Posts
All the articles I've posted.
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Configuring IIS methods for ASP.NET Web API on Windows Azure Websites and elsewhere
That’s a pretty long title, I agree. When working on my implementation of RFC2324, also known as the HyperText Coffee Pot Control Protocol, I’ve been struggling with something that you will struggle with as well in your ASP.NET Web API’s: supporting additional HTTP methods like HEAD, PATCH or PROPFIND. ASP.NET Web API has no issue with those, but when hosting them on IIS you’ll find yourself in Yellow-screen-of-death heaven.
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How I push GoogleAnalyticsTracker to NuGet
If you check my blog post Tracking API usage with Google Analytics, you’ll see that a small open-source component evolved from MyGet. This component, GoogleAnalyticsTracker, lives on GitHub and NuGet and has since evolved into something that supports Windows Phone and Windows RT as well. But let’s not focus on the open-source aspect. It’s funny how things evolve. GoogleAnalyticsTracker started as a small component inside MyGet, and since a couple of weeks it uses MyGet to publish itself to NuGet. Say what? In this blog post, I’ll elaborate a bit on the development tools used on this tiny component.
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A phone call from the cloud: Windows Azure, SignalR & Twilio
Note: this blog post used to be an article for the Windows Azure Roadtrip website. Since that one no longer exists, I decided to post the articles on my blog as well. Find the source code for this post here: 05 ConfirmPhoneNumberDemo.zip (1.32 mb). It has been written earlier this year, some versions of packages used (like jQuery or SignalR) may be outdated in this post. Live with it.
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Sending e-mail from Windows Azure
Note: this blog post used to be an article for the Windows Azure Roadtrip website. Since that one no longer exists, I decided to post the articles on my blog as well. Find the source code for this post here: 04 SendingEmailsFromTheCloud.zip (922.27 kb). When a user subscribes, you send him a thank-you e-mail. When his account expires, you send him a warning message containing a link to purchase a new subscription. When he places an order, you send him an order confirmation. I think you get the picture: a fairly common scenario in almost any application is sending out e-mails.
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(Almost) time for something new...
September 1st, 2005. Fresh from school, I got the opportunity to start at RealDolmen (Dolmen, back then). Not just a “welcome, here’s your customer, cya!”-start, but a start where my fresh colleagues and I got a 4 months deep dive from people in the industry. Entirely different from what school taught me, focused “on the job”. 4 months later, I started at my first customer, then the second, third, a project developed in-house, did some TFS customizations, some Windows Azure, …
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From API key to user with ASP.NET Web API
ASP.NET Web API is a great tool to build an API with. Or as my buddy Kristof Rennen (and the French) always say: “it makes you ‘api”. One of the things I like a lot is the fact that you can do very powerful things that you know and love from the ASP.NET MVC stack, like, for example, using filter attributes. Action filters, result filters and… authorization filters. Say you wanted to protect your API and make use of the controller’s User property to return user-specific information. You probably will add an [Authorize] attribute (to ensure the user is authenticated) to either the entire API controller or to one of its action methods, like this: Code highlighting produced by Actipro CodeHighlighter (freeware) http://www.CodeHighlighter.com/
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What PartitionKey and RowKey are for in Windows Azure Table Storage
For the past few months, I’ve been coaching a “Microsoft Student Partner” (who has a great blog on Kinect for Windows by the way!) on Windows Azure. One of the questions he recently had was around PartitionKey and RowKey in Windows Azure Table Storage. What are these for? Do I have to specify them manually? Let’s explain… All Windows Azure storage abstractions (Blob, Table, Queue) are built upon the same stack (whitepaper here). While there’s much more to tell about it, the reason why it scales is because of its partitioning logic. Whenever you store something on Windows Azure storage, it is located on some partition in the system. Partitions are used for scale out in the system. Imagine that there’s only 3 physical machines that are used for storing data in Windows Azure storage:
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MyGet Build Services - Join the private beta!
Good news! Over the past 4 weeks we’ve been sending out tweets about our secret project MyGet project “wonka”. Today is the day Wonka shows his great stuff to the world… In short: MyGet Build Services enable you to add packages to your feed by just giving us your GitHub repo. We build it, we package it, we publish it. Our build server searches for a file called MyGet.sln and builds that. No probem if it's not there: we'll try and build other projects then. We'll run unit tests (NUnit, XUnit, MSTest and some more) and fail when those fail. We'll search for packages generated by your solution and if none are generated, we take a wild guess and create them for you.
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Get your Windows 8 up to speed fast
With the release of Windows 8 on MSDN yesterday, I have a gut feeling that today, around the globe, people are installing this fresh operating system on their machine. I’ve done so too and I wanted to share with your two tools: one that helped me get up to speed fast, one that will help me up to speed even faster the next time I want to reset my PC. One of the best things created for Windows, ever, is Chocolatey. If you are familiar with Ninite, you will find that both serve the same purpose, however Chocolatey is more developer focused.
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ASP.NET Web API OAuth2 delegation with Windows Azure Access Control Service
If you are familiar with OAuth2’s protocol flow, you know there’s a lot of things you should implement if you want to protect your ASP.NET Web API using OAuth2. To refresh your mind, here’s what’s required (at least): That’s a lot to build there. Wouldn’t it be great to outsource part of that list to a third party? A little-known feature of the Windows Azure Access Control Service is that you can use it to keep track of applications, user consent and token expiration & refresh token handling. That leaves you with implementing: Let’s do it!