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Communication Between Your PC and Azure VM via Windows Azure Connect

- by Shaun

With the new release of the Windows Azure platform there are a lot of new features available. In my previous post I introduced a little bit about one of them, the remote desktop access to azure virtual machine. Now I would like to talk about another cool stuff – Windows Azure Connect. What’s Windows Azure Connect I would like to quote the definition of the Windows Azure Connect in MSDN With Windows Azure Connect, you can use a simple user interface to configure IP-sec protected connections between computers or virtual machines (VMs) in your organization’s network, and roles running in Windows Azure. IP-sec protects communications over Internet Protocol (IP) networks through the use of cryptographic security services. There’s an image available at the MSDN as well that I would like to forward here As we can see, using the Windows Azure Connect the Worker Role 1 and Web Role 1 are connected with the development machines and database servers which some of them are inside the organization some are not. With the Windows Azure Connect, the roles deployed on the cloud could consume the resource which located inside our Intranet or anywhere in the world. That means the roles can connect to the local database, access the local shared resource such as share files, folders and printers, etc. Difference between Windows Azure Connect and AppFabric It seems that the Windows Azure Connect are duplicated with the Windows Azure AppFabric. Both of them are aiming to solve the problem on how to communication between the resource in the cloud and inside the local network. The table below lists the differences in my understanding. Category Windows Azure Connect Windows Azure AppFabric Purpose An IP-sec connection between the local machines and azure roles. An application service running on the cloud. Connectivity IP-sec, Domain-joint Net Tcp, Http, Https Components Windows Azure Connect Driver Service Bus, Access Control, Caching Usage Azure roles connect to local database server Azure roles use local shared files, folders and printers, etc. Azure roles join the local AD. Expose the local service to Internet. Move the authorization process to the cloud. Integrate with existing identities such as Live ID, Google ID, etc. with existing local services. Utilize the distributed cache. And also some scenarios on which of them should be used. Scenario Connect AppFabric I have a service deployed in the Intranet and I want the people can use it from the Internet. Y I have a website deployed on Azure and need to use a database which deployed inside the company. And I don’t want to expose the database to the Internet. Y I have a service deployed in the Intranet and is using AD authorization. I have a website deployed on Azure which needs to use this service. Y I have a service deployed in the Intranet and some people on the Internet can use it but need to be authorized and authenticated. Y I have a service in Intranet, and a website deployed on Azure. This service can be used from Internet and that website should be able to use it as well by AD authorization for more functionalities. Y Y How to Enable Windows Azure Connect OK we talked a lot information about the Windows Azure Connect and differences with the Windows Azure AppFabric. Now let’s see how to enable and use the Windows Azure Connect. First of all, since this feature is in CTP stage we should apply before use it. On the Windows Azure Portal we can see our CTP features status under Home, Beta Program page. You can send the apply to join the Beta Programs to Microsoft in this page. After a few days the Microsoft will send an email to you (the email of your Live ID) when it’s available. In my case we can see that the Windows Azure Connect had been activated by Microsoft and then we can click the Connect button on top, or we can click the Virtual Network item from the left navigation bar. The first thing we need, if it’s our first time to enter the Connect page, is to enable the Windows Azure Connect. After that we can see our Windows Azure Connect information in this page. Add a Local Machine to Azure Connect As we explained below the Windows Azure Connect can make an IP-sec connection between the local machines and azure role instances. So that we firstly add a local machine into our Azure Connect. To do this we will click the Install Local Endpoint button on top and then the portal will give us an URL. Copy this URL to the machine we want to add and it will download the software to us. This software will be installed in the local machines which we want to join the Connect. After installed there will be a tray-icon appeared to indicate this machine had been joint our Connect. The local application will be refreshed to the Windows Azure Platform every 5 minutes but we can click the Refresh button to let it retrieve the latest status at once. Currently my local machine is ready for connect and we can see my machine in the Windows Azure Portal if we switched back to the portal and selected back Activated Endpoints node. Add a Windows Azure Role to Azure Connect Let’s create a very simple azure project with a basic ASP.NET web role inside. To make it available on Windows Azure Connect we will open the azure project property of this role from the solution explorer in the Visual Studio, and select the Virtual Network tab, check the Activate Windows Azure Connect. The next step is to get the activation token from the Windows Azure Portal. In the same page there is a button named Get Activation Token. Click this button then the portal will display the token to me. We copied this token and pasted to the box in the Visual Studio tab. Then we deployed this application to azure. After completed the deployment we can see the role instance was listed in the Windows Azure Portal - Virtual Connect section. Establish the Connect Group The final task is to create a connect group which contains the machines and role instances need to be connected each other. This can be done in the portal very easy. The machines and instances will NOT be connected until we created the group for them. The machines and instances can be used in one or more groups. In the Virtual Connect section click the Groups and Roles node from the left side navigation bar and clicked the Create Group button on top. This will bring up a dialog to us. What we need to do is to specify a group name, description; and then we need to select the local computers and azure role instances into this group. After the Azure Fabric updated the group setting we can see the groups and the endpoints in the page. And if we switch back to the local machine we can see that the tray-icon have been changed and the status turned connected. The Windows Azure Connect will update the group information every 5 minutes. If you find the status was still in Disconnected please right-click the tray-icon and select the Refresh menu to retrieve the latest group policy to make it connected. Test the Azure Connect between the Local Machine and the Azure Role Instance Now our local machine and azure role instance had been connected. This means each of them can communication to others in IP level. For example we can open the SQL Server port so that our azure role can connect to it by using the machine name or the IP address. The Windows Azure Connect uses IPv6 to connect between the local machines and role instances. You can get the IP address from the Windows Azure Portal Virtual Network section when select an endpoint. I don’t want to take a full example for how to use the Connect but would like to have two very simple tests. The first one would be PING. When a local machine and role instance are connected through the Windows Azure Connect we can PING any of them if we opened the ICMP protocol in the Filewall setting. To do this we need to run a command line before test. Open the command window on the local machine and the role instance, execute the command as following netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="ICMPv6" dir=in action=allow enable=yes protocol=icmpv6 Thanks to Jason Chen, Patriek van Dorp, Anton Staykov and Steve Marx, they helped me to enable the ICMPv6 setting. For the full discussion we made please visit here. You can use the Remote Desktop Access feature to logon the azure role instance. Please refer my previous blog post to get to know how to use the Remote Desktop Access in Windows Azure. Then we can PING the machine or the role instance by specifying its name. Below is the screen I PING my local machine from my azure instance. We can use the IPv6 address to PING each other as well. Like the image following I PING to my role instance from my local machine thought the IPv6 address. Another example I would like to demonstrate here is folder sharing. I shared a folder in my local machine and then if we logged on the role instance we can see the folder content from the file explorer window. Summary In this blog post I introduced about another new feature – Windows Azure Connect. With this feature our local resources and role instances (virtual machines) can be connected to each other. In this way we can make our azure application using our local stuff such as database servers, printers, etc. without expose them to Internet. 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.

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Firefox for NTLM secured sites

- by Sarang

Spent the last weekend fighting to get firefox to connect to a sharepoint portal hosting my homegrown TFS instance's TFS/WEB and team project portal from a friends' place. Firefox is THE favourite browser and I was hating to se it fail miserably with NTLM authentication. Fun part is it showed the login prompt accepted credentials and like a pestering young puppy came back for the same credentials. After banging my head and various "I don't know what I don't know" attempts I decided to play god and entered the firefox's advance config mode. And voila! there sits a nifty little option called network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris. Assign your URI to it and you are through. No more shameface before those Chrome/Opera users. :). To enter FireFox's god mode, open a new tab and type about:config in the address bar. There is a search box which certainly comes handy shifting through hundreds of options. The root lies in firefox's default mechanism of not allowing NTLM passthrough authentication. Firefox defaults to digest credentials which are blatantly refused by a web app expecting NTLM which results in authentication failure and Firefox keeps asking for credentials over and over again. The steps listed above are same as adding a website to your trusted sites' list in Internet Explorer.

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Windows Azure Evolution – Welcome to VS2012

- by Shaun

When the Microsoft released the first preview version of Windows 8 and Visual Studio, many people in the community were asking if the windows azure tool is available to it. The answer was “NO”. Microsoft promised that the windows azure tool will only support the Visual Studio 2010 but when the 2012 was final released, windows azure tool should be work. But now alone with the new windows azure platform was published we got the latest Windows Azure SDK 1.7, which is compatible to the Visual Studio 2012 RC. You can retrieve the latest version of the Windows Azure SDK through Web Platform Installer, which I think it’s the easiest and simplest way to download and install, since besides the SDK itself it also needs some other components. To download the latest windows azure SDK from Web Platform Installer, just go to the windows azure website and clicked the Develop, .NET and click the blue “install” button. Then you need to select which version of Visual Studio you want to use, Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Studio 2012 RC. After selected the current version you will download an EXE file. This file will lead you to install the Web Platform Installer 4.0 (if you haven’t installed) and the latest windows azure SDK. You can see the version name is June 2012, 1.7. Finally the WebPI will detect the dependent components you need to download and begin to install. But if you want to challenge yourself you can download the components and install them manually. The standalone installations are listed in this page with the instruction on how to install them with necessary pre-requirements. Once you finished the installation you can open the Visual Studio 2012 RC and as usual, it need to be run as administrator. If you clicked the New Project link from the start page, navigated to Cloud category you will find that there no project template available. Is there anything wrong? So, if you changed the target framework from the default .NET 4.5 to .NET 4 you will see the azure project template. This is because, currently the windows azure instance does not support .NET 4.5. After clicked OK you will see the role creation window, which is similar as what you have seen before. But there are some new role templates in this SDK. Firstly you will have ASP.NET MVC 4 web role available, which means you can create ASP.NET MVC 4 applications for internet, intranet, mobile and WebAPI on the cloud. Then there are two new worker role templates, “Cache Worker Role” and “Worker Role with Service Bus Queue”. “Worker Role with Service Bus Queue” is a worker role which had added necessary references to access the Windows Azure Service Bus Queue. It also have some basic sample code in the worker role class which could read messages from the queue when started. The “Cache Worker Role” is a worker role which has the in-memory distributed cache feature enabled by default. This feature is different than the Windows Azure Caching. It allows the role instance to use its memory as a in-memory distributed cache clusters. By using this feature you can have one or more worker roles as some dedicate cache clusters. Alternatively, you can make part of your web role and worker role’s memory as the cache clusters as well. Let’s just create an ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Role, and click F5 to run it under the local emulator. If you have been working with azure for a while you should know that I need to setup the local storage emulator before running locally if it’s a fresh azure SDK installation. But in this version when we started our azure project the Visual Studio will check if the storage emulator had been initialized. If not, it will run the initializer automatically. And as you can see, in this version the storage emulator relies on the SQL Server 2012 Local DB feature. It will create the emulator database and tables in the default local database. You can set the storage emulator to use a standard SQL Server default instance by using the command “dsinit /instance:.”. The “dsinit” tool now is located at %PROGRAM FILES%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Azure\Emulator\devstore After the Visual Studio complied and deployed the package our website should be shown in the browser. This is the MVC 4 Web Role home page on my Windows 8 machine in IE10. Another thing you might notice is that, in this version the compute emulator utilizes IIS Express to host the web roles instead of the full IIS. You can add breakpoint in the code and debug, and you can use the local storage emulator to test your code for accessing the storage service. All of them are same as what your are doing now on SDK 1.6. You can switch to use IIS to run your web role in local emulator. Just open the windows azure porject property windows, in the Web page select “Use IIS Web Server”. For more information about this please have a look on Nuno’s blog post. In the role property page in Visual Studio there’s no massive changes. You can configure your role settings such as the endpoints, certificates and local storage, etc.. One thing was added is the Caching tab. Here you can specify enable the caching feature or not, and how much memory you want to use as the cache cluster. I will introduce more details about it in the future posts. The publish and package feature are also no change. You can publish your project to azure directly through Visual Studio 2012, while you can create the package and upload manually. Below is the SDK version of my deployment which is 1.7.30602.1703 in the developer portal. Summary In this post I introduced about the new Windows Azure SDK 1.7 especially on how it works on the latest Visual Studio 2012 RC. There’s no significant changes in the visual studio tool in this version but some small enhancement such as ASP.NET MVC 4, Cache Worker Role, using SQL 2012 Local DB and IIS Express, etc.. 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.

