December, 2011

A few minutes ago Microsoft released an advance notification security bulletin announcing that we are releasing an out-of-band security update to address an ASP.NET Security Vulnerability . The security update we are releasing resolves a publicly disclosed Denial of Service issue present in all versions of ASP.NET.  We’re currently unaware of any attacks on ASP.NET customers using this exploit, but we strongly encourage customers to deploy the update as soon as possible.  We are releasing...

Hi, today is my last day at Microsoft. I am moving back home to Vancouver, BC. I won’t be allowed to post to my MSDN blog any more, so I found a new home at http://cathydumas.com/ . You can watch there for updates.  You can also contact me through my blog and on Linked In. Cheers Blog Post by: Cathy Dumas - MSFT

About a year ago, I read a profile about Hans Rosling in the Economist magazine . Apparently I had been living under a rock, as I had never seen his data visualizations before. Pretty impressive: Rosling made sure all his information was put up publically on gapminder.org . I resolved to use this data set to come up with some nifty visualizations, but never quite got around to this project – until now. I had to do quite a bit of ETL to get the data into a form that was suitable for consumption by...

Last time I mentioned there is something new in Platform Update 3 Beta called SendReceiveExtension. I still don’t know much about it other than the general reason for adding it to the .Net framework, which is basically to allow non-.Net classes to play the role of .Net’s WorkflowServiceHost class (System.ServiceModel.Activities) . Remember this stuff is all still in Beta. Unfortunately that also means there’s no documentation for it. Today I’m going to try to partially fix that deficiency, by thinking...

Try this… Create a new ASP.NET Web Application (MVC or Web Forms).  Then add a new a WCF Workflow Service to your web project. Now try to add a service reference to your workflow service.  It fails with an error. There was an error downloading metadata from the address. Please verify that you have entered a valid address. Why is this happening? The most common reasons why this happens are The project won’t build for some reason Service Metadata is not enabled How do I fix it? Build the...

In my previous posts I’ve written about my experiences with WorkflowServices and Silverlight. Troubleshooting Workflow Services / Silverlight Using Workflow Services and Silverlight Together WorkflowServices, CanCreateInstance and Silverlight Problem with Extensions This morning I got an email notification that someone had posted a question about my Silverlight / State Machine Workflow Service sample on MSDN Code Gallery. “Downloaded current version and ran. Generated remote server not found error...

In my previous post about impersonation , I mentioned that DirectQuery impersonation was a bit tricky. That is because there is a special project property called Impersonation Settings that determines the credentials to use when connecting to the data source. The MSDN documentation of this property is a little thin, so let’s walk through the details. If I were to write the MSDN on the Impersonations Settings property, I might write something like this: Property Description Default Always use the...

As some of you might know, I’ve spent much of my time the last 6 months working on Windows Azure – which is Microsoft’s Cloud Computing Platform (I also continue to work on ASP.NET, .NET, VS and a bunch of other products). Next Tuesday, Dec 13th we’ll be holding a special Learn Windows Azure training event for developers.  It will provide a great way to learn Windows Azure and what it provides.  You can attend the event either by watching it streamed LIVE online, or by attending in person...

If you look at my previous post on the tabular project structure , you’ll see this teaser: “There are a couple of other files in the project folder, an optional ABF file and a hidden user settings file, but I’ll talk about those another day.” The ABF file description I just put off because it was complicated, but I finally got around to describing the ABF file . The user settings file I put off deliberately because I knew we were going to change the design for RC0. Now the design is done, I can tell...

This is the seventh in a series of blog posts I'm doing on ASP.NET 4.5. The next release of .NET and Visual Studio include a ton of great new features and capabilities.  With ASP.NET 4.5 you'll see a bunch of really nice runtime and tooling improvements with both Web Forms and MVC - as well as in the core ASP.NET base foundation that both are built upon. Today’s post covers some of the improvements we are adding to the next release of Visual Studio to make working with CSS and CSS3 even...

G’day all, just a little snippet of news to share – remember .Net 4 Platform Update 1 ? The update with State Machine? Well, we are almost up to Platform Update 3 now, and the beta version is available for download . Note that this is not the final PU3, this is just a beta version of PU3 - it may break things or screw up your machine somehow, so treat it with a little caution. That said I can think of two reasons you might want to try the beta version despite the risk. 1 - to Beta Test! If any of...