carlosag : .NET

Microsoft Web Platform Installer Beta Released

CarlosAg Blog — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 11:00:00 GMT

Today we are releasing a new Web Site at http://www.microsoft.com/web/ where users can get a one stop shop for learning about the Microsoft Web Platform. This is part of a bigger effort to make it easier to get started with building and running Web Applications on Windows and IIS. As part of this a new tool called the Web Platform Installer Beta is also being released to help you getting started installing and getting all the software that you need from a single place without having to hunt around for installers, links or anything else. Just launch the tool, choose the software and configuration you are interested and it takes care of validating and installing pre-requisites. This tool will let you easily setup your development machines for...(read more)

Adding ASP.NET Tracing to IIS 7.0 Failed Request Tracing

CarlosAg Blog — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT

IIS 7.0 Failed Request Tracing (for historical reasons internally we refer to it as FREB, since it used to be called Failed Request Event Buffering, and there are no "good-sounding-decent" acronyms for the new name) is probably the best diagnosing tool that IIS has ever had (that doesn't require Debugging skills), in a simplistic way it exposes all the interesting events that happen during the request processing in a way that allows you to really understand what went wrong with any request. To learn more you can go to http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/266/troubleshooting-failed-requests-using-tracing-in-iis7/ . What is not immediately obvious is that you can use this tracing capabilities from your ASP.NET applications to output the tracing information...(read more)

IIS 7.0 Talk at ASP.NET Connections at Orlando

CarlosAg Blog — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:15:00 GMT

Last Monday I gave a presentation at the ASP.NET Connections event in Orlando, the title was IIS 7.0 for ASP.NET Developers . I just wish I had more time to stay at Orlando, weather was great, especially considering that Sunday I was watching Snow in Redmond and then Monday and Tuesday I was around 80 degrees in sunny Orlando. Anyway, thanks for all the people who attended the session, you can download the Slides and the Demos from here. Here are some of the things that I demonstrated: First Demo: ApplicationHost.config, Web.config and Tools. Showed the Application Pools list and how Visual Studio 2008 now provides IntelliSense for all the configuration of IIS. Added a new Application Pool using Notepad, and IIS Manager shows it. Showed the...(read more)

Not getting IntelliSense in your web.config for system.webServer sections in Visual Studio 2008?

CarlosAg Blog — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 00:20:00 GMT

Today I was playing a bit with Visual Studio 2008 and was surprised to see that I was not getting IntelliSense in my web.config. As you might already know IntelliSense in Xml in Visual Studio is implemented by using a set of schemas that are stored in a folder inside the VS folder, something like: \Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Xml\Schemas. After looking to the files it was easy to understand what was going on, turns out I was developing using .NET 2.0 settings and Visual Studio now ships different schemas for Web.config files depending on the settings that you are using: DotNetConfig.xsd, DotNetConfig20.xsd and DotNetConfig30.xsd . As I imagine I looked into the DotNetConfig.xsd and it indeed has all the definitions for the system...(read more)

How to register a new Section Definition using Microsoft.Web.Administration

CarlosAg Blog — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:10:00 GMT

Today I was asked how can someone would be able to add a new section definition using Microsoft.Web.Administration, so I thought I would post something quickly here just to show how this could be achieved. using System ; using Microsoft.Web.Administration ; class Program { static void Main( string [] args) { using ( ServerManager m = new ServerManager ()) { Configuration config = m.GetApplicationHostConfiguration() ; SectionDefinition definition = RegisterSectionDefinition(config, "system.webServer/mySubgroup/mySection" ) ; definition.OverrideModeDefault = "Allow" ; m.CommitChanges() ; } } public static SectionDefinition RegisterSectionDefinition( Configuration config, string sectionPath) { string [] paths = sectionPath.Split( '/' ) ; SectionGroup...(read more)

Host your own Web Server in your application using IIS 7.0 Hostable Web Core

CarlosAg Blog — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 08:00:00 GMT

IIS 7.0 includes a very cool feature that is not so well known called Hostable WebCore (HWC). This feature basically allows you to host the entire IIS functionality within your own process. This gives you the power to implement scenarios where you can customize entirely the functionality that you want "your Web Server" to expose, as well as control the lifetime of it without impacting any other application running on the site. This provides a very nice model for automating tests that need to run inside IIS in a more controlled environment. This feature is implemented in a DLL called hwebcore.dll, that exports two simple methods: WebCoreActivate . This method allows you to start the server. It receives three arguments, out of which the most important...(read more)

IIS Admin Pack: Configuration Editor

CarlosAg Blog — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 08:00:00 GMT

Today I will be talking about one of the features included in the new IIS Admin Pack called Configuration Editor. Configuration Editor is an IIS Manager feature that will let you managed any configuration section available in your configuration system. Configuration Editor exposes several features from configuration that are not exposed anywhere else in IIS Manager, including: Schema Driven - Config Editor is entirely driven by the configuration schema (found in \windows\system32\inetsrv\config\schema\), this means that if you extend the configuration system creating your sections, they will be available for managing inside config editor, no need to build additional UI for them. Additional Information - Config Editor exposes more information...(read more)

IIS 7.0 Admin Pack: Request Filtering

CarlosAg Blog — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 14:00:00 GMT

