Latest Microsoft Blogs

Announcing the release of AMQP support with Windows Azure Service Bus

ScottGu's Blog — Thu, 23 May 2013 14:42:37 GMT

For the past five years, Microsoft has been working with a diverse group of companies to develop the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) standard. The group of 20+ companies consisted of tech vendors, including Red Hat and VMware, and enterprises like JPMorgan Chase and Credit Suisse. The goal has been to build an open, wire-level protocol standard for messaging that enables easy interoperability between different vendor products. Back in October 2012, the OASIS standards organization announced the approval of AMQP 1.0 as an OASIS Standard and, on the same day, we released a preview implementation of it with Windows Azure Service Bus. Today, I’m pleased to announce that AMQP 1.0 support in Windows Azure Service Bus has been released as...(read more)

Redirecting ASP.NET Legacy URLs to Extensionless with the IIS Rewrite Module

Scott Hanselman - ASP.NET — Fri, 10 May 2013 22:57:50 GMT

ASP.NET has included support for "friendly URLs" for a while now. ASP.NET MVC has always supported friendly URLs and more recently, so has Web Forms. That means if you don't want to have the .aspx extension, you certainly don't have to. However, there's a LOT of existing legacy apps out there as well as apps that you may not have full control over. For example, there's a site that I want to influence but it's got dozens (hundreds) of links to foo.html and bar.html existing pages. Legacy (n): A super-fancy way of saying "already exists." What I want to do is kind of sloppy and I'm doing it for aesthetic reasons. I'll hopefully get around to updating the site's links later and know that future...(read more)

ASP.NET hosts six community created SPA templates now

.NET Web Development and Tools Blog — Mon, 06 May 2013 22:25:16 GMT

Since announcement of 4 community created Single Page Application templates when releasing ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 in February 2013, the community has done some updates to the templates and released 2 more templates: Backbone template and Breeze/Angular template. You can view the details and download the templates at http://www.asp.net/single-page-application/overview/introduction/other-libraries . To use these templates, please make sure you installed Visual Studio 2012 Update 2, which included ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2. Template’s website (if have any) and source location are listed here: Backbone Template https://github.com/kazimanzurrashid/AspNetMvcBackboneJsSpa Breeze/Angular template http://www.breezejs.com/samples...(read more)

One ASP.NET: Nancy.Templates for Visual Studio

Scott Hanselman - ASP.NET — Mon, 06 May 2013 21:23:08 GMT

I hope you've updated to Visual Studio 2012.2 and picked up Web Essentials because we're continuing to add goodness all the time. As we march forward with the One ASP.NET vision , so does the community. One of the major goals has been to make it easier for the community to not only make templates but also live alongside ASP.NET templates as peers. This has been historically hard. It's still too complex, in fact, but it's easier than before . I'm hoping that one day soon making templates will be as easy as making and sharing NuGet packages . Not only is most of ASP.NET open source , but so are the Azure SDKs, NuGet and more. However, there's a large and rich world of open source frameworks and projects that some companies...(read more)

Penny Pinching in the Cloud: Enabling New Relic Performance Monitoring on Windows Azure Websites

Scott Hanselman - ASP.NET — Thu, 02 May 2013 00:11:18 GMT

I've been looking for ways to save money running my (now 12) websites in the cloud lately. Getting insights from logs has been helpful, but I really want more details as to what my app is doing so that I might do less of it. Remember the secret of scaling an application. Have your app do as little as possible. If you do nothing, you can scale infinitely. I like to use tools like Glimpse to profile my apps, check database calls, and explore what's really going on. If you like application insights you may be familiar with New Relic . They are a clever system that profiles apps of all kinds, including sites ASP.NET and Azure. I tweeted this afternoon for folks to hit my site and help me test New Relic. My lovely friends on Twitter promptly...(read more)

Please update to the latest version of Web Essentials 2012 after installing VS2012 Update 2

.NET Web Development and Tools Blog — Wed, 01 May 2013 22:42:39 GMT

After releasing ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2, which is also included in Visual Studio 2012 update 2, we’ve received a few customer feedback about their VS shows an error dialog saying: An exception has been encountered. This may be caused by an extension. You can get more information by examining the file 'C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\ActivityLog.xml'. When looking at ActivityLog.xml, the following error message may show up: System.ComponentModel.Composition.ImportCardinalityMismatchException: Duplicate EditorFormatDefinition exports with identical name attributes exist. Duplicate name is LESSCSSVARIABLEDECLARATIONCLASSIFICATIONFORMAT To solve this problem, one just need to update the “ Web Essentials...(read more)

Announcing the Release of WebMatrix 3

ScottGu's Blog — Wed, 01 May 2013 19:53:06 GMT

I’m excited to announce the release of WebMatrix 3. WebMatrix is a free, lightweight web development tool we first introduced in 2010 , and which provides a great, focused web development experience for ASP.NET, PHP, and Node.js. Today’s release includes a ton of great new features. You can easily get started by downloading it, and watching an introduction video: Some of the highlights of today’s release include deep Windows Azure integration, source control tooling for Git and TFS, and a new remote editing experience. Windows Azure Integration With WebMatrix 3, we are making it really easy to move to the cloud. The first time you launch WebMatrix 3, there’s an option to sign into Windows Azure. You...(read more)

CDNs fail, but your scripts don't have to - fallback from CDN to local jQuery

Scott Hanselman - ASP.NET — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 19:58:14 GMT