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Rob Blackwell on interoperability and Azure

- by Eric Nelson

At QCon in March we had a sample Azure application implemented in both Java and Ruby to demonstrate that the Windows Azure Platform is not just about .NET. The following is an interesting interview with Rob Blackwell, the R&D director of the partner who implemented the application. UK Interoperability Team Interviews Rob Blackwell, R&D Director at Active Web Solutions. Is Microsoft taking interoperability seriously? Yes. In the past, I think Microsoft has, quite rightly come in for criticism, but architects and developers should look at this again. The Interoperability Bridges site (http://www.interoperabilitybridges.com/ ) shows a wide range of projects that allow interoperability from Java, Ruby and PHP for example. The Windows Azure platform has been architected with interoperable APIs in mind. It's straightforward to access the various storage facilities from just about any language or platform. Azure compute is capable of running more than just C# applications! Why is interoperability important to you? My company provides consultancy and bespoke development services. We're a Microsoft Gold Partner, but we live in the real world where companies have a mix of technologies provided by a variety of vendors. When developing an enterprise software solution, you rarely have a completely blank canvas. We often see integration scenarios where we need to exchange data with legacy systems. It's not unusual to see modern Silverlight applications being built on top of Java or Mainframe based back ends. Could you give us some examples of where interoperability has been important for your projects? We developed an innovative Sea Safety system for the RNLI Lifeboats here in the UK. Commercial Fishing is one of the most dangerous professions and we helped developed the MOB Guardian System which uses satellite technology and man overboard devices to raise the alarm when a fisherman gets into trouble. The solution is implemented in .NET running on Windows, but without interoperable standards, it would have been impossible to communicate with the satellite gateway technology. For more information, please see the case study: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=4000005892 More recently, we were asked to build a web site to accompany the QCon 2010 conference in London to help demonstrate and promote interoperability. We built the site using Java and Restlet and hosted it in Windows Azure Compute. The site accepts feedback from visitors and all the data is stored in Windows Azure Storage. We also ported the application to Ruby on Rails for demonstration purposes. Visitors to the stand were surprised that this was even possible. Why should Java developers be interested in Windows Azure? Windows Azure Storage consists of Blobs, Queues and Tables. The storage is scalable, durable, secure and cost-effective. Using the WindowsAzure4j library, it's easy to use, and takes just a few lines of code. If you are writing an application with large data storage requirements, or you want an offsite backup, it makes a lot of sense. Running Java applications in Azure Compute is straightforward with tools like the Tomcat Solution Accelerator (http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/winazuretomcat )and AzureRunMe (http://azurerunme.codeplex.com/ ). The Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus can also be used to connect heterogeneous systems running on different networks and in different data centres. How can The Service Bus be considered an interoperability solution? I think that the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus is one of Microsoft’s best kept secrets. Think of it as “a globally scalable application plumbing kit in the sky”. If you have used Enterprise Service Buses before, you’ll be familiar with the concept. Applications can connect to the service bus to securely exchange data – these can be point to point or multicast links. With the AppFabric Service Bus, the applications can exist anywhere that has access to the Internet and the connections can traverse firewalls. This makes it easy to extend or scale your application or reach out to other networks and technologies. For example, let’s say you have a SQL Server database running on premises and you want to expose the data to a Java application running in the cloud. You could set up a point to point Service Bus connection and use JDBC. Traditionally this would have been difficult or impossible without punching holes in firewalls and compromising security. Rob Blackwell is R&D Director at Active Web Solutions, www.aws.net , a Microsoft Gold Partner specialising in leading edge software solutions. He is an occasional writer and conference speaker and blogs at www.robblackwell.org.uk Related Links: UK Azure Online Community – join today. UK Windows Azure Site Start working with Windows Azure

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GuestPost: Unit Testing Entity Framework (v1) Dependent Code using TypeMock Isolator

- by Eric Nelson

Time for another guest post (check out others in the series), this time bringing together the world of mocking with the world of Entity Framework. A big thanks to Moses for agreeing to do this. Unit Testing Entity Framework Dependent Code using TypeMock Isolator by Muhammad Mosa Introduction Unit testing data access code in my opinion is a challenging thing. Let us consider unit tests and integration tests. In integration tests you are allowed to have environmental dependencies such as a physical database connection to insert, update, delete or retrieve your data. However when performing unit tests it is often much more efficient and productive to remove environmental dependencies. Instead you will need to fake these dependencies. Faking a database (also known as mocking) can be relatively straight forward but the version of Entity Framework released with .Net 3.5 SP1 has a number of implementation specifics which actually makes faking the existence of a database quite difficult. Faking Entity Framework As mentioned earlier, to effectively unit test you will need to fake/simulate Entity Framework calls to the database. There are many free open source mocking frameworks that can help you achieve this but it will require additional effort to overcome & workaround a number of limitations in those frameworks. Examples of these limitations include: Not able to fake calls to non virtual methods Not able to fake sealed classes Not able to fake LINQ to Entities queries (replace database calls with in-memory collection calls) There is a mocking framework which is flexible enough to handle limitations such as those above. The commercially available TypeMock Isolator can do the job for you with less code and ultimately more readable unit tests. I’m going to demonstrate tackling one of those limitations using MoQ as my mocking framework. Then I will tackle the same issue using TypeMock Isolator. Mocking Entity Framework with MoQ One basic need when faking Entity Framework is to fake the ObjectContext. This cannot be done by passing any connection string. You have to pass a correct Entity Framework connection string that specifies CSDL, SSDL and MSL locations along with a provider connection string. Assuming we are going to do that, we’ll explore another limitation. The limitation we are going to face now is related to not being able to fake calls to non-virtual/overridable members with MoQ. I have the following repository method that adds an EntityObject (instance of a Blog entity) to Blogs entity set in an ObjectContext. public override void Add(Blog blog) { if(BlogContext.Blogs.Any(b=>b.Name == blog.Name)) { throw new InvalidOperationException("Blog with same name already exists!"); } BlogContext.AddToBlogs(blog); } The method does a very simple check that the name of the new Blog entity instance doesn’t exist. This is done through the simple LINQ query above. If the blog doesn’t already exist it simply adds it to the current context to be saved when SaveChanges of the ObjectContext instance (e.g. BlogContext) is called. However, if a blog with the same name exits, and exception (InvalideOperationException) will be thrown. Let us now create a unit test for the Add method using MoQ. [TestMethod] [ExpectedException(typeof(InvalidOperationException))] public void Add_Should_Throw_InvalidOperationException_When_Blog_With_Same_Name_Already_Exits() { //(1) We shouldn't depend on configuration when doing unit tests! But, //its a workaround to fake the ObjectContext string connectionString = ConfigurationManager .ConnectionStrings["MyBlogConnString"] .ConnectionString; //(2) Arrange: Fake ObjectContext var fakeContext = new Mock<MyBlogContext>(connectionString); //(3) Next Line will pass, as ObjectContext now can be faked with proper connection string var repo = new BlogRepository(fakeContext.Object); //(4) Create fake ObjectQuery<Blog>. Will be used to substitute MyBlogContext.Blogs property var fakeObjectQuery = new Mock<ObjectQuery<Blog>>("[Blogs]", fakeContext.Object); //(5) Arrange: Set Expectations //Next line will throw an exception by MoQ: //System.ArgumentException: Invalid setup on a non-overridable member fakeContext.SetupGet(c=>c.Blogs).Returns(fakeObjectQuery.Object); fakeObjectQuery.Setup(q => q.Any(b => b.Name == "NewBlog")).Returns(true); //Act repo.Add(new Blog { Name = "NewBlog" }); } This test method is checking to see if the correct exception ([ExpectedException(typeof(InvalidOperationException))]) is thrown when a developer attempts to Add a blog with a name that’s already exists. On (1) a connection string is initialized from configuration file. To retrieve the full connection string. On (2) a fake ObjectContext is being created. The ObjectContext here is MyBlogContext and its being created using this var fakeContext = new Mock<MyBlogContext>(connectionString); This way a fake context is being created using MoQ. On (3) a BlogRepository instance is created. BlogRepository has dependency on generate Entity Framework ObjectContext, MyObjectContext. And so the fake context is passed to the constructor. var repo = new BlogRepository(fakeContext.Object); On (4) a fake instance of ObjectQuery<Blog> is being created to use as a substitute to MyObjectContext.Blogs property as we will see in (5). On (5) setup an expectation for calling Blogs property of MyBlogContext and substitute the return result with the fake ObjectQuery<Blog> instance created on (4). When you run this test it will fail with MoQ throwing an exception because of this line: fakeContext.SetupGet(c=>c.Blogs).Returns(fakeObjectQuery.Object); This happens because the generate property MyBlogContext.Blogs is not virtual/overridable. And assuming it is virtual or you managed to make it virtual it will fail at the following line throwing the same exception: fakeObjectQuery.Setup(q => q.Any(b => b.Name == "NewBlog")).Returns(true); This time the test will fail because the Any extension method is not virtual/overridable. You won’t be able to replace ObjectQuery<Blog> with fake in memory collection to test your LINQ to Entities queries. Now lets see how replacing MoQ with TypeMock Isolator can help. Mocking Entity Framework with TypeMock Isolator The following is the same test method we had above for MoQ but this time implemented using TypeMock Isolator: [TestMethod] [ExpectedException(typeof(InvalidOperationException))] public void Add_New_Blog_That_Already_Exists_Should_Throw_InvalidOperationException() { //(1) Create fake in memory collection of blogs var fakeInMemoryBlogs = new List<Blog> {new Blog {Name = "FakeBlog"}}; //(2) create fake context var fakeContext = Isolate.Fake.Instance<MyBlogContext>(); //(3) Setup expected call to MyBlogContext.Blogs property through the fake context Isolate.WhenCalled(() => fakeContext.Blogs) .WillReturnCollectionValuesOf(fakeInMemoryBlogs.AsQueryable()); //(4) Create new blog with a name that already exits in the fake in memory collection in (1) var blog = new Blog {Name = "FakeBlog"}; //(5) Instantiate instance of BlogRepository (Class under test) var repo = new BlogRepository(fakeContext); //(6) Acting by adding the newly created blog () repo.Add(blog); } When running the above test method it will pass as the Add method of BlogRepository is going to throw an InvalidOperationException which is the expected behaviour. Nothing prevents us from faking out the database interaction! Even faking ObjectContext at (2) didn’t require a connection string. On (3) Isolator sets up a faking result for MyBlogContext.Blogs when its being called through the fake instance fakeContext created on (2). The faking result is just an in-memory collection declared an initialized on (1). Finally at (6) action we call the Add method of BlogRepository passing a new Blog instance that has a name that’s already exists in the fake in-memory collection which we set up at (1). As expected the test will pass because it will throw the expected exception defined on top of the test method - InvalidOperationException. TypeMock Isolator succeeded in faking Entity Framework with ease. Conclusion We explored how to write a simple unit test using TypeMock Isolator for code which is using Entity Framework. We also explored a few of the limitations of other mocking frameworks which TypeMock is successfully able to handle. There are workarounds that you can use to overcome limitations when using MoQ or Rhino Mock, however the workarounds will require you to write more code and your tests will likely be more complex. For a comparison between different mocking frameworks take a look at this document produced by TypeMock. You might also want to check out this open source project to compare mocking frameworks. I hope you enjoyed this post Muhammad Mosa http://mosesofegypt.net/ http://twitter.com/mosessaur Screencast of unit testing Entity Framework Related Links GuestPost: Introduction to Mocking GuesPost: Typemock Isolator – Much more than an Isolation framework

