As I’m leaving my current hosting provider, my WordPress backup needs to run  on Azure. In this blog post I’d like to explain a few different ways to archive this. There are three possibilities I have encountered so far. Let’s start with the simplest.

The simplest way to get WordPress up and running on Azure

For the first migration of you WordPress blog to Azure you only need an Azure account. Create a new Website by choosing “Website from catalog” and select WordPress from the blog section. You need to enter a domain name for your blog and accept a third party service to host your MySQL database. Thereafter your blog will be created .

By browsing to your recently created domain you’ve be prompted to setup an admin account for your blog. Next you create a backup of your old WordPress blog. Therefore you select the export option in the tools menu of your admin panel. As a result you’ll get a WordPress eXtended Rss file (WXR). This file you have to import into your new blog on Azure. The import function is located in the same menu like the export function – maybe you will be asked to install a plugin supporting the import. Now, your blog on Azure contains all your posts and the migration is finished.

Running WordPress on Azure with a Microsoft SQL database

For using this method you need to know how to work with a FTP client. To start with, we create a new Azure website and upload the downloaded and extracted WordPress files into the wwwroot location of the website.

As an alternative, you can use the website we have just created and remove the database by unlinking it from the website. This can be done by browsing to the settings of you website, in the sub-menu “Linked Ressources”.

Thereafter you have to download the WordPress DB Abstraction plugin. Extract it and copy it to the “./wp-content/mu-plugins/wp-db-abstraction/” folder on your website. Also you have to extract the db.php file from this plugin and copy it into the “./wp-content/” folder. Finally, you need to remove the web.config file in your WordPress root directory – this file will be auto generated by the plugin.

Now let’s get a new MS SQL database by browsing to the website settings and creating a new linked SQL database resource. Than you have to navigate to the following location of your WordPress domain with your browser:

./wp-content/mu-plugins/wp-db-abstraction/setup-config.php

After having browsed to domain above, you’ll get a screen asking you for your database credentials. Insert your database without the port and choose PDO SqlSrv as database type. The rest is self-explaining. Afterwards your database connection is set and you can create a new admin account. To import you current WordPress data you need to follow the steps having been described above (simple solution).

The third way. Cloning you MySQL database to MS SQL

This alternative should be used by those who know what they do. To start with, setup you Azure WordPress blog having been described above – with one exception: instead of creating a new admin user and using the import function of WordPress you need to clone the existing MySQL database to the new MS SQL database.

In order to fulfill this task you need the Microsoft SQL Server Migration Assistant. When you have downloaded and installed it you need to create a new project and select the migration to Azure option. Before filling out the connection settings to Azure you have to go to the Azure dashboard and add the current IP to the acceptance list of the database server. Afterwards you can setup the connections.

Having established both connections you can go to the MySQL database which should be cloned and select “Convert Schema” from the context menu. This will locally(!) convert the existing schema to the MS SQL database. Check the result. If it was successful, select the Azure database and choose “Synchronize Database” from the context menu. This will process the local changes to the database.

Than you choose “Migrate Data” from the MySQL database and synchronize the Azure database again. That’s it. If everything is all right you have an exact clone of you MySQL data in your Azure database, now. Check it by browsing to you Azure hosted WordPress blog.

A couple of months ago there was a campaign on Kickstarter that offered to create a new blogging platform – Ghost. It sounded promising so I become a backer.

After I received an invitation and tried the platform I decided to switch to Ghost after they open source the code on GitHub. To do so I started planning the migration process which I want to share with you today.

First things first. As the platform is very new it’s important to get creative in order to have more than “just a blogging platform”. (With this slogan the providers wants to stress that they have no intention to develop another Content Management System (CRM), like WordPress has become.)

What does Ghost offer?

Today it offers a very rudimentary blogging platform with a markdown editor as writing tool. They use Node.js as environment and have a very clean code base – certainly because at the time there isn’t very much code at all. As a developer it is a nice opportunity to get involved in an upcoming platform and influence the direction with suggestions or by pull requests via GitHub.

