Secure RESTful WCF Service with SHA-256 hashing

This is an old draft I found, perhaps it is useful if you’re trying to do SHA-256. If not, let me know, I might be able to help you out. Azure Storage supports secure access of resources without logon. It involves hashing the query part of the URL and then signing that hash. I’ve implemented this at my workplace in the following steps:

Create a web project for a WCF service.

Update the .svc file…

Post has been published on http://www.varindersandhu.in/2010/10/09/whats-new-in-visual-studio-2010/

What’s New in Visual Studio 2010?

This topic contains links to information about new features and enhancements in Visual Studio 2010 and associated service releases.

New in Visual Studio 2010 

Languages

Title Description What’s New in Visual Basic 2010 Describes new features in the Visual Basic language and Code Editor. The features include implicit line continuation, auto-implemented properties, collection initializers, and more. What’s New in Visual C# 2010 Describes new features in the C# language and Code Editor. The features include the dynamic type, named and optional arguments, enhanced Office programmability, and variance. What’s New in Visual C++ 2010 Describes new and revised features in Visual C++. The features include lambda expressions, the rvalue reference declarator, and the auto, decltype, and static_assert keywords. What’s New in Visual F# 2010 Describes the F# language, which is a language that supports functional programming for the .NET Framework.

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For More Details Log on to

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386063.aspx

Post has been published on http://www.varindersandhu.in/2010/10/03/microsoft-visual-studio-2010/

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010

A powerful IDE that ensures quality code

Visual Studio 2010 is packed with new and enhanced features that simplify the entire development process from design to deployment. Customize your workspace with multiple monitor support. Create rich applications for SharePoint and the Web. Target multiple versions of the .NET Framework with the same tool. Eliminate the dreaded “no repro” problem with IntelliTrace. And much more. 

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For More Details Log on to

Since the last few months it feels like web standards are moving at pace that we would really like them to move. Every browser is pushing the envelope ahead including our very own IE9. For the first time it feels like web is getting the extra freedom of expression that it deserves and we want to contribute to that.

ASP.NET developers have been asking for HTML5 & CSS3 support all the time and today we are super excited to announce the public availability of Visual Studio Web Standards Update which brings a ton of HTML5 & CSS3 support to Visual Studio 2010 SP1. VS Web Standards Update is a free extension available for anyone who is using Visual Studio 2010 SP1 and it provides HTML5 & CSS3 support based on current W3C specifications.

HTML5

VS Web Standards Update provides you intellisense and validation for most common HTML 5 features like:

· Video & related tags

· Audio & related tag

· New input types like email, url, date etc

· Drag & Drop support

· Accessibility standard WAI-ARIA

· Microdata

· Schema.org & more SEO friendly goodness

·

Browser APIs

· Geo-Location - Having location aware websites is growing trend and now you will have full intellisense and validation within Visual Studio for creating websites which are location aware. For sample view the source for the IE9 test drive demo.

· Local Storage – IE has been supporting local storage from IE8 onwards, now Visual Studio will provide you with full fidelity intellisense to create sites which can save state within browser. For sample of try view source on HTML5 Demo Site

CSS3

This update supports intellisense and validation for most of the CSS3 modules including:

· 2D Transforms

· 3D Transforms

· Animations

· Background & Borders

· Basic Box Model

· Basic UI

· Behavior

· Color

· Flexible Box Layout

· Fonts

· Generated Content for Paged Media

· Hyperlink Presentation

· Line

· Lists

· Marquee

· Media Queries

· Multi Column

· Namespaces

· Paged Media

· Presentations Levels

· Ruby

· Selectors

· Speech

· Syntax

· Template Layout

· Text

· Transitions

Additionally, if you are trying to make websites which work on a variety of platforms and browsers you will love the fact that Web Standards Update not only supports IE specific prefixes like –ms; but also other vendor prefixes like –webkit and –moz.

With all of the above goodness we hope you all will enjoy this update as much as we did creating it and hope you will share the good news with our larger developer community.

