Al Pascual ASP.NET Blog

RT: How To Activate Internet Tethering Now On iPhone OS 3.0

albertpascual — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 04:43:00 GMT

When the iPhone 3G 3.0 update came out, we were expecting some kind of tethering for people like me that goes on the road a lot and need the laptop connected to the web in regular basis. AT&T didn’t supply that option and they might be adding that for a huge monthly fee.

Now some people found the way around that problem and how to do it, in 5 minutes following this instructors your laptop can be online connected to your iPhone via USB or Bluetooth.

All the details to do that takes 5 minutes and can be found here at iSmashPhone

http://www.ismashphone.com/2009/06/activate-internet-tethering-now-on-iphone-os-30.html

Follow those instructions to be able to activate your iPhone for tethering. Now this is not what AT&T wants you to do, so they may charge you if they find out and of course that application to unlock the feature is not being tested by Apple.

Cheers

Silverlight 2.0 Authentication Services.

albertpascual — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 04:42:00 GMT

Message based authentication managed by Silverlight not the browser.

Silverlight can use the browsers cookies and send them to the hosts. When you authenticate with ASP.NET the authentication cookie stored to your computer will be used by Silverlight if you create a Silverlight Authentication Service

Create a service.svc make sure to select the Silverlight Service.

<%@ ServiceHost Language="C#" Service="System.Web.ApplicationServices.AuthenticationService %>

On your web.config add the service to be enable it.

<service name="System.Web.ApplicationServices.AuthenticationService" behaviorConfiguration="AuthenticationServiceTypeBehaviors"> <endpoint contract="System.Web.ApplicationServices.AuthenticationService" binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="userHttp" bindingNamespace="http://asp.net/ApplicationServices/v200"/> </service>

Then just connect to the service as a service web reference and use the methods for the authentication

http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2008/05/03/accessing-the-asp-net-authentication-profile-and-role-service-in-silverlight.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2008/06/23/using-asp-net-authentication-in-a-web-service-with-silverlight.aspx

Cheers

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Problems with the clientaccesspolicy.xml for Silverlight access to HTTPS

albertpascual — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 04:37:00 GMT

I deployed a Silverlight application that needs to access HTTPS resources, for the deployment of course I read the guidelines to declared on the clientaccesspolicy file the https explicitly. So on the resources that needed to be access by Silverlight I added the following clientaccesspolicy.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<access-policy>
  <cross-domain-access>
    <policy>
      <allow-from http-request-headers="*">
        <domain uri="http://*"/>
        <domain uri="https://*"/>
      </allow-from>
      <grant-to>
        <resource path="/" include-subpaths="true"/>
      </grant-to>
    </policy>
  </cross-domain-access>
</access-policy>

On some of my previous posts I explain my frustration believing that Silverlight was not able to read the security cookie to send it at each request, until a change was made to the client access policy file to do not state explicitly that HTTPS had access to that resource.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<access-policy>
  <cross-domain-access>
    <policy>
      <allow-from http-request-headers="*">
        <domain uri="*"/>
      </allow-from>
      <grant-to>
        <resource path="/" include-subpaths="true"/>
      </grant-to>
    </policy>
  </cross-domain-access>
</access-policy>

All the sudden as an act of magic, Silverlight was able to access those resources. The SSL certificate is not self signed so Silverlight is happy using those resources after changing the clientaccesspolicy.xml to allow any access.

I was very surprise at that, anybody can shine some light to this problem? All resources I read mandate to explicitly add the https on the domain uri to allow https calls from Silverlight, yet that part was the one that blocked my Silverlight application.

Cheers

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Great philosophy to build applications I picked up at the MVP Summit.

albertpascual — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 05:15:00 GMT

At the MVP Summit I got more than just new technology and roadmaps, many people have the philosophy of building software. I now it’s being a while since the 2009 MVP Summit, I wanted to practice the philosophy before posting it and saying that is the best thing since slice bread. Just to make sure to give credit where credit is due, this is was my philosophy, I “borrowed” it from the right people:

Scenario focused
Business customers drive scenarios.
Scenarios drive the technology.
- Technology does not drive the scenarios.
- Scenarios should be end to end.
- Enable scenarios (simply and basically)
Take only a few innovative risks

As I think about it I have failed many times in following this philosophy, I enjoy taking risks as well as technology drives my scenarios in many instances.

