Supporting IIS, Internet Development and Commerce Server.

Sometimes Friday will be Link Day.

Hi,

Every now and then instead of an in-depth post I might post some links which I’ve shared with my team during the week or that has been sent to me.

So here goes.

1) Robert McMurrary has a very good post on using the FTP 7.5 Extensibility to Dynamically restrict IP Addresses. 
Using FTP 7.5 Extensibility to create an Auth Provider with Dynamic IP Restrictions.

Here in support we’ve had at least one customer ask for this functionality and it’s really good that you can do this now in FTP 7.5.

2) Also on the FTP Front here’s a neat way of tracking your user sessions in FTP 7.0 and FTP 7.5

FTP 7.x x-session and Log Parser

3) Sysinternals have a new tool called ProcDump.exe which can be used to assist you in troubleshooting issues when one of your IIS Worker Processes takes a lot of CPU time.

Using ProcDump.exe from Sysinternals to Monitor IIS Processes for High CPU.

4) The Web Topics blog is also the source of this link which explains how to use Failed Request Tracing to generate a dump file when a request takes a long time.

Capturing a Dump file on a long running request in IIS 7

5) From the Morning Brew Blog I’ve come across this nice link on removing elements from your Asp.Net MVC views.

Asp.Net MVC Views on a Diet

That’s it for today I think.

Please use the comments box if you’d like to see more of this or if you don’t find this useful.

Silverlight and the Date Picker Control

I worked on an issue recently with a customer that was very interesting.
They were using Silverlight 2.0 and this issue does not reproduce in Silverlight 3.

They were using the DatePicker Control for their project and noticed that the Watermark “enter text here” would appear if they changed focus away from the Date Picker.

The repro was pretty simple.

The XAML looked like this.

<UserControl 
    xmlns:basics="clr-namespace:System.Windows.Controls;assembly=System.Windows.Controls" 
    x:Class="SilverlightApplication3.Page"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" 
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" 
    Width="400" Height="300">
    <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White">
       
        <StackPanel>
            <basics:DatePicker x:Name="datePicker" Width="130" Margin="10"></basics:DatePicker>
            <Button Width="130" Height="25"></Button>
        </StackPanel>

    </Grid>
</UserControl>

And the code looked like this.

namespace SilverlightApplication3
{
    public partial class Page : UserControl
    {
        public Page()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
            datePicker.SelectedDate = DateTime.Now;
        }

    }

We pick up the <enter text here> from the DatePickerTextBox_DefaultWatermarkText resource so we’ll need to do something to work around this.

So I came up with this solution.

1) Add a new Silverlight Class library to your project.
2) Set this class up to inherit from the DatePicker control.

Then write some code like this.

    public class Class1 : DatePicker
    {
        public override void OnApplyTemplate()
        {
            base.OnApplyTemplate();
            DatePickerTextBox box = base.GetTemplateChild("TextBox") as DatePickerTextBox;
            if (box != null)
            {
                box.Watermark = "<Enter a Date>";
            }
        }
    }

Then you can use the new control and your page and when the focus changes from the DatePicker control you have a watermark that asks for a Date rather than text.

I hope this helps.

Commerce Server 2009 Training Resources.

As Commerce Server 2009 is now out and available I thought it would be a nice idea to do a post on “Where Can I learn more about Commerce Server 2009?”.

The first place to keep in your list would be the documentation that is available here.
Commerce Server 2009 Documentation

Then you can take a look at the PDC Session from last year to give you an idea of the new features available in this product.

Commerce Server “Mojave” (Mojave was the code name for this version of Commerce Server.)

There is also a really good session from Scott Cairney from the Product Group over at Tech Ed Online with a Q and A.

There’s no direct link unfortunately but you can go to Tech Talks at Tech Ed Online and search for “Commerce Server” and you’ll find this video and a choice of download formats.

One of the really nice new features in Commerce Server 2009 is the ability to integrate with Virtual Earth to build a Store Locator page.