Sharable Links

· Download URL - http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/a15c3ce9-f58f-42b7-8668-53f6cdc2cd83

· VWD Team Announcement post by Mads - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdevtools/archive/2011/06/15/web-standards-update-for-visual-studio-2010-sp1.aspx

· Walkthrough post by Hanselman - http://www.hanselman.com/blog/AnnouncingTheWebStandardsUpdateHTML5SupportForTheVisualStudio2010Editor.aspx

Finally, I want to call out that this update is made feasible due to heroic efforts by a lot our team members working on their personal spare time, so please give a huge shout out to our team including Mads Kristensen, Peter Spada, Van Kichline, Aliaksei Baturytski, Damian Edwards, Barry Tang, Bala Chirtsabesan, Alex Gavrilov, Xinyang Qiu, Jon Jung, Scott Hanselman, Teri Schroeppel & Yong Lee.

Thanks again!!

Vishal R. Joshi | http://vishalrjoshi.com | @vishalrjoshi

The TechEd, Middle East web site does not have deep-linking for the sessions so I thought I would quickly blog it out so that it can be shared easily.  Here are the sessions Scott & I are doing at TechEd Dubai (sorted by date & time)if you are around please stop by:

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09 March 2011 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM

Deep Dive into Razor

Track: Web Platforms (WEB303)

Speakers: Scott Hunter

Razor is the new syntax for building web applications in both ASP.NET Web Pages and ASP.NET MVC. It has a very concise syntax that blurs the transition between code and markup. We will start with a deep dive showing how to program the web using Razor which will include building reusable components called helpers that can share both markup and code in a very natural way. Next we will demonstrate how Razor’s extensibility can be used to use it outside of typical web scenario’s by writing some code using the Razor syntax to send rich emails that contain both text, markup and code. You should walk away knowing how to program that web with Razor and how Razor can be used outside the web to increase your productivity as a rich templating engine.

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The New Cool Kid on the Block: ASP.NET MVC 3

09 March 2011 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM

Track: Web Platforms (WEB304) 

Speaker: Vishal Joshi

ASP.NET MVC 3 with its friends Razor and NuGet are here to make your web development much easier and jazzier. If you are a web developer intending to build standards based, maintainable and extensible apps in a productive fashion, you are not allowed to leave Tech·Ed without learning about ASP.NET MVC 3. It doesn’t matter even if you haven’t played with ASP.NET MVC before, come join us and we will introduce you to it. If you have been working with ASP.NET MVC already, join us and you can hear about all the new toys you now have.

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10 March 2011 09:00 AM - 10:00 AM

What’s New in ASP.NET & Visual Studio for Web Developers

Track: Web Platforms (WEB305)

Speaker: Scott Hunter

ASP.NET 4 gives you more control than ever over markup as well as adding exciting new features making both client and server side data based applications easier and faster to develop than ever before. With Visual Studio 2010 adding improved support for JavaScript, HTML markup and CSS editing and powerful new web application deployment technology, together, ASP.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 make it easier and quicker than ever to develop standards based, CSS styled web applications. We will also cover some of the latest improvements in Visual Studio such as support for Razor Syntax, NuGet and IIS Express.

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10 March 2011 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM

Introduction to Microsoft ASP.NET MVC

Track: Web Platforms (WEB05L) 

Speakers: Scott Hunter, Vishal Joshi

This lab introduces you to developing Web applications with ASP.NET MVC, and teaches you the basic conventions and features contained within it. It also shows you how to unit test your custom controllers and your application's route definitions.

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10 March 2011 01:45 PM - 02:45 PM

Meet the Visual Studio Team

Track: Developer Tools, Languages, and Frameworks (IAT209)

Speakers: Lisa Feigenbaum, Shy Cohen, Brian Keller, Vishal Joshi, Scott Hunter

Session Type: Interactive Discussion

Audience: Developer

This is an opportunity to interact with key members of the Visual Studio team. They discuss their areas of expertise and answer any questions you might have.

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10 March 2011 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM

Web Deployment That Can Impress your Boss

Track: Web Platforms (WEB306)

Speaker: Vishal Joshi

If you typically deploy your web applications using Windows Explorer or have a deployment document longer than your resume, please stop. Come see a practical session on how the new deployment goodness in Visual Studio 2010 can help. We dig into Web Deploy (a.k.a. MSDeploy) and deployment from within Visual Studio 2010. Learn how to package up web apps in .zip files, deploy them using UI, or command file, move their settings and databases easily and much more. We start with the basics and ramp it up quickly, exploring team build deployment and advanced techniques.