As developers we know there is more than just writing code, something that business analysts do not account when trying to price your resource and time. We should get rid of all developers as Phil Haack fantastic blog post described. Hey wait, he is in our side on this one. Yet brings something very interesting into surface, programmers are not communicating effectively to non very technical person or we get frustrated to keep repeating or explaining the same concepts.

A developer is just a resource in a project, is not even the most important resource nor the one that deserves more attention, the developer in a project yet is normally the one that requires more time and budget to get the product to the customer.

Following the philosophy to build new application, developers and architects should spend as much time as they need to build an architecture and build prototypes proof the concept.

When architecting a solution we are eager to use the latest technology as well as not creating workflows from end to end. If you look back on your previous challenges you would be surprise to find out you took perhaps a few risks that increased the time and cost of the entire project. I’m not saying, that you should never take a risk, I for once take many risks in my projects and I’ll be taking more in future ones, I make sure to managed those by early prototyping and increasing the amount of time to avoid surprises, even with that, surprises will come, yet you’ll have the proper budget and time to deal with those as they arise.

This works for me besides my 2008 resolution, easy, flexible and always ready!

Some great resources to help manage your programmers ego.

http://www.secretgeek.net/program_communicate_4reasons.asp

Cheers

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The June Microsoft Silverlight links

albertpascual — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 02:11:49 GMT

As many developers come to the wonderful side of Silverlight there are now many new resources to help you to write code in Silverlight. I would like to bring some very interesting ones into the light on my monthly link series.

The Interesting list.

GeoReference any XAML to place it correctly on an ElementLayer by Morten Nielsen

Hanselminutes Podcast – Silverlight 3 with Tim Heuer where Scott Hanselman and time Heuer discuss the new features of Silverlight 3

Hanselman’s Breaking all the rues with WCF. A must have if you work with Silverlight and Silverlight web services.

Silverlight 3: Displaying and Charting with TwitterCounter.

Stream operations in WCF and Silverlight 3.

Silverlight 3 and Expression Blend 3 Launch date.

Art’s Place announcement : ArcGIS API for Silverlight/WPF Release Candidate now available.

Adam Kinney’s blog : Silverlight-based Local Impact Map

Deep Zooming on the fly.

Corey SchumanVersioning your Silverlight application.

From the wonderful blog at nikhilk.net

And if you are tired of the ASP.NET MVC project, you can always check the Silverlight MVC

The Locate Me with Virtual Earth Sample for Silverlight

MouseWheel behavior for Silverlight.

Rolling Stone Archives in Silverlight.

The Silverlight Toolkit

The late news about the new release for Silverlight 2 and 3

The .NET RIA Services

What’s the .NET RIA Services?

.NET RIA Services MIX ‘09 Talk and Sildes

And the geeky goes to:

And the Silverlight cool application award goes to a French developer.

Cheers

The next generation of entertainment, stop renting and start streaming.

albertpascual — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 04:38:00 GMT

As a geek and self proclaimed technologies I have a large list of gadgets that I would like to purchase, as a father and husband the list can only be accessed 3 times a year at most to purchase the next that makes more sense. Last weekend was father’s day, one of the marked days when my wife may purchase from such a list.

My 3 daughters and wife surprised me on father’s day morning with the new The LG BD 370 Network Blu-ray Disc Player that I have been asking for a while.

This great device is much more than a Blu-Ray disc player, the most amazing part of this gadget is that will stream Netflix movies from your Instant Queue for free with your unlimited subscription of Netflix. A huge money saver in renting fees from your local blockbuster.

The DVD Renting evolution.

Local DVD store => DVD in the mail => Streaming movies to your TV

The progression on movie entertainment has slowly moved from when you had to go to your local video store to rent your DVDs. Netflix came a long and you didn’t had to leave your house in order to received your movies. Blockbuster came 6 months later with the same option giving also their customers the option to exchange their movies at the store, a great new twist that brought many users back to the Blockbuster option without realizing that extra fees on the delay of returning those DVDs.

I started testing Netflix streaming using my wife’s laptop that has a HDMI port to connect to the big screen TV, we enjoyed the first and second season of heroes straight to the big TV without waiting for a DVD in the mail or incurring in any more changes. My kids enjoyed as well a few children movies. The evolution was simple, instead of moving around the TV I needed to add into the list a network Blu-Ray to use a remote control and having the device always connected to the TV.

1080p DVD quality.