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Troubleshooting SQL Azure Connectivity

- by kaleidoscope

Technorati Tags: Rituraj,Connectivity Issues with SQL Azure Troubleshooting SQL Azure Connectivity How to resolve some of the common connectivity error messages that you would see while connecting to SQL Azure A transport-level error has occurred when receiving results from the server. (Provider: TCP Provider, error: 0 - An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host.) System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding. The statement has been terminated. An error has occurred while establishing a connection to the server. When connecting to SQL Server 2005, this failure may be caused by the fact that under the default settings SQL Server does not allow remote connections Error: Microsoft SQL Native Client: Unable to complete login process due to delay in opening server connection. 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. Some troubleshooting tips a) Verify Azure Firewall Settings and Service Availability Reference: SQL Azure Firewall - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee621782.aspx b) Verify that you can reach our Virtual IP Reference: Telnet Troubleshooting Guide - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753360(WS.10).aspx Reference: How to Use TRACERT to Troubleshoot TCP/IP Problems in Windows - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314868 c) Windows Firewall on the local machine Frequently Asked Questions - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb736261(VS.85).aspx Reference: Windows Firewall with Advanced Security Getting Started Guide - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc748991(WS.10).aspx d) Other Firewall products Reference: http://www.whatismyip.com/ e) Generate a Network Trace using Microsoft Network Monitor tool Reference: How to capture network traffic with Network Monitor - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/148942 f) SQL Azure Denial of Service (DOS) Guard SQL Azure utilizes techniques to prevent denial of service attacks. If your connection is getting reset by our service due to a potential DOS attack you would be able to see a three way handshake established and then a RESET in your network trace.

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Don’t Forget! In-Memory Databases are Hot

- by andrewbrust

If you’re left scratching your head over SAP’s intention to acquire Sybase for almost $6 million, you’re not alone. Despite Sybase’s 1990s reign as the supreme database standard in certain sectors (including Wall Street), the company’s flagship product has certainly fallen from grace. Why would SAP pay a greater than 50% premium over Sybase’s closing price on the day of the announcement just to acquire a relational database which is firmly stuck in maintenance mode? Well there’s more to Sybase than the relational database product. Take, for example, its mobile application platform. It hit Gartner’s “Leaders’ Quadrant” in January of last year, and SAP needs a good mobile play. Beyond the platform itself, Sybase has a slew of mobile services; click this link to look them over. There’s a second major asset that Sybase has though, and I wonder if it figured prominently into SAP’s bid: Sybase IQ. Sybase IQ is a columnar database. Columnar databases place values from a given database column contiguously, unlike conventional relational databases, which store all of a row’s data in close proximity. Storing column values together works well in aggregation reporting scenarios, because the figures to be aggregated can be scanned in one efficient step. It also makes for high rates of compression because values from a single column tend to be close to each other in magnitude and may contain long sequences of repeating values. Highly compressible databases use much less disk storage and can be largely or wholly loaded into memory, resulting in lighting fast query performance. For an ERP company like SAP, with its own legacy BI platform (SAP BW) and the entire range of Business Objects and Crystal Reports BI products (which it acquired in 2007) query performance is extremely important. And it’s a competitive necessity too. QlikTech has built an entire company on a columnar, in-memory BI product (QlikView). So too has startup company Vertica. IBM’s TM1 product has been doing in-memory OLAP for years. And guess who else has the in-memory religion? Microsoft does, in the form of its new PowerPivot product. I expect the technology in PowerPivot to become strategic to the full-blown SQL Server Analysis Services product and the entire Microsoft BI stack. I sure don’t blame SAP for jumping on the in-memory bandwagon, if indeed the Sybase acquisition is, at least in part, motivated by that. It will be interesting to watch and see what SAP does with Sybase’s product line-up (assuming the acquisition closes), including the core database, the mobile platform, IQ, and even tools like PowerBuilder. It is also fascinating to watch columnar’s encroachment on relational. Perhaps this acquisition will be columnar’s tipping point and people will no longer see it as a fad. Are you listening Larry Ellison?

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The Incremental Architect´s Napkin - #1 - It´s about the money, stupid

- by Ralf Westphal

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/theArchitectsNapkin/archive/2014/05/24/the-incremental-architectacutes-napkin---1---itacutes-about-the.aspx Software development is an economic endeavor. A customer is only willing to pay for value. What makes a software valuable is required to become a trait of the software. We as software developers thus need to understand and then find a way to implement requirements. Whether or in how far a customer really can know beforehand what´s going to be valuable for him/her in the end is a topic of constant debate. Some aspects of the requirements might be less foggy than others. Sometimes the customer does not know what he/she wants. Sometimes he/she´s certain to want something - but then is not happy when that´s delivered. Nevertheless requirements exist. And developers will only be paid if they deliver value. So we better focus on doing that. Although is might sound trivial I think it´s important to state the corollary: We need to be able to trace anything we do as developers back to some requirement. You decide to use Go as the implementation language? Well, what´s the customer´s requirement this decision is linked to? You decide to use WPF as the GUI technology? What´s the customer´s requirement? You decide in favor of a layered architecture? What´s the customer´s requirement? You decide to put code in three classes instead of just one? What´s the customer´s requirement behind that? You decide to use MongoDB over MySql? What´s the customer´s requirement behind that? etc. I´m not saying any of these decisions are wrong. I´m just saying whatever you decide be clear about the requirement that´s driving your decision. You have to be able to answer the question: Why do you think will X deliver more value to the customer than the alternatives? Customers are not interested in romantic ideals of hard working, good willing, quality focused craftsmen. They don´t care how and why you work - as long as what you deliver fulfills their needs. They want to trust you to recognize this as your top priority - and then deliver. That´s all. Fundamental aspects of requirements If you´re like me you´re probably not used to such scrutinization. You want to be trusted as a professional developer - and decide quite a few things following your gut feeling. Or by relying on “established practices”. That´s ok in general and most of the time - but still… I think we should be more conscious about our decisions. Which would make us more responsible, even more professional. But without further guidance it´s hard to reason about many of the myriad decisions we´ve to make over the course of a software project. What I found helpful in this situation is structuring requirements into fundamental aspects. Instead of one large heap of requirements then there are smaller blobs. With them it´s easier to check if a decisions falls in their scope. Sure, every project has it´s very own requirements. But all of them belong to just three different major categories, I think. Any requirement either pertains to functionality, non-functional aspects or sustainability. For short I call those aspects: Functionality, because such requirements describe which transformations a software should offer. For example: A calculator software should be able to add and multiply real numbers. An auction website should enable you to set up an auction anytime or to find auctions to bid for. Quality, because such requirements describe how functionality is supposed to work, e.g. fast or secure. For example: A calculator should be able to calculate the sinus of a value much faster than you could in your head. An auction website should accept bids from millions of users. Security of Investment, because functionality and quality need not just be delivered in any way. It´s important to the customer to get them quickly - and not only today but over the course of several years. This aspect introduces time into the “requrements equation”. Security of Investments (SoI) sure is a non-functional requirement. But I think it´s important to not subsume it under the Quality (Q) aspect. That´s because SoI has quite special properties. For one, SoI for software means something completely different from what it means for hardware. If you buy hardware (a car, a hair blower) you find that a worthwhile investment, if the hardware does not change it´s functionality or quality over time. A car still running smoothly with hardly any rust spots after 10 years of daily usage would be a very secure investment. So for hardware (or material products, if you like) “unchangeability” (in the face of usage) is desirable. With software you want the contrary. Software that cannot be changed is a waste. SoI for software means “changeability”. You want to be sure that the software you buy/order today can be changed, adapted, improved over an unforseeable number of years so as fit changes in its usage environment. But that´s not the only reason why the SoI aspect is special. On top of changeability[1] (or evolvability) comes immeasurability. Evolvability cannot readily be measured by counting something. Whether the changeability is as high as the customer wants it, cannot be determined by looking at metrics like Lines of Code or Cyclomatic Complexity or Afferent Coupling. They may give a hint… but they are far, far from precise. That´s because of the nature of changeability. It´s different from performance or scalability. Also it´s because a customer cannot tell upfront, “how much” evolvability he/she wants. Whether requirements regarding Functionality (F) and Q have been met, a customer can tell you very quickly and very precisely. A calculation is missing, the calculation takes too long, the calculation time degrades with increased load, the calculation is accessible to the wrong users etc. That´s all very or at least comparatively easy to determine. But changeability… That´s a whole different thing. Nevertheless over time the customer will develop a feedling if changeability is good enough or degrading. He/she just has to check the development of the frequency of “WTF”s from developers ;-) F and Q are “timeless” requirement categories. Customers want us to deliver on them now. Just focusing on the now, though, is rarely beneficial in the long run. So SoI adds a counterweight to the requirements picture. Customers want SoI - whether they know it or not, whether they state if explicitly or not. In closing A customer´s requirements are not monolithic. They are not all made the same. Rather they fall into different categories. We as developers need to recognize these categories when confronted with some requirement - and take them into account. Only then can we make true professional decisions, i.e. conscious and responsible ones. I call this fundamental trait of software “changeability” and not “flexibility” to distinguish to whom it´s a concern. “Flexibility” to me means, software as is can easily be adapted to a change in its environment, e.g. by tweaking some config data or adding a library which gets picked up by a plug-in engine. “Flexibiltiy” thus is a matter of some user. “Changeability”, on the other hand, to me means, software can easily be changed in its structure to adapt it to new requirements. That´s a matter of the software developer. ?

