If you have downloaded the Visual Studio 11 you have may noticed that ASP.NET MVC 4 defaults to a new Membership Provider.  Instead of SqlMembershipProvider it uses the new DefaultMembershipProvider.

DefaultMembershipProvider is a cleaned up version of the membership provider that will work again SQL Azure or SQL Server or SQL Express or SQL Compact, etc.  Scott Hanselman talks about it here.  If you dig into DefaultMembership provider you will notice is has vastly simplified the SQL schema.  There were compatibility issues with a number of the SQL Server features the original version used. 

1. The new version has eliminated the assorted lowered* columns in the tables.
2. The new version has eliminated all the stored procedures.
3. The new version has eliminated all the views

When you fire up a site configured with the new provider it automatically creates tables in your ApplicationServices database without you having to run aspnet_regsql.  When it does this it creates all the tables without the aspnet_ prefix that SqlMembershipProvider used.  It is also smart enough to not drop any tables that may be present if there is a naming conflict with a table it uses.  In this case it just silently fails to create the table. This is nice as it preserves the old Membership data and doesn’t put any of your data at risk if you didn’t realize that migrating your MVC 3 application to MVC 4 was going to cause this change in behavior.

When I saw all of these changes I wanted to adopt the new provider so I could use the same Membership schema on premise or in Azure. Unfortunately it appears that Microsoft doesn’t provide a script to migrate your data from the old schema to the new one.  So I walked through creating a script that adds the new objects, moves the data from the old objects to the new ones and drops the old objects. I don’t even begin to claim to be a SQL Wizard but I am posting the script to save anyone else the wasted 30 minutes of their life creating it. 

http://www.vergentsoftware.com/downloads/SystemWebProvidersSchemaUpdateGeneric.zip

Once you run the script you will find that you still can’t login.  Membership.ValidateUser() will fail when trying to authenticate the user.  Spent some time spelunking through this and couldn’t figure out the issue at first.  A great friend at Microsoft put me in touch with the developer who wrote the code and he insisted that DefaultMembershipProvider is not backward compatible with SqlMembershipProvider.  I certainly understood this from the standpoint of the schema changes mentioned above but suspected that I was still missing something.

I had just seen Scott’s x2 announcement here and here about the aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com site so I fired up GIT and did a clone of the source code. Unfortunately System.Web.Providers is not only largely undocumented on MSDN and elsewhere it also is not included in the source code that has been made public as part of aspnetwebstack. Really unfortunate and I posted a request that it be added to the codeplex site.  Still trying to figure out what had changed I decided to decompile DefaultMembershipProvider and compare it to SqlMembershipProvider to see if I could find a work around.  I went and grabbed my copy of TelerikJust Decompile (my Reflector had expired and I wasn’t willing to drop some coin just to decompile .NET code) and started spelunking.

After an hour or so I finally found the culprit.  Both providers have a method called GetHashAlgorithmType() that returns the hashing algorithm used to hash the combined password and salt.  In SqlMembershipProvider there is a check of several flags to determine if it should use SHA1 instead of whatever the configured hash algorithm is:

private HashAlgorithm GetHashAlgorithm()
{
    if (this.s_HashAlgorithm == null)
    {
        string hashAlgorithmType = Membership.HashAlgorithmType;
        if (this._LegacyPasswordCompatibilityMode == MembershipPasswordCompatibilityMode.Framework20 && 
            !Membership.IsHashAlgorithmFromMembershipConfig && hashAlgorithmType != "MD5")
        {
            hashAlgorithmType = "SHA1";
        }
        HashAlgorithm hashAlgorithm = HashAlgorithm.Create(hashAlgorithmType);
        if (hashAlgorithm == null)
        {
            RuntimeConfig.GetAppConfig().Membership.ThrowHashAlgorithmException();
        }
        this.s_HashAlgorithm = hashAlgorithmType;
        return hashAlgorithm;
    }
    else
    {
        return HashAlgorithm.Create(this.s_HashAlgorithm);
    }
}

Notice Line 6?  It reverts to SHA1 if a number of conditions hold true.  Now compare it to the following code snippet from DefaultMembershipProvider:

private HashAlgorithm GetHashAlgorithm()
{
    if (this._HashAlgorithm == null)
    {
        string hashAlgorithmType = Membership.HashAlgorithmType;
        HashAlgorithm hashAlgorithm = HashAlgorithm.Create(hashAlgorithmType);
        if (hashAlgorithm != null)
        {
            this._HashAlgorithm = hashAlgorithmType;
            return hashAlgorithm;
        }
        else
        {
            object[] objArray = new object[1];
            objArray[0] = this._HashAlgorithm;
            throw new ConfigurationErrorsException(string.Format(CultureInfo.CurrentCulture, 
                ProviderResources.Invalid_hash_algorithm, objArray));
        }
    }
    else
    {
        return HashAlgorithm.Create(this._HashAlgorithm);
    }
}

Notice it just uses whatever the default hash algorithm is.  This led me to the final part of the solution.  If you don’t specify a hashing algorithm when configuring the Membership provider it defaults to HMACSHA256.  SqlMembershipProvider in many cases defaults back to SHA1 as it was in my case.  You can change your web.config to force the Membership system to use SHA1 like so:

<membership defaultProvider="DefaultMembershipProvider" hashAlgorithmType="SHA1">

This fixed the issue for me and I am now up and running with the DefaultMembershipProvider!  Your mileage may vary and use at your own risk, etc.

