One of the things I am very interested in is the .NET stack and especially the .NET Core platform. In this blog post I want to briefly highlight what it takes to get a sample .NET Core application up and running on Azure and how to use New Relic’s Application Performance Monitoring (APM) to monitor this application.

Please note: while I am writing this, the latest version of .NET Core SDK is .NET Core 2.0 Preview 2; dependent upon how you get the SDK, there is already a preview 3 of the .NET Core CLI out there, but this is currently not supported on Azure. You can check for support by using a Developer Console (Developer Tools –> Console of an Azure App Service) within the Azure portal and navigate to D:\Program Files (x86)\dotnet\sdk.

Last week I learned a very interesting lesson. I am just in the end phase of a custom software delivery project. Using OLIVANOVA’s model driven software development approach, I created a three-tier application with an ASP.NET client, a COM+ based server tier and MS SQL Server as the persistence layer. The COM+ application is deployed to a dedicated server along with the SQL Server database management system.

The ASP.NET application is created on another server that lives in a DMZ (demilitarized zone). This web server does not have access to the Internet from inside, but is accessible from outside of this company. A connection (HTTP) from the web-server to the database server is then responsible for communication between the user-interface and the server tier.

Microsoft has released a security advisory about a vulnerability in ASP.NET. A security patch is already available here.

Below are some details on how the vulnerability works:

“To understand how this vulnerability works, you need to know about cryptographic oracles. An oracle in the context of cryptography is a system which provides hints as you ask it questions. In this case, there is a vulnerability in ASP.NET which acts as a padding oracle. This allows an attacker to send cipher text to the web server and learn if it was decrypted properly by examining which error code was returned by the web server. By making many such requests (and watching what errors are returned) the attacker can learn enough to successfully decrypt the rest of the cipher text.” (quoted from Scott Guthrie’s blog)

I finally managed to add this project on sourceforge … here is the link

A couple of days ago I received an email from Steven Davis. He proposed some brilliant enhancements to the MySQL session state store provider. Thanks to him, I am able to provide a new release of it today.

New features he incorporated into the provider are:

• added cluster db support: the ability to retry within a cluster of servers, the web.config can then use connectionStringList=","
• fixed timeout Minutes to TotalMinutes
• changed namespace to Kimpel.MySqlSessionDll to make debugging clearer

Release v.03 now also supports MySQL Connector/Net 6.2. I also added a SQL script to create the necessary sessions table.

As Joel (original URL https://cid-a4e6342ee2ff07cb.profile.live.com/) and Ciprian Tarta (original URL https://cid-9e17649272bd0cd7.profile.live.com/) mentioned, the code for the MySQL session state store provider contained a little bug in the RemoveItem method. I fixed this bug and also tried to re-format the document.

You can download the document here: https://www.kimpel.com/FileDownloader.aspx?file=MySqlSessionStateStore v.0.2.zip.

Enjoy!

As I mentioned earlier here, my website ultimately is .NET ready .

Since I have quite a number of photos online that are off the record, I wanted to ‘protect’ them using forms authentication (within the former web hosting package developed in PHP I was using .htaccess and .htpassword files in order to protect complete directories).

So, from my professional experience, I know that saving data in session is feasible. However, the problem comes with a clustered environment that you usually run into in production environments. One possible solution now is to store session data in a database. Since the package I ordered at Easy CGI does not come with a MS SQL Server database (unless you add it as an additional feature to your package) you are limited to MS Access or MySql as your database management system … well, this actually isn’t that much of a choice since MS Access is not really suitable in a multi-user environment.

I just found a solution to the issue in the subject. I had the problem a while ago and the only resolution was to re-install my machine. Today I had the same issue again after installing (what I figured out) an UMTS software on my machine. ASP.NET and IIS worked just fine before, but after installing the UMTS software this morning I had the same problems again. I googled and fortunately found this post. The resolution is just to run the little application attached. This will remove the bmnet.dll installed and will fix settings within the windows socket layer. It worked for me.