MyAdviceWriter ...

Want to win some easy money? We have a sweepstakes, where we are giving away seven $50 gift certificate each week until June 14th. Just enter once, and you are in each drawing until the end.

To enter, you must do all of the following:

• Make sure you have a valid Windows Azure Account. Don't have one? Get your FREE trial here https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/free-trial/ or activate your MSDN Subscription benefit that includes Windows Azure access at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/msdn-benefits/.
• Create and deploy a new Windows Azure web application according to the content/technical guidelines listed below and deploy to Windows Azure no later than the end date listed above. The web site http://walearningpath.cloudapp.net/ provides guidance and instructions for how to accomplish this.
• Once your Windows Azure web application is deployed send an email to msnextde@microsoft.com with the URL to your deployed web application.

If you are selected as a winner we will need your Azure subscription ID to verify your Windows Azure subscription. Limit one (1) entry per Windows Azure subscription overall.

The official rules are posted on here.

Recently, the Windows Store blog announced that in the next significant Windows 8 preview release they will be expanding their global coverage with 33 additional app submission locales for developers.

Our store services are ramping up as planned--and of course the plan includes ramping up developer registrations to enable app submissions to the Windows store. Today, you need an invite “token” to register. This begs the question - How can YOU get a token?

It’s easy! If your app is ready and you want to be among those developers who get to submit to the store early, simply attend one of the 100s of free Application Excellence Labs that DPE and Windows are holding around the world.

Follow these steps to get invited to an App Excellence lab:

1. Contact me (mike.benkovich@microsoft.com) for instructions on how I can nominate your app for an excellence lab.

2. Create a really great Windows 8 Metro style app (or game) immediately. Get it as ready as if you were submitting to the store.

Hopefully, there will be a lab near you. Right now, we have labs in 40+ countries and we may be adding more.

Of course, coming to the lab is not all you have to do. I have to go back to step #1: You need to have a compelling, functional app that follows our UX guidelines, our performance best practices, and our store certification requirements²

The lab is a 4-hour engagement with a trained Microsoft Services Engineer. This person will run your app through a series of tests based on a quality checklist to ensure your app is (or will be) in top-notch shape when you submit. You will also get a chance discuss ways to make your app even better and you will get answers to any questions you might have.

If your app meets the criteria, then booyah! You get a token to register your developer account and (once you have been verified and all that) you will be able to submit your app to the Windows store.

If your app does not meet the criteria, nothing is lost. You will still end up with a much better app³ and you will be able to submit it when registration opens for all developers.

Good luck. We are looking forward to seeing your apps and helping you to make them great!

Prepare For the Windows Store

ü  Get your app into the Windows Store! - Register and create your app profile found here http://aka.ms/CRReg. 

ü  Download and install the Windows 8 Consumer Preview 

ü  Download and install the Visual Studio 11 Express Beta for Windows 8

Additional Resources

ü  Stay connected with our Windows 8 Evangelists? Visit their blogs to keep informed about all the latest news, updated information and local events you can attend.

·         Jennifer Marsman

·         Jeff Brand

·         Clark Sell

·         Jared Bienz

• ü  Windows Developer Center for Metro apps
• ü  Design guidance for Windows 8 apps
• ü  Windows 8 Code Samples
• ü  Developer Forums for asking questions and getting unblocked

Test your app before submitting with the Windows App Certification Kit (WACK)

Business Software is in the business of data management. Creating, updating, deleting and using information in new ways as well as simplifying how it is collected and reported is key to what we do as technology professionals. With the advent of Cloud Computing being able to take advantage of relational data directly in the cloud using the same skills we’ve been using with solutions built on premise means we’ll spend less time on the good old learning curve. One great example where this is the case is SQL Azure, the relational database service from Microsoft.

If you’ve been working with SQL Server for any length of time you’ll know that at its base it is a relational database engine that talks on port 1433 and speaks a language called Tabular Data Stream (or TDS). Common tools for working with SQL Server on premise includes SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), BCP, Integration Services, Visual Studio, and many more too numerous to name. What is interesting about SQL Azure is that it uses the same protocols and ports as SQL Server you run on premise, so all the same tools continue to work. In this post I’d like to show how to get started working with SQL Azure quickly, provisioning a server, creating a database and some schema, and then migrating data to it.

Provisioning a Server

First thing we need is a service running in a datacenter to host our databases from. This is a logical service that represents many physical machines. We provision a server by going to the Windows Azure management portal (http://windows.azure.com) and selecting the Database section. From there we select our subscription and then click the Create button in the ribbon.