The device comes set up as default to provide you with 1080i that you can change to 1080p using your HDMI and renting of course Blu-Ray disks, that will cost you an extra $2 on your Netflix monthly price. The quality change from the normal HD provided by my Dish Network to 1080p is substantial on audio and a little noticeable on the video quality. My wife protested that she could not tell the difference.

The Streaming Quality.

When streaming from Netflix the device checks your bandwidth to deliver the best quality on the speed of your internet, having a FIOS internet into my house, I do believe that I’m getting the best possible quality streamed to my TV that I would say is close to my HD channels.

The only complain I have.

After you purchase the device, in this case my wife did, you won’t be able to connect it to the Internet without a Ethernet cable to your router. Now I am in the 99% of people that does not have Ethernet ports in every room in the house. The device does not come with a wireless card, only a Ethernet port, a huge design problem if you asked me, for the price of a device like that, I would pay an extra $50 for a wireless N card on it, instead you’ll have to get a power line to connect your device with an extra $100 out of your pocket.

Pay Per View.

The device also upon running a software update will provide you with a Pay Per View application to download movies, an option that I don’t see myself using it as much having the Blu-Ray coming in regular basis, I do not know what quality of movies will be streamed from that service.

What’ next?

In summary the device is a great purchase for my family and one of the gadgets that will be use by everybody in the house. I believe these kind of devices will grow in popularity as more and more families adopt the Internet as the pipe to bring the information into your house. In my case we are completely in dependency of the Internet. I filled all the ports on my router already. I have the router provided by Verizon FIOS and connected to it, 2 wireless routers, an N and a G as well as a Vonage device that connects to the router and to the phone socket to provide a telephone service around the house. Now the new Powerline network adapter to connect my LG BD 370 Network Blu-ray Disc Player to the Internet. Of course various computers using the wireless as well as 2 iPhones and a WII, without forgetting my wireless printer that one day will be an Internet Printer without any doubt.

We overloading the devices in the house to provide us with all this gadgets and the continuation of the increase pipe to the Internet.

So, what’s the next gadget in the list? Or the better question, when is the next time that I’ll be able to get a new device? New date is Xmas or my birthday in January. I believe is time for me to get a 64 bit Windows 7 touch screen laptop by Xmas ;-) I won’t keep my fingers crossed in this one, as right now after this one my WAF (Wife approval factor) is pretty low.

Cheers

ESRI Silverlight/WPF API: Release Candidate available

albertpascual — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 02:23:00 GMT

The ArcGIS API for Microsoft Silverlight™/WPF™ Release Candidate is now available.
RC version updated June 2009 (build 255).

Resolved bugs:

Large features often render erratically when zooming in closely.
Better and more accurate placement of elements in the ElementLayer. Elements with an envelope width/height of 0 will not be scaled but treated similar as a marker symbol, and respect the VerticalAlignment and HorizontalAlignment for relative positioning.
When switching to design-mode, Visual Studio may crash when XAML preview is enabled.
Geocode an address containing an ampersand.
Map contents will not display if it contains only GraphicsLayers or FeatureLayers.
Geometry task operations do not accept a graphic item input with an Envelope geometry type.
Geoprocessor task SubmitJobLastResult property is always null.

Updates\Enhancements:

Breaking Change: All assemblies and namespaces have been appended with name “Client”. For example: ESRI.ArcGIS.* has become ESRI.ArcGIS.Client.*. This change was made to clearly demark the Silverlight\WPF assemblies and types and avoid collisions with other ESRI APIs, such as ArcObjects.
Breaking Change: The ESRI.ArcGIS.Widgets.* assembly and namespace is now ESRI.ArcGIS.Client.Toolkit.*.
Breaking Change: The ESRI.ArcGIS.VirtualEarth.* assembly and namespace is now ESRI.ArcGIS.Client.Bing.*.
Breaking Change: Marker, line and fill outline symbols do not scale while zooming.
Breaking Change: The ICopyrightPanel interface has been removed. Map layer copyright information has been removed from the Map control.
Breaking Change: ClassBreakRenderer has been renamed to ClassBreaksRenderer.
Breaking Change: Clustering has been moved from FeatureLayer to GraphicsLayer. Clustering is also customizable. You can define the properties of the flare and cluster symbols. See the Simple Clusterer and Custom Clusterer samples for an example.
GraphicsLayer has an IsHitTestVisible property to enable\disable interaction with mouse events.
ArcGIS Server Map service layers have a Unit property to discover the unit of the map (e.g. esriDecimalDegrees, esriMeters).
Tasks have an IsBusy property and a CancelAsync() method. When a task instance is executing (sending a request and waiting for a response) the IsBusy property returns true. To cancel execution, call CancelAsync().
Task operations allow for including a user token (user defined object) when executing the task. The user token will be returned to the appropriate event handler when task execution completes or fails.
RoutingTask has been added to support routing operations provided by ArcGIS Server Network Analyst services.

