl to generate a .svg file which can be rederend in the browser.");
            Console.WriteLine("No etl file specified.");
            Console.WriteLine("Usage: TraceParser <etl file> <startInMs> <stopInMs> <pid> <callStackSubstring>");
            Console.WriteLine("        startInMs, stopInMs and Pid can be replaced by * to not set any specific value for it");
            return;
        }

        string file = Args[0];
        if (Args.Length > 1)
        {
            if (Args[1] != "*")
            {
                MinMs = int.Parse(Args[1]);
            }
        }
        if (Args.Length > 2)
        {
            if (Args[2] != "*")
            {
                MaxMs = int.Parse(Args[2]);
            }
        }
        if (Args.Length > 3)
        {
            if (Args[3] != "*")
            {
                Pids = Args[3].Split(new char[] { ',' }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)
                                .Select(int.Parse)
                                .ToArray();
            }
        }
        if (Args.Length > 4)
        {
            CallStackSubstring = Args[4];
        }

        Symbols.SymPath._NT_SYMBOL_PATH = @"c:\windows\symbols;C:\symbols;" + file + ".NGENPDB";
        var log = TraceLog.OpenOrConvert(file,
            new TraceLogOptions
            {
                AlwaysResolveSymbols = false,
                //   ConversionLog = Console.Out,
                ShouldResolveSymbols = (s) => true,
            });
        Log = log;


        if (Pids == null)
        {
            Pids = log.Processes.Select(p => p.ProcessID).ToArray();
        }

        foreach (var pid in Pids)
        {
                foreach(var ev in log.Processes.Single(x => x.ProcessID == pid)
                                                .EventsInProcess
                                                .ByEventType<SampledProfileTraceData>()
                                                .Where(ev => ev.TimeStampRelativeMSec > MinMs && ev.TimeStampRelativeMSec < MaxMs))
                {
                    DumpCallStack(Log.CallStacks[Log.GetCallStackIndexForEvent(ev)]);
                }
        }
    }

    private void DumpCallStack(TraceCallStack traceCallStack)
    {
        if (traceCallStack == null)
        {
            return;
        }

        TraceCallStack current = traceCallStack;

        List<string> stacks = new List<string>();
        while (current != null)
        {
            if (current.CodeAddress != null)
            {
                // do not step into the kernel where drivers with .sys are on the stack
                if (current.CodeAddress.ModuleFileName.EndsWith(".exe") ||
                    current.CodeAddress.ModuleFileName.EndsWith(".dll"))
                {
                    stacks.Add(String.Format("{0}!{1}", current.CodeAddress.ModuleName, current.CodeAddress.FullMethodName));
                }
            }

            current = current.Caller;
        }

        if (this.CallStackSubstring != null)
        {
            // clear all stacks which do not contain our code 
            if (!stacks.Any(x => x.Contains(CallStackSubstring)))
            {
                stacks.Clear();
            }
        }

        stacks.Reverse();

        if (stacks.Count > 0)
        {
            Console.WriteLine();
            Console.Write(String.Join(";", stacks));
            Console.Write(" 1");
        }
    }
}

Number of Unit test projects in Visual Studio solution

Michael Freidgeim — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 20:11:25 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/mnf/archive/2013/06/09/number-of-unit-test-projects-in-visual-studio-solution.aspx

Some time ago I have discussion with my co-worker how to organize test projects.

Should we have a single test project that does all sorts of things and references every project?

It is good to have one integration test dll, but for unit tests, what is the point merging everything into one.

In ideal world I agree that small independent projects are better. Unfortunately we have solution size limitations

From http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5197192/which-is-better-unit-test-project-per-solution-or-per-project?lq=1

However, Visual Studio performance quickly degrades as the number of projects increases. Around the 40 project mark compilation becomes an obstacle to compiling and running the tests, so larger projects may benefit from consolidating test projects.

From http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb668953.aspx

Single solution. If you work on a small system, create a single solution and place all of your projects within it.
Partitioned solution. If you work on a large system, use multiple solutions to group related projects together. Create solutions to logically group subsets of projects that a developer would be most likely to modify as a set, and then create one master solution to contain all of your projects. This approach reduces the amount of data that needs to be pulled from source control when you only need to work on specific projects.
Multiple solutions. If you are working on a very large system that requires dozens of projects or more, use multiple solutions to work on sub-systems but for dependency mapping and performance reasons do not create a master solution that contains all projects.

At the moment we decided to go with one huge integration test and one huge unit test projects.

And we constantly trying to keep reasonable (not too many) number of projects in the main solution. Unfortunately this number is quite big - 70+.