I have been spinning up on writing Metro applications and wanted to try pulling in WNS and Azure.  Unfortunately I couldn’t get all of the bits to play together correctly in Windows 8.

Started searching around and found a list of instructions to get Windows Azure development tools up and running on Windows 8.  Check it out here. If you want to install VS 2010 and Dev 11 check here instead.

In a nutshell Web Platform Installer will not install the Windows Azure SDK on Windows 8.

If installing Visual Studio 10 on Windows 8 you need to manually install Visual Studio Express SP1 prior to installing Visual Studio.

Finally Windows Azure .NET applications can only target .NET Framework 3.5 or 4.0.  .NET Framework 4.5 is unsupported on Windows Azure.

I finally broke down and did a full Windows 8 install on my secondary machine using Boot to VHD. 

Very easy to get up and running and Scott Hanselman has a great post here and here with all the steps.

Now that I have it up and running I decided to go fire off the Windows Experience Index and found that it wouldn’t complete since I was booting off a VHD.

Searching around I found that WEI is just a shell around WinSat.exe.  You can open up an administrative command prompt and fire off Winsat dwm to let the desktop window manager measure your performance and decide which features to enable.

Saw an interesting presentation mentioned about what does it mean to have a small team?  What does it mean to have a faster team?  What are the traits of a great developer?

http://speakerdeck.com/u/searls/p/the-mythical-team-month

I have a customer who is a consulting firm that does quite a bit of .NET, Sharepoint, and Mobile work. They have various remote developers throughout the United States and have opened an office in Vietnam to offshore some of the work.

They currently have a server sitting in a co-location running Hyper-V with about a dozen or so VMs. The VMs are typically staging and integration environments where they deploy their work and then allow their customers to connect in and check things out, typically over HTTP. They have found they have just about hit the limit of their existing hardware and we were chatting about whether it made sense to purchase some new hardware or purchase VMs from any number of cloud providers like RackSpace or Amazon EC2.

While looking at this question I remembered about a local company, SkyTap, here in Seattle that I had looked at when in a former job. I was debating moving our development and testing lab into the cloud.  At the time I didn’t pull the trigger as we ended up getting some decommissioned hardware from our production data center that we used to fill the gap. 

Now with all the folks offering cloud based virtual instances I was curious what was so unique about SkyTap.  I gave them a call to get some pricing and they offered to sit down and walk me through their offering.

First off SkyTap isn’t trying to compete with Microsoft Windows Azure, Amazon EC2 or Rackspace to run your production applications.  They see their niche as providing elastic capacity to corporations for non-production needs.  Complete environment for Development, Quality Assurance, Training, and Sales.  Their secret sauce is how quickly they can get a particular environment up and running for you.

The interface to their offering is completely web based and browser/platform agnostic.  The demo I received was done under OS X in Google Chrome. To quickly get started you start by creating a new VM from a template. They offer a large number of preconfigured templates for most of the operating systems out there.  Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 2008R2, Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc.  They provide pre-configured templates at each patch/service pack level.  The combination of base platform + service pack means out of the box they offer a few 100 templates to get you started.

Select a template, ask it to create a VM and 15-20 seconds later you have a spun up instance of the operating system that is just waiting for you to personalize it with things like the machine name, license key, etc.

When you spin up a new VM it comes up in a “Configuration” or environment that is isolated from all other VMs in the system as well as the internet. You can modify the default configuration and add CPU, Memory, NICs, Disk, etc. This is similar to the "Network Fence” concept in Visual Studio Lab Management.  Each configuration may contain one or more virtual networks to allow you to reproduce your desired application deployment architecture.  Configurations can be connected to one another to simulate distributed architectures.

You can connect directly to the machine in two ways.  They provide a web based Java plugin they call the SRA that is essentially a Virtual KVM that allows you “bare metal” access to all of your VMs.  Alternatively you can expose the VM to the internet for RDP or SSH access via NAT.  The endpoint used to access the VM is shown in the management web site.

If you want to make the applications running on the machine actually accessible to the internet you can map public IP addresses to the configuration and then map them to networks internal to the configuration.

Once you have your application deployed SkyTap has a number of very cool features you can leverage.

How many times have you gotten an email like this: “Testing a breaking change in QA1.  Will have environment back up and running in 30 minutes.”  With SkyTap the individual who needs to run the test can click a button and in a couple of minutes clone the entire environment and have it up and running in a new configuration alongside the old one.  She can do her tests and then delete the configuration.