More details at Art’s Place:

http://www.dotartsplace.net/blog/post/2009/06/18/ArcGIS-API-for-SilverlightWPF-Release-Candidate-now-available.aspx

Starting your young kid in development and software

albertpascual — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 04:45:00 GMT

Tonight I read the blog post from Brad Abrams a “developer” at Microsoftthat I have been following from years, one of the first Microsoft people to have a blog really. I was very fortunate to meet him in person the last MVP Summit.

When I was a kid living in Manresa (Barcelona, Spain) at my little school we got a few first generation of Apple computer with only one language LOGO. I loved the 1 hour a week that we were able to have a class in that lab and learn that language. I believe that was there where I learned about my love for computers. I kept my big floppy disk with save logo applications to draw in the screen.

Now Logo is back and alive again, I’ll be setting up my kids computer with theFMSLogo for Windows so my oldest that will be 6 on Saturday can learn how to develop an application.

You can download the open source application here.

Here is the info from the website.

A Logo programming environment for MS-Windows operating systems. FMSLogo (contrasted with other Logo dialects) has an easy-to-use GUI that encourages learning, especially for young children. FMSLogo was once called MSWLogo.

I’ll keep you inform to see how it goes. Thanks Brad for the heads up.

Cheers

via http://alpascual.com

IIS Security Settings for Silverlight 2.0

albertpascual — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 04:44:00 GMT

The web is great for learning patterns and practices when you are planning to deploy a solution. With Silverlight learning how to configure IIS for best results in a very secured environment is a huge task, what happens if you just configure IIS to access Windows Authentication, would the request from Silverlight for the clientaccesspolicy.xml or the crossdomain.xml file are being requested with your Windows Authentication over a few firewalls?

Integrated Windows authentication does not work across proxy servers or other firewall applications.

If integrated Windows authentication fails, due to improper user credentials or some other problem, the browser will prompt the user to enter their user name and password.

So if is Silverlight requesting that file protected by Integrated Windows authentication in a background thread, the browser will not display the prompt, therefore, Silverlight won’t access that resource and your application will fail miserably.

Knowing how to configure IIS for Silverlight is the key and some trade off should be provided. Below I tried to gather all the good patterns and practices from Microsoft to configure your IIS, I could not find specific patters for Silverlight and IIS. Yet I believe there is enough information to understand the best way to secure your resources without kicking Silverlight out.

IIS and Anonymous is the most used setting, removing it will cause many issues to your resources to run, understanding how to lock it is maybe the best way to keep your application pool running.

Anonymous access, the most common Web site access control method, allows anyone to visit the public areas of your Web sites. In IIS 6.0, anonymous users are assigned by default to the IUSR_computername account, which is a valid Windows account that is a member of the Guests group. The IUSR_computername account can be defined on a computer or on a domain.

IIS Best Practices

• Restrict write access permissions for the IUSR_computername account. This will help limit the access anonymous users have to your computer.

• Store executable files in a separate directory. This makes it easier to assign access permissions and audit for administrators.

• Create a group for all anonymous user accounts. You can deny access permissions to resources based on this group membership.

• Deny execute permissions for anonymous users to all executables in Windows directories and subdirectories.

Preventing Anonymous Access in HTTP and HTTPS by Nicholas Allen.

Disabling anonymous access requires coordinating the settings in IIS and in your service configuration. Those two sources must be in agreement about whether anonymous access is expected. IIS is already using Windows authentication in this case, so let's look at what needs to happen to the service configuration file. I'm assuming that this is IIS6 so the only network transport we're talking about here is HTTP.

Configuring Anonymous Authentication

By default, the IUSR_computername account is included in the Windows user group Guests. You can create multiple anonymous accounts, one for each Web or FTP site, directory, or file. By giving these account differing access permissions, or by assigning these accounts to different Windows user groups, you can grant users anonymous access to your different areas of your public Web and FTP content.