As of today the main limitations are the missing comment system and the (work in progress) file and image administration.

The not existing comment system isn’t a problem, it’s a feature! If you want a comment system you can use a comment system service like Disqus. Later, there will be plugins therefore, due then you need to modify the theme.

My current comments are on Disqus and I wouldn’t have a problem to switch them to Ghost as long as the links to the posts will still be the same. The reason therefore is that Disqus links the comments with the post via the post url. But this shouldn’t be a problem as every link staying the same is a priority of mine to maintain the connection with other sites that have posted links to my content.

Rather than stay with Disqus I would like to implement the Google+ comment system. It would need just a few steps to archive this but I would lose all preview comments. In order to achieve this without losing my comments, I adopted the Google JavaScript to find a way to add my old comments. I had no luck with that but I hope that there will be a solution in the near future – maybe Google opens the API? In the meantime I’m fine in using Disqus.

The file system can also be obtained by a service – search for “image cdn service”. On the one hand, I think from a visitor’s perspective this is the appreciated way to serve your images. Because of the high performance and optimization of this services they can decrease the loading time significantly. On the other hand I’m rather skeptical about getting my images to other parties because if my blog goes over the free traffic limit of this services I have to pay for the service beside my normal hosting fees. Furthermore, if the service is down my site won’t show any images – you can still read my blog without comments but without images it’s a poor user experience.

Probably, I will try the Azure storage account combined with their Content delivery network (CDN) service. I know that it’s not a cheap solution but I prefer having full control over my content. Additionally, I am planning to move the whole blogging environment to Azure, read more about it below.

A custom Theme for a new platform.

Being sure to switch my blogging platform I thought about a custom theme. I like a clean theme that works well on all browsers and concentrates on the text and reading experience. Ghost is eager to provide such a theme, so why develop one by myself?

I am going to develop a custom theme because I have a few requirements that I always need to implement by myself. Therefore I prefer to build my own. One of the main requirements is to post code. I need a theme that highlights the code and scales it for small and large devices. The second requirement is to use micro formats for defining the author and the post. This is important for search engines in order to improve the preprocessing of the information.

The theme developing process.

Although Ghost was not accessible for me yet, I started to develop my theme because it is easy to guess what information’s will be displayed in a blog and from the Kickstarter campaign I knew that the content will be displayed via handlebar.js. Handlebar.js is a template engine for JavaScript. Having created my theme I just need to switch the static content with the appropriate handlebar syntax to dynamically display my content.

To start with development I made a snapshot of my browser and removed the content in Photoshop. As a result I got my border template for the new blog. Then, I started to search the web for blog themes I like and collected them. With this collection I started playing around, creating a design prototype in Photoshop. Below you can see two pictures of my template but they are still not finished because I iterate over the process and customize the images as soon as I have a new idea to see if it works out.

At NightlyBuild I have published the current state of the process. This is a good way for testing the template on different devices and also let friends check it out to get feedback.

As a side note: I have hosted it at x10hosting.com. It is free as long as you login once a month, you can add your own custom domain and they have a very comprehensive toolset.

The hosting and developing plans.

I was searching for a (very) stable hosting provider that offers me to run a Node.js application and is not too expensive for my low bandwidth usage. Many services offer to run Node.js applications but they are very expensive if you just plan to run a little website on it. After looking around I thought about Azure.

Usually, Azure is not really cheap but it offers the best flexibility and for testing something out it’s very cheap because you can run you applications for a few minutes on Azure, check if they work like intended and then shut down everything again. So I started calculating how expensive it would be to run a little server on Azure and what I would need to run a Node.js application. It turned out that you can use an Azure website to run such an application and it costs 9$ the month. Not cheap but for the flexibility you can get it is definitely interesting.

So I looked into it and found out that you can easily deploy new versions of your application by providing a Git repository connection in the configuration of your Azure website. This is a really nice feature that was totally new to me. It means that I could add the Ghost GitHub repository in my configuration and would be able to update my blog to the newest version with a click of a button. There is also a panic button that reverse the process if anything goes wrong.

The setup.