Tom Schultz has a Web Cast that’s up on Channel 9. Channel 9 Store Locator Webcast.

If you’d like to feed back to Tom about this Webcast then he has a permalink over on his blog.

There is also a lot of sample code at Multi-Channel Foundation Samples that will show you how to use the new API’s.

Finally if you’re a Commerce Server Partner we have the following sessions over at Partner Academy Live.

PAL sessions:

Microsoft Commerce Server 2009: Trends, Sales Strategies, and Solutions The New Microsoft Commerce Server 2009 Product Release

Silverlight Version Numbers

Just as note to myself here are the Silverlight Version numbers.

Release	Version	Release Date
1.0 RTW	1.0.20816	September 4th 2007
1.0 GDR	1.0.2115.0	November 20th 2007
1.0 GDR	1.0.30109.00	January 15th 2008
1.0 GDR	1.0.30401.00	April 4th 2008
1.0 GDR	1.0.30715.00	July 23rd 2008
2.0 RTW	2.0.31005.00	October 14th 2008
2.0 GDR	2.0.40115.00	February 18th 2009

Here’s an explanation of the acronyms I used if you’re not familiar with them.

RTW is Release to Web.
GDR is General Distribution Release.

There is a published document on the Silverlight Release History and it’s current location is below.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/F/D/8/FD8F5947-78FF-40A5-9A34-5E35243C12E4/40115/Microsoft%20Silverlight%20Release%20History.html

Commerce Server 2009

Hello,

Commerce Server 2009 is now available for MSDN Subscribers. This is discussed further at this post .

There are a number of resources also detailed at the link above and these include the following.

• Readme and Installation Guide.
• The Default Site Performance Guide.
• Multi-Channel Foundation Samples.
• The Partner SDK.

To go along with this release you’ll see that the main Commerce Site has been updated at http://www.microsoft.com/commerceserver and we’ve got some other resources available.

The new Commerce Server 2009 forum is here .

If you’re going to MIX09 then there will be a session about Commerce Server 2009 as discussed here.

And finally one of my colleagues has written up a quick installation guide for Commerce Server 2009 developers which you can see here.

Catching up on my Blog reading

After my extended break I’ve been catching up on my blog reading and I’ve come across some interesting posts which I’d like to share with you.

Commerce Posts.

Ryan Donovan has completed an interesting series on the Architecture behind Commerce 2007. He has a wrap up post here and the entire series is tagged here.

The Commerce Server 2009 December CTP has been released and Ryan talks about this here and there’s some more information on the main Commerce Server blog here.

I’ll be certainly taking a look at this release and seeing what’s new.

IIS Posts.

Wade Hilmo has written an interesting post about “How IIS can help with SQL Injection” which gives some background about what SQL Injection vulnerabilities are and how you can configure IIS 7 or IIS 6 (and earlier versions) to filter out attempts at SQL Injection.

The Web Platform Installer that I blogged about previously has been updated and now supports Windows XP and Windows 2003. You can get this at Web Platform Installer .

This is just a sample of what’s been happening while I’ve been away. I’ve got a lot to catch up on and so I will talk to you again soon.

Introduction to the Secure FTP Server 7.0 in Windows 2008

I’ve been working with this a lot recently and thought I’d share some of what I found with you.

You'll see that I'll refer a lot to Robert McMurray's post as he is the Program Manager for this feature in the IIS product team.

First of all you can download the release version from http://www.iis.net/ftp.

Then you need to install the fix below.

955136  A hotfix rollup is available for the out-of-band FTP service for IIS 7.0
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;955136

Then to setup the FTP over SSL you can follow the steps at http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/304/using-ftp-over-ssl/

The steps are pretty simple.

You need to

a) Create a Self Signed Certificate

b) Create your site and enable SSL using the Certificate above.

Ok, so now you have a Secure FTP site and so how do you connect?