My last post talked about the Technical Preview release of the IIS 7.0 Admin Pack, and how it includes 7 new features that will help you manage your IIS 7.0. Today I was going to start writing about more details about each feature and Bill Staples just posted something (How to (un)block directories with IIS7 web.config) that almost seems that it was planned for me to introduce one of the features in the Admin Pack, namely Request Filtering UI. IIS 7.0 includes a feature called Request Filtering that provides additional capabilities to secure your web server, for example it will let you filter requests that are double escaped, or filter requests that are using certain HTTP Verbs, or even block requests to specific "folders", etc. I will not go...(read more)

Search your configuration sections in web.config files using IIS 7.0 API's

CarlosAg Blog — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:05:00 GMT

Background In IIS 7.0 we have the great functionality to allow you to configure the Web Server settings in a distributed way, including the IIS configuration along with the ASP.NET configuration in the web.config files by using Configuration Sections. For example, the following shows a web.config adding a default document (home.aspx) to a Web Application inside my Default Web Site: < configuration > < system.webServer > < defaultDocument > < add value ="home.aspx" /> </ defaultDocument > </ system.webServer > < system.web > < authentication mode ="Forms" /> </ system.web > </ configuration > Now, that is great but it does come with a price, specially for server administrators it means...(read more)

Using Microsoft.Web.Administration in Windows PowerShell

CarlosAg Blog — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 00:53:00 GMT

A couple of months ago I wrote about using LINQ with Microsoft.Web.Administration to manage and query IIS 7.0 configuration. Somebody came back to me and said that LINQ was very cool but that it was very much Developer oriented and that in a production server without VS or .NET 3.5 it wouldn't be an option. Indeed that is a very valid comment and so I decided to show similar stuff with a tool that is available in Windows and its more IT oriented, Windows PowerShell. So in this blog I will quickly mention some of the things you can easily do with Microsoft.Web.Administration inside Windows PowerShell. To start working with Microsoft.Web.Administration the first thing you need to do is load the assembly so that you can start using it. It is quite...(read more)

Backgammon and Connect4 for Windows Mobile

CarlosAg Blog — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

During the holidays my wife and I went back to visit our families in Mexico City where we are originally from. Again, during the flights I had enough spare time to build a couple of my favorite games, Backgammon and Connect4. I've already built both games for Windows using Visual Basic 5 almost 11 years ago but as you would imagine I was far from feeling proud of the implementation. So this time I started from scratch and ended up with what I think are better versions of them (still not the best code, but pretty decent for just a few hours of coding). In fact the AI for the Backgammon version is a bit better and the Connect4 is faster and more suited for a Mobile device. You can go with your PDA/Smartphone to http://www.carlosag.net/mobile/...(read more)

Sudoku and Tetris Game for Windows Mobile

CarlosAg Blog — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 18:20:00 GMT

During my last two business trips (to Barcelona for TechEd and Mexico for ReMix) I was way too bored on the plane and since I recently got my Motorola Q9 (which is a sweet Windows Mobile Phone) decided to write myself a Tetris game and to port my Sudoku game to Windows Mobile as a way to do my "first steps" in the .NET Compact Framework. To my surprise it was really easy to write them and even more to port the desktop version of Sudoku to run in all the .NET Compact Framework platforms. Since holidays are coming I thought of share them as a gift for this holiday's season. Bottom line (with the risk of sounding like a marketing dude, which I'm not) .NET is a cool technology that makes it really easy to code for many devices, from high-end servers...(read more)

The new Configuration System in IIS 7

CarlosAg Blog — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 21:48:00 GMT

Today I was planning on talking about the configuration classes that I purposedly skipped in my last post, but I realized it would be better to explain a little bit more about the new configuration system used in IIS 7. First of all, many of you (as me) will be extremely happy to know that the old "monolithic-centralized-admin only" metabase is dead, we have got rid of it for a much better configuration store. Now, before you feel panic, let me assure you that we haven’t just killed it and forget about the thousands of lines of scripts or custom tools built using the old metabase API’s (such as ABO), for that we have created something we called ABOMapper which will allow all of those applications to keep running transparently, since it will...(read more)

Microsoft.Web.Administration in IIS 7

CarlosAg Blog — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 06:56:00 GMT

While creating the new administration stack in IIS 7 , we were looking into the different ways users could manipulate the server configuration as well as the new runtime information available in IIS 7 (Internally we call this RSCA-Runtime State and Control API) from managed code, and we realized we needed to provide a simpler and more straight forward API that developers could consume from managed code. Microsoft.Web.Administration is the answer to this problem. This API is designed to be simple to code against in an “intellisense-driven” sort of way. At the root level a class called ServerManager exposes all the functionality you will need. To show the power and simplicity of this API, let’s look at some samples below. To try this samples just...(read more)

The evil WinForms Splitter

CarlosAg Blog — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 07:01:00 GMT

Beware of SplitPosition. Today I spent quite some time debugging an issue in the new product I am working on. Well, to summarize what I was seeing in our UI is that for some reason certain information that I was expecting to be there when a TreeNode was expanded, it just wasn’t there. It was completely surprising to me, since in that particular code path, we do not start multiple threads or use Application.DoEvents nor anything like that, basically all we do is a simple assignment in the TreeView after select event, something like: private void OnTreeViewAfterSelect( object sender, TreeViewEventArgs e) { _myObject = DoSomeProcessing() ; } However, for some reason in another event handler of our TreeView, _myObject was not set. How can this be...(read more)