If you have a complication application setup that you need to spin up on a regular basis you can get if configured and installed and then with the press of a button indicate to SkyTap that you would like this to be created as a new template.  This will allow you to create a new configuration from the template in minutes and have a complete multi-VM configuration spun up.  Great for load testing where you may want to spin up a Test Controller and multiple load agents all at once.

Similar to the other cloud services you are billed based on how many resources you use.  SkyTap introduces the concept of a SVM (SkyTap Virtual Machine).  It isn’t what you would think.  Each VM uses a variable number of SVMs based on how many CPUs or how many gigabytes of memory the machine has allocated.  The VM is billed based on the greater of number of CPUs or allocated memory.

A machine with 4 CPUs and 2GB of memory would be 4 SVMs.  A machine with 2 CPUs and 4GB of memory would also be 4 SVMs.

Customers purchase a number of SVM hours and a quantity of disk space each month on a subscription basis.  This is the one unfortunate aspect of the SkyTap model.  I pay a fixed price per month + overage charges as opposed to paying for exactly what I use.

This means the question ultimately comes down to whether or not the convenience oriented features that allow you quickly create, clone, and reuse complete environments are worth the increased cost.  SkyTap doesn’t publish prices on their website so if you are interesting in the convenience features give them a call.

FYI: I am not a skytap customer nor do I even have a demo account.  Just thought I would share what I learned.

My main machine nowadays is a MacBook air running Windows 7 most of the time. Wish I could get 8GB into it but other than that I really love the hardware. With the Windows 8 consumer preview out I had to give it a try. I was a little reticent given the Apple hardware to install Windows 8 with bootcamp. Couldn’t find many examples of folks who had done it yet. Figured I would wait for a few other folks to blaze that trail.

That left virtualization. I have seen a few posts from folks who have been disappointed with the performance when Windows 8 is virtualized. Even Microsoft recommends against it.

I decided to forge ahead anyway using the new VMWare 8 since Hyper-V won’t run on Windows 7 (can’t wait for Hyper-V in Windows 8!). Installed using the Windows 7 operating system choice in VMware with no problems. Since the MacBook Air only has 4GB I limited the VM to 1GB of memory. I was actually shocked at how quickly it installed, around 15 minutes from the USB key to the virtual disk sitting on my SSD.

At first I was a bit disappointed with the performance.  The graphics weren’t that fluid.  Installed the VMWare Integration Services and what a huge difference.  The Windows Experience Index shot up to a 5.3 for graphics and I got the fluidity folks are talking about.

Performance is pretty darn good in only a 1GB VM.  Quite usable.

Performance at first was not that great.

Grab your bits on MSDN.

Then head here to download some hands on labs around the cool new features in TFS!

Labs are available on:

• Agile Project Management in Team Foundation Server 11
• Building the Right Software - Generating Storyboards and Collecting Stakeholder Feedback with Visual Studio 11
• Diagnosing Issues in Production with IntelliTrace and Visual Studio 11
• Exploratory Testing and Other Enhancements in Microsoft Test Manager 11
• Making Developers More Productive with Team Foundation Server 11
• Unit Testing with Visual Studio 11 - MSTest, NUnit, xUnit.net, and Code Clone

Microsoft even provides a Virtual Machine with all the bits pre-installed, a solution to walk through and even process data loaded into the TFS instance so you can look at backlogs, stories, etc.

Good stuff.

Grab your bits on MSDN.

Then head here to download some hands on labs around the cool new features in TFS!

Labs are available on:

• Agile Project Management in Team Foundation Server 11
• Building the Right Software - Generating Storyboards and Collecting Stakeholder Feedback with Visual Studio 11
• Diagnosing Issues in Production with IntelliTrace and Visual Studio 11
• Exploratory Testing and Other Enhancements in Microsoft Test Manager 11
• Making Developers More Productive with Team Foundation Server 11
• Unit Testing with Visual Studio 11 - MSTest, NUnit, xUnit.net, and Code Clone

Microsoft even provides a Virtual Machine with all the bits pre-installed, a solution to walk through and even process data loaded into the TFS instance so you can look at backlogs, stories, etc.

Good stuff.

Grab your bits on MSDN!

Then head here to download some hands on labs around the cool new features in TFS!

Labs are available on:

• Agile Project Management in Team Foundation Server 11
• Building the Right Software - Generating Storyboards and Collecting Stakeholder Feedback with Visual Studio 11
• Diagnosing Issues in Production with IntelliTrace and Visual Studio 11
• Exploratory Testing and Other Enhancements in Microsoft Test Manager 11
• Making Developers More Productive with Team Foundation Server 11
• Unit Testing with Visual Studio 11 - MSTest, NUnit, xUnit.net, and Code Clone

Microsoft even provides a Virtual Machine with all the bits pre-installed, a solution to walk through and even process data loaded into the TFS instance so you can look at backlogs, stories, etc.

Good stuff.