Well you can use one of the following tools.

a) A command line FTPS.exe similar to FTP.exe in Windows from http://www.ipswitchft.com/moveitfreely or

b) A GUI tool like Filezilla from http://filezilla-project.org/

You'll see from the following blog entry how the current Web Browsers support Secure FTP.

http://blogs.msdn.com/robert_mcmurray/archive/2008/09/24/ftp-clients-part-1-web-browser-support.aspx

So that's why you'll need to test with FTPS.exe or Filezilla.

Then you come to the interesting part which is Implicit or Explicit FTP?

Once again Robert covers this well here.

http://blogs.msdn.com/robert_mcmurray/archive/2008/11/10/ftp-clients-part-2-explicit-ftps-versus-implicit-ftps.aspx

Implicit FTPS means that the FTP communication is encrypted from the very first packet.

An SSL Handshake must be carried out before you exchange any FTP commands.

Explicit FTPS means that an FTP client connects over the control/command channel (usually on port 21), and then the client can negotiate SSL for either the command/control channel or the data channel using new FTP commands like AUTH, PROT, CCC, etc.

You'll see that the Advanced SSL Policy gives you more granular controls over what happens on the control and data channels.

This means that the following defines how the FTP Server uses Explicit or Implicit FTP.

If you enable FTPS and you assign the FTP site to the default port of 21, you are using Explicit SSL.

If you enable FTPS and you assign the FTP site to port 990, you are using Implicit SSL.

In point of fact, if you enable FTPS and you assign the FTP site to any port other than port 990, you are always using Explicit SSL.

The FTP logs are a good resource for troubleshooting  and there is also some good ETW tracing.

The instructions for setting this up and parsing the log files are here.

http://blogs.iis.net/sudt/archive/2008/08/28/collecting-etw-traces-for-ftp-sessions.aspx

I hope this is useful and I’ve enjoyed learning about the great features in this new FTP release.

Using the Microsoft Web Application Installer.

This is a follow on from my last post on the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. If you haven’t read that post then go ahead and read it and I’ll wait here.

Welcome back!

Once again I am using my Hyper-V Windows 2008 64 Bit image. Then I go to http://www.microsoft.com/web and download the Microsoft Web Application Installer .

As many of these applications require PHP and MySql I’d better configure these before running the Application Installer.

So for PHP I’ll follow the links on http://www.iis.net/php .
Now that my PHP Test page is working I will continue.
Then for MySQL I will follow the instructions on this link.
http://blogs.iis.net/stjacobs/archive/2008/10/17/setting-up-mysql-for-the-web-application-installer.aspx

So now that I have both PHP and MySQL configured I can continue with the install.

The first thing I see is the Welcome Notice and a prompt to Agree to the Web Application Installer License Agreement.



After clicking on Agree I get a list of the Applications I would like to install.




As I did with the Platform Installer I will try to install everything.
The thing to note on this screen is that you can only select one application at a time.

I’m going to start with Drupal.

The tool asks you where you want this application to reside.




I picked the default and then setup the Drupal Configuration.
Then I get prompted for some PHP Config settings and then get prompted to restart the Web Site.

Then my Drupal application was returning a 404 not found.
After some research I identified that my open_basedir in my php.ini was set to c:\Inetpub\wwwroot.

So I changed this to be c:\Inetpub\ and then it worked.

Well sort of worked.



As you can see I’ve messed up the Configuration of Drupal.

Browsing to the Drupal Install page advises me that it cannot connect to the MySQL Database.

So I will go off and fix this and report on this in a later post.

Using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer.

You may have heard about the new tools available for getting up and running quickly on IIS 7 on Windows 2008. Bill Staples talks about this here.

So I thought I’d try these tools out and see how my experience goes.

So first I set up a Windows Server 2008 64 Bit Image on my Windows Server 2008 Hypervisor machine.

The next step is to visit the new one stop URL for Microsoft Web Technologies.

This is at http://www.microsoft.com/web .
I then clicked on Downloads and chose the Microsoft Web Platform Installer.

When you launch this tool you get a choice of what you want to install.

