Heart Internet Brief Introduction This company was started in the year 2004 by Jonathan Brealey and Tim Beresford and claim to be the second company growing the fastest in the UK. They have brought in a high degree of automation with the intent to present customers more control over their account and what’s more they have been able to keep the prices at very affordable levels.
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Heartinternet.co.uk
Today, I had to deliver a talk on Security features in .NET and IIS and I was going through the www.iis.net website. In the past I had been there for Smooth streaming and other stuff but I stumbled upon the tools, a truck load of them that are very handy utilities while managing a webserver. URL Scan Site Shell Server Defender and much more related to security at http://www.iis.net/downloads/Security and with respect to performance http://www.iis.net/downloads/Performance Ok, and my titbit for this post is that, if you want to use the URL Scan utility on your server running IIS 7, IIS 7.5, you need to enable IIS 6 Metabase Compatibility before configuring the tool. Here is a write up on the same site to do that at http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/125/metabase-compatibility-with-iis-7/ Cheers !!!
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IIS Tools – truck load of them at www.iis.net
Recently, one of the queries I had was on “TCP error code 10060: A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond” while consuming a web service over proxy settings. Setting the UseDefaultWebProxy to true didn’t help with this error. I had earlier written a post on explicitly setting the proxy in the configuration file for Web Services. The scenario here though was, a WCF Service Client trying to consume the web service.
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Resolving the “TCP error code 10060: A connection attempt failed…” while consuming a web service
Earlier I had written on migrating your Northwind database from SQL Server to SQL Azure. In that, I had mentioned that the SQL Azure Migration Wizard supports migrating the schema and doesn’t do the data migration which has to be done manually. Meanwhile, George Huey has published a recent version on the SQL Azure Migration Wizard at CodePlex which also does data migration. What this means is that, you can take an existing database and generate the scripts and go ahead and deploy the database along with data into your SQL Azure Database. That’s one hell of work done in a single step, I would say.
The rest is here:
Update to my post on SQL Azure Migration Wizard
In the previous post I had described the steps to secure your Windows Azure tokens and get the necessary Visual Studio templates as well as making your web application Azure ready by adding the cloud project and building against it. Once you have tested the Development Fabric, the instances as well as the application, the next step would be to publish it to the Windows Azure platform. Select the “CloudService1” project that you added to the solution, right click and select “Publish” Once you click on “Publish”, if you are connected to the internet, it would try and open up Azure login screen and once you sign in, https://windows.azure.com/Cloud/Provisioning/Default.aspx If you had received the Windows Azure Tokens, and claimed them (as per my previous posts), you would hit the screen as below upon clicking on your project. in the above, once you click on “New Service” it opens up the page to choose the type of service you would want to create. As mentioned earlier, in the CTP you would get to create 2 storage accounts and one hosted service. In our case, we would require a hosted service, so select the same and proceed to the next screen. It would provide you the option to specify the Service name and description (note both are mandatory) I have provided a name as well as description as per the screen below.
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Moving your ASP.NET Application to Windows Azure – Part II
Earlier I had written 2 posts – Taking your Northwind Database to SQL Azure and binding it to an ASP.NET GridView Part I and Part II . I thought, I will complete the series with a post on moving your ASP.NET Application as well to Windows Azure making it a truly cloud based application. Before we start, there are a bunch of things that you would need to do. First and foremost, you would need a Token for Windows Azure. You can request for a free token for Windows Azure from here after providing your Live ID and a few more details. I am not aware of the current time it takes for receiving a token but in the past it used to be 24 hours. Similarly, if you want to have SQL Azure Tokens, you can get it from here and then login to https://sql.azure.com to redeem the token once you receive the same. (if you had migrated your SQL Database to SQL Azure as per my earlier posts, you would have done these already) Once you receive the tokens for Windows Azure, you would need to visit the http://lx.azure.microsoft.com/ and sign in with your Live ID that you used for registering for the tokens. Once you login, you would be able to see a screen as below Since you haven’t claimed the tokens, there won’t be any projects listed here. You can click on “Account” tab and click on “Manage my Tokens” in the bottom to claim the tokens for Windows Azure. With this token you can create 1 hosted services account and 2 blob storage accounts.
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Moving your ASP.NET Application to Windows Azure – Part I
If you have used the Entity Framework that shipped with Visual Studio 2008 SP1, you would really start appreciating the flexibility it offers for building schema driven data access layer and get it to the UI Layer either directly or using a middle tier such as WCF RIA Service. Check my earlier post on this, if you are interested further 
Meanwhile, the other exciting stuff that has been around is the SQL Azure which is part of the Windows Azure platform. SQL Azure provides relational data over the web which means, the Database is hosted, maintained and all is done by us and you get to store your database and query the same as if you were running it in your local Data Center or server. Of course, SQL Azure is currently CTP and you can get free access to it if you have the Azure Tokens. While I had earlier written about Migrating your database to SQL Azure that example used an ASP.NET front end which had a GridView doing direct data binding with SQL DataSource. Obviously, one would want to use some of the more abstract controls such as LINQ DataSource / Entity DataSource.