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Build Explorer version 1.1 for Visual Studio Team Explorer is released

- by terje

Our free extension to Visual Studio , the folder based Build Explorer Version 1.1 has now been released, and uploaded to the Visual Studio Gallery and Codeplex. We have collected up a few changes and some bugs, as follows: Changes: Queue Default Builds can now be optionally fully enabled, fully disabled or enabled just for leaf nodes (=disabled for folders). If you got a large number of builds it was pretty scary to be able to launch all of them with just one click. However, it is nice to avoid having the dialog box up when you want to just run off a single build. That’s the reasoning between the 3rd choice here. Auto fill-in of the builds at start up and refresh This was a request that came up a lot, and which was also irritating to us. When the Team Project is opened, the Build explorer will start by itself and fill up it’s tree. So you don’t need to click the node anymore. There was also quite a bit of flashing when the tree filled up, this has been reduced to just a single top level fill before it collapses the node. The speed of the buildup of the tree has also been increased. The “All Build Definitions” node is now shown on top of the list Login box appeared in certain cross domain situations. This was a fix for the TF30063 authentication problem we had in the beginning. Hopefully the new code has that fixed properly so that both the login box and the TF30063 are gone forever. Our testing so far seems to indicate it works. If anyone gets a real problem here there are two workarounds: 1) Turn off the auto refresh to reduce the issue. If this doesn’t fix it, then 2) please reinstall the former version (go to the codeplex download site if you don’t have it anymore) Write a comment to this blog post with a description of what happens, and I will send a temporary fix asap. Bug fixes: The folder name matching was case sensitive, so “Application.CI” and “application.CI” created two different folders. View all builds not shown for leaf odes, and view builds didn’t work in all cases. There was some inconsistencies here which have been fixed. Partly fixed: The context menu to queue a new build for disabled builds should be removed, but that was a difficult one, and is still on the list, but the command will not do anything for a disabled build. Using the Queue Default Builds on a folder, and if it had some disabled builds below an error box appeared and ruined the whole experience. As a result of these fixes there has been introduced some new options, as shown below: The two first settings, the Separator symbol and the options for how to handle Queuing of default builds are set per Team Project, and is stored in the TFS source control under the BuildProcessTemplates folder, with the name Inmeta.VisualStudio.BuildExplorer.Settings.xml The next two settings need some explanations. They handle the behavior for the auto update of the build folders. First, these are stored in the local registry per user, at the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software\Inmeta\BuildExplorer. The first option Use Timed Refresh at Startup, if turned off, you will need to click the node as it is done in Version 1.0. The second option is a timed value, the time after the Build explorer node is created and until the scanning of the Build folders start. It is assumed that this is enough, and the tests so far indicates this. If you have very many builds and you see that the explorer don’t get them all, try to increase this value, and of course, notify me of your case, either here or on the Visual Gallery site.

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Comments on Comments

- by Joe Mayo

I almost tweeted a reply to Capar Kleijne's question about comments on Twitter, but realized that my opinion exceeded 140 characters. The following is based upon my experience with extremes and approaches that I find useful in code comments. There are a couple extremes that I've seen and reasons why people go the distance in each approach. The most common extreme is no comments in the code at all. A few bad reasons why this happens is because a developer is in a hurry, sloppy, or is interested in job preservation. The unfortunate result is that the code is difficult to understand and hard to maintain. The drawbacks to no comments in code are a primary reason why teachers drill the need for commenting code into our heads. This viewpoint assumes the lack of comments are bad because the code is bad, but there is another reason for not commenting that is gaining more popularity. I've heard/and read that code should be self documenting. Following this thought pattern, if code is well written with meaningful names, there should not be a reason for comments. An addendum to this argument is that comments are often neglected and get out-of-date, but the code is what is kept up-to-date. Presumably, if code contained very good naming, it would be easy to maintain. This is a noble perspective and I like the practice of meaningful naming of identifiers. However, I think it's also an extreme approach that doesn't cover important cases. i.e. If an identifier is named badly (subjective differences in opinion) or not changed appropriately during maintenance, then the badly named identifier is no more useful than a stale comment. These were the two no-comment extremes, so let's look at the too many comments extreme. On a regular basis, I'll see cases where the code is over-commented; not nearly as often as the no-comment scenarios, but still prevalent. These are examples of where every single line in the code is commented. These comments make the code harder to read because they get in the way of the algorithm. In most cases, the comments parrot what each line of code does. If a developer understands the language, then most statements are immediately intuitive. i.e. what use is it to say that I'm assigning foo to bar when it's clear what the code is doing. I think that over-commenting code is a waste of time that slows down initial development and maintenance. Understandably, the developer's intentions are admirable because they've had it beaten into their heads that they must comment. However, I think it's an extreme and prefer a more moderate approach. I don't think the extremes do justice to code because each can make maintenance harder. No comments on bad code is obviously a problem, but the other two extremes are subtle and require qualification to address properly. The problem I see with the code-as-documentation approach is that it doesn't lift the developer out of the algorithm to identify dependencies, intentions, and hacks. Any developer can read code and follow an algorithm, but they still need to know where it fits into the big picture of the application. Because of indirections with language features like interfaces, delegates, and virtual members, code can become complex. Occasionally, it's useful to point out a nuance or reason why a piece of code is there. i.e. If you've building an app that communicates via HTTP, you'll have certain headers to include for the endpoint, and it could be useful to point out why the code for setting those header values is there and how they affect the application. An argument against this could be that you should extract that code into a separate method with a meaningful name to describe the scenario. My problem with such an approach would be that your code base becomes even more difficult to navigate and work with because you have all of this extra code just to make the code more meaningful. My opinion is that a simple and well-stated comment stating the reasons and intention for the code is more natural and convenient to the initial developer and maintainer. I just don't agree with the approach of going out of the way to avoid making a comment. I'm also concerned that some developers would take this approach as an excuse to not comment their bad code. Another area where I like comments is on documentation comments. Java has it and so does C# and VB. It's convenient because we can build automated tools that extract these comments. These extracted comments are often much better than no documentation at all. The "go read the code" answer always doesn't fulfill the need for a quick summary of an API. To summarize, I think that the extremes of no comments and too many comments are less than desirable approaches. I prefer documentation comments to explain each class and member (API level) and code comments as necessary to supplement well-written code. Joe

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Silverlight Cream for April 01, 2010 -- #827

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Max Paulousky, Hassan, Viktor Larsson, Fons Sonnemans, Jim McCurdy, Scott Marlowe, Mike Taulty, Brad Abrams, Jesse Liberty, Scott Barnes, Christopher Bennage, and John Papa and Ward Bell. Shoutouts: Tim Heuer posted a survey: What tools are the minimum to get started in Silverlight?... have you responded yet? Don't want to miss this discussion: Channel 9 Live at MIX10: Bill Buxton & Erik Meijer - Perspectives on Design Bookmark this... Jesse Liberty has moved his site: Silverlight Geek I stand with Tim Heuer on this: Congratulations to latest 2nd quarter Silverlight MVPs From SilverlightCream.com: Wizards. Prototype of sketching Wizard for WPF - 1 Max Paulousky is creating a SketchFlow WPF wizard in Expression Blend... looks like good Expression Blend and SketchFlow no matter what the target is Windows Phone 7 Navigation Hassan has another WP7 Video up, and this one is on Navigation and passing data from page to page. Silverlight 4 PathListBox Viktor Larsson is blogging about the PathListBox, and definitely had a good time doing so.. lots of fun examples. CountDown Clock in Silverlight 4 Fons Sonnemans has reworked his Sivlerlight 3 FlipClock to be this Silverlight 4 CountDown Clock utilizing the Viewbox control to make it scalable. Generic class for deep clone of Silverlight and CLR objects Jim McCurdy has a Silverlight 3 and 4-tested CloneObject class that he's using for creating a deep copy of an object and all it's properties... think drag/drop or undo/redo. Animating the Fill Color of a Silverlight Ellipse Scott Marlowe has a tutorial up that animates a pass/fail indicator with a smooth transition from a red to a green state... all with code. Silverlight 4, Blend 4, MVVM, Binding, DependencyObject Mike Taulty has a great tutorial up on Blend4 and binding... he's got a somewhat contrived example going, but it certainly looks good to me :) Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Authentication and Personalization Next up in Brad Abrams' series is Authentication and Personalization. RIA Services makes this easy to do... let Brad show you! An Annotated Line of Business Application Jesse Liberty is walking through the design and delivery of his HyperVideo project with this mini tutorial. Want to understand the thought process behind the LOB app, check this out. How to hack Expression Blend Seems like there was just some discussion about some of this today and here Scott Barnes posts this hack job for Expression Blend... pretty cool actually :) d:DesignInstance in Blend 4 Christopher Bennage has a follow-on post about using d:DesignInstance in Blend 4, and this is a very nice tutorial on the subject Silverlight TV 19: Hidden Gems from MIX10, UFC's Multi-Touch App John Papa and Ward Bell front and center for Silverlight TV number 19... and check out those threads! Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows Phone MIX10

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Last week I was presented with a Microsoft MVP award in Virtual Machines – time to thank all who hel

