DiscountASP.NET announces enhancing our SQL Server hosting with the launch of SQL Server Profiling as a service. SQL Profiler is a powerful tool that allows the application and database developer to troubleshoot general SQL locking problems, performance issues, and perform database tuning
Read the rest here:
DiscountASP.NET Launches SQL Server Profiling as a Service
We updated the browser definitions files included with ASP.NET 4 to include information on recent browsers and devices such as Google Chrome and the iPhone. You can use these browser definition files with earlier versions of ASP.NET such as ASP.NET 3.5
More here:
Use ASP.NET 4 Browser Definitions with ASP.NET 3.5
One of the comments I got on my last post on view/view model hookup options was the following: I’ve been a mvvm fan but actually when I see all the hoops to jump through I wonder at times how effective this is So I wanted to take a moment to list what I thought compelled me to adopt the ViewModel pattern of client application development (so much so, that I now feel odd writing Silverlight and sometimes even Ajax apps in any other way). Some will be obvious benefits, especially to those already using MVVM in their everyday development, but I want to throw in a couple that are farther out exploratory ideas that I am thinking about
Link:
The Case for ViewModel
Some time back, I blogged about different options to hook up a view to its view model when following the ViewModel (aka MVVM) pattern. There are multiple approaches in use out there. I raised the possibility of a convention-based approach in addition to existing ones like the ViewModelLocator pattern.
Go here to see the original:
View/ViewModel Association – Convention and Configuration-based Approaches
As promised in the previous post, here is a first look on Visual Studio 2010 RC. i am sure many of you have downloaded the bits already so this is for those who are waiting yet. VS 2010 RC is an upgrade to the Beta 2 that was shipped last year. This build has been heavily focussed on implementing community feedback and fixing performance issues reported. The start up screen looks as below. A little darker compared to the Beta 2 build. You can read my earlier post on First look on Beta 2 here I didn’t notice much of changes to the project templates as yet. But, I did visibly see a great improvement in performance. Particularly when working with projects / solutions, Beta 2 used to take up a lot of resource which isn’t the case with this RC Build. Couple of quick things that have been well documented and blogged about are that, there is no Express edition for this RC release. Silverlight 4 development and WCF RIA with Silverlight 4 isn’t supported in this RC build. Similarly, the RC build doesn’t support the Silverlight Business Application Development although the template is listed. When you select the template and try creating a project, it fails with “This project type is not supported by the current version” error
Read the original post:
Visual Studio 2010 RC first look and Windows Azure Tools
Warning: This is my experimentation and cannot be taken as a recommendation ! I gave it to my temptation and installed the Visual Studio 2010 RC despite having a lot of upcoming WCF RIA Services talks. (One is scheduled right tomorrow and it would be disastrous to try anything fancy) Much has been explained around the non-availability of Silverlight 4 Tools updated version for this RC release and subsequently the inability to work with WCF RIA Services and SL4. Infact, Tim Heuer has put up a nice FAQ on VS 2010 RC and Silverlight Development However, I went ahead and installed VS 2010 RC and the WCF RIA Services Preview for VS 2010 Beta 2, hoping to get it work at least for catering to ASP.NET Development. Much to my surprise, it did work! I could just grab the DLLs from C:Program FilesMicrosoft SDKsRIA Servicesv1.0LibrariesServer onto my project reference and grab the System.Web.DomainServices.WebControls.dll file onto my toolbox and then was able to use the DomainDataSource control in the Webform. Similarly the “Domain Service Class” template was also available as a “Add – New Item” which I could use to generate the middle tier. I have written a detailed step by step on this in my earlier post However, note that, this only works and doesn’t provide any warranty. Also, the SL4 Tools don’t work which means, this is not going to help on the Silverlight development front.
Originally posted here:
WCF RIA Services Preview and the Visual Studio 2010 RC
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.
Follow this link:
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 !!!
Continue reading here:
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.
Original post:
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.
Read the original:
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.
Read the rest here:
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.
More:
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.
Here is the original post:
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.
Continued here:
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.
Read the original here:
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”.
See the original post:
Released: CodeIt.Right version 1.8.09300 – now compatible with VS2010 Beta 2!