This will provision a SQL Azure service in a specified data center. The management tool lets you select the data center and set administrative credentials. These credentials are whatever you want, but with a couple restrictions. For example it disallows certain usernames for the admin  account including SA, Root, Admin, Guest, etc. Next it requires a strong password which includes 3 of the 4 types of characters on the keyboard (Upper Case, Lower Case, Numbers, and/or Symbols). The last step is to set up some firewall rules which specify who can see the server. By default there are no rules included, you even need to check the box to allow Windows Azure Services to see the server. You should also add a rule for your development machine, but be aware that it’s looking at the external facing IP address. Fortunately when you click the Add button it includes your external facing IP address.

Once this is done you’ll see you have a new database service created. The server name is auto generated for you and is part of the *.database.windows.net domain. It includes a master database (which is used by the system, no charge to you), and you can add databases as needed. To create a database select your server and then click the “Create” button.

You’ll see a dialog that prompts you to decide the size of database and the name. You have options for Web and Business and sizes ranging from 1 GB to 150 GB.

After creating the database the ribbon provides  buttons which include functionality such as management of the schema and performance data from your database, as well as tools to import and export the data and schema. You can also drop the database and/or the server from the ribbon.

In the right pane you’ll find properties about your database. The pieces of information that are most useful include the allocated size, actual size, management URL (which is simply the generated name + .database.windows.net), and a link button to see examples of the connection strings you’ll use in your application to connect to SQL Azure.

So that’s it. I’ll go into the web based management tool in another post, but the key is that it is very easy to get up and started working with SQL Azure. In less than 5 minutes you can provision a service and be up and running with your database in the cloud.

Enjoy!
-mike

If you have an MSDN Subscription you get Azure benefits which you can use to develop in the cloud. In this post I’d like to share what’s involved in activating these.

As you can see there are some pretty hefty benefits available that you can start using immediately. To get going log into the MSDN Subscription site http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions and log in to see your account.

After you select the MSDN Subscription you’re working with, click the link to Activate Windows Azure. It will navigate to the Azure account management page and begin the process of activation. Depending on the level of subscription you have you’ll see details on the amount of resources that are included with your benefits. All that will be required to activate them is a credit card.

Next enter your credit card info, and click to continue…Note that although the credit card is required for activation, a cap is applied to the account and your subscription will be suspended if your reach any of the usage limits for the duration of the billing cycle (month).

After validating the credit card your account is provisioned. To see information about your active subscriptions click on the Account link to see details. As the third screen shows my account has a $0 spending limit attached to it, so I will not be billed for the duration of my subscription unless I remove the cap. More on that in another post.

Happy Coding!

Yesterday in Bangalore at the GIDS conferences I did a session on working with Windows 8 and Notification Services. In it we talked about the live tiles that make up the new start screen in Windows 8 and how as a developer you have new ways to interact with your users thru the use of Toast, Tile, Badge and Raw notifications. We explored the 2 pieces of the puzzle that as developers we need to build, and showed how to make it all work.

The client app and the Cloud service make up the 2 parts of the equation, and the process is fairly simple. The client application developer registers their application with Windows Push Notification Service (WNS), then requests a channel to be notified on. It sends that channel to it’s Cloud partner who persists the channel and then uses that to send notifications thru WNS to the client. The result is a very rich interactive experience. There are many templates and formats for the notification to take, and as a developer all you need to do is select the one you want and send thru the appropriate values.

The tools and technologies you need include 2 versions of Visual Studio, including Visual Studio 2010 with the Windows Azure SDK 1.6 installed, and Dev11 to build the Metro style client application on Windows 8. This Starting from scratch there are NuGet packages you could use, but a MUCH easier path is to use the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 hosted on http://watwindows8.codeplex.com. Nick Harris has a great blog post that talks thru the contents of the kit and details for installing, but the basic premise is that on a 32 GB developer tablet (small disk) I was able to install all the parts I needed to be able to make it work and still had 10 GB left over after installing everything.

Enjoy!

Access Control Services is one of the many services that are part of the Windows Azure Platform which handles an authentication conversation for you, allowing you an easy way to integrate cloud identity from providers like Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Live ID with your application. You need an active Azure Subscription (click here to try the 90 day Free Trial), add an ACS service namespace, then add a Secure Token Service (STS) reference to your  application (you’ll need the Windows Identity SDK and tools for Visual Studio to add the Federation Utility that does that last part – download here).