- by Liam Westley

MVP in Virtual Machines Last week, on 1st April, I received an e-mail from Microsoft letting me know that I had been presented with a 2010 Microsoft® MVP Award for outstanding contributions in Virtual Machine technical communities during the past year. It was an honour to be nominated, and is a great reflection on the vibrancy of the UK user group community which made this possible. Virtualisation for developers, not just IT Pros I consider it a special honour as my expertise in virtualisation is as a software developer utilising virtual machines to aid my software development, rather than an IT Pro who manages data centre and network infrastructure. I’ve been on a minor mission over the past few years to enthuse developers in a topic usually seen as only for network admins, but which can make their life a whole lot easier once understood properly. Continuous learning is fun In 1676, the scientist Isaac Newton, in a letter to Robert Hooke used the phrase (http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/268025.html) ‘If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants’ I’m a nuclear physicist by education, so I am more than comfortable that any knowledge I have is based on the work of others. Although far from a science, software development and IT is equally built upon the work of others. It’s one of the reasons I despise software patents. So in that sense this MVP award is a result of all the great minds that have provided virtualisation solutions for me to talk about. I hope that I have always acknowledged those whose work I have used when blogging or giving presentations, and that I have executed my responsibility to share any knowledge gained as widely as possible. Thanks to all those who helped – a big thanks to the UK user group community I reckon this journey started in 2003 when I started attending a user group called the London .Net Users Group (http://www.dnug.org.uk) started by a nice chap called Ian Cooper. The great thing about Ian was that he always encouraged non professional speakers to take the stage at the user group, and my first ever presentation was on 30th September 2003; SQL Server CE 2.0 and the.NET Compact Framework. In 2005 Ian Cooper was on the committee for the first DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper! day, the free community conference held at Microsoft’s UK HQ in Thames Valley park in Reading. He encouraged me to take part and so on 14th May 2005 I presented a talk previously given to the London .Net User Group on Simplifying access to multiple DB providers in .NET. From that point on I definitely had the bug; presenting at DDD2, DDD3, groking at DDD4 and SQLBits I and after a break, DDD7, DDD Scotland and DDD8. What definitely made me keen was the encouragement and infectious enthusiasm of some of the other DDD organisers; Craig Murphy, Barry Dorrans, Phil Winstanley and Colin Mackay. During the first few DDD events I met the Dave McMahon and Richard Costall from NxtGenUG who made it easy to start presenting at their user groups. Along the way I’ve met a load of great user group organisers; Guy Smith-Ferrier of the .Net Developer Network, Jimmy Skowronski of GL.Net and the double act of Ray Booysen and Gavin Osborn behind what was Vista Squad and is now Edge UG. Final thanks to those who suggested virtualisation as a topic ... Final thanks have to go the people who inspired me to create my Virtualisation for Developers talk. Toby Henderson (@holytshirt) ensured I took notice of Sun’s VirtualBox, Peter Ibbotson for being a fine sounding board at the Kew Railway over quite a few Adnam’s Broadside and to Guy Smith-Ferrier for allowing his user group to be the guinea pigs for the talk before it was seen at DDD7. Thanks to all of you I now know much more about virtualisation than I would have thought possible and it continues to be great fun. Conclusion If this was an academy award acceptance speech I would have been cut off after the first few paragraphs, so well done if you made it this far. I’ll be doing my best to do justice to the MVP award and the UK community. I’m fortunate in having a new employer who considers presenting at user groups as a good thing, so don’t expect me to stop any time soon. If you’ve never seen me in action, then you can view the original DDD7 Virtualisation for Developers presentation (filmed by the Microsoft Channel 9 team) as part of the full DDD7 video list here, http://www.craigmurphy.com/blog/?p=1591. Also thanks to Craig Murphy’s fine video work you can also view my latest DDD8 presentation on Commercial Software Development, here, http://vimeo.com/9216563 P.S. If I’ve missed anyone out, do feel free to lambast me in comments, it’s your duty.

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Talking Shop With Richard Banks and Paul Batum

- by Liam McLennan

Last night Richard Banks recorded Paul Batum and I for his podcast. We talked about Alt.NET Seattle 2010 and my software craftsmanship tour. It was a lot of fun and I hope you enjoy it.

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5 Steps to getting started with IronRuby

- by Eric Nelson

IronRuby is a Open Source implementation of the Ruby programming language for .NET, heavily relying on Microsoft's Dynamic Language Runtime. The project's #1 goal is to be a true Ruby implementation, meaning it runs existing Ruby code. Check out this summary of using the Ruby standard library and 3rd party libraries in IronRuby. IronRuby has tight integration with .NET, so any .NET types can be used from IronRuby and the IronRuby runtime can be embedded into any .NET application. These 5 steps should get you nicely up and running on IronRuby – OR … you could just watch a video session from the lead developer which took place earlier this month (March 2010 - 60mins). But the 5 steps will be quicker :-) Step 1 – Install IronRuby :-) You can install IronRuby automatically using an MSI or manually. For simplicity I would recommend the MSI install. TIP: As of the 25th of March IronRuby has not quite shipped. The download above is a Release Candidate (RC) which means it is still undergoing final testing by the team. You will need to uninstall this version (RC3) once the final release is available. The good news is that uninstalling IronRuby RC3 will work without a hitch as the MSI does relatively little. Step 2 – Install an IronRuby friendly editor You will need to Install an editor to work with IronRuby as there is no designer support for IronRuby inside Visual Studio. There are many editors to choose from but I would recommend you either went with: SciTE (Download the MSI): This is a lightweight text editor which is simple to get up and running. SciTE understands Ruby syntax and allows you to easily run IronRuby code within the editor with a small change to the config file. SharpDevelop 3.2 (Download the MSI): This is an open source development environment for C#, VB, Boo and now IronRuby. IronRuby support is new but it does include integrated debugging. You might also want to check out the main site for SharpDevelop. TIP: There are commercial tools for Ruby development which offer richer support such as intellisense.. They can be coerced into working with IronRuby. A good one to start with is RubyMine which needs some small changes to make it work with IronRuby. Step 3 – Run the IronRuby Tutorial Run through the IronRuby tutorial which is included in the IronRuby download. It covers off the basics of the Ruby languages and how IronRuby integrates with .NET. In a typical install it will end up at C:\Program Files\IronRuby 0.9.4.0\Samples\Tutorial. Which will give you the tutorial implemented in .NET and Ruby. TIP: You might also want to check out these two introductory posts Using IronRuby and .NET to produce the ‘Hello World of WPF’ and What's IronRuby, and how do I put it on Rails? Step 4 – Get some good books to read Get a great book on Ruby and IronRuby. There are several free ebooks on Ruby which will help you learn the language. The little book of Ruby is a good place to start. I would also recommend you purchase IronRuby Unleashed (Buy on Amazon UK | Buy on Amazon USA). You might also want to check out this mini-review. Other books are due out soon including IronRuby in Action. TIP: Also check out the official documentation for using .NET from IronRuby. Step 5 – Keep an eye on the team blogs Keep an eye on the IronRuby team blogs including Jimmy Schementi, Jim Deville and Tomas Matousek (full list) TIP: And keep a watch out for the final release of IronRuby – due anytime soon!

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TFS Auto Shelve - New Visual Studio 2010 / TFS 2010 Extension

- by MikeParks

We've been working with the Visual Studio 2010 SDK and the TFS 2010 SDK a lot recently to create new Visual Studio Extensions. You can find these extensions in the Visual Studio Gallery. If you're a developer/programmer, you should check it out, they have some pretty cool tools out there. I'd be surprised if you told me you went there and couldn't find any tools that could help you. One of the new extensions Cory and I made is called TFS Auto Shelve. Check out the description and read about it below. If you're interested and you have VS 2010 w/TFS 2010, feel free to try it out and let us know what you think. You can download it here: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/080540cb-e35f-4651-b71c-86c73e4a633d Here's a description and screenshots of what it does: Automatically shelves the latest version of all pending changes from local TFS workspaces to the TFS Server every "x" number of minutes when solutions are opened. · Purpose o Created for Team Foundation Server 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 o This tool is mainly aimed at the Programmer/Developer audience so they can always have the latest copy of their pending changes backed up to the TFS Server while coding · Functionality o Menu options become active and automatic shelving begins when a solution that mapped to a TFS Workspace is opened in Visual Studio o In Tools > TFS Auto Shelve (Running/NotRunning): Automatic shelving can be turned on/off o In Tools > TFS Auto Shelve Now : Shelve all code can be manually triggered o Each TFS workspace has its own shelveset which is re-used to save the latest version of pending changes o Shelvesets are named as Base Name + Workspace Name o Shelveset comment contains item count o If there are no pending changes, no shelvesets will be created/updated o If a solution is opened that is not mapped to a TFS Workspace, menu options are disabled since shelving only works for mapped workspaces. · Configuration o In Tools > Options > TFS Auto Shelve Options: Base Name is configurable o In Tools > Options > TFS Auto Shelve Options: "x" number of minutes is configurable in options · Logging o Custom Visual Studio Activity Logging is implemented. If you run into any errors, please startup Visual Studio with the /log switch, re-create the error, then close Visual Studio. You can browse to “%AppData%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\ActivityLog.XML” to view the log. Please feel free to inform us of any errors you see and we can work it out via email. · Other Helpful Information o To view shelvesets, open Source Control Explorer, click on File > Source Control > Unshelve Pending Changes o Workspaces can be modified by opening the Source Control Explorer > Clicking on Workspaces drop down > Click Workspaces… > Click Add / Edit / Removed Thanks! - Mike

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Surface development: it’s just like software development

- by Dennis Vroegop

Surface is magic. Everyone using it seems to think that way. And I have to be honest, after working for almost 2 years with the platform I still get that special feeling the moment I turn on the unit to do some more work. The whole user experience, the rich environment of the SDK, the touch, even the look and feel of the Surface environment is so much different from the stuff I’ve been working on all my career that I am still bewildered by it. But… and this is a big but.. in the end we’re still talking about a computer and that needs software to become useful. Deep down the magic of the Surface unit there is a PC somewhere, running Windows Vista and the .net framework 3.5. When you write that magic software that makes the platform come alive you’re still working with .net, WPF/XNA, C#, VB.Net and all those other tools and technologies you know so well. Sure, the whole user experience is different from what you’ve known. And the way of thinking about users, their interaction and the positioning of screen elements requires a whole new paradigm. And that takes time. It took me about half a year before I had the feeling I got it nailed down. But when that moment came (about 18 months ago…) I realized that everything I had learned so far on software development still is true when it comes to Surface. The last 6 months I have been working with some people with a different background to start a new company. The idea was that the new company would be focussing on Surface and Surface only. These people come from a marketing background and had some good ideas for some applications. And I have to admit: their ideas were good. Very good. Where it all fell down of course is that these ideas need to be implemented in a piece of software. And creating great software takes skilled developers and a lot of time and money. That’s where things went wrong: the marketing guys didn’t realize and didn’t want to realize that software development is a job that takes skill. You can’t just hire a bunch of developers and expect them to deliver the best sort of software, especially not when it comes to Surface. I tried to explain that yes, their User Interface in Photoshop looked great, but no: I couldn’t develop an application like that in a weeks time. Even worse: the while backend of the software (WCF for communications, SQL Server for the database, etc) would take a lot more time than the frontend. They didn’t understand. It took them a couple of days to drawn the UI in Photoshop so in Blend I should be able to build the software in about the same amount of time. Well, you and I know that it doesn’t work that way. Software is hard to write, and even harder to write well, and it takes skill and dedication. It’s not something you can do as fast as you can draw a mock up for a Surface application in Photohop. The same holds true for web applications of course. A lot of designers there fail to appreciate the hard work that goes into writing the plumbing for a good web app that can handle thousands of users. Although the UI is very important, it’s not all there is to it. And in Surface development this is the same. The UI should create the feeling of magic, but the software behind it is what makes it come alive. And that takes time. A lot of time. So brush of you skills and don’t throw them away if you start developing for Surface. Because projects (and colaborations) can fail there as hard as they can in any other area of software development. On a side note: we decided to stop the colaboration (something the other parties involved didn’t appreciate and were very angry about) and decided to hire a designer for the Surface projects. The focus is back where it belongs: on the software development we know so well and have been doing very well for 13 years. UI is just a part of the whole project and not the end product. So my company Detrio is still going strong when it comes to develivering Surface solutions but once again from a technological background, not a marketing background.