There's a great website called http://whoownsmyavailability.com that serves as a reminder to me (and all of us) that external dependencies are, in fact, external. As such, they are calculated risks with tradeoffs. CDNs are great, but for those minutes or hours that they go down a year, they can be super annoying. I saw a tweet today declaring that the ASP.NET Content Delivery Network was down. I don't work for the CDN team but I care about this stuff (too much, according to my last performance review) so I turned twitter to figure this out and help diagnose it. The CDN didn't look down from my vantage point. I searched for things like "ajax cdn,"microsoft cdn," and "asp.net cdn down" and looked at the locations...(read more)

Seeking Feedback on Alternative Formats for ASP.NET MVC and Deployment Content Maps

.NET Web Development and Tools Blog — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 18:02:35 GMT

The ASP.NET content maps are lists of resources that we have reviewed and recommend. The content maps have been popular in their present form, but we’re looking at ways to improve them, such as by publishing more lists but with a narrower focus to each one, by providing more information for each link, and by formatting them differently. Here are links to the existing content maps and three pages that show new approaches we’re considering: ASP.NET Deployment Content Map ASP.NET MVC 4 Content Map ASP.NET Data Access Content Map How to deploy an ASP.NET web application to a Windows Azure Web Site using Visual Studio How to secure an ASP.NET MVC app How Do I Configure FTP Security in IIS? We’re calling the new lists “curated views.” Curated...(read more)

Announcing the release of Windows Azure SDK 2.0 for .NET

ScottGu's Blog — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 17:37:03 GMT

This morning we released the v2.0 update of the Windows Azure SDK for .NET. This is a major refresh of the Windows Azure SDK with some really great new features and enhancements. These new capabilities include: Web Sites : Visual Studio Tooling updates for Publishing, Management, and for Diagnostics Cloud Services: Support for new high memory VM sizes, Faster Cloud Service publishing & Visual Studio Tooling for configuring and viewing diagnostics data Storage : Storage Client 2.0 is now included in new projects & Visual Studio Server Explorer now supports working with Storage Tables Service Bus : Updated client library with message pump programming model support, support for browsing messages, and auto-deleting idle messaging entities...(read more)

Windows Azure: Improvements to Virtual Networks, Virtual Machines, Cloud Services and a new Ruby SDK

ScottGu's Blog — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 18:51:15 GMT

This morning we released some great enhancements to Windows Azure. These new capabilities include: Virtual Networks : New Point-to-Site Connectivity (very cool!), Software VPN Device and Dynamic DNS Support Virtual Machines: Remote PowerShell and Linux SSH provisioning enhancements Cloud Services : Enable Remote Desktop Support Dynamically on Web/Worker Roles Ruby SDK : A new Windows Azure SDK support for Ruby All of these improvements are now available to start using immediately (note: some services are still in preview). Below are more details on them: Virtual Networks: New Point-to-Site Connectivity and Software VPN Device support Last week we announced the general availability of Virtual Network support as part of our IaaS release. Virtual...(read more)

XDT (XML Document Transform) released on codeplex.com

.NET Web Development and Tools Blog — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:50:48 GMT

In Visual Studio 2010 we introduced a simple and straight forward method of transforming web.config during publishing/packaging. This support is called XML Document Transform, aka XDT. It allows you to transform any XML file, not just web.config. To learn more about XDT check out the docs . Since we've released XDT there has been interest in re-using the transformation engine in other scenarios. To enable some of those scenarios we released XDT on NuGet . After that we started working on integrating XDT into NuGet and asked for some feedback from the community . In order to cover all the scenarios for NuGet users we decided to release the source of XDT on codeplex.com using an Apache 2.0 license . You can now redistribute XDT with your own...(read more)

Windows AzureConf this Tuesday

ScottGu's Blog — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 04:59:11 GMT

This Tuesday, April 23, we’ll be hosting Windows AzureConf – a free online event for and by the Windows Azure community. It will be streamed online from 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM PST via Channel 9 , and you can watch it all for free. I’ll be kicking off the event with a Windows Azure keynote in the morning (a great way to learn more about Windows Azure if you haven’t used it yet!). Following my talk the rest of the day will be full of excellent presentations from members of the Windows Azure community. You can ask questions from them live and I think you’ll find the day an excellent way to learn more about Windows Azure – as well as hear directly from developers building solutions on it today. Last year’s Windows AzureConf was a great success...(read more)

ASP.NET Web API: CORS support and Attribute Based Routing Improvements

ScottGu's Blog — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 18:37:38 GMT

We’ve seen a huge adoption of ASP.NET Web API since its initial release. In February we shipped the ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 Update – which added a number of additional enhancements to both Web API and the other components of ASP.NET. The ASP.NET Team has been hard at work on developing the next set of features (lots of cool stuff coming). One of the great things about this work has been how the team has used the open source development process – which we announced we were adopting last spring - to collaborate even more closely with the community to both validate the features early, as well as enable developers in the community to directly contribute to the development of them. Below are some updates on two of the great...(read more)

Windows Azure: General Availability of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

ScottGu's Blog — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 13:01:44 GMT

This morning we announced the general availability release of our Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) support for Windows Azure – including our new Virtual Machine and Virtual Network capabilities. This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production apps. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using it today. In addition to supporting all of the features and capabilities included during the preview, today’s IaaS release also includes some great new enhancements: New VM Image Templates (including SQL Server, BizTalk Server, and SharePoint images) New VM Sizes (including Larger Memory Machines) New...(read more)