The anonymous account must have the user right to log on locally. If the account does not have the Log On Locally permission, IIS will not be able to service any anonymous requests. The IUSR_computername accounts on domain controllers are not assigned this right by default and must be changed to Log On Locally to allow anonymous requests.

You can also change the security privileges for the IUSR_computernameaccount in Windows. However, if the anonymous user account does not have permission to access a specific resource, your Web server will refuse to establish an anonymous connection for that resource. For more information, see Setting Web Server Permissions.

To change the account used for anonymous authentication

In the Internet Information Services snap-in, select a site, directory, or file, and open its property sheets.
Select the appropriate Directory Security or File Security property sheet. Under Anonymous Access and Authentication Control, clickEdit.
In the Authentication Methods dialog box, under Anonymous access, click Edit.
In the Anonymous User Account dialog box, either type in, orBrowse to, the valid Windows user account you want to use for anonymous access.
Clear the Allow IIS to control password check box to enter the account's password.

Important If you change the IUSR_computername

Configuring Integrated Windows Authentication

Integrated Windows authentication does not work across proxy servers or other firewall applications.

If integrated Windows authentication fails, due to improper user credentials or some other problem, the browser will prompt the user to enter their user name and password.

Only Microsoft Internet Explorer, version 2.0 or later, supports integrated Windows authentication.

Configure IIS to host Silverlight applications

http://silverlight.net/forums/t/479.aspx

Cheers

Class to handle HTTPS and non HTTP services

albertpascual — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 04:01:00 GMT

To follow the post from yesterday I created a class to handle better HTTPS and HTTP web services. The problem is not seeing the request in HTTPS, just the connection to the server.

public class SSLSilverlightWebServiceProxy : SSLService.SimpleSilverlightWebServiceSoapClient
    {
        public SSLSilverlightWebServiceProxy()            
        {
            if (Config.Globals.WebService.Address != null)
            {
                if (Config.Globals.WebService.Address.Length &gt; 0)
                {
                    Config.Globals.WebService.Address = Config.Globals.WebService.Address.ToLower().Replace("silverlightwebservice.svc", "SimpleSilverlightWebService.asmx");
                    System.ServiceModel.EndpointAddress address = new System.ServiceModel.EndpointAddress(Config.Globals.WebService.Address);
                    base.Endpoint.Address = address;

                     //HTTPS                    
                    if (address.Uri.ToString().ToLower().IndexOf("https") == 0)
                    {
                        if (base.Endpoint.Contract.Name.IndexOf("SSL") == -1)
                        {
                            System.ServiceModel.BasicHttpBinding myBinding = new System.ServiceModel.BasicHttpBinding(System.ServiceModel.BasicHttpSecurityMode.Transport);
                            base.Endpoint.Contract.Name = base.Endpoint.Contract.Name + "SSL";

                            myBinding.MaxReceivedMessageSize = 2147483647;
                            myBinding.MaxBufferSize = 2147483647;
                            base.Endpoint.Binding = myBinding;
                        }
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        System.ServiceModel.BasicHttpBinding myBinding = new System.ServiceModel.BasicHttpBinding(System.ServiceModel.BasicHttpSecurityMode.None);
                        base.Endpoint.Contract.Name = base.Endpoint.Contract.Name;

                        myBinding.MaxReceivedMessageSize = 2147483647;
                        myBinding.MaxBufferSize = 2147483647;
                        base.Endpoint.Binding = myBinding;
                    }
                }
            }   
        }

Using the Web Platform Installer and the Search Engine Optimization Toolkit.

albertpascual — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 05:35:00 GMT

This is great news to manage your installs and find out what’s new out there to play with. The Web Platform Installer will let you installed and managed the applications installed in your computer. You can download it here.

You can select from web platforms installers like Blogs, content managements, eCommerce, Galleries, Tools and Wikis.

The Search Engine tool inside that awesome bundle.

After installing it go to IIS and you’ll find the new tool to Optimize any website. Enter the URL for the website and start running it, in these case I added http://alpascual.com as a URL.

For a blog with many links and pages could take a very long time to run. I’m expecting a lot of errors after many years or migrating and changing blog engines, will be great knowing the pages and images that are broken instead of going over years of posts. The status is telling me there are only 437 links on my blog, something that sounds a little low.

Even with high expectations I wasn’t expecting such a huge numbers of SEO violations and broken links.

I cannot find a way to export a complete report for sending it or storing it as well would be nice a button to Fix it! ;-) I think I have a lot of work ahead of me.