Finally I decided to build the following setup to develop and host my new blog. Because I want to be able to develop my own theme and maybe some extensions, I need a test environment and an own source control system. As source control system I choose my existing Team Foundation Server (TFS) service. You can host your source code for free and since a couple of months they provide you with the option to use Git as source repository – perfect! The same system as the Ghost project uses, making copies between my source code and the official source easy.

5 branches in one project – oh my.

I created a new Git project on my TFS service and added 5 branches. The first is for cloning the main branch of the Ghost GitHub project to my repository. The second for my html theme. The third is my nightly build branch dedicated for the active development on plugins and merging the html theme. Another branch for integrating the official branch and the nightly branch and the last branch is the public branch. The code of the public branch will be used to publish new versions of my blog.

Don’t worry, I have created an overview to visualize my idea. Read on, it will show up bellow.

4 Azure websites, because I can.

On Azure I created one website as shared. This means that I have to pay 9$ per month and get the possibility to add my own domain to it. This will be the website for my blog.

The other three sites will cost me nothing because you can host up to 20 websites on Azure for free – as long as you do not need custom domain names. One of the three sites will be used for testing new versions of the (cloned) official GitHub repository in order to see the new features in action and decide if I should push the changes to my blog as well. The other two sites are for testing the nightly build branch and of course for the integration branch.

Below you can see a diagram that illustrates my setup.

In summary.

I know my setup is oversized for such a little blog but in my job as developer I’m used to have this kind of setup to ensure a high quality of our releases. So I’m familiar with it and it won’t take me long to get this setup and running.

As you know my last blog post was a few months ago. It’s because I have switched my company and had to get back in my routine. But now my love for writing is back and I will keep you posted on this project. In the meantime I’d like to hear what you think about my plans

Ein Ausschnitt aus der Zusammenfassung der semesterübergreifenden Arbeit:

Diese Arbeit befasst sich mit der Erstellung einer Homepage, die dem angemeldeten Benutzer ermöglicht, sein E-Mail-Kontingent sowie sein verbleibendes Kontingent auf der privaten Dateiablage der Universität einzusehen.

Die Arbeit gliedert sich hierzu in zwei Phasen. [..]

Phase I

In diesem Teil der Arbeit wird der Schwerpunkt auf die Grundlagen gelegt und es wird damit begonnen, die Projektstruktur aufzubauen sowie die Anmeldung am Active Directory zu realisieren.

Die Grundlagen umfassen hierbei den Microsoft Windows Server, den Microsoft SQL-Server, das .NET-Framework, die Entwicklungsumgebung Visual Studio 2010 sowie das Entwicklungsmuster Model-View-Controller.

Die Umsetzung des Projekts wird unter Verwendung von Visual Studio 2010 und ASP.NET MVC 3 angegangen. Es wird hierzu beschrieben, an welchen Stellen die Anwendung und der IIS konfiguriert werden müssen, um eine verschlüsselte Verbindung zuzulassen und wo die Anmeldedaten für das ActiveDirectory abgelegt werden. Des Weiteren werden Daten aus dem ActiveDirectory in einer lokalen Datenbank zwischengespeichert, welche ebenfalls beschrieben wird.

Phase II

In diesem Teil der Arbeit wird der Schwerpunkt auf die praktische Umsetzung gelegt, wodurch der Grundlagenteil kleiner ausfällt als in der ersten Ausarbeitung.

Die Grundlagen umfassen hierbei den Microsoft Exchange Server, das Linux Rechtesystem sowie die Verbindung zweier Peers über das Secure Shell Protokoll. Das Secure Shell Protokoll wird benötigt, um eine Verbindung zwischen der Anwendung und dem Linux Server herzustellen.

Die Umsetzung des Projekts wird unter Verwendung von Visual Studio 2010 und ASP.NET MVC 3 angegangen. In dieser Ausarbeitung wird anhand von Quellcode beschrieben wie die Funktionalität der Anwendung umgesetzt wurde und welche Hürden dafür zu nehmen waren. Des Weiteren wird dem Leser im Unterkapitel Oberflächendesign das Aussehen der Oberfläche anhand von Momentaufnahmen
vorgeführt und erklärt, was den Entwickler dazu bewogen hat es so und nicht anders
umzusetzen.