There have been several requests floating around to be able to use XDTs (the technology behind Web.Debug.Config/Web.Release.Config) with other XML files within the project…  To make that feasible I wrote a XmlDocumentTransform.targets  file which can generically transform any XML file using the standard Web.Config Transformation syntax introduced with VS 2010…

Learn more about XDT & Web.Config Transformation here…

Now to get started first download XmlDocumentTransform.targets file from my Skydive…

Follow the below simple steps to get transformation working for any well formed XML file in your project…

Step 1: Save the downloaded XmlDocumentTransform.targets to %ProgramFiles%\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\Web\XmlDocumentTransform.targets

NOTE: I would highly encourage you to make a copy of the Microsoft.WebApplication.targets file as backup before you do Step 2 below, as if this file is modified incorrectly then your VS 2010 instances might start showing funny problems which will be virtually impossible to debug and the only option left with you will be to repair/uninstall-install VS 2010… (i.e. proceed at your own risk :-))

 Step 2: Put following line of code in Microsoft.WebApplication.targets file just before closing of the Project node i.e. before ...   The Microsoft.WebApplication.targets file is located at %ProgramFiles%\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\WebApplications... 

   NOTE: Changing the above targets file will allow you to use this functionality with all the Web Application Projects (WAPs), if you just want to change this for the current project then you can put the same Import node in .csproj or .vbproj as well...  If you use per project model then you can also check in this file into source code control and have your team use it seamlessly…

Step 3: Open your .csproj/vbproj file and insert the below property in section  Settings.xml;app.config

 NOTE: The Settings.xml or app.config can be replaced with the name of Xml files you want to transform…

Step 4: Insert TransformXml; similar to #3 above but do not modify the TransformXml; text here…  This is the actual hook which ties in your project to this generic XDT system...  After making the Step 3 & Step 4 changes your project file should have below content…

Step 5: Create Setting.Debug.Xml or similar files and put XDT syntax in them... You need to make sure in the .csproj/.vbproj file of yours you have the DependentUpon property is set like the example below:               Configuration\Settings.xml               Configuration\Settings.xml    

NOTE: The above will allow your solution to look pretty, i.e. just like web.debug.config and web.release.config files show nested under web.config, your *.$(configuration).* files will show nested under your parent file too…

With the above 5 steps you are all set to use XDT with any of the deployment models covered in the Overview of Web Deployment Post…  In a way above steps harness the power of Web Publishing Pipeline (WPP) extensibility model and you can do several other extensions like above if you are familiar with MsBuild sytax…

SAMPLE:   The remainder of the post is just showing you the steps to test whether the changes you made worked or not (i.e. the remaining half of the post is just playing with what you already accomplished in the first half)… :-)

To test the above target file I created the below MVC 2.0 project structure:

Once you put DependentUpon node in your project file you will have to click the  “Show All Files” icon on the solution explorer for VB Projects to see Settings.Debug.Xml

My Settings.xml file looked as below:

My Settings.Debug.xml file looked as below:

To test out I tried simple “file system” publish (Right click on project and say Publish)… The new WAP Publish dialog for me looked as below:

After publishing my C:\TestPublish folder looked as below:

Note that Settings.Debug.xml was removed from my final publish location as it is not required for my web to function and the content of Settings.xml file were transformed and looked as below:

TeamBuild/Commandline Approach: You can also use your new transformations from TeamBuild/MsBuild by using the below command (from VS 2010 Command prompt if you are trying locally):

MsBuild MyXDTTestProject.csproj /t:TransformXml

The output of the command line transform should look as below:

As specified above your transformed XML will be stored in obj\$(configuration)\Settings.xml… 

As such feel free to open the XmlDocumentTransform.targets file which you download, I have tried to put as much comments as I could to make it readable…  If you go through it I am sure you will be able to do many other cool things out of it…

I have been dormant for ever, have been keeping busy on a very exciting project… Anyways April 12th 2010 was a big day with VS 2010 formally launching…  Few days back I asked Twitter whether people needed a ready made talk to talk about VS 2010 Web Deployment as part of the community launch events of VS 2010 and got a lot of asks for the content so here it is… 

