Tag: General
All the articles with the tag "General".
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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!
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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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Domain based routing with ASP.NET Web API
Imagine you are building an API which is “multi-tenant”: the domain name defines the tenant or customer name and should be passed as a route value to your API. An example would be http://customer1.mydomain.com/api/v1/users/1. Customer 2 can use the same API, using http://customer2.mydomain.com/api/v1/users/1. How would you solve routing based on a (sub)domain in your ASP.NET Web API projects? Almost 2 years ago (wow, time flies), I’ve written a blog post on ASP.NET MVC Domain Routing. Unfortunately, that solution does not work out-of-the-box with ASP.NET Web API. The good news is: it almost works out of the box. The only thing required is adding one simple class: Code highlighting produced by Actipro CodeHighlighter (freeware) http://www.CodeHighlighter.com/
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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.