A Quick Discussion of Active and Passive FTP Connections

I get a lot of questions about Active versus Passive FTP Connections, specifically when people are configuring their FTP firewall settings as described in my articles like Configuring FTP Firewall Settings in IIS and FTP Firewall Support , and I get related questions when people are trying to figure out why they can't use the command-line FTP.EXE utility that ships with Windows over the Internet.

Controlling the display of ASP.NET validator controls

Recently, I worked on an old webform project and used the asp.net validation controls. I previously used some features of validation controls, but I encountered more scenarios this time. I found these controls are fairly flexible and can be configured to work in many different ways:Validator ControlsThe most important properties that control the display are Text, ErrorMessage and Display pr

Announcing the release of AMQP support with Windows Azure Service Bus

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 interopera

Intercepting LINQ Queries

A common request when working with LINQ queries (Entity Framework, NHibernate, etc) is the ability to intercept them, that is, inspect an existing query and possibly modify something in it. This is not extremely difficult to do “by hand”, but Microsoft has a nice class called ExpressionVisitor which makes the job easier. It basically has virtual methods that get called whenever the class visits

IP Throttling in ASP.NET Web API

Some Web APIs use the client IP address to enforce Service Level Agreements such as limit the number of calls in a period of time. The client IP address can be used as a replacement for an authentication key sometimes when a previous registration of client applications is not required. This is relatively simple to implement in a message handler,public class IPThrottlingMessageHandler : Del

Dynamically Loading Controllers and Views with AngularJS and RequireJS

New to AngularJS? Check out the AngularJS in 60-ish Minutes video to get a jumpstart on using the framework to build Single Page Applications (SPAs).Dynamically Loading Controllers and Views AngularJS provides a simple way to associate a view with a controller and load everything at runtime using the $routeProvider object. Routing code is typically put in a module’s config() function and loo

The holy grail: Automatically diagnose IIS + ASP.NET website hangs

We finally did it. LeanSentry now automatically detects and diagnoses IIS and ASP.NET hangs! Read More......( read more ) Read More......(read more)

The powerful .NETMF on your wrist! Meet the Agent

So if you've been under a rock lately, you might have missed this little phenom known as KickStarter. Well today you're going to want to check it out. Secret Labs, the folks who brought you Netduino (hey, I'm wearing a Netduino t-shirt today, what a coincidence) have teamed up with a watch maker in New York City (SL is based there as well) to bring you Agent! http://www.agentwatches.com/ So what i

Tricky issue with HTML5 drag and drop

Recently a reader asked about a tricky issue with HTML5 drag and drop. The issue is this: HTML5 supports native drag and drop through draggable property and several events such as dragstart, drag, dragenter, dragleave, dragover and drop. Normally dragstart event handler is where you set the data that is to be transferred between the drag source and drop target. The drop event handler is where

Everyone else is doing it (incorrectly)!

_[This is actually a repost from my personal blog, but I think the technical audience might “dig” it as well.]_Innovation is hard. You can definitely foster it, but you can't really force it. It's completely fascinating when people innovate in a massively disruptive way. While you can't make innovation happen, it's something I try to strive for. There are certain ways that I've had a great de

modern.ie

We are planning to update our very old web application so that it works better with modern web browsers. I have heard of modern.ie in the past and decided to give it a try. The site has a scanner that can scan a URL entered by a user. Unfortunately, our site requires log-in before getting to the page we want to scan. Fortunately, the site also offers a downloadable scanner that we can use in our

Red Gate Is Looking For Feedback On Its ASP.NET MVC Web Development Education Website

Red Gate is looking for feedback on its ASP.NET Web Development Education website.Visit their website and answer the survey.

70-484 exam: Essentials of Developing Windows Store Apps using C#

Just got this one! Here is a little tip for you: While studying a new exam the first thing to do is to consult the “Skills Measured” section of the official page of Microsoft Learning website: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/Exam.aspx?ID=70-484Better than that, Vitor Ciaramella, put together this nice sheet with direct hyperlinks to MSDN resources for each topics covered by the ex

Come support us at TechEd 2013 and get awesome stuff!

Are you going to TechEd this year? Be sure to come see us, and get some awesome stuff - including an exclusive LeanSentry discount, and a chance to win a Microsoft Surface! We've been working hard to to bring better monitoring and production troubleshooting Read More......( read more ) Read More......(read more)

Mapping and Location in iOS and Android at Xamarin Evolve 2013

The following is a link to my talk on Mapping & Location in iOS and Android at Xamarin Evolve 2013.  Obviously, the talk is centered on MonoTouch, aka Xamarin.iOS, and Mono for Android, aka Xamarin.Android.  In this talk, I cover the native functionality of each platform.  In addition, I cover Google Maps for iOS SDK.  I hope that you find the talk to be helpful.http://xamarin.com/evolve/2013#s

World's largest startup competition and hackathon (AngelHack 2013) comes to Singapore in June 2013

Entrepreneurship has been on the rise in sunny Singapore over the past years with more and more youths having the guts to take the bold step to be different - stepping out of the comforts of a stable 9am to 5pm desk job to realize their dreams. Although I'm still fairly un-impressed with our startup scene here (in comparison with the US, or something closer to home - China and Korea), I am happy t

