Visual Studio 2010 with Parallels
Posted on November 24th, 2009
So for those who run Windows 7 natively this isn’t really an issue. For those of us who want to run on a Mac and have been frustrated with the failure of Fusion 3, go give Parallels Desktop 5 a try.
I made the mistake of assuming vmware would do a good job with Fusion 3 but that turned out to be a waste of money and time. It makes Windows 7 virtual machines terribly slow with poor graphics. If you’re using any heavy WPF applications like VS 2010 this was brutal. Parallels is the complete opposite with great graphics and slick performance even for WPF applications.
If you aren’t using VS 2010 (beta 2 as of writing) yet, is that rock a little heavy? ;-)
Tags: .NET, fusion, parallels, vs2010
Filed under General | 2 Comments »
Simple DB Profile Provider added to MultiCore
Posted on September 20th, 2009
The first take on a simple db profile provider has been added to the current release of multicore. That version is 1.0.2.0 and binaries/source are on github.
The profile provider works – has some limitations and will only work with string properties. When I get some more free time I’ll add support for other useful types :)
I also pushed source and released binaries to codeplex, for those more familiar with that you can find the code here.
As usual the wiki and source can be found on the main multicore site.
Tags: multicore, profile_provider
Filed under .NET, Software | No Comments »
Is Amazon SimpleDB Injection Attack Safe?
Posted on September 18th, 2009
I hope as a developer you are well aware of SQL Injection attacks and if you aren’t, you’re living under a pretty big rock :)
It occurred to me recently that with more cloud based database technologies coming into existence that I have yet to see mention of this problem with those services. I think it is definitely something that warrants a good amount of research.
Initially I’m going to focus my efforts on Amazon’s simple db service since I’m actively using it. I’ll post my findings and any techniques to prevent discovered issues. Off the bat I’m guessing you can’t be too malicious since a delete request cannot be embedded into a select request however unwanted results are never good and a select looks like it could return more data than the developer was hoping for with a traditional attack.
If you have any thoughts on this or know of existing posts from other developers please comment! or post them on the multicore site.
Filed under Software | 1 Comment »
Don’t use xbox extenders
Posted on September 17th, 2009
Yes this is a rant but it has useful information for those who don’t know. It is a classic case of why you can’t trust Microsoft with anything that they manage or host, even platform services. (think: playsforsure or those recently screwed by mesh)
So, Microsoft want you to spend your hard earned cash to buy big powerful machines that can run Vista or Windows 7 Ultimate so you can have a media pc. They also tout their xbox as the perfect extender … really? Then why the frack is it so damn hard to get content to play on the extenders and when finally netflix is announced they decide you have to be a gold member to use it. They also prevent the netflix media center running on the extender … you know – which makes perfect sense, why the fuck would I want movies on my extender anyway?
So you might think a gold membership isn’t so bad, erm well explain how you’re get it on 3 extenders? You have to buy 3 and so that’s a cool $150 a year just for Micro$oft. They works out now at just over $30 a month JUST to use Netflix on your xbox.
If you already have media center you should be able to use it to stream the freaking content, that is what is was supposed to do. What else are they going to conveniently block? It also raises the question why I can’t use my gold account across all house xboxes.
I sometimes wonder why I even bother using media center, it is poorly supported – there really is no internet content it can pull and the geniuses at Redmond decided to remove, yes remove the existing netflix support in Vista from Windows 7 … clap clap – now rumor has it a better netflix component is coming to Windws 7 but why on earth would you remove the existing one …..
The lesson here is, an xbox is for playing games … period.
Tags: xbox
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Edge version of multicore released
Posted on September 9th, 2009
I’ve pushed up the first release of the “edge” branch of the multicore project.
This is basically an “un-released” version but is being tested in production so should have minimal bugs or issues …. (I said should!)
You can find the latest edge release notes here
http://wiki.github.com/typemismatch/multicore/edge-notes
Here is the direct link to the edge source
http://github.com/typemismatch/multicore/tree/edge
There is not a compiled release for edge … at this point.
Edge is trending to the 1.0.2.0 release.
Tags: multicore
Filed under .NET | No Comments »
DotNetMultiCore Goes Live
Posted on August 30th, 2009
I finally got this code to a point I think others might be able to find it useful.
So what is multicore? It is a wrapper library for cloud based technologies like Amazon’s Web Services and coming soon, (ish) – support for Microsoft’s Azure services.
The current library is written in c# and a compiled binary is also available. The current feature set includes:
- Amazon Simple DB Membership Provider for ASP.NET
- Amazon Simple DB Role Provider for ASP.NET
- A provider that wraps up Simple DB in a few easy to use commands.
- A stand alone wrapper for fetching/writing Simple DB data.
- Includes the Amazon SDB and SQS libraries.
This project is open source and is kept on github. See below for details and to follow the project.
