June 2010 - Posts
Earlier this week I blogged about IIS Express , and discussed some of the work we are doing to make ASP.NET development easier from a Web Server perspective. In today’s blog post I’m going to continue the simplicity theme, and discuss some of the work we are also doing to enable developers to quickly get going with database development. In particular, I’m pleased to announce that we’ve just completed the engineering work that enables Microsoft’s free SQL Server Compact Edition (SQL CE) database to work within ASP.NET applications. This enables a light-weight, easy to use, database option that now works great for ASP.NET web development. Introducing SQL Server Compact Edition 4 SQL CE is a free, embedded, database engine that enables...
When I posted my RIA Services and Authentication post earlier in the week (which I highly recommend checking out first if you haven't), the first comments/tweets I saw indicated people also want to see roles working in the application. So I decided to add this bit of functionality, both in the Book Club application and the supporting functionality in the RIAEssentials framework, so you can use it easily in your own applications as well. From a scenario perspective, what I am going to do is require an Admin role to browse and add book club members. Adding and Using Roles The first step is to update the AuthenticationService implementation I showed earlier to add roles into the authentication process. It only requires quite literally a couple...
Three months ago at MIX we announced and first demoed the Silverlight PivotViewer control. The Silverlight PivotViewer control enables you to visualize thousands of objects at once, and sort and browse data in a way that helps you see trends and quickly find what you’re looking for. It’s ability to compare information, and navigate it in a way that feels natural and fast, is really unrivaled in the market today. PivotViewer is one of those technologies that’s way better experienced than described. Below are a few cool examples of large information sets published on the web using it with Silverlight 4: Netflix Instant Watch Movies This Netflix Instant Watch collection is hosted on Windows Azure and was built by a member of the Windows...
The first post in this series can be found here: http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/archive/2010/06/16/how-i-understood-monads-part-1-2-sleepless-and-self-loathing-in-seattle.aspx Last time , I tried to explain how beer and Lou helped me finally understand monads. I gave a couple of trivial examples. Hopefully now that you have this new functional hammer, everything will start looking like a nail. So let’s have a look at a few screws this time. Like last time, I’ll be pretty liberal with the definition of a monad as long as the spirit of monads seems to be preserved. Feel free to nitpick in the comments ;) Oh yeah, jQuery is a monad In jQuery, you first create a wrapped set of HTML elements and then execute operations on it, the result of which is...
Developers today build and test ASP.NET sites and applications using one of two web-servers: The ASP.NET Development Server that comes built-into Visual Studio The IIS Web Server that comes built-into Windows Both of the above options have their pros and cons, and many ASP.NET developers have told us: “I wish I could have the ease of use of the ASP.NET Development Server, but still have all the power and features of IIS”. Today I’m happy to announce a new, free option that we are enabling – IIS Express - that combines the best characteristics of both, and which will make it easier to build and run ASP.NET sites and applications. IIS Express will work with VS 2010 and Visual Web Developer 2010 Express, will run on Windows XP and higher...
Authentication is the third in a series of posts covering the key concepts of RIA Services using the Book Club application to digger deeper and go beyond the basics. Links to the first two posts on validation and authorization as well as an overview of the application/source code are at the end of this post. Authentication Overview Like authorization, RIA Services provides a higher level programming model, and out-of-the-box, but extensible solution. Authentication answers the question: "Do these credentials represent a valid user?" Credentials might be user name and password, or any other piece of data that can be used to verify that the user is who he/she says they are. Generally, a side-effect of authentication is to produce a representation...
We’ve received several reports of an occasional issue occurring with VS 2010 when developers try and do “Cut” or “Copy” text operations of text. In some cases VS incorrectly calculates that not enough memory is available (even though there is memory available) and displays the following error message: "Insufficient available memory to meet the expected demands of an operation at this time, possibly due to virtual address space fragmentation. Please try again later." There is now a public patch available for this issue which you can download and apply here if you are running into it. More details on the issue can be found on the Visual Studio team blog here . Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also...
When a zip package is built from VS2010 web application UI (via Build Deployment Package command), or through command line (msbuild myproject.csproj /t:package), a few files are generated in the destination folder. Here’s some brief description: File Name Description myApp.deploy-readme.txt Read me file of how to use myApp.deploy.cmd. myApp.deploy.cmd The auto generated command file which can be used in many situations. Check MSDN topic for details. myApp.SetParameters.xml The parameter file that user can modify to affect deployed IIS application, such as IIS application name, connection string etc. Check MSDN topic for more details. myApp.SourceManifest.xml The source manifest file that VS uses to compile the package via web deploy...
For some time now, I had been noticing some interest for monads, mostly in the form of unintelligible (to me) blog posts and comments saying “oh, yeah, that’s a monad” about random stuff as if it were absolutely obvious and if I didn’t know what they were talking about, I was probably an uneducated idiot, ignorant about the simplest and most fundamental concepts of functional programming. Fair enough, I am pretty much exactly that. Being the kind of guy who can spend eight years in college just to understand a few interesting concepts about the universe, I had to check it out and try to understand monads so that I too can say “oh, yeah, that’s a monad”. Man, was I hit hard in the face with the limitations of my own abstract thinking abilities...
This post digs deeper into the Book Club application from the perspective of the authorization feature of RIA Services. You can check out more information about the application via its associated table of contents post. The post covers how the out-of-box authorization rules can be applied, how custom rules that can be implemented, how custom rules can use additional bits of information in their implementation, and how client-side UI can be customized to account for authorization. The sample application has been updated, so you might want to download the latest release of the code from the RIA Services Essentials project on CodePlex or browse the checkin history . Authorization and validation share a lot of common concepts and patterns, so the...
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