If you’ve seen an error that says ‘Unable to find assembly Microsoft.IdentityModel’ and wondered what’s the deal? In the documentation for working with a Secure Token Service (STS) you might have seen that this assembly is not part of the default deployment of your Windows Azure package, and that you’ll need to add the reference to your project and set the deployment behavior to deploy a local copy with the application…all good, right?

So you follow the instructions and still get the error. One reason for this is that you might be seeing an error caused by calling methods from the serviceRuntime which changes the appdomain of your webrole. In that case you should consider adding a Startup Task to load the WIF assembly in the Global Assembly Cache.

The basic logic is that in the startup of the web role you’ll need to inject a startup task to run the gacutil executable to do the installation. I created a startup folder in my web project to contain the scripts and files necessary, including a copy of gacutil.exe, a configuration file for it, and a batch file “IdentityGac.cmd” to contain the script commands needed.

I copied the gactuil.exe and config files from my C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\Bin\x64 directory, and put them in the Startup folder. Next I created a cmd file (in notepad) with the commands to install the assembly into the GAC. I found a post that discusses how to create a script to do the installation on http://blogs.infosupport.com/adding-assemblies-to-the-gac-in-windows-azure/ where it installs the Windows Identity files and then sets the windows update service to on demand, installs the SDK, then runs gacutil.

    @echo off
    sc config wuauserv start= demand
    wusa.exe "%~dp0Windows6.1-KB974405-x64.msu" /quiet /norestart
    sc config wuauserv start= disabled
    e:\approot\bin\startup\gacutil /if e:\Approot\bin\Microsoft.IdentityModel.dll

I add these files to the Startup folder, and then open the properties for the 3 files and set the build action to none and “Copy to Output Directory” to Copy Always. This ensures that these files will be present in the deployed instance for my startup task. Next we edit the startup tasks in the Service Definition file, adding a section for <Startup>, and a <Task… to run our script file.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<ServiceDefinition name="MplsKickSite.Azure" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceDefinition">
  <WebRole name="MplsKickSite" vmsize="ExtraSmall">
    <Sites>
      <Site name="Web">
        <Bindings>
          <Binding name="Endpoint1" endpointName="Endpoint1" />
        </Bindings>
      </Site>
    </Sites>
    <Endpoints>
      <InputEndpoint name="Endpoint1" protocol="http" port="80" />
    </Endpoints>
    <Startup>
      <Task commandLine="Startup\IdentityGac.cmd" executionContext="elevated" taskType="simple">
      </Task>
    </Startup>
    <Imports>
      <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" />
      <Import moduleName="RemoteAccess" />
      <Import moduleName="RemoteForwarder" />
    </Imports>
  </WebRole>
</ServiceDefinition>

In Steve Marx’s post on Startup Task Tips & Tricks he suggests that when debugging a new startup task to set the taskType to background instead of simple so that it won’t prevent Remote Desktop from getting configured. If you’re interested to download the Startup folder I used I’ve uploaded a zip archive file with the files here.

Happy Coding!

Today I showed a work around for when you are showing ACS on a site that is running without setting up the SSL piece.

<system.web>
  <!--Hack to get past request token on non-SSL site—>
  <httpRuntime requestValidationMode="2.0" />
  <pages validateRequest="false" controlRenderingCompatibilityVersion="4.0" 
         clientIDMode="AutoID"></pages>

          ...

Note that shutting off validation of requests is not recommended, as it opens exploits against your site. For a better way of approaching this, Sandrino Di Mattia does a great job of explaining the right way of how to deploy and use the access control service in an Azure deployed solution.

http://fabriccontroller.net/blog/a-few-tips-to-get-up-and-running-with-theazure-appfabric-access-control-service

Make sure you add a reference to Microsoft.IdentityModel v3.5.0.0 and then set the properties of the assembly to copy local with the deploy.

On another track we looked at how to explore the claims that are included as part of the returned identity. In the Azure event I also showed a page that shows the contents of the user identity and display information about the claims contained in the token returned from ACS. I created a page in a secure location, then added a simple data grid to the page (called GridView1 and then in the page load I pull the identity information from the authenticated user data. The code for the PageLoad is below:

        protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {

            try
            {
                // Cast the Thread.CurrentPrincipal
                IClaimsPrincipal icp = Thread.CurrentPrincipal as IClaimsPrincipal;

                // Access IClaimsIdentity which contains claims
                IClaimsIdentity claimsIdentity = (IClaimsIdentity)icp.Identity;

                // icp.Identity.Name;
                // txtAuthName.Text = claimsIdentity.Name;
                
                txtAuthType.Text = claimsIdentity.AuthenticationType;
                txtIsAuthenticated.Text = claimsIdentity.IsAuthenticated.ToString();


                var myClaims = from c in claimsIdentity.Claims
                               select new { c.ClaimType, c.Value };


                GridView1.DataSource = myClaims;
                GridView1.DataBind();


                // Enable secret content for administrators
                if (Thread.CurrentPrincipal.IsInRole("Administrator"))
                {
                    this.secretContent.Visible = true;
                }
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                txtAuthType.Text = ex.Message;
            }
        }

Enjoy!