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Binding Entity Framework to your SQL Azure Database – Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2
While working on SQL Azure connectivity from Visual Studio 2010, I faced the above error. The full error text is as below:- “ Server name cannot be determined. It must appear as the first segment of the server’s dns name (servername.database.windows.net). Some libraries do not send the server name, in which case the server name must be included as part of the user name (username@servername). In addition, if both formats are used, the server names must match .
Ok, I am playing with the Windows Azure Training Kit November 2009 release and the first sample I wanted to try was “Migrating web applications to Windows Azure”. I believe a whole bunch of people moving to Azure aren’t just going to create new web apps but rather try and move their existing web apps which is why, I thought this exercise is more important. After following the initial few steps, I came to the place where we manage state providers and one of the requirement is to the StorageClient library available as a part of the training kit. Now when you add reference to this library (project) and try to build, you may hit the above error i.e. unable to find “Microsoft” or “Microsoft.ServiceHosting.ServiceRuntime” which is one of the primary assemblies used in the “StorageAccountInfo.cs” file. I went through various searches and found out the information that this has moved to Microsoft.WindowsAzure.ServiceRuntime. What followed was a series of build errors in the same file pointing to various references. So the idea behind this post is to help folks get through this hurdle.
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FIX for Unable to find “Microsoft.ServiceHosting.ServiceRuntime” Windows Azure Training Kit Nov 09
I have been playing with the WCF RIA Services (erstwhile .NET RIA Services) for sometime and found that most of the samples out there focus on Silverlight based applications. While the new WCF RIA Services preview for VS 2010 is awesome in terms of its Silverlight integration, I also wanted to test out on building plain vanilla ASP.NET Applications and using the power of WCF RIA Services to build a middle tier for the same. Ok, to begin with, I already had Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 installed and went ahead and installed the WCF RIA Services Preview for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 (note that, if you already have the WCF RIA Services for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 installed, this doesn’t install on top of it – so you have to chose whether to use the one that works with Visual Studio 2008 with SL3 or VS 2010 Beta 2 with SL4 Beta – i chose the latter) Once I had these installed, I went ahead and created an “File – New Project – Empty ASP.NET Web Application” in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2.
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Using WCF RIA Services without Silverlight in Visual Studio 2010 for building 3 tier ASP.NET Applications
In the ViewModel, aka the MVVM pattern, a view such as a UserControl is bound to its associated view model. The view model manages state exposed as observable properties, operations exposed as methods and raises notifications via events. An interesting question is how a View should specify its view model, and how a view model instance should be created.
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ViewModel Pattern for Silverlight – Options for Hooking a View to its Model
If you have been using the SQL Azure Portal for creating SQL Databases and connecting to them from your SQL Server Management Studio, you would have realized the ability to query the Azure Cloud Databases from within the management studio. While this provides great opportunities in terms of relation capabilities and accessibility over the Cloud, there has been a recent upgrade to SQL Azure and in that process there has been a Firewall Support added to the SQL Azure Portal access. Specifically when you try to connect to SQL Azure, you would face the error Cannot connect to Additional Information Cannot open server requested by the login. Client with IP Address ” ” is not allowed to access the host server. Login failed for user ‘ ’
I’m going to Berlin! Next week, I’m giving talks at Tech-Ed Europe on two of my favorite topics: What’s New in Microsoft ASP.NET Model-View-Controller ASP.NET Model-View-Controller (MVC) 2 introduces new features to make you more productive when building an ASP.NET MVC application. Templated helpers allow automatically associatiating edit and display elements with data types
Originally posted here:
Speaking at Tech-Ed Europe Next Week
Today we are releasing new version of CodeIt.Right – build 1.8.09300. This version features complete ASP.NET support, it is compatible with VS2010 Beta 2 (in addition to VS2008, VS2005, VS2003), Add Rule dialog improvements – “Hide Rules in the Profile” and “Quick Search”, 10+ new rules including new category “CodingStyle”.
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Released: CodeIt.Right version 1.8.09300 – now compatible with VS2010 Beta 2!
Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is out and has a slick new UI. Also, this Beta has most of the features that would ship with the final version compared to the earlier Beta. Note that while new features might be added, there are chances that some of the features demonstrated here may also not be a part of the final release. But, for now, lets examine the current Beta 2. The first thing you would notice and probably like, is the UI enhancements. Herebelow, is the launch screen. Also, the start page has been modified to accommodate more useful things. The good thing is that you can completely customize the Start Page since it is a XAML based UI. You can find the start page itself as a Project at C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 10.0Common7IDEStartPages once you install the Beta. You can change it to reflect your organization specific templates, document repositories etc., Optionally you can even turn it off permanently, or, upon opening a project, using the checkbox options in the bottom left
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Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 – a first look at the UI and Web Development
Earlier, I had written this post on how you can accomplish using FileUpload control in UpdatePanel since by default it wasn’t supported. The post seems to have helped many and keeps being the most visited one. However, with the new release of Ajax Control Toolkit (v 3.0.30930) released specifically for .NET 3.5 SP1 (with Visual Studio 2008 SP1), there are couple of new controls. One of them is the AsyncFileUpload control.
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FileUpload in UpdatePanel, ASP.NET, like Gmail
In the previous post we had examined on getting access to SQL Azure, creating your first database, accessing it with SQL Server Management Studio and then migrating the Northwind database schema to SQL Azure using the SQL Azure Migration Wizard Beta. As explained earlier, the SQL Azure Migration Wizard migrates the schema of your database after tuning it for working with SQL Azure. However, we would still need to migrate the Data to our SQL Azure Server. At the moment, the step I took was to open the instnwnd.sql script in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMO) and copy the Insert statements alone to execute. Note that, you cannot run all the scripts directly onto the SQL Azure portal like I explained earlier due to the limitations / formats supported currently in SQL Azure. To begin with, open “C:SQL Server 2000 Sample Databases” folder (the default location where Northwind and pubs sample database gets installed) and double click on the instnwnd.sql script. It opens up in SSMO. Examine the scripts and navigate to the portion where the INSERT statements begin. I took the portion and put it up as a single insert script. You can download the script from the link below:- Running the scripts from SQL Server Management Studio As explained in my previous post, open SSMO and cancel the initial login prompt. Click on “New Query” and specify the server name as the fully qualified Azure Server name i.e. .ctp.database.windows.net, specify the user name, password. Click on “Options” and specify “Northwind” at “Connect to database” option. Click “Connect”. It should be able to connect provided you have specified the path, username, password etc., correctly and created the “Northwind” database as per the previous post. There will be a small error prompt that comes before opening the Query window, as below. You can ignore that and click “ok” Once you are in the SqlQuery1.sql screen you can check if the database is created and the tables are there by running a bunch of few queries as below:- SELECT * FROM Products SELECT * FROM Orders etc., You will get blank result sets since we haven’t migrated the data yet
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Taking your Northwind Database to SQL Azure and binding it to an ASP.NET Grid View – Part II
SQL Azure is the latest buzz around Cloud Computing and the ability to take relational database to the cloud as is, is something most would welcome compared to the earlier model of ACE (Authority, Container, Entity) that was there when SQL Azure was SSDS. Well, like others, I also got interested and wanted to explore the SQL Azure. SQL Azure is currently in CTP and offers token based access. I would briefly outline the steps here on getting the SQL Azure Token, although Jim O’Neil has a nice post on this Visit SQL Azure Registration at Microsoft Connect Sign in with your Live ID (Passport, Hotmail, MSN, Live) Fill in the details and submit the form You should receive the invitation code in an email from an alias “SQL Azure Talk” or something similar (note this may take from a day to a week until the CTP is available) Visit https://sql.azure.com Fill in the Invitation Code received in the email You will be directed a page similar to below Click on the “Manage” link in the right. It will take you to a page as below:- This page is where you can create / delete databases as well as get the connection string etc., In the top of this page you will also see “Connection Strings” , “Reset Password” icons and also the Server Name, User Name that you chose, and the location where the database is hosted
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Taking your Northwind Database to SQL Azure and binding it to an ASP.NET Grid View – Part I
Recently I upgraded to Windows 7 RTM and started setting up my machine. The usual set of tools I install are Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008, Expression etc., Also, for .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 I would require to install the respective SP1 releases as well since they are mandatory and contain tons of new features as well. I had done this in the past in Windows Vista, Windows 7 RC etc., and while I was trying to install .NET 3.5 SP1 on the new Windows 7 RTM, it surprisingly, popped up a message as below:- I then realized that .NET 3.5 SP1 is now available in Windows Features under “Control Panel – Programs – Turn Windows Features on or off”. All I had to do, was enable it.
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.NET 3.5 SP1 now available as a Windows Feature in Windows 7 RTM
You must have heard the buzz around the WebsiteSpark program that we are launching today. It is a great program that covers a lot of concerns start-ups have – where is the money for me to buy all the software. Earlier, we had launched programs such as BizPark for the start up eco-system, DreamSpark for students which has helped millions of people world wide. Today, we are launching WebsiteSpark program targeted specifically at small web companies who develop and design websites. You can read more about the terms, what you get for free etc., from this great post by Scott Guthrie I think this is the best time to be an entrepreneur and if we could help you in a little way, we are happy to do that
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WebsiteSpark – Helping your small web development companies