Phase I

Phase II

[1] Beschrieben in Work with Exchange Web Services

Problemstellung: Aufgrund des steigenden Aufkommens von mobilen Geräten in Unternehmen werden individuelle Applikationen benötigt, welche auf der jeweiligen Plattform betrieben werden können und auf die Einsatzzwecke der Firma zugeschnitten sind.

Für die Entwicklung solcher individuellen Lösungen möchte die zu untersuchende Firma einen eigenen Bereich aufbauen, wozu sie Grundlagenwissen benötigt. Dieses soll in dieser Arbeit, mit Schwerpunkt auf das Betriebssystem iOS, erarbeitet werden, da laut einer aktuellen Studie der Firma Check Point mobile Endgeräte mit dem Betriebssystem iOS den größten Anteil an mobilen Endgeräten im Firmenumfeld ausmachen. Des Weiteren wird ein Schwerpunkt auf die plattformunabhängige Entwicklung gelegt, um Quellcode wiederverwenden zu können und um die Entwicklungskosten der gleichen Applikation für weitere Plattform zu minimieren.

Ziel: Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, herauszufinden welche Möglichkeiten der Applikationsentwicklung es für die Entwicklung auf mobilen Endgeräten gibt und worin deren Vor- und Nachteile bestehen. Des Weiteren soll die Recherche der Ausarbeitung, sich an den Produkten und Möglichkeiten der Plattform iOS orientieren.

Viel Spaß beim lesen

Die heutige Ausarbeitung wurde Ende 2011 geschrieben, in einem Zeitraum von ungefähr 9 Wochen und war meine zweite Projektarbeit im Studium. Seit also so freundlich und berücksichtigt dies wenn Ihr euch an der ein oder anderen Formulierung stoßt

Die Ausarbeitung beschäftigt sich mit den Vor- und Nachteilen der Individualprogrammierung für Clouddienste des Weiteren stellt sie den Funktionsumfang von SharePoint 2010 vor und vergleicht diesen mit SharePoint Online. Anschließend werden Möglichkeiten analysiert mit denen sich SharePoint Online erweitern lässt um fehlenden Funktionalitäten gegenüber SharePoint 2010 zu kompensieren.

Problemstellung: Die Aufgabe dieser Arbeit ist es, Möglichkeiten zu finden, mit welchen der Funktionsumfang von SharePoint Online erweitert werden kann sowie die Vor- und Nachteile von Cloudlösungen zu evaluieren. Hierzu werden zwei Anwendungsbeispiele vorgestellt und betrachtet wie diese sich, in SharePoint und SharePoint Online, lösen lassen.

Ziel: Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, den Funktionsumfang von SharePoint Online kennen zu lernen und hierdurch festzustellen welche Vor- und Nachteile die Migration zu SharePoint Online bietet. Sowie aufkommende Probleme bei der Migration von bestehenden Systemen zu erkennen.
Des Weiteren ist Ziel der Arbeit, Möglichkeiten aufzuzeigen, mit welchen sich der Funktionsumfang von SharePoint Online erweitern lässt und diese Möglichkeiten auf die Tauglichkeit seitens der Anforderungen der zu untersuchenden Firma zu evaluieren.

Ich wünsche euch nun viel Spaß beim Lesen und falls Fragen auftauchen zögert nicht den Artikel zu kommentieren oder mir eine Mail zu schreiben.

Damit diese und weitere Arbeiten die ich in meinem Studium angefertigt habe nicht auf meiner Festplatte in Vergessenheit geraten möchte ich Sie durch das Veröffentlichen auf meinem Blog der Allgemeinheit zugänglich machen, auf dass sie für den ein oder andere noch nützlich sein können.