I decided to take the “Your Choice” Option.

This gives you the option to decide what Web Server options you want and if you want to install the various Tools and Frameworks for developing on and with IIS.

I decided to go with everything at this point.

Note: As this tool allows you to install the new IIS 7 Extensions you’ll note that you have both the new FTP 7 Server and the original FTP Server. This reflects the fact that you can install the original FTP  Server in the IIS Role.


After this I agreed to the license terms and clicked on Ok.
During the install you get a nice Progress screen as shown below.




During the install you get prompted for a location to store the files used for the SQL PHP Driver.

Then once I’ve finished I get this nice screen.

 

In the next post I’ll cover the Application Installer and let you know how that goes.

The UK ReMix 2008 Videos are online

The ReMix UK 2008 videos are up on the site for you to review at your leisure. If you go to the agenda page here then you will be able to click and download the presentation slides or watch the session.

Here’s what I saw while I was there.

Day 1

The Keynote from Bill Buxton and Scott Guthrie.
Introduction to Silverlight Parts 1 and 2 from Scott Guthrie.
Ado.Net Data Services for the Web from Mike Flasko.
Visual Studio Tips and Tricks from Sara Ford.

Day 2

Understanding the ASP.NET Model View Controller from Scott Guthrie.
ASP.NET Front End Performance from Chris Hay. (There is no data for this one).
The story behind the ugliest website on the Internet from Jim McNiven and Chris Curzon.
20/20 Talks.

Working in Customer Services and Support

I thought I'd add a little post about working in Support at Microsoft and how you can find out some more information about this kind of career.

I've worked in support for Microsoft products for the last 13 years and the last 11 of these years has been spent working for Microsoft.

In that time I've supported products like.

Windows 95
Microsoft FrontPage
Windows NT 4.0
Microsoft Site Server 3.0
IIS 4.0/5.0/6.0/7.0
Commerce Server 2000\2002\2007.

I really like my job and love helping people resolve their issues using Microsoft Technology. The down side to my job is that no-one calls me when it's all working!

The Careers site has more information about careers in this area in Europe.

http://www.microsoft.com/emea/careers/technicalJobs/CSS.mspx

The role I fill is that of an Escalation Engineer and it's described at the link below.

http://www.microsoft.com/emea/careers/technicalJobs/EscalationEngineer.mspx 

On this page is a link to a document which explains a week in the life of an Escalation Engineer. It does describe what my average week looks like.

So if you're interested in a career in supporting Microsoft Technology then visit our main European Careers page here.

http://www.microsoft.com/emea/careers/default.mspx

Thoughts post Remix UK 2008

The Remix UK 2008 conference was held in Brighton on the 18th and 19th of September and I was lucky enough to attend.
It was described on the web site as " A 48 hr conversation all about the ‘Next Web’, what it means today and the potential impact of technologies, tools and techniques for the future. Inspiring designers and developers to take the media they love to new levels of user experience."
The 1st day started off with a keynote from Bill Buxton of Microsoft Research and Scott Guthrie who is a Corporate Vice President in the Developer Division at Microsoft. His team is responsible for Asp.Net, Silverlight and many other technologies.

Bill started off with a presentation on how "He loves Apple, the Iphone, the IPod, the Wii and Google".
He explained that he loves them because they have made design integral to their business. He wants design to be integral to Microsoft's business as well.
Scott Guthrie presented on "Great User Experiences via the Web, Media, Rich Internet Applications and Mobile".
Highlights here included.
-Silverlight has 1.5m downloads a day.
- The ITV.Com did a demo of their Silverlight Football Wall. (http://www.itv.com/Sport/Football/VideoWall/default.html)
I also attended sessions on Silverlight, Asp.Net MVC and Ado.Net Data Services.

I did attend Sara Ford's presentation on Visual Studio Tips and Tricks and it was as interesting as I had hoped.

Sara blogged about her experiences here.