I had a question after a Windows Azure Camp about what ports need to be opened and enabled at my work environment to enable working with Windows Azure. While the services work with REST there are a couple services that will benefit from adjusting the firewall to allow traffic between on-premise and the cloud. I found settings for Service Bus and SQL Server, and the settings are below…

Service Bus

-Minimal: Enable outbound http on port 80 and 443, authenticated against proxy server if any

-Optimal: Allow outbound on port 9350 to 9353, can limit to well known IP range

- 9350 unsecured TCP one-way client

- 9351 Secured TCB one-way (all listeners, secured clients)

- 9352 Secured TCP Rendezvous (all except one way)

- 9353 Direct Connect Probing Protocol (TCB listeners with direct connect)

SQL on-Premise via Windows Azure Connect

-In SSMS - Enable Remote Connections on SQL Server properties window

-In SQL Server Configuration Manager

- Disable or stop SQL Server Browser

- Enable TCP/IP in the SQL Server Network Configuration | Protocols for server

- Edit TCP/IP protocol properties and set TCP Dynamic Ports to Blank, and then specify TCP Port to 1433

- Restart SQL Service

-In Windows Firewall add the following rules

- Inbound Port 1433 (TCP) Allow the connection

- Apply to all profiles (Domain, Private and Public)

- Name the rule something significant

Enjoy!

One of the great things about Windows Azure is that it is a platform that is for the most part agnostic about what frameworks and languages you want to use. While I tend to do most of my demos in C# there is no reason we couldn’t use VB, PHP, Node.js, Java or any other language. In fact the developer story for the Microsoft Cloud is that if it runs on Windows it can run in Windows Azure. All you need is to configure the machine appropriately (more on that in another post). You can learn more about the tools by checking out the Tools section of the Windows Azure site.

For this CloudTip I got a request for how to do the encryption of the web.config but this time in VB. The logic is about the same, although I found that in VB I had to add a line to the configuration to save the new settings. The code for this in vb.net (adding to the global.asax file in the "Session_Start" subroutine…

Sub Session_Start(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As EventArgs)

    ' Code that runs when a new session is started 

    EncryptSection("appSettings")

End Sub

Private Sub EncryptSection(ByVal sSection As String)

    Dim config = System.Web.Configuration.WebConfigurationManager.OpenWebConfiguration(Context.Request.ApplicationPath)

    Dim configSection As ConfigurationSection = config.GetSection(sSection)

    If configSection.SectionInformation.IsProtected = False Then

        configSection.SectionInformation.ProtectSection("DataProtectionConfigurationProvider")

        config.Save()

    End If

End Sub

If you have questions about Cloud that would make a great Cloud Tip topic send them to me at my email or comment on the post.

Thanks!

In Windows Azure and especially with SQL Azure we need to store passwords to access things. I wanted to show how you can encrypt the web.config file by adding code to the global.asax file. The cool part of this is that using this technique you can secure application specific settings like connection strings and other data in the unlikely event that someone is able to get a copy of the configuration file (like by copying it to a thumb drive from the host machine or something similar).

The basic logic is to create a variable that points to a configuration section, then checking that the section is protected (i.e. encrypted). If it isn't, then call the ProtectSection method to encrypt the contents. The server uses the local DPAPI (Data Protection API) to encrypt the configuration section with a machine specific key, so only that machine can decrypt the contents. The code to add to the global.asax.cs file in the Application Start event for this is:

protected void Session_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) 
{ 
    EncryptSection("appSettings"); 
} 
     
private void EncryptSection(string sSection)
{
    Configuration config = System.Web.Configuration
                             .WebConfigurationManager
                             .OpenWebConfiguration
                             (Context.Request.ApplicationPath);

    ConfigurationSection configSection =
        config.GetSection(sSection);

    if (!configSection.SectionInformation.IsProtected)
    {
        configSection.SectionInformation.ProtectSection
        ("DataProtectionConfigurationProvider");
        config.Save();
    }
}

Happy Coding!