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Why I’m *NOT* Attending MOSOConf

- by D'Arcy Lussier

It’s my daughter’s birthday on Saturday, she turns 10! Lot’s of party planning to do this week! What, you thought this was going to be a rant post? Hope everyone has a fantastic time at MOSOConf and congrats to the organizers for putting on another fantastic event! Btw, if you’re looking to get even more mobile and web development goodness, come check out Prairie IT Pro & Dev Con in Regina this October – we just announced our current session/speaker line-up and we’ll be adding more sessions over the summer! Click the image below to visit the event site!

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One National Team One Event – SharePoint Saturday Kansas City

- by MOSSLover

I wasn’t expect to run an event from 1,000 miles away, but some stuff happened you know like it does and I opted in. It was really weird, because people asked why are you living in NJ and running Kansas City? I did move, but it was like my baby and Karthik didn’t have the ability to do it this year. I found it really challenging, because I could not physically be in Kansas City. At first I was freaking out and Lee Brandt, Brian Laird, and Chris Geier offered to help. Somehow I couldn’t come the day of the event. Time-wise it just didn’t work out. I could do all the leg work prior to the event, but weekends just were not good. I was going to be in DC until March or April on the weekdays, so leaving that weekend was too tough. As it worked out Lee was my eyes and ears for the venue. Brian was the sponsor and prize box coordinator if anyone needed to send items. Lee also helped Brian the day of the event move all the boxes. I did everything we could do electronically, such as get the sponsors coordinate with Michael Lotter on invoicing and getting the speakers, posting the submissions, budgeting the money, setting up a speaker dinner by phone, plus all that other stuff you do behind the scenes. Chris was there to help Lee and Brian the day of the event and help us out with the speaker dinner. Karthik finally got back from India and he was there the night before getting the folders together and the signs and stuffing it all. Jason Gallicchio also helped me out (my cohort for SPS NYC) as he did the schedule and helped with posting the speakers abstracts and so did Chris Geier by posting the bios. The lot of them enlisted a few other monkeys to help out. It was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen, but it worked. Around 100+ attendees ended up showing and I hear it was a great event. Jason, Michael, Chris, Karthik, Brian, and Lee are not all from the same area, but they helped me out in bringing this event together. It was a national SharePoint Saturday team that brought together a specific local event for Kansas City. It’s like a metaphor for the entire SharePoint Community. We help our own kind out we don’t let me fail. I know Lee and Brian aren’t technically SharePoint People they are honorary SharePoint Community Members. Thanks everyone for the support and help in bringing this event together. Technorati Tags: SharePoint Saturday,SPS KC,SharePoint,SharePoint Saturday Kanas City,Kansas City

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Error: The base type 'System.Web.UI.MasterPage' is not allowed for this page

- by Patrick Olurotimi Ige

I came across this error when i was trying to ajaxify my sharepoint site. After adding the AjaxifyMoss from the codeplex developed by Richard Finn. And tried loading my site i got the error Error: The base type 'System.Web.UI.MasterPage' is not allowed for this page So i decided to check the web.config and i noticed the SafeControl tag doesn't have the .Net 2.0 assembly included despite the fact i added both vsersios 2.0 and 3.5. Its possible the.Net 3.5 assebply overwrote the 2.0. Anyway after i added the below which is the 2.0 verison <SafeControl Assembly="System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" Namespace="System.Web.UI" TypeName="*" Safe="True" AllowRemoteDesigner="True" /> And refreshed my page. It worked

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Azure – Part 6 – Blob Storage Service

- by Shaun

When migrate your application onto the Azure one of the biggest concern would be the external files. In the original way we understood and ensure which machine and folder our application (website or web service) is located in. So that we can use the MapPath or some other methods to read and write the external files for example the images, text files or the xml files, etc. But things have been changed when we deploy them on Azure. Azure is not a server, or a single machine, it’s a set of virtual server machine running under the Azure OS. And even worse, your application might be moved between thses machines. So it’s impossible to read or write the external files on Azure. In order to resolve this issue the Windows Azure provides another storage serviec – Blob, for us. Different to the table service, the blob serivce is to be used to store text and binary data rather than the structured data. It provides two types of blobs: Block Blobs and Page Blobs. Block Blobs are optimized for streaming. They are comprised of blocks, each of which is identified by a block ID and each block can be a maximum of 4 MB in size. Page Blobs are are optimized for random read/write operations and provide the ability to write to a range of bytes in a blob. They are a collection of pages. The maximum size for a page blob is 1 TB. In the managed library the Azure SDK allows us to communicate with the blobs through these classes CloudBlobClient, CloudBlobContainer, CloudBlockBlob and the CloudPageBlob. Similar with the table service managed library, the CloudBlobClient allows us to reach the blob service by passing our storage account information and also responsible for creating the blob container is not exist. Then from the CloudBlobContainer we can save or load the block blobs and page blobs into the CloudBlockBlob and the CloudPageBlob classes. Let’s improve our exmaple in the previous posts – add a service method allows the user to upload the logo image. In the server side I created a method name UploadLogo with 2 parameters: email and image. Then I created the storage account from the config file. I also add the validation to ensure that the email passed in is valid. 1: var storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.FromConfigurationSetting("DataConnectionString"); 2: var accountContext = new DynamicDataContext<Account>(storageAccount); 3: 4: // validation 5: var accountNumber = accountContext.Load() 6: .Where(a => a.Email == email) 7: .ToList() 8: .Count; 9: if (accountNumber <= 0) 10: { 11: throw new ApplicationException(string.Format("Cannot find the account with the email {0}.", email)); 12: } Then there are three steps for saving the image into the blob service. First alike the table service I created the container with a unique name and create it if it’s not exist. 1: // create the blob container for account logos if not exist 2: CloudBlobClient blobStorage = storageAccount.CreateCloudBlobClient(); 3: CloudBlobContainer container = blobStorage.GetContainerReference("account-logo"); 4: container.CreateIfNotExist(); Then, since in this example I will just send the blob access URL back to the client so I need to open the read permission on that container. 1: // configure blob container for public access 2: BlobContainerPermissions permissions = container.GetPermissions(); 3: permissions.PublicAccess = BlobContainerPublicAccessType.Container; 4: container.SetPermissions(permissions); And at the end I combine the blob resource name from the input file name and Guid, and then save it to the block blob by using the UploadByteArray method. Finally I returned the URL of this blob back to the client side. 1: // save the blob into the blob service 2: string uniqueBlobName = string.Format("{0}_{1}.jpg", email, Guid.NewGuid().ToString()); 3: CloudBlockBlob blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(uniqueBlobName); 4: blob.UploadByteArray(image); 5: 6: return blob.Uri.ToString(); Let’s update a bit on the client side application and see the result. Here I just use my simple console application to let the user input the email and the file name of the image. If it’s OK it will show the URL of the blob on the server side so that we can see it through the web browser. Then we can see the logo I’ve just uploaded through the URL here. You may notice that the blob URL was based on the container name and the blob unique name. In the document of the Azure SDK there’s a page for the rule of naming them, but I think the simple rule would be – they must be valid as an URL address. So that you cannot name the container with dot or slash as it will break the ADO.Data Service routing rule. For exmaple if you named the blob container as Account.Logo then it will throw an exception says 400 Bad Request. Summary In this short entity I covered the simple usage of the blob service to save the images onto Azure. Since the Azure platform does not support the file system we have to migrate our code for reading/writing files to the blob service before deploy it to Azure. In order to reducing this effort Microsoft provided a new approch named Drive, which allows us read and write the NTFS files just likes what we did before. It’s built up on the blob serivce but more properly for files accessing. I will discuss more about it in the next post. 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.

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Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio Ultimate 2010-Part 3