I was at her 20\20 talk and it did go down very well. The entire 20\20 talk (1 slide or demo every 20 seconds) was a very good idea and came across very well.

I also really enjoyed the "Ready Steady Speak" sessions ran by the Next Gen User Group. This was a chance for people who hadn't presented at a conference like this to get up and do 5 minutes on a topic of their choice.

I came away impressed by our Design and Developer message for the Web and was glad to see so many external developers excited by and programming with Microsoft Tools for the Web.

Remix UK 2008

I'm looking forward to attending Remix UK this week.

Each delegate will receive a Microsoft Expression Professional Subscription worth over £650 which contains;
    Expression® Studio
(Expression Web, Expression Design, Expression Encoder, Expression Blend, Expression Media)
    Visual Studio® Standard Edition
    Office Standard Edition
    Office Visio® Professional
    Windows® XP
    Windows Vista® Business Edition
    Virtual PC
    Parallels Desktop for Mac  (so Mac developers can install Windows Vista in a virtual machine on their Mac and run all the other software included)
    Pre-configured virtualized server environments

There is also going to be a Master Class on the Thursday evening

Master Class with Live Labs and other well-versed Photosynth peeps: 6-7 p.m. 
Hear a talking version of the Photosynth guide for taking the best images to use in a synth and then head out into the Brighton landscape (weather permitting) to take your own photos. You can either join us in creating a community synth or feel free to have a go yourself. We’d of course love it if you download the synther (it’s free!) however if you want to build a synth on one of our machines, you can do that too. We’ll have a sign-up sheet for slots on the Friday.

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/remix08/photosynth.aspx

Download the free technology and begin to create synth's at www.Photosynth.com
How To video & guide here... http://photosynth.net/about.aspx
Keep up to date with the Photosynth Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/photosynth/

I've not had the chance to play with Photosynth yet so I might bring my camera along and take part. Even if I don't go to the Master class I might take my own photos and synth them later on.

Anyway I must get back to planning which sessions I will be attending.

I see that Sara Ford is doing a Visual Studio IDE Tips and Tricks session which should be good. If you use Visual Studio at all then I recommend her blog.

Commerce Server 2007 Training Resources.

One of the questions I am commonly asked is "Where can I learn more about Commerce Server?".

I mentioned this topic briefly on my post Starting to look at Commerce Server.

So if you're new to Commerce Server where can you start?

The first place I would start is the Commerce Server Developer Center on MSDN.

The documentation for Commerce Server 2007 covers a lot of the basic concepts and ideas that you will need to know around the main Commerce Server Systems.

Introducing Commerce Server 2007

Then we can start to look at the concepts of each of the Commerce Server 2007 systems.

Concepts of the Catalog System
Concepts of the Inventory System
Concepts of the Marketing System
Concepts of the Orders System
Concepts of the Profiles System
Concepts of the Biz Talk Adapters

The Deployment sections of the documentation is also invaluable for understanding how to configure Commerce Server.

Building Commerce Server Deployments

I would then recommend viewing the following Webcasts.

Catalog System Development
Order System Development
Profiles System Development
Commerce Server 2007 Architectural Deep Dive

The other question I often receive is "Where's the Commerce Server 2007 book?".

Well there's a story behind this and I will let Wade explain this on his blog.

Update on the Commerce Server book

The Commerce Server blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/commerce) advertises upcoming training from time to time and so please keep an eye out.

For example Upcoming Commerce Server training.

I hope you found this list of resources useful and enjoy reading about Commerce Server 2007!

Microspotting Anyone?

I was very happy to come across the Microspotting web site.

It's something that I wouldn't normally come across as it's on it's own site and so you can't see in the normal MSDN\Technet\IIS.Net feeds which is where I spend most of my time when I am reading RSS posts.

It's a web site that profiles the smart, interesting and sometimes zany people who work at Microsoft.

I consider myself to fit into 2 of the 3 categories I've listed above. It's up to you to consider which 2!

I should probably come out with it and say that I want a T-Shirt