Cheers

Teaching ASP.NET 3.5 At University of Riverside this summer

albertpascual — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 02:27:00 GMT

A big heads up if you are thinking to learn ASP.NET 3.5, this summer I’ll be teaching it at University of Riverside (UCR), if you want to sign up the link and information about the course is available below.

https://onlinereg.extension.ucr.edu/unexreg/OR_Classschedule.CourseDescription?pCourseID=11126

Course: CS X438.2

Introduces the use of ASP.NET to create visually consistent pages, manage layout with themes and develop master pages. Topics include ASP.NET programming model, web development in Visual Studio, anatomy of an ASP.NET page, ASP.NET server controls, working within the page, rich page composition, ADO.NET data providers, ADO.NET data containers, the data-binding model, the Linq-to-SQL programming model, creating bindable grids of data, managing list of records, managing views of a record, ASP.NET infrastructure and ASP.NET AJAX extensions. This course helps prepare participants for Microsoft Exam number 70-562.

Prerequisite:
CSC X435.51, Visual Basic Application Development Advanced, or CSC X443.32, C# Application Development Advanced, or equivalent experience.

Certificate Program(s):
Required for Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD) Certificate

Instructor:
Albert Pascual, BS, Senior Software Engineer, Redlands

Credit:
4 units

Date/Time:
Thurs., 6-10 p.m. & Sat., 8 a.m.-5 p.m. July 16, Aug. 6, 8, 13, 20 & 27 & Sept. 3 & 10 (8 meeting/s)

Location:
University Extension Center, RIVERSIDE

Text:
"Programmig Microsoft ASP.NET 3.5," Dino Esposito ISBN: 0735625271

Fee:
$895

Reg #:
091-MBY-Y07

Dealing with Silverlight and SSL and without SSL

albertpascual — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 04:26:00 GMT

Silverlight can without any problem talk to HTTP or HTTPS.

So if you do not know where will be deployed you’ll need to make sure your application will work well in both scenarios.

All your web services will need two configuration on the binding of the protocol.

<configuration>
    <system.serviceModel>
              
        <bindings>
            <basicHttpBinding>
                <binding name="BasicHttpBinding_SilverlightWebService" maxBufferSize="2147483647"
                    maxReceivedMessageSize="2147483647">
                    <security mode="None" />
                </binding>
              <binding name="BasicHttpBinding_SilverlightWebServiceSSL" maxBufferSize="2147483647"
                    maxReceivedMessageSize="2147483647">
                <security mode="Transport" />
              </binding>
            </basicHttpBinding>
        </bindings>

One for not security (None) and the other for SSL (Transport)

Second, you’ll have to create a class inheriting from the base proxy class of the service.

public class SilverlightWebServiceProxy : SLService.SilverlightWebServiceClient

Then detect if is in https and use the correct security model.

base.Endpoint.Contract.Name = base.Endpoint.Contract.Name + "SSL";

This is simple, yet you need to make sure all the resources that you accessed in HTTP are accessible in HTTPS.

Please make sure to use the correct clientaccesspolicy.xml that explicitly says that https is ok to access the resources, otherwise Silverlight will failed.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<access-policy>
    <cross-domain-access>
        <policy>
            <allow-from http-request-headers="SOAPAction">
                <domain uri="http://*" />
                <domain uri="https://*" />
            </allow-from>
            <grant-to>
                <resource include-subpaths="true" path="/"/>
            </grant-to>
        </policy>
    </cross-domain-access>
</access-policy>

Hope this helps

Cheers

Is Silverlight 2 ready for the Enterprise solution?

albertpascual — Sat, 30 May 2009 20:43:37 GMT

Is it my imagination or they are selling Silverlight for the enterprise space? This is a question to all experts, in my line of work, I have to deliver enterprise solutions that will stand in any environment and will talk to existing enterprise architectures as well as will perform to the standards. Where does Microsoft Silverlight fits in all that? So let’s say that you are implementing a huge environment inside a network that external users need to consume. You have 2 options, add the servers outside the firewall or use Microsoft Internet Security & Acceleration Server, a very fancy enterprise ready proxy to expose web applications to the internet without users having access to the physical computer (fancy reverse proxy).

Now ISA is very flexible and can read HTML, TEXT, XML and re-write URL to expose IIS on the internet, so the URLs and resources get automatically re-written so no changes need to be made on the ASP.NET app. A typical ASP.NET application is deployed on a farm of web servers that are linked on a load balancer then ISA translates the traffic to the outside world and the links as well manages all security requests between IIS and ISA and application servers.