Problemstellung: In der zu untersuchenden Firma gab es das Problem, dass die zu verwaltenden Datenmengen zu groß wurden, um sie mit der bisherigen Lösung weiterhin zu verwalten. Die Verteilung der Dokumente in die Ordnerstruktur und die Verlinkung in andere Ordner nahm ein zu großes Ausmaß an, sodass die Übersichtlichkeit verloren ging und der administrative Aufwand unrentabel wurde. Dazu kam, dass es keine praktikable Lösung für Sicherungen gab, sodass der Server für Sicherungen erst heruntergefahren werden musste, was ein Ausfall der Erreichbarkeit der Daten zufolge hatte.

Ziel: Das Ziel war es die Datenmengen in ein neues System zu portieren, welches eine merkliche Erleichterung der Administration zufolge haben sollte. Weiter wurde gewünscht, dass es eine ausgeklügelte Suche gibt, mit welcher sich die Daten schnell und effizient wiederauffinden lassen. Zudem wurden eine dauerhafte Erreichbarkeit und die Option zur Datensicherung verlangt.

Ich wünsche euch viel Spaß beim lesen

At this time I was a little disappointed but I understand the security reason – with this functionality you could permanently exclude the user from the device if you trigger it on every unlock action. So I got creative and thought about dimming the brightness of the screen as soon as the cover is closed and also set the timeout interval for the lock screen to the minimal possible value, all in the name of saving some energy.

Turns out the minimum value of the lock screen is 30 seconds! And do you think I could listen/hook up an event to the brightness sensor in the background process? A background process can run for max 6 seconds, after this time period the process will be terminated by the system and starting a new process out of the running background task wasn’t properly working either -.-

That was my experience with the WP8 development since tonight. Today I had the great idea to code an app that turns the volume and vibration off at night and enables it at morning (I have a light sleep). Turns out you can’t change any phone settings inside an app, you can only open the right settings panel to offer the user to change the appropriate setting.

I just have no luck on programming something that my WP8 experience would improve

After all this pointless coding I’m the opinion that it would be great if Microsoft would ease restrictions – because of me you have to pay extra for this ability’s because they will test your app more thorough. For the WinRT development there is something like this available. You only can use some functionality (for example: company authentication) if you use a company owned account.

As a side note: If you’d like to debug your code on a real phone you need a WP8 development account for a $99 USD. I think this is stupid for hobby developers. I’d like to train my WP8 development skills by programming nice little apps for myself until I think I have something others would enjoy (and I could earn/compensate the account license) then I would be happy to buy a license. I think buying a license before I can see the value on my own device is discouraging – happily I was still registered as student and could test the software on my device for free

Links to start with WP8 development:

• Windows Phone SDK 8.0
• Windows Phone API reference
  
• Windows Phone Samples
• Windows Phone Toolkit
• Advanced possibilities: Dynamic fractal lock screen

Edit: Found this post by Ralf Rottmann in which he writes about his system change because of to many restrictions.

I used Fiddler, a web debugging proxy, to understand the authentication process. First you need to get the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) tokens. I looked up the needed requirements for the SAML-Tokens and was able to get them. With those tokens I was now able to get a token from the Microsoft Online Services (MOS) via the Secure Token Service (STS). With that token I can now finally authenticate my application against SharePoint Online and receive a authentication token that I have to use in all my REST-Requests (as cookies) in order to authenticate my requests.

At this last point on receiving the token from the Secure Token Service (STS) I stumbled upon an article from Omar Venado that solved my problem and posted the solution in his blog. Because I was short on time I used his finished solution in my project (with a few fixes and modifications) and throw my pre finished solution away. This is why I didn’t post some code snippets – look at Omar’s post for the snippets and a deeper explanation.