Project home: http://www.dotnetmulticore.com/
The code is Mono 2.4 compatible if you need to use it on Ubuntu or some other Linux based server. There is an Edge branch available via github as well if you want to risk using the latest drop ;)
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Windows Azure fails with pricing model.
Posted on July 14th, 2009
Microsoft announced the pricing for their Azure services today. On the whole they are pretty close to industry standards with one big exception.
If you deploy an application, rather than charging for compute power directly, you’re being charged for having the deployment active per hour. At $0.12 per hour this means a single application is costing you the same as your own, entire EC2 server with Amazon.
Sure you can have multiple roles in an application package but since upgrading the package takes all those roles offline they really have to be roles working together and not with separate concerns.
Unless I’m really missing something (always a possibility) this will never work for me or my clients. We’ve already begun the migration work to take existing .NET services that were built for Azure and will be migrating them to Ruby for cheaper deployment options.
I can’t really compare SQL services etc just yet but as usual, it looks like the Microsoft option is always going to be far more costly than alternatives. A real pity.
Tags: Azure
Filed under General | No Comments »
Don’t go Mono, go Ruby …
Posted on June 27th, 2009
I’ve always liked the Mono project and since its inception way back when I’ve dabbled with their technology. The thought of running .NET on linux was something I always wanted to do. Recently I had a real business need to have parts of an application run on UBuntu. Not only that but I hear plenty of clients make the wild claim that “hey, if we need to run on linux we’ll just use mono!”
Initially I looked at doing this in Ruby but the learning curve for my back end services was a little steep. No problem, I’ll keep development moving in C# but keep it simple 2.0 so that it can run on Mono. Over the last few days I setup some new UBuntu servers and tried to get some of these applications running. No luck. I even ran the analyser tool which tries to make sure everything is compatible… it was. All the calls I use are available in Mono but the results are different.
That alone is high risk. If I’m using the same basic calls then I really need the results to be the same on each platform. It then occurred to me that the entire principle of the Mono project is doomed to fail. It is and always will be a sub-par port of .NET.
The bottom line is, if you want or need your application to truly run cross platform then use a language with native support, from the beginning for those needs. There are many. You have choices like Java, Python or Ruby just to name some. C# for the time being is a Windows language.
I have chosen to slowly convert rather than port and will run back ground services as Ruby apps which once written in Ruby run anywhere Ruby is supported without problems. My websites however will remain asp.net mvc. I have had plenty of success with Rails but the new MVC for .NET is just too good :)
Just a side note: I’m sure plenty of applications can be built in Mono but they need to be built and tested in Mono from the beginning. The problem you’ll run into is many c# 3rd party components, if not most, are written and tested in .NET and you don’t really know if they’ll work on Mono. Again here I say – if you only use Mono fine but why not rather use a true cross platform technology rather than a continuous port.
Tags: mono
Filed under .NET, Software | No Comments »
Going live with Windows Azure
Posted on June 8th, 2009
So of course you’re only going to do this if you’re nuts … right? Remember that I never said I wasn’t!
Here is the application that I needed to host. In my mind a perfect candidate for a compute cloud. It is basically a second stage monitoring service. I have various services deployed in other data centers. If one fails or goes offline the server it is on will restart it. (Stage 1) – but what if the entire server is down? This is my second service, every few minutes it checks data in the cloud (AMZ) for last contact times from a bunch of services. If anything has checked in within 5 minutes … bamb! I get some critical email warnings.
The application consisted of a Worker Role that does the monitoring and then a Web Role. This is used to expose a REST API to my mobile applications so that status information can also be pulled at any time. Due to the 1 project limit currently on Azure I bundled these two roles into one package.
Deployment was a snap. Just upload the package and configuration files and it hits staging without issue. Azure allows a staging to production promotion which is great. I hit the promote and then run buttons and all was well – the service deployed and run without issue.
It has been running without any noticed downtime for a few days now. Today a service outside Azure happened to fail and I received my email, awesome. Some notes about Azure so far:
- The only errors always seem to be from the actual web admin tool. You get the usual MS generic error and you have just try again.
- On one occasion the application said it was promoted to production and running but the DNS for the Web Role failed to register.
- The web admin site is too slow.
That is all for now. Next I’ll be testing the data services! I love Amazon’s high speed de-normalized database so looking for something similar.
Tags: Azure, Deployment
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Watch your time zones on Windows Azure!
Posted on June 8th, 2009
So I deployed some code to Windows Azure and was initially surprised that it was running differently than what I had observed locally.
Turns out and once you think of it its a no brainer … my code was running in a different time zone. All my other services were in EST but this was PST. The solution in my case is to keep everything as GMT and then do any necessary calculations :)
You might wonder if this is documented anywhere. To be honest, I have no idea since most of the documentation has been very poor. The website for Azure has circular links that will drive you nuts and the local SDK docs are just focused more on the API and are too incomplete as well.
Update: Since posting I’ve been told all servers will be and are currently in GMT time. Cool!
Tags: Azure
Filed under Software | 3 Comments »