I don’t want to just have this post as a link whore ;) but this is a critical update to VS 2010 that you need.
VS 2010 has by far been the best IDE released from Microsoft and has some fantastic extensions. One of the included features in SP1 is full support for IIS Express. I’m not sure why we have to wait for a service pack for a new feature versus using their own extension library … but anyway – it is at least now available and the installation of IIS Express won’t seem so pointless :)
Grab it here via the web installer.
Amazon is by far becoming one of the biggest dedicated server hosts with their EC2 offerings. As many of you already know they currently do not offer more than a single IP per server instance. Why? who knows – it would seem to be an easy obstacle for them to fix but users have been asking for that feature for over 5 years and still nothing and no word on if it will ever be supported.
Now the issue is that IIS 7+ only supports a single certificate per IP. Yes you can use host headers for multiple sites but all those sites must use the same certificate. You cannot hack, cheat or tweak your way around this.
One solution is to use a new server for each client that needs a dedicated IP with SSL but of course the costs here get a little expensive. There is a much cheaper solution!
Since the Amazon Elastic Load Balancer now supports SSL termination you can setup a load balancer to handle the SSL, install your certificate via the EC2 control panel and then internally forward your request on port 80 without SSL.
To do this when you’re setting up the load balancer use HTTP (80) to HTTP (80) and the new HTTPS (443) to HTTP(80) – upload your certificate in pem format. If you don’t have the certificate in PEM format and let’s be honest, since you’re running on IIS you won’t. Follow these steps to get it
- Export your certificate from IIS as a PFX, set your password.
- Make sure you have openssl installed.
- Type, openssl pkcs12 -in yourExport.pfx -nocerts -out privateKey.pem
- Type, openssl pkcs12 -in yourExpport.pfx -clcerts -nokeys -out publicCert.pem
- Type, openssl rsa -in privateKey.pem -out privateKey.pem
At each of the openssl steps you’ll need to enter the PFX export password. The last step will remove the password from the private key to be compatible with Amazon. Now copy and paste the contents of the privateKey.pem and publicCert.pem into the load balancer certificate setup screen and you’ll be set.
Update your DNS CName entry for your site or customer site and you’ll have SSL.
I’m back at my blog, man was it looking a little deserted especially with the last post being a good few months ago ;) well, that is what happens with a new kid happens oh and you also try kick off a new start up.
The kid is doing great, the startup is already dead – I will post shortly about how to kill a startup in less than 6 months :) Of course like most hard headed software engineers I am already hard at work on the next “great idea” and might very well be posting about that in another 6 months!
I’ve reworked the theme, will add more pages about current projects and am determined to post some decent code examples. Since I learn so much from everyone else out there it is time to try feed back my knowledge into the system.
-hope you enjoy.
I’d like to introduce a new media service that has just gone live called Audomate. This service has been developed by a small group of people and is based on Microsoft’s .NET framework and MVC2.
What is Audomate? A service that converts online content such as website articles, blogs or any readable media to a professional audio recording. Rather than text to speech which just doesn’t produce a quality recording we use a team of professional voice talent to record each article usually within minutes of the initial request.
You as the consumer can then add any article you wish to your audio channel which can be synced with any device capable of supporting podcast feeds. We have also partnered with various partners to continually ingest content that you can listen to while traveling or just working. Those that use iTunes can simply add your channel URL as a podcast feed and then sync with an Apple device.
We currently support the socialable plugin for WordPress so if you would like your blog content to available via an automatic podcast feed just check the box for Audomate.
If you would like to test this now just click the Audomate link below this post! Enjoy.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Microsoft is just releasing far too many updates and features to the .NET technology stack.
I’ve just read the announcement from Scott G. about the new features in MVC 3 – nothing really outside custom view engines which could really have been released as stand alone items…. now instead development companies will have to make sure they’re “up-to-date” and running on MVC3 and 2 was just released with .NET 4.0 and VS 2010.
If they don’t slow down and they won’t because they don’t get “it” – the technology divergence will destroy the stack just as it has with Java.
-thanks :)
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? ;-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
