Articles filed in category 'Build and Deploy'

SignalR is the latest in a long string of new technologies pouring out from the ASP.NET team recently, when Microsoft rolled out version 1.0 of SignalR when Visual Studio Update 2 was announced. In a nutshell, SignalR is technology for .NET that allows you to build real time, connected Web applications. Connected in the sense that you can build Web applications that can send and receive and broadcast data in real time. The canonical example of a 'connected' application ...is a chat application where a client can broadcast messages to all other connected clients. While that's pretty cool in and of itself, that only begins to scratch the surface of what's possible with SignalR as you can communicate in a wide variety of ways between client and server and between all clients to push data around.See More

Nov/Dec 2007 Doc Detective Column

Visual Studio .NET is the new standard for developing .NET applications.Although Visual Studio .NET does a number of things very well to assist in the development process, there are certainly areas that need improvement. One of those areas is dealing with a build process that requires something a little more than just compiling source code.

You already know that using Visual Studio 2013 streamlines building business apps. Beth shows you how to use its Cloud Business App project template to improve collaboration between Office 365, SharePoint, and all your mobile devices.

Do you have a cool personalized application that you want to offer to over 400 million users? Do you want to light it up with Live controls or create a mashup with Live resources? Windows Live ID now offers a simple way for third parties to get Live ID authentication in your Web or rich client applications, letting you reach millions of Live ID users, integrate with Live Controls, and access Live services.

After four years of trying out every iteration of Web server application deployment that Microsoft created for .NET, ClickOnce has finally allowed me to succeed in deploying one particularly complex smart client application. But I still had to tear a few more hairs out before I got it working and came to love ClickOnce. I’m writing this article to share some of the not-so-obvious ways (including a hack or two) to use ClickOnce for application deployment.

Who said client deployment has to be difficult? Many developers would love to leverage the rich UI, high performance, and offline capability offered by smart client applications; however, they’ve been turned off by the high TCO caused by client deployment headaches. The advent of ClickOnce client deployment technology in the .NET Framework 2.0 heralds a new era where client deployment takes on the ease and reliability of Web deployment.

In today’s world of fast food, fast cars, and instant gratification, people expect to be in touch at all times.We have become conditioned to staying in touch with businesses, friends, and families. Because of this desire for instant data, we have the Internet, cell phones, Wi-Fi, MP3 players, and DVD players. As the equipment needed to drive this thirst has become smaller and smaller, we find ourselves looking for portable replacements for our bulky desktop computers.

Hudson makes continuous integration easy and powerful.Though Hudson is a Java project, it can easily build your .NET applications. You configure Hudson easily via the web interface rather than tweaking XML. With plenty of plugins available to .NET projects, Hudson provides plenty of powerful features.

“Don’t do it! Don’t do it!” the little voice in my head shouted as I contemplated using the worn out cliché “Good things come to those who wait” to describe the experience of designing Windows applications with Visual Studio 2005.However, that cliché accurately communicates the idea that building Windows Forms applications in Visual Studio 2005 is better, makes you more productive, and provides you with more fun than doing the same in Visual Studio 2003, not to mention VB6!

So you finally have a product to sell, and a site to sell it on. But wait; how do you prevent unauthorized users from downloading your products? Forms Authentication provides only part of the solution. In this article, I’ll show how to prevent specific users from accessing specific files on your site; even by browsing directly to them.

Modern applications are no longer isolated, stand-alone applications, limited to a single process or machine. Distributed applications allow you to put components in close proximity to the resources they use, allow multiple users to access the application, enable scalability and throughput, and increase overall availability and fault isolation. Component-oriented programming is especially geared towards distribution because it is all about breaking the application into a... set of interacting components, which you can then distribute to different locations. .NET has a vast infrastructure supporting distributed applications and remote calls. This article focuses on just a single aspect of .NET remoting: the different object activation models available to a distributed application.See More

Automate high-friction, unpredictable tasks in your environment to regain sanity and achieve a rapid, sustainable pace.Every environment has them: The dreaded manual tasks that drain productivity from the team and adds instability to the processes. We usually only dedicate half our brain power and never enough time to deal with them, which only compounds the problem. What if you could easily automate out the most painful tasks and gain a huge boost in productivity and speed of delivery?

“Integrate the data tier developer in to the core development life cycle and process.”That is one of the main objectives of Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals, also known under its project name “Data Dude”. Bringing the data tier developer into Visual Studio is the first step in enabling closer integration between the application and data tier developer. Having both environments leverage the same Team Foundation Build (Team Build) system enables daily ...and automatic integration of changes into the build process, enforcing closer integration and shorter feedback cycles between the two originally disjoint disciplines.See More

We've all faced those irritable questions about our applications running in production. Typically a system administrator will spring one on you on a Friday afternoon just when you're finishing out the week with a game of foosball. Why did this request fail? What is causing so many disk IO spikes? What requests are failing as a result of this error? Why is the application running so slowly? Why are all the resources being gobbled up on the Web server? These questions ofte...n make us stare blankly for a while, mumble something, and then scramble back to our cave (or server room) for hours on end trying to provide answers,See More

So you wanna be agile, do you?You want to work in small increments and continuously deliver business functionality. You want to embrace change, even if that means taking on new requirements late in the game. But wait, won’t that be dangerous? It doesn’t have to be if you’ve got a solid Continuous Integration infrastructure in place.

The third release of the .NET Framework (version 2.0) introduces many changes and innovations not just in the application frameworks, but also in the essential mechanics of assemblies themselves.Microsoft strived to improve on a few limitations of the original assemblies model, as well as provide new features and capabilities in assemblies and in the tools used to build and manage them, predominantly Visual Studio 2005. These include application assembly reference, refer...ence aliasing, friend assembly, better strong name protection, specific versioning, and targeting specific CPU architectures, and more. This article describes each such new feature, and when applicable, recommends best practices and guidelines.See More

The smart way to share data between computers and other people is to place it in an online Internet store, which the other parties can access, but you want to make sure only the right people can access your data. This article will help you understand how the Windows Live delegated authentication system is used to access certain Windows Live data stores and the technologies Microsoft is building to make this work easier for you.