Titles & Abstract I would recommend you do not use are below… :-)  The reason I say that is coz VS 2010 & Web Deploy are way more exciting than the way I present here; so get creative and make a fun abstract & title…  The only reason I have them descriptive is so that you know what are the key items to put in there…

Title: Web Deployment with VS 2010 & Web Deploy

Abstract: Web deployment is not as easy as it should be; whether you are deploying to a shared hosting environment or to your company’s web servers there are a lot of manual steps involved.  Check out how new VS 2010 and Web Deploy can help you deploy your web along with its dependencies like databases and IIS settings to any environment with just One Click Publish.  Also check out how  you can transport your entire web in a single .zip file and finally hear all about the web.staging.config, web.release.config etc  and the simple transformation syntax in them to create web.config per deployment configuration… Finally also learn how you can automate your Web Deployments using Team build so you no more have to worry about daily builds and setting up of environments…

Video:  Check out the video at http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/FT56, this should prep you up on what are the talking points…

Demos & Slides: You can download it from my SkyDrive

If you have any questions/thoughts on the content you can feel free to write comments here or reach me at @VishalRJoshi 

Hope this helps!!

There are some known issues/bugs related to VS 2010 Web Deployment features in VS 2010 Beta 2 Read Me… I can imagine reading the entire Beta 2 read me file can be daunting so I thought I can just copy paste the ones related to Web Deployment here…

DB Deployment will fail if the Database Name is longer than 127 characters

Description: If you are using latest VS 2010 Web Deployment Features and trying to deploy your database using the Deploy SQL property page then at times you might get error from VSMsDeploy task. 

There might be several reasons for the failure including connection and authentication issue but a current bug in the product does not allow you to script schema/data from a database (typically SQL Express MDF file) if the file path is longer than 127 characters.  In the OS like XP or Win2K3 the default path for the VS project & its default ASP.NET Login/Profile DB could be something like C:\Documents and Setting\... \Visual Studio 2010\Projects\MyProject\App_Data\ASPnet_DB.mdf... This path can potentially exceed 127 characters and result into Deployment failure...

Workaround: The easy work around is to have the project copied to a location where the path will not exceed 127 characters for e.g. C:\MyProject\App_Data...  This issue will eventually be resolved in the product...

Some VS 2010 Web Deployment Features will not work if VS 2010 is installed on Vista RTM instead of Vista SP1

Description:  If you are using the new Web Deployment feature set in VS 2010 and are using the below features which integrate with MSDeploy:

Web Packaging

One-Click Publishing

DB Deployment

then you will have to use Vista SP1 instead of Vista RTM as your OS.

Workaround: MsDeploy requires features which are built inside Vista SP1 and hence trying to run Web Deployment features on Vista RTM fails.  This is a required dependency so you will have to use Vista SP1 as your OS for VS 2010.  Do note that you can still use any other operating system like XP, Win2K3, Win2k8 R2, Win7 etc to install VS 2010 and use the Web Deployment features, it is just advised that any of the OS versions that you use are updated with the latest Service Packs so that all the required dependencies are in place.

MsDeploy.exe.config file will be required to run Web Deployment on machines with .NET 4.0 only

Description: If you installed VS 2010 on a clean machine which does not have .NET 2.0 (e.g Win2K3)  and are trying to use the VS 2010 Web Deployment Features then when you run the deploy.cmd file to install your web package you might receive error stating "Msdeploy.exe -.NET Framework Initialization Error Unable to find a version of the runtime to run this application."  This is due to the fact that VS 2010 comes with only .NET 4/CLR4 and and CLR 4 does not allow CLR 2.0 executables to run  without having an explict exe.config file…  If you are using other .NET 2.0/3.0 or 3.5 exes on a box with just .NET 4 then you might face similar issues with those EXEs too…

Workaround: You can easily work around this by going to "%Program Files%\IIS\Microsoft Web Deploy" (& additionally also on "%Program Files (x86)%\IIS\Microsoft Web Deploy" folders and create following msdeploy.exe.config file in there

<configuration> <startup useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy="true"> <supportedRuntime version="v2.0.50727" /> <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" /> startup> configuration>

This issue will be fixed in the future releases of the product.