Manjula's Blog : ASP.Net, ASP.Net 3.5

Microsoft Web Deployment Tool Is Here!

Manjula Perera — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 06:59:00 GMT

Good News for ASP.Net Developers

This is yet another exiting development by Microsoft. I just came across with an article about this tool in the IIS main web site and thought of sharing the information with the readers of this blog.

Overview

Last week Microsoft has launched the Microsoft Web Deployment Tool as a Community Technical Preview (CTP), which provides deployment and migration support for IIS versions 6.0 and 7.0. This tool incorporates many features that enable web server administrators to deploy, sync and migrate websites, including configuration, content, SSL certificates and other types of data associated with a Web server.

This tool can be used on Windows Server 2008 and Internet Information Services 7.0 as well as Windows Server 2003 and Internet Information Services 6.0.

Features

Provides administrators with a way to quickly synchronize a site or server and deploy changes to existing sites and servers
Provides administrators with a way to migrate sites or entire servers from IIS 6.0 to IIS 7.0, including their settings and content
Allows administrators to check what components are installed on the source server. I.e. to check what components to be installed or requirement to have an advanced installation in IIS 7.0
Troubleshooting and Validation Features

Support

For support in this tool please refer to the support forum, or download the documentation here.

Requirements

The following prerequisites must be fulfilled in order to install the tool:

You must be using Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008.
The .NET 2.0 Framework SP1 or greater must be installed.
Internet Information Services 6.0 or 7.0 must be installed in order to perform operations on IIS.
You must install the tool as an administrator. If User Access Control (UAC) is enabled, you must use the “Run as Administrator” option when installing.

Download

You can download the Microsoft Web Deployment Tool here.

References

IIS

ScottGu's Blog

Beware with debug="true" in Web.config file of an ASP.Net web application

Manjula Perera — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 08:26:00 GMT

Problem

I thought of sharing this information with the users of the user group and the readers of this blog. I just came across with an odd situation in my enhancement project developed in ASP.Net 1.0. (As usual)

The problem was that I compiled the project in the "Debug" mode and it went through rigorous testing and life was good. But, later on I noticed that I compiled with "Debug" mode and changed back to "Release" mode and re-compiled the application. This is because if we use debug="true" in our production (live) application it will perform less efficiently than when we use debug="false". See below comments of a sample Web.config file.

</httpModules>

If you need further clarifications on why there's a performance issue please refer to the following article by experts in the industry because this article is about a different scenario related to these settings.

Beware of deploying debug code in production - by Milan Negovan

Don’t run production ASP.NET Applications with debug=”true” enabled - by Scott Guthrie @ Microsoft

Ok back to the problem. Then after this change one of the pages that retreive data from two databases start giving "Request Timed Out" error. This page normally takes more than two minutes to retrieve data. Again if I set debug="true" and re-compile this page wouldn't give any errors. It's wired. So I sort help from good old friend Google.

Solution

When I searched Google I found many people has faced the same issue way before than me (see references). According to the replies in these forums I realised that we just need to add the following tag within <system.web> </system.web> tags. E.g

<system.web>

............

</system.web>

References

DevX Discussions

Velocity Reviews

SubSonic - Part 1 - An Introduction

Manjula Perera — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 06:27:00 GMT

Overview

This is another interesting article about the new trends of the software industry. I would like to share the information I gathered while researching on this new toolset with the user group members and the readers of this blog. I thought of writing about SubSonic because it's another way of accessing/ Querying the database (Actually, SubSonic is a third party toolset to auto generate the Data Access Layer (DAL) of our application and maintain it when the database changes). This is just another handy tool for us as LINQ. Therefore I'll write about SubSonic in parallel to the LINQ articles. We can compare LINQ and SubSonic later on. Since this is the first article about SubSonic in this forum I'll start with an introduction.

What is SubSonic?

SubSonic, initially named as ActionPack is developed as an open source project by Rob Conery before he joined Microsoft, but who is currently working for Microsoft in the ASP.Net team under Scott Guthrie. The other team members of this project are Eric Kemp, Scott Watermasysk, Jon Galloway, Phil Haack, and Gavin Joyce. This project has got attention from Microsoft even though it is still an open source project. SubSonic will be developed on top of ASP.Net and the new MVC framework that Microsoft has given more attention of. (This information is true at the time of writing this article and as per the SubSonic Project & Rob Conery's comments)
We can download the latest source code here
SubSonic is a toolset that helps a website build itself. It brings some of the fun and elegance of Ruby on Rails to ASP.NET
This implements Active Record design pattern.
Helps us quickly build data driven websites without writing data manipulation code
Has a DAL generator that enables us to rapidly create strongly typed collections and CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) enabled objects, which represent the selected database tables
Has an object relational (OR) mapper which extends to stored procedures and views
Could also automatically generate the UI for the data manipulation tasks (scaffolding support). This is very handy when creating the admin panel of a data driven web applications. We don't need to worry about creating it from scratch
Has a dynamic query tool that let us use SQL Server, MySQL and Enterprise Library (Application Blocks) without having to know the underlying SQL syntax (Lets go into technical details in the next articles to follow)
We just need to give the reference to the SubSonic DLL and set SubSonic settings in the Web.config file to make use of the power of SubSonic (Lets go into technical details in the next articles to follow)
Saves lot of development time and that is the main objective of creating SubSonic. Will our bosses give more work for the time we save using SubSonic?

Summery

SubSonic is an open source tool set to auto generate data manipulation code and interfaces. This works on top of ASP.Net and the MVC framework. This gives an extension and a cool new addition to the strength of .Net compliance languages and most importantly this SAVES lot of development time.

Rule Of Thumb

I'm pretty sure SubSonic will not replace classic SQL, T/SQL or PL/SQL but it will extend the data manipulation capability of the programmer. IT saves lot of time. It's a pretty cool tool to be in our tool box. We as the programmers must decide when to use it and when not to.

References