How ISA manages Silverlight 2?

How does ISA managed Silverlight 2? So there is a XAP file (a Zip file of all Silverlight DLLS) that will go over IIS and ISA will deliver to the browser like any other image for that matter, the browser is the one that will load and process Silverlight using he Silverlight plug in. So is not a server and does not render HTML, means in plain Spanglish that the Silverlight application that works inside the Intranet that access resources and applications servers inside the Intranet won’t be able to access resources on the Internet, is like taking a fish out of the water. Silverlight will try to access your database located at 192.168.1.1 without any success or the webservice at your 192.168.1.2 that now thanks to the ISA you can access by the name of mickey.corpnet.com

ISA cannot see inside the DLLS to replace 192.168.1.2 to mickey.corpnet.com as well requests from the browser that have not being process inside the corpnet network will be lost on the Internet? Now ISA does just much more than filtering, takes care of knowing where to send the request back so will work with load balancers, caching engines providing replicated content as well as session state servers.

Silverlight accessing secured resources

Another point in the enterprise space is the security, you login into ISA and ISA will take care of sending that information to the respective IIS servers, now what happens when Silverlight makes a request from the browser without inheriting all the security from the ASPX page? I bet you the request won’t make it very far.

This is about security, do you want the user to receive all your application zip up nicely so can see what is doing? So it means that you need to write code as you were writing for an Open Source solution, do not add anything in Silverlight that will compromise the solution as at the end of the request, you’ll provide the user all your source code.

Do I need to add all my business logic in the ASP.NET app?

The Solutions is Silverlight 3?

Is then Microsoft Silverlight 3 the enterprise ready solution that will be provided for us? We know now that will inherit the security from the server side, yet, and will provide us with object state as well as browser history, yet any change of having ISA being able to change the resources that Silverlight will have to consume? In other words, will Silverlight 3 XAP going to be able to be translated by ISA?

We know that we can open XAP files and open as well the DLL that it contains by using reflector, now is ISA going to open those dlls, translate links and recompile them on the fly? Or Microsoft will provide us with a solution that we can attached a resource file that gets zip inside the XAP file so ISA can access?

Hacking Silverlight?

We know that we need a solution to this problem if we want to use Silverlight on enterprise solutions, otherwise what Microsoft Silverlight provides in performance is taking it away from not being very flexible in the Web.

Right now we know that out of the box Silverlight and ISA won’t work like ASP.NET that does not need any code changes to be configured using ISA or any other reverse proxy, Silverlight is going to need to understand profiles in different domains. So the idea is not elegant nor simple, you’ll have to add all your resources into different XML files, each XML file is for a different profile, so thing that you are using the Silverlight application in 7 different functions and domains around the solution, and 7 more outside the network, you’ll have to package secured those resources to access the application servers that you need.

There are many way to do it, you can build the XAP depending who is requesting it and add the XML inside the XAP so when the XAP loads on the browser your XML is there for you to read and know the names of the computers you need to talk to.

You can also deploy a webservices that from any place the Silverlight application can access and get information of where I am? Where is everything?

In any case, non of these solutions are ideal, as is expecting the developer to get it ready for the enterprise instead of being able to work with existing enterprise solutions.

Please tell me your story!

Given that, I would like to hear of your experience in Silverlight on an enterprise implementation. How did you solve the issues of Silverlight security as well as other resources that had to consume? Is then Silverlight just a technology for writing nice banners? What about clustering, load balancing, session state?

Cheers

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Links for the month of May

albertpascual — Thu, 28 May 2009 03:53:37 GMT

It’s being a while since posting links to what’s happening around the community, I thought today is a perfect day to do that as I have to catch up myself on the blogs and email, I have been really busy traveling for work.

Things not to miss a free event called Community Day 09.

MVPs Headline at 3rd Microsoft Community Day!

From Shawn Wildermuth:

Silverlight Tour and Silverlight Firestarter both coming to Washington, DC

And talking about Shawn, please make sure you read his article about Behaviors in Silverlight 3. Part 1 to be read first.

From the Silverlight world.

Silverlight in Visual Studio 2010 From Vikram Pendse

Huge memory problem with "transparent background" in sl-3

The one I missed Report from TechEd – MVP pre-show summit

Enjoy,

Cheers