Tag: ASP.NET
All the articles with the tag "ASP.NET".
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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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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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Hands-on Windows Azure Services for Windows
A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft announced their Windows Azure Services for Windows Server. If you’ve ever heard about the Windows Azure Appliance (which is vaporware imho :-)), you’ll be interested to see that the Windows Azure Services for Windows Server are in fact bringing the Windows Azure Services to your datacenter. It’s still a Technical Preview, but I took the plunge and installed this on a bunch of virtual machines I had lying around. In this post, I’ll share you with some impressions, ideas, pains and speculations.
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Tweaking Windows Azure Web Sites
A while ago, I was at a customer who wanted to run his own WebDAV server (using www.sabredav.org) on Windows Azure Web Sites. After some testing, it seemed that this PHP-based WebDAV server was missing some configuration at the webserver level. Some HTTP keywords required for the WebDAV protocol were not mapped to the PHP runtime making it virtually impossible to run a custom WebDAV implementation on PHP. Unless there’s some configuration possible… I’ve issued a simple phpinfo(); on Windows Azure Websites, simply outputting the PHP configuration and all available environment variables in Windows Azure Websites. This revealed the following interesting environment variable:
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Fourth year as an MVP, second year for Windows Azure
Woohoo! I just received the great mail I expect yearly on the first of July: Dear Maarten Balliauw, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2012 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Windows Azure technical communities during the past year. The Microsoft MVP Award provides us the unique opportunity to celebrate and honor your significant contributions and say "Thank you for your technical leadership." Toby Richards General Manager Community & Online Support
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Setting up a webfarm using Windows Azure Virtual Machines
With the release of Microsoft’s Windows Azure Virtual Machines, a bunch of new scenarios became available on their cloud platform. If you plan to host multiple web applications, you can either go with Windows Azure Web Sites or go with a webfarm you create using the new IaaS capabilities. The first is okay for any type of application, the latter may be suitable when running a large-scale web application that can not be deployed easily in the PaaS offering. In this blog post, I’ll show you how to build a webfarm with (free!) load balancing.
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Use NuGet Package Restore to avoid pushing assemblies to Windows Azure Websites
Windows Azure Websites allows you to publish a web site in ASP.NET, PHP, Node, … to Windows Azure by simply pushing your source code to a TFS or Git repository. But how does Windows Azure Websites manage dependencies? Do you have to check-in your assemblies and NuGet packages into source control? How about no… NuGet 1.6 shipped with a great feature called NuGet Package Restore. This feature lets you use NuGet packages without adding them to your source code repository. When your solution is built by Visual Studio (or MSBuild, which is used in Windows Azure Websites), a build target calls nuget.exe to make sure any missing packages are automatically fetched and installed before the code is compiled. This helps you keep your source repo small by keeping large packages out of version control.
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GitHub for Windows Azure Websites
With the new release of Windows Azure and Windows Azure Websites, a lot of new scenarios with Windows Azure just became possible. One I like a lot, especially since Appharbor and Heroku have similar offers too, is the possibility to push source code (ASP.NET or PHP) to Windows Azure instead of binaries using Windows Azure Websites. Not everyone out there is a command-line here though: if you want to use Git as a mechanism of pushing sources to Windows Azure Websites chances are you may go crazy if you are unfamiliar with command-line git commands. Luckily, a couple of weeks ago, GitHub released GitHub for Windows. It features an easy-to-use GUI on top of GitHub repositories. And with a small trick also on top of Windows Azure Websites.
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Using the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network
As you know, Windows Azure is a very rich platform. Next to compute and storage, it offers a series of building blocks that simplify your life as a cloud developer. One of these building blocks is the content delivery network (CDN), which can be used for offloading content to a globally distributed network of servers, ensuring faster throughput to your end users. I’ve been asked to write an article on this matter, which I did, and which is live at ACloudyPlace.com since today. As a small teaser, here’s the first section of it:
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Pro NuGet is finally there!
Short version: Install-Package ProNuget or http://amzn.to/pronuget It’s been a while since I wrote my first book. After I’ve been telling that writing a book is horrendous (try writing a chapter per week after your office hours…) and that I would never write on again, my partner-in-crime Xavier Decoster and I had the same idea at the same time: what about a book on NuGet? So here it is: Pro NuGet is fresh off the presses (or on Kindle). Special thanks go out to Scott Hanselman and Phil Haack for writing our foreword. Also big kudos to all who’ve helped us out now and then and did some small reviews. Yes Rob, Paul, David, Phil, Hadi: that’s you guys.