Lessons from live blogging with Azure (nothing bad happened)

I wrote previously about how I built a "live blog" app in Azure, so we could use it for PointBuzz during last week's festivities at Cedar Point. Not surprisingly, it worked just fine. As I expected, the whole thing was kind of overkill. Sweet, over-provisioned overkill.The traffic loads we encountered were not a big deal. At one point, we were close to 300 simultaneous connections. We didn't

Consuming Windows Azure Mobile Services REST API from ASP.NET Web API App

Windows Azure Mobile Services lets the developers to use structured storage, user authentication and push notifications to Android, iOS, HTML, Windows Store, or Windows Phone 8 apps  by leveraging the Windows Azure Cloud platform. Using with Windows Azure Mobile Services, you can enjoy the scalability power of Cloud to your Mobile apps. In this blog post, I will demonstrate how to persist data o

Creating a simple Live Cricket Score using ASP.NET SignalR

        Introduction:                    I am from Pakistan. Like most of Pakistanis, I am also a huge fan of Cricket. Yesterday, I got some time from my busy job. I thought to create a simple Cricket Live Score feature using ASP.NET SignalR. It is also Interesting to note that the guys(David Fowler from West Indies and Damian Edwards from Australia) that are heavily involved in SignalR devel

Using Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) in ASP.NET Web API

For security reasons browsers prohibit AJAX calls to resources residing outside the current origin. This means you under the current settings, you can't provide a service exposed by a Web API to some other origin. However, at times you might want to allow a legitimate origin to access a resource. This is where Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) specifications come into the picture. While there

Entity Framework Code First Fluent Validation

Back to Entity Framework Code First (EFCF) validation. On my previous post I mentioned that EFCF did not support fluent validation. While this is true, it isn’t too hard to implement one such mechanism, which is exactly why I am writing this! I will be using the SavingChanges event to inject the validation logic, which will be implemented by strongly typed delegates. Let’s see some code:

Entity Framework Code First Validation

IntroductionMost persistence frameworks implement some kind of custom validation of entities before they are sent to the database. By custom I mean something more than just “is not null”, “has XX characters”, etc. This typically includes individual properties as well as validation of the entity as a whole – for example, checking that a property’s value is valid when used together with another

Blogs Portugueses Sobre SharePoint

This post is in portuguese only, sorry!A partir de um comentário no LinkedIn, no grupo da Comunidade Portuguesa de SharePoint (http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=996587&trk=anet_ug_hm) foi começada uma lista dos blogs de autores portugueses e brasileiros sobre SharePoint, ainda que não exclusivamente. Vou publicar essa lista aqui, e tentarei mantê-la actualizada.* Comunidade Portugu

System.InvalidOperationException: jsdebug Web Service method name is not valid

If you are getting a 'web service undefined' error when calling a web service from Javascript which is defined inside the ScriptManager tag like so: <asp:ScriptManager ID="ScriptManager1" runat="server"><Services><asp:ServiceReference Path="~/Services/WebService.asmx" InlineScript="True" /></Services></asp:ScriptManager>Actual Error: System.InvalidOperationException: jsdebug Web Ser

Using the Enterprise Library 6 Configuration Console with Visual Studio 2012

You will have to download and run the Configuration Console from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38789, there is no NuGet package for it. After that, you will get a context menu for each project on the solution for editing the configuration:

Hiring .NET Developers in Washington DC

My company, Thycotic Software is hiring for .NET Developers.  http://www.thycotic.com/career_tdddeveloper.html This is a great position - competitive salary, great benefits, awesome developers and fun problems to solve - you will be challenged!

Could not load type System.ServiceModel.Activation.HttpModule

If you install DotNet framework 4.0 on IIS server and then enable .NET 3.0 or 3.5 WCF features, you might see following error when browse your application site made of ASP.NET 4.0 (or run on ASP.NET 4.0 application pool).Could not load type ‘System.ServiceModel.Activation.HttpModule' from assembly ‘System.ServiceModel, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089′.    De

Building for Web scale is a different skill

There are a lot of things that one can find satisfying about building stuff for the Web. For a lot of people, it's probably just the act of building something cool, pretty and useful. These are certainly things to strive for, but for me, the interesting thing has always been to build something that can scale.Like so many things in life, this particular desire grew out of experience. Very earl

free pop3 for Windows 2012 Server

Our team develops tools for Windows Server. Fifteen years ago we started with a pop3 queuing (popConnect) tool. We offer a free extender for the IIS SMTP Service to support pop3.·         You want to provide emails from any source (e.g. IIS, SharePoint, …) for POP3 retrieval by any mail client (e.g. Outlook, Thunderbird, …). ·         You used the Microsoft POP3 Service in Windows Server 200

Filter Collections Automatically With Entity Framework Code First

IntroductionIn some O/RMs, it is possible to specify automatic filters for entity collections such as one-to-many or many-to-many. These are applied automatically whenever these collections are being populated. Entity Framework does not offer one such mechanism, however, it is possible to implement it.Context CollectionsIn Entity Framework Code First, entities are exposed as IDbSet<T> or