- by Tarun Arora

Welcome back once again, in Part 1 of Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 I talked about why Performance Testing the application is important, the test tools available in Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 and various test rig topologies, in Part 2 of Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 I discussed the details of web performance & load tests as well as why it’s important to follow a goal based pattern while performance testing your application. In part 3 I’ll be discussing Test Result Analysis, Test Result Drill through, Test Report Generation, Test Run Comparison, Asp.net Profiler and some closing thoughts. Test Results – I see some creepy worms! In Part 2 we put together a web performance test and a load test, lets run the test to see load test to see how the Web site responds to the load simulation. While the load test is running you will be able to see close to real time analysis in the Load Test Analyser window. You can use the Load Test Analyser to conduct load test analysis in three ways: Monitor a running load test - A condensed set of the performance counter data is maintained in memory. To prevent the results memory requirements from growing unbounded, up to 200 samples for each performance counter are maintained. This includes 100 evenly spaced samples that span the current elapsed time of the run and the most recent 100 samples. After the load test run is completed - The test controller spools all collected performance counter data to a database while the test is running. Additional data, such as timing details and error details, is loaded into the database when the test completes. The performance data for a completed test is loaded from the database and analysed by the Load Test Analyser. Below you can see a screen shot of the summary view, this provides key results in a format that is compact and easy to read. You can also print the load test summary, this is generated after the test has completed or been stopped. Analyse the load test results of a previously run load test – We’ll see this in the section where i discuss comparison between two test runs. The performance counters can be plotted on the graphs. You also have the option to highlight a selected part of the test and view details, drill down to the user activity chart where you can hover over to see more details of the test run. Generate Report => Test Run Comparisons The level of reports you can generate using the Load Test Analyser is astonishing. You have the option to create excel reports and conduct side by side analysis of two test results or to track trend analysis. The tools also allows you to export the graph data either to MS Excel or to a CSV file. You can view the ASP.NET profiler report to conduct further analysis as well. View Data and Diagnostic Attachments opens the Choose Diagnostic Data Adapter Attachment dialog box to select an adapter to analyse the result type. For example, you can select an IntelliTrace adapter, click OK and open the IntelliTrace summary for the test agent that was used in the load test. Compare results This creates a set of reports that compares the data from two load test results using tables and bar charts. I have taken these screen shots from the MSDN documentation, I would highly recommend exploring the wealth of knowledge available on MSDN. Leaving Thoughts While load testing the application with an excessive load for a longer duration of time, i managed to bring the IIS to its knees by piling up a huge queue of requests waiting to be processed. This clearly means that the IIS had run out of threads as all the threads were busy processing existing request, one easy way of fixing this is by increasing the default number of allocated threads, but this might escalate the problem. The better suggestion is to try and drill down to the actual root cause of the problem. When ever the garbage collection runs it stops processing any pages so all requests that come in during that period are queued up, but realistically the garbage collection completes in fraction of a a second. To understand this better lets look at the .net heap, it is divided into large heap and small heap, anything greater than 85kB in size will be allocated to the Large object heap, the Large object heap is non compacting and remember large objects are expensive to move around, so if you are allocating something in the large object heap, make sure that you really need it! The small object heap on the other hand is divided into generations, so all objects that are supposed to be short-lived are suppose to live in Gen-0 and the long living objects eventually move to Gen-2 as garbage collection goes through. As you can see in the picture below all < 85 KB size objects are first assigned to Gen-0, when Gen-0 fills up and a new object comes in and finds Gen-0 full, the garbage collection process is started, the process checks for all the dead objects and assigns them as the valid candidate for deletion to free up memory and promotes all the remaining objects in Gen-0 to Gen-1. So in the future when ever you clean up Gen-1 you have to clean up Gen-0 as well. When you fill up Gen – 0 again, all of Gen – 1 dead objects are drenched and rest are moved to Gen-2 and Gen-0 objects are moved to Gen-1 to free up Gen-0, but by this time your Garbage collection process has started to take much more time than it usually takes. Now as I mentioned earlier when garbage collection is being run all page requests that come in during that period are queued up. Does this explain why possibly page requests are getting queued up, apart from this it could also be the case that you are waiting for a long running database process to complete. Lets explore the heap a bit more… What is really a case of crisis is when the objects are living long enough to make it to Gen-2 and then dying, this is definitely a high cost operation. But sometimes you need objects in memory, for example when you cache data you hold on to the objects because you need to use them right across the user session, which is acceptable. But if you wanted to see what extreme caching can do to your server then write a simple application that chucks in a lot of data in cache, run a load test over it for about 10-15 minutes, forcing a lot of data in memory causing the heap to run out of memory. If you get to such a state where you start running out of memory the IIS as a mode of recovery restarts the worker process. It is great way to free up all your memory in the heap but this would clear the cache. The problem with this is if the customer had 10 items in their shopping basket and that data was stored in the application cache, the user basket will now be empty forcing them either to get frustrated and go to a competitor website or if the customer is really patient, give it another try! How can you address this, well two ways of addressing this; 1. Workaround – A x86 bit processor only allows a maximum of 4GB of RAM, this means the machine effectively has around 3.4 GB of RAM available, the OS needs about 1.5 GB of RAM to run efficiently, the IIS and .net framework also need their share of memory, leaving you a heap of around 800 MB to play with. Because Team builds by default build your application in ‘Compile as any mode’ it means the application is build such that it will run in x86 bit mode if run on a x86 bit processor and run in a x64 bit mode if run on a x64 but processor. The problem with this is not all applications are really x64 bit compatible specially if you are using com objects or external libraries. So, as a quick win if you compiled your application in x86 bit mode by changing the compile as any selection to compile as x86 in the team build, you will be able to run your application on a x64 bit machine in x86 bit mode (WOW – By running Windows on Windows) and what that means is, you could use 8GB+ worth of RAM, if you take away everything else your application will roughly get a heap size of at least 4 GB to play with, which is immense. If you need a heap size of more than 4 GB you have either build a software for NASA or there is something fundamentally wrong in your application. 2. Solution – Now that you have put a workaround in place the IIS will not restart the worker process that regularly, which means you can take a breather and start working to get to the root cause of this memory leak. But this begs a question “How do I Identify possible memory leaks in my application?” Well i won’t say that there is one single tool that can tell you where the memory leak is, but trust me, ‘Performance Profiling’ is a great start point, it definitely gets you started in the right direction, let’s have a look at how. Performance Wizard - Start the Performance Wizard and select Instrumentation, this lets you measure function call counts and timings. Before running the performance session right click the performance session settings and chose properties from the context menu to bring up the Performance session properties page and as shown in the screen shot below, check the check boxes in the group ‘.NET memory profiling collection’ namely ‘Collect .NET object allocation information’ and ‘Also collect the .NET Object lifetime information’. Now if you fire off the profiling session on your pages you will notice that the results allows you to view ‘Object Lifetime’ which shows you the number of objects that made it to Gen-0, Gen-1, Gen-2, Large heap, etc. Another great feature about the profile is that if your application has > 5% cases where objects die right after making to the Gen-2 storage a threshold alert is generated to alert you. Since you have the option to also view the most expensive methods and by capturing the IntelliTrace data you can drill in to narrow down to the line of code that is the root cause of the problem. Well now that we have seen how crucial memory management is and how easy Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 makes it for us to identify and reproduce the problem with the best of breed tools in the product. Caching One of the main ways to improve performance is Caching. Which basically means you tell the web server that instead of going to the database for each request you keep the data in the webserver and when the user asks for it you serve it from the webserver itself. BUT that can have consequences! Let’s look at some code, trust me caching code is not very intuitive, I define a cache key for almost all searches made through the common search page and cache the results. The approach works fine, first time i get the data from the database and second time data is served from the cache, significant performance improvement, EXCEPT when two users try to do the same operation and run into each other. But it is easy to handle this by adding the lock as you can see in the snippet below. So, as long as a user comes in and finds that the cache is empty, the user locks and starts to get the cache no more concurrency issues. But lets say you are processing 10 requests per second, by the time i have locked the operation to get the results from the database, 9 other users came in and found that the cache key is null so after i have come out and populated the cache they will still go in to get the results again. The application will still be faster because the next set of 10 users and so on would continue to get data from the cache. BUT if we added another null check after locking to build the cache and before actual call to the db then the 9 users who follow me would not make the extra trip to the database at all and that would really increase the performance, but didn’t i say that the code won’t be very intuitive, may be you should leave a comment you don’t want another developer to come in and think what a fresher why is he checking for the cache key null twice !!! The downside of caching is, you are storing the data outside of the database and the data could be wrong because the updates applied to the database would make the data cached at the web server out of sync. So, how do you invalidate the cache? Well if you only had one way of updating the data lets say only one entry point to the data update you can write some logic to say that every time new data is entered set the cache object to null. But this approach will not work as soon as you have several ways of feeding data to the system or your system is scaled out across a farm of web servers. The perfect solution to this is Micro Caching which means you cache the query for a set time duration and invalidate the cache after that set duration. The advantage is every time the user queries for that data with in the time span for which you have cached the results there are no calls made to the database and the data is served right from the server which makes the response immensely quick. Now figuring out the appropriate time span for which you micro cache the query results really depends on the application. Lets say your website gets 10 requests per second, if you retain the cache results for even 1 minute you will have immense performance gains. You would reduce 90% hits to the database for searching. Ever wondered why when you go to e-bookers.com or xpedia.com or yatra.com to book a flight and you click on the book button because the fare seems too exciting and you get an error message telling you that the fare is not valid any more. Yes, exactly => That is a cache failure! These travel sites or price compare engines are not going to hit the database every time you hit the compare button instead the results will be served from the cache, because the query results are micro cached, its a perfect trade-off, by micro caching the results the site gains 100% performance benefits but every once in a while annoys a customer because the fare has expired. But the trade off works in the favour of these sites as they are still able to process up to 30+ page requests per second which means cater to the site traffic by may be losing 1 customer every once in a while to a competitor who is also using a similar caching technique what are the odds that the user will not come back to their site sooner or later? Recap Resources Below are some Key resource you might like to review. I would highly recommend the documentation, walkthroughs and videos available on MSDN. You can always make use of Fiddler to debug Web Performance Tests. Some community test extensions and plug ins available on Codeplex might also be of interest to you. The Road Ahead Thank you for taking the time out and reading this blog post, you may also want to read Part I and Part II if you haven’t so far. If you enjoyed the post, remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Questions/Feedback/Suggestions, etc please leave a comment. Next ‘Load Testing in the cloud’, I’ll be working on exploring the possibilities of running Test controller/Agents in the Cloud. See you on the other side! Thank You! Share this post : CodeProject

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What I’m working on for this blog…

- by marc dekeyser

Yes it has gone quiet again for the time being! As I am in training for Exchange 2013 and have the need to keep some customers happy (well, we all have to do something to earn our keep ;)) time to write blog posts or even work on my little side projects is limited. So for the time being there are no new blog posts coming but I’d like to tell you that you can expect posts on the following topics: * Automating lab server deployments (Using WDS and MDT 2012 RU1) * Scripts to automate application installations (and integration with the above) * Exchange 2013 posts * Exchange 2013 automation scripts (since I’m already seeing where I could do something here :P) As always, I’m still taking requests…

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Visual Studio 2010 Launch April 12 Las Vegas

- by Dave Campbell

I'm going to be in 'Vegas for the Launch on Monday, I'm not sure what time I'm getting in on Sunday, but I'm staying over Monday night as well, so if you're going to be around in that time-frame, send me an email! Bummer to not be there for Silverlight on Tuesday, but hey... watching Scott Guthrie is always worth the drive :)

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Silverlight Cream for March 26, 2010 -- #821