CMAP Code Camp – TypeScript Code Samples

Steve Michelotti — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 08:50:42 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michelotti/archive/2013/06/07/cmap-code-camp-ndash-typescript-code-samples.aspx

Thanks to everyone who attended my presentation at last week’s CMAP code camp. All code samples and slides can be found here.

Create and publish your NuGet package in one click with the New-NuGetPackage PowerShell script

deadlydog — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 14:56:52 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/deadlydog/archive/2013/06/07/create-and-publish-your-nuget-package-in-one-click-with.aspx

I’ve spent a good chunk of time investigating how nuget.exe works and creating a PowerShell script called New-NuGetPackage to make it dirt simple to pack and push new NuGet packages.

Here’s a list of some of the script’s features:

Yona Shtern, CEO of Beyond the Rack, Speaking at ICTAM Breakfast June 12

D'Arcy Lussier — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 02:26:33 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/dlussier/archive/2013/06/07/153083.aspx

ICTAM has a fantastic breakfast meeting scheduled for Wednesday, June 12th! If you’re interested in startup culture, e-commerce, and hot breakfasts, definitely consider checking it out! Note that there’s a cost for the event.

Date: Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Location: The Fairmont Winnipeg, 2 Lombard Place, Winnipeg, Manitoba

Time: 7:30am – 9:15am

Cost: ICTAM Members - $40.00 / Non-Members - $80.00 (includes hot breakfast)

Details and Registration: http://ictam.olasoft.com/viewEvent.html?productId=7382

More Information: Nancy.zubriski@ictam.ca or 204 944-0533

Canada's Yona Shtern failed at four startups before succeeding on his fifth with Beyond the Rack. A private shopping club for women and men offering authentic designer brand apparel and accessories at up to 80% off retail prices, Beyond the Rack's sales hit $6 million in its first year, $50 million in its second and $100 million in its third. By 2012 sales had reached a staggering $200 million. Shtern credits big bucks (including $53 million from angel and venture-capital investors) and the brainpower behind it—so-called “smart money”—as essential to creating one of North America's fastest-growing on-line enterprises. Yona will share the story of Beyond the Rack, its meteoric rise as an online retail powerhouse and the factors and strategies that continue to feed its success. His discussion will cover:

· Raising capital

· Recognizing gaps in expertise and investing in top senior talent

· Turning your employees into stakeholders

· Keeping focus and working toward your objectives

MDUGJax KICKOFF!!! - Mr Joe Healy himself presenting - BUILDING WINDOWS 8 APPS WITH API-MASHED TEMPLATES

mrad — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 16:33:34 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/mrad/archive/2013/06/06/mdugjax-kickoff---mr-joe-healy-himself-presenting---building.aspx

FREE STUFF ALERT!!!

event link:

http://www.meetup.com/MDUGJax/events/123007012/

PLS follow the link above to REGISTER TO BE ABLE TO WIN FREE STUFF from Microsoft, Nokia, Telerik and other vendors!!!

Microsoft Developers User Group Jax (MDUGJax) official kickoff event.

food and location sponsored by Incepture Jacksonville.

Florida's First Coast welcomes back:

Joe Healy (Microsoft)

blog: http://www.devfish.net

who will be presenting:

"BUILDING WINDOWS 8 APPS WITH API-MASHED TEMPLATES"

Building an app from scratch is great. But why not start with some building blocks someone else has laid out,
and make them your own? We’ve got a number of mashable API driven templates that can give you a jumpstart
on building a Windows 8 application. Come explore the templates and how to use and customize them at this
technical overview talk.

Attendees should have some level of comfort with CSharp and XAML for this talk.

Presenter: Joe Healy (@devfish :: http://blogs.msdn.com/devfish/ ) is the Developer Evangelist for Microsoft
in the state of Florida. Follow his blog to keep up with him on the latest happenings in the area!

When:

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

6:00 PM

Where:

Hotel Indigo Jacksonville - Deerwood Park

9840 Tapestry Park Circle, Jacksonville, FL (map)

Icenium Overview and Demo - JAXMUG May 16, 2013

mrad — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 16:10:51 GMT

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/mrad/archive/2013/06/06/icenium-overview-and-demo---jaxmug-may-16-2013-yet-again.aspx

Presenting at JUXMUG

Icenium Overview and Demo

Find out how to use your skills in HTML, CSS and JavaScript to develop,

test, and publish applications that run natively on the Apple iOS and

Google Android mobile platforms by combining the convenience of

a local coding environment with cloud-based compilation, data storage, and publishing.

link to the event

link to slides