But because of my question on stackoverflow.com I received a view e-mails if I had found the solution to my problem and if I’m willing to share it. So I fought I make this blog post to spread the solution. I have also created a new project and copied the modified version of Omar’s solution in it and created a Windows 8 Store skeleton app. You can find it at Github: https://github.com/jwillmer/SharePointAuthentication

Feel free to use it, improve it and tell others about it

In the past 3-4 months I was playing around with the WinRT-Framework and have built a RSS-Feed-App. Although the app is stable I haven’t sent it to the app store yet. One of the reasons is, that there are already basic implementations of feed apps in the store and the other reason is the limited time

So last week I got a call from my company that we need an app to show customers that we have experience in developing WinRT apps and as always we need it yesterday. Lang story short, I rebuild my RSS-Reader, implemented a SharePoint Online authentication and modified the look and feel of the app to fit our corporate identity – now we have a SharePoint-RSS-Reader

(How I was able to connect to the SharePoint Online with an AFDS in front I will post later this week. For that post I first have to make a demo project, because the code is way too much to post it all in one blog post.)

Today I was very relaxed, showing my chief last weeks work but later that day then I run the Windows App Certification Kit (WACK) I became two errors:

First was that the background color was too close to the foreground color. Because I had custom styled all controls and they are very well readable (grey background and blue foreground) I had no clue what to do. Later that day I found the Trick: Set the Theme from “light” to “dark” and the error is gone.

Second error was that I had a Direct3D exception although I didn’t use any Direct3D animations. First I blamed the 3rd part dll but I was wrong. I reconfigured the debugger to show me all exceptions, found a few, fixed it but the error was still there. I visited the windows error logs but found nothing suspicious. Then, an hour ago I started the WACK again, at home on my laptop and it run through without a problem! I think the WACK test have a problem with a second monitor during the testing

This two errors have cost me one work day, so I hope I can help with this post one or another reader. Because the WinRT app development is very new there are very few posts out there that describe what to do if you have this errors but I hope in a few months it will be better

Edit:

A link to a blog post of Olivier Matis that have some similar problems: guruumeditation.net

Was das Plugin genau kann und wozu es gut ist habe ich schon einmal aufgeschrieben, in der Anleitung für meine Kollegen. Hier der interessante Teil davon:

Das Outlook Visitenkarten Add-In wurde entwickelt, um Anwendern die Möglichkeit zu bieten, komfortabel ihre, im Active Directory hinterlegten, Informationen zu pflegen und aktuell zu halten.

Der Grund für die Entwicklung dieses Add-Ins lag darin, dass in unserem Unternehmen die Soft- und Hardware der Mittarbeiter ausgetauscht wurde. Das Unternehmen migrierte von Windows XP zu Windows 7 und Office 2010.

Die in Office 2010 zur Verfügung stehenden Funktionen zur Kollaboration beziehen die Kontaktinformationen der Anwender aus dem Active Directory. Leider war dieses zum damaligen Zeitpunkt nicht ausreichend gepflegt, wodurch in den Office Produkten nur spärliche Informationen über den eigenen sowie die Firmenkontakte angezeigt wurden.

Um diese Informationen schnell und ohne viel Bürokratie einzupflegen, wurde dieses Add-In entwickelt, welches den Anwendern die Möglichkeit bietet, ihre Kontaktinformationen selbst zu pflegen und aktuell zu halten.

Die zu bearbeitenden Felder können im Active Directory durch den Administrator eingeschränkt werden. Dadurch behält die IT weiterhin die Kontrolle über die Einträge im Active Directory und kann Anwender- oder Gruppengebundene Rechte für die Bearbeitung der Felder anlegen.

Durch die Installation der Anwendung als ClickOnce-Bereitstellung ist die Aktualisierung problemlos und es werden keine erhöhten Anwenderrechte für die Installation benötigt, wodurch der Einsatz für einen maximalen Anwenderkreis ermöglicht wird.

Das Plugin funktioniert wirklich gut, einzig eine manuelle Anmeldung an das Active Directory fehlt. (Das Plugin verwendet immer das Systemkonto.) Dies ist aber für 99% der Anwender egal, weil diese das vorkonfigurierte Betriebssystem des Unternehmens benutzen – der Rest sind Entwickler(maschinen), welche sich mit dem AD-Explorer von Microsoft zu helfen wissen ;-).

Für alle die es testen möchten, selbst gebrauchen können oder sogar Lust haben es auszubauen, habe ich es auf GitHub geladen.

Zu finden unter: https://github.com/jwillmer/OutlookContactInformationAddIn