- by Dave Campbell

In this Issue: Max Paulousky, Christian Schormann, John Papa, Phani Raj, David Anson(-2-, -3-), Brad Abrams(-2-), and Jeff Wilcox(-2-, -3-). Shoutouts: Jeff Wilcox posted his material from mix and some preview TestFramework bits: Unit Testing Silverlight & Windows Phone Applications – talk now online At MIX10, Jeff Wilcox demo'd an app called "Peppermint"... here's the bleeding edge demo: “Peppermint” MIX demo sources Erik Mork and Co. have put out their weekly This Week In Silverlight 3.25.2010 Brad Abrams has all his materials posted for his MIX10 session Mix2010: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Microsoft Silverlight... including play-by-play of the demo and all source. Do you use Rooler? Well you should! Watch a video Pete Brown did with Pete Blois on Expression Blend, Windows Phone, Rooler Interested in Silverlight and XNA for WP7? Me too! Michael Klucher has a post outlining the two: Silverlight and XNA Framework Game Development and Compatibility From SilverlightCream.com: Modularity in Silverlight Applications - An Issue With ModuleInitializeException Max Paulousky has a truly ugly error trace listed by way of not having a reference listed, and the obvious simple solution. Next time he'll talk about the difficult situations. Using SketchFlow to Prototype for Windows Phone Christian Schormann has a tutorial up on using Expression Blend to develop for WP7 ... who better than Christian for that task?? Silverlight TV 18: WCF RIA Services Validation John Papa held forth with Nikhil Kothari on WCF RIA Services and validation just prior to MIX10, and was posted yesterday. Building SL3 applications using OData client Library with Vs 2010 RC Phani Raj walks through building an OData consumer in SL3, the first problem you're going to hit, and the easy solution to it. Tip: When creating a DependencyProperty, follow the handy convention of "wrapper+register+static+virtual" David Anson has a couple more of his 'Tips' up... this first is about Dependency Properties again... having a good foundation for all your Dependency Properties is a great way to avoid problems. Tip: Do not assign DependencyProperty values in a constructor; it prevents users from overriding them In the next post, David Anson talks about not assigning Dependency Property values in a constructor and gives one of the two ways to get around doing so. Tip: Set DependencyProperty default values in a class's default style if it's more convenient In his latest post, David Anson gives the second way to avoid setting a Dependency Property value in the constructor. Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Brad Abrams Abrams adds SEO to the tutorial series he's doing. He begins with his PDC09 session material on the subject and then takes off on a great detailed tutorial all with source. Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Localizing Business Application Brad Abrams then discusses localization and Silverlight in another detailed tutorial with all code included. Silverlight Toolkit and the Windows Phone: WrapPanel, and a few others Jeff Wilcox has a few WP7 posts I'm going to push today. This first is from earlier this week and is about using the Toolkit in WP7 and better than that, he includes the bits you need if all you want is the WrapPanel Data binding user settings in Windows Phone applications In the next one from yesterday, Jeff Wilcox demonstrates saving some user info in Isolated Storage to improve the user experience, and shares all the necessary plumbing files, and other external links as well. Displaying 2D QR barcodes in Windows Phone applications In a post from today, Jeff Wilcox ported his Silverlight 2D QR Barcode app from last year into WP7 ... just very cool... get the source and display your Microsoft Tag. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight Silverlight 3 Silverlight 4 Windows Phone MIX10

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Revisiting ANTS Performance Profiler 7.4

- by James Michael Hare

Last year, I did a small review on the ANTS Performance Profiler 6.3, now that it’s a year later and a major version number higher, I thought I’d revisit the review and revise my last post. This post will take the same examples as the original post and update them to show what’s new in version 7.4 of the profiler. Background A performance profiler’s main job is to keep track of how much time is typically spent in each unit of code. This helps when we have a program that is not running at the performance we expect, and we want to know where the program is experiencing issues. There are many profilers out there of varying capabilities. Red Gate’s typically seem to be the very easy to “jump in” and get started with very little training required. So let’s dig into the Performance Profiler. I’ve constructed a very crude program with some obvious inefficiencies. It’s a simple program that generates random order numbers (or really could be any unique identifier), adds it to a list, sorts the list, then finds the max and min number in the list. Ignore the fact it’s very contrived and obviously inefficient, we just want to use it as an example to show off the tool: 1: // our test program 2: public static class Program 3: { 4: // the number of iterations to perform 5: private static int _iterations = 1000000; 6: 7: // The main method that controls it all 8: public static void Main() 9: { 10: var list = new List<string>(); 11: 12: for (int i = 0; i < _iterations; i++) 13: { 14: var x = GetNextId(); 15: 16: AddToList(list, x); 17: 18: var highLow = GetHighLow(list); 19: 20: if ((i % 1000) == 0) 21: { 22: Console.WriteLine("{0} - High: {1}, Low: {2}", i, highLow.Item1, highLow.Item2); 23: Console.Out.Flush(); 24: } 25: } 26: } 27: 28: // gets the next order id to process (random for us) 29: public static string GetNextId() 30: { 31: var random = new Random(); 32: var num = random.Next(1000000, 9999999); 33: return num.ToString(); 34: } 35: 36: // add it to our list - very inefficiently! 37: public static void AddToList(List<string> list, string item) 38: { 39: list.Add(item); 40: list.Sort(); 41: } 42: 43: // get high and low of order id range - very inefficiently! 44: public static Tuple<int,int> GetHighLow(List<string> list) 45: { 46: return Tuple.Create(list.Max(s => Convert.ToInt32(s)), list.Min(s => Convert.ToInt32(s))); 47: } 48: } So let’s run it through the profiler and see what happens! Visual Studio Integration First, let’s look at how the ANTS profilers integrate with Visual Studio’s menu system. Once you install the ANTS profilers, you will get an ANTS menu item with several options: Notice that you can either Profile Performance or Launch ANTS Performance Profiler. These sound similar but achieve two slightly different actions: Profile Performance: this immediately launches the profiler with all defaults selected to profile the active project in Visual Studio. Launch ANTS Performance Profiler: this launches the profiler much the same way as starting it from the Start Menu. The profiler will pre-populate the application and path information, but allow you to change the settings before beginning the profile run. So really, the main difference is that Profile Performance immediately begins profiling with the default selections, where Launch ANTS Performance Profiler allows you to change the defaults and attach to an already-running application. Let’s Fire it Up! So when you fire up ANTS either via Start Menu or Launch ANTS Performance Profiler menu in Visual Studio, you are presented with a very simple dialog to get you started: Notice you can choose from many different options for application type. You can profile executables, services, web applications, or just attach to a running process. In fact, in version 7.4 we see two new options added: ASP.NET Web Application (IIS Express) SharePoint web application (IIS) So this gives us an additional way to profile ASP.NET applications and the ability to profile SharePoint applications as well. You can also choose your level of detail in the Profiling Mode drop down. If you choose Line-Level and method-level timings detail, you will get a lot more detail on the method durations, but this will also slow down profiling somewhat. If you really need the profiler to be as unintrusive as possible, you can change it to Sample method-level timings. This is performing very light profiling, where basically the profiler collects timings of a method by examining the call-stack at given intervals. Which method you choose depends a lot on how much detail you need to find the issue and how sensitive your program issues are to timing. So for our example, let’s just go with the line and method timing detail. So, we check that all the options are correct (if you launch from VS2010, the executable and path are filled in already), and fire it up by clicking the [Start Profiling] button. Profiling the Application Once you start profiling the application, you will see a real-time graph of CPU usage that will indicate how much your application is using the CPU(s) on your system. During this time, you can select segments of the graph and bookmark them, giving them mnemonic names. This can be useful if you want to compare performance in one part of the run to another part of the run. Notice that once you select a block, it will give you the call tree breakdown for that selection only, and the relative performance of those calls. Once you feel you have collected enough information, you can click [Stop Profiling] to stop the application run and information collection and begin a more thorough analysis. Analyzing Method Timings So now that we’ve halted the run, we can look around the GUI and see what we can see. By default, the times are shown in terms of percentage of time of the total run of the application, though you can change it in the View menu item to milliseconds, ticks, or seconds as well. This won’t affect the percentages of methods, it only affects what units the times are shown. Notice also that the major hotspot seems to be in a method without source, ANTS Profiler will filter these out by default, but you can right-click on the line and remove the filter to see more detail. This proves especially handy when a bottleneck is due to a method in the BCL. So now that we’ve removed the filter, we see a bit more detail: In addition, ANTS Performance Profiler gives you the ability to decompile the methods without source so that you can dive even deeper, though typically this isn’t necessary for our purposes. When looking at timings, there are generally two types of timings for each method call: Time: This is the time spent ONLY in this method, not including calls this method makes to other methods. Time With Children: This is the total of time spent in both this method AND including calls this method makes to other methods. In other words, the Time tells you how much work is being done exclusively in this method, and the Time With Children tells you how much work is being done inclusively in this method and everything it calls. You can also choose to display the methods in a tree or in a grid. The tree view is the default and it shows the method calls arranged in terms of the tree representing all method calls and the parent method that called them, etc. This is useful for when you find a hot-spot method, you can see who is calling it to determine if the problem is the method itself, or if it is being called too many times. The grid method represents each method only once with its totals and is useful for quickly seeing what method is the trouble spot. In addition, you can choose to display Methods with source which are generally the methods you wrote (as opposed to native or BCL code), or Any Method which shows not only your methods, but also native calls, JIT overhead, synchronization waits, etc. So these are just two ways of viewing the same data, and you’re free to choose the organization that best suits what information you are after. Analyzing Method Source If we look at the timings above, we see that our AddToList() method (and in particular, it’s call to the List<T>.Sort() method in the BCL) is the hot-spot in this analysis. If ANTS sees a method that is consuming the most time, it will flag it as a hot-spot to help call out potential areas of concern. This doesn’t mean the other statistics aren’t meaningful, but that the hot-spot is most likely going to be your biggest bang-for-the-buck to concentrate on. So let’s select the AddToList() method, and see what it shows in the source window below: Notice the source breakout in the bottom pane when you select a method (from either tree or grid view). This shows you the timings in this method per line of code. This gives you a major indicator of where the trouble-spot in this method is. So in this case, we see that performing a Sort() on the List<T> after every Add() is killing our performance! Of course, this was a very contrived, duh moment, but you’d be surprised how many performance issues become duh moments. Note that this one line is taking up 86% of the execution time of this application! If we eliminate this bottleneck, we should see drastic improvement in the performance. So to fix this, if we still wanted to maintain the List<T> we’d have many options, including: delay Sort() until after all Add() methods, using a SortedSet, SortedList, or SortedDictionary depending on which is most appropriate, or forgoing the sorting all together and using a Dictionary. Rinse, Repeat! So let’s just change all instances of List<string> to SortedSet<string> and run this again through the profiler: Now we see the AddToList() method is no longer our hot-spot, but now the Max() and Min() calls are! This is good because we’ve eliminated one hot-spot and now we can try to correct this one as well. As before, we can then optimize this part of the code (possibly by taking advantage of the fact the list is now sorted and returning the first and last elements). We can then rinse and repeat this process until we have eliminated as many bottlenecks as possible. Calls by Web Request Another feature that was added recently is the ability to view .NET methods grouped by the HTTP requests that caused them to run. This can be helpful in determining which pages, web services, etc. are causing hot spots in your web applications. Summary If you like the other ANTS tools, you’ll like the ANTS Performance Profiler as well. It is extremely easy to use with very little product knowledge required to get up and running. There are profilers built into the higher product lines of Visual Studio, of course, which are also powerful and easy to use. But for quickly jumping in and finding hot spots rapidly, Red Gate’s Performance Profiler 7.4 is an excellent choice. 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