February 2012 – Dhananjay Kumar

Windows 8 Consumer Preview is available to Download

Folks on the leap day of lap year 2012 are you feeling Metrofied ? Certainly I am , Eventually we have got what we have been waiting since BUILD. Windows 8 Consumer Preview is available to download.

Download ISO image of Windows 8 Consumer Preview from here

Image taken from web.

As they are saying there are more than 10000 changes in consumer preview from the developer preview. Seems there are apps like Kindle, Dictionary etc. are there in the preview.

Download ISO image of Windows 8 Consumer Preview from here

Download Windows 8 and enjoy. I will be doing more developer centric blog post on the same in coming days.

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How to create WCF REST Service and host in Windows Azure

In this post, we will create a WCF REST Service and host in Windows Azure. We will learn following things in this post

Working with WCF Web Role
Enabling REST on WCF Web Role
Returning XML and JSON from REST service
Deploying WCF Service Web Role to Windows Azure

We need to host WCF Service in Windows Azure. So create project choosing WCF Service Web Role from Cloud tab.

We are going to return list of Players from the Service as XML and JSON. For that add a class to project called Players and attribute it as DataContract. Below I am creating Players class and attributing the class as DataContract and all the properties as DataMember.


[DataContract]
public class Players
{
[DataMember]
public string Name { get; set; }
[DataMember]
public string Sports { get; set; }
[DataMember]
public string Country { get; set; }
[DataMember]
public string ImageUrl { get; set; }

}

After creating DataContract, we need to create ServiceContract. I am creating ServiceContract with two OperationContracts. One OperationContract is retuning XML whereas another is returning JSON. ServiceContract is given below,

IService1.cs


[ServiceContract]
public interface IService1
{

[WebGet(UriTemplate="/GetPlayersXml",
RequestFormat=WebMessageFormat.Xml,
ResponseFormat=WebMessageFormat.Xml,
BodyStyle= WebMessageBodyStyle.Bare)]
List<Players> GetPlayersXml();

[WebGet(UriTemplate = "/GetPlayersJson",
RequestFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json,
ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json,
BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.Bare)]
List<Players> GetPlayersJson();

}

There are two operation contracts.
GetPlayersXml function will be returning XML as response.
GetPlayersJson function will be rturning JSON as response.
Using WebGet attribute REST behavior has been enabled on the Operation Contracts.
We can get Players as XML at Uri baseaddress/Service1.svc/GetPlayersXml and as JSON at Uri baseaddress/Service1.svc/GetPlayersJson

We have created DataContract and defined the ServiceContract. Next we need to implement service. In implementing I am returning hardcoded data however you can return data from SQL Azure or Azure Storage as well. Service is implemented as below,

Service1.svc.cs


public class Service1 : IService1
{
public List<Players> GetPlayersXml()
{
return GetPlayers();
}

public List<Players> GetPlayersJson()
{
return GetPlayers();

}

private List<Players> GetPlayers()
{
List<Players> Players = new List<Players>
{
new Players
{
Country ="India", Name="Sachin Tendulkar",Sports ="Cricket", ImageUrl="sachin.jpg"
},
new Players
{
Country ="India", Name="MS Dhoni",Sports ="Cricket", ImageUrl="dhoni.jpg"
},
new Players
{
Country ="Australia", Name="Rickey Ponting",Sports ="Cricket", ImageUrl="rickey.jpg"
},
new Players
{
Country ="India", Name="Sandeep Singh",Sports ="Hockey", ImageUrl="sandeep.jpg"
},

};
return Players;
}
}

In service implementation I have created a function named GetPlayers(). This function is returning List of Players and calling same function in both function GetPlayerXml and GetPlayerJson.

Last step we need to perform is to enable REST EndPoint on the service. For that we need to configure EndPoint behavior as below,

And then we need to create EndPoint with WebHttpBinding to enable REST on WCF Service. EndPoint will be as below,

In contract PlayerData is namespace and IService1 is ServiceContract we created in previous step. Finally configuration will be as below,


<system.serviceModel>
<behaviors>
<serviceBehaviors>
<behavior name="servicebehavior">
<serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true"/>
<serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="false"/>
</behavior>
</serviceBehaviors>
<endpointBehaviors>
<behavior name="restbehavior">
<webHttp/>
</behavior>
</endpointBehaviors>
</behaviors>
<services>
<service name ="PlayerData.Service1" behaviorConfiguration ="servicebehavior" >
<endpoint name ="RESTEndPoint"
contract ="PlayerData.IService1"
binding ="webHttpBinding"
address =""
behaviorConfiguration ="restbehavior"/>
</service>
</services>
<serviceHostingEnvironment multipleSiteBindingsEnabled="true" />
</system.serviceModel>

This is what all we need to do to create a WCF REST Service to be hosted on Windows Azure. Press F5 to run and test WCF Service Web Role in local development fabric. Make sure that you have set Windows Azure project as startup project.

On running you can see output in browser as below. I am calling GetPlayerXml function

You can see that Players data as XML is accessible at baseaddress/Service1.svc/GetPlayersXml. Since currently we are running WCF Service Web Role in local azure emulator so base address is IP address of localhost at port 81.

Next after testing locally you can deploy service at Windows Azure. For that right click at Windows Azure project and select Package. Next choose Service Configuration as Cloud and Build Configuration as Release and click Package.

After successful package you can see Service Package File and Cloud Service Configuration file in the folder explorer. We need to upload these two files to deploy application on Microsoft Data Center. And later upload this package in Windows Azure Hosted service to host created WCF Service Web Role in Windows Azure.

In another way to publish see this post wriiten by me to publish from Visual Studio

In this way you can create a WCF REST Service and host in Windows Azure. I hope this post is useful. Thanks for reading.

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Step by Step Guide to Create First Windows Azure Application

Target audience: Beginners in Windows Azure or Level 100

One can argue that why this step by step guide after so many years of Windows Azure? and why I wrote this article after my more than 80 articles on Azure?

Answer is, when I started writing this article, my objective was very much clear in my mind. I wanted to help people starting with Windows Azure from installation of SDK to Deployment to Microsoft Data Center. In this article I am targeting people who want to start learning and developing for Windows Azure.

Article is divided into five parts

Installation of Windows Azure SDK
Developing First Windows Azure Web Application
Deploying application locally in Development Storage Fabric
Registration for free Windows Azure Trial
Deployment of the Application in Microsoft Data Center

I will start fresh with installation of Windows Azure SDK and I will conclude this post with deployment of simple application in Windows Azure Hosted Service. I am not going to create a complex application since purpose of this post is to walkthrough with all the steps from installation, development, debugging to deployment. In further post we will get into more complex applications. Proceed through rest of the post to create your first application for Windows Azure.

Installation of Windows Azure SDK

Step 1

Go to official site of Windows Azure at link http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/

Step 2

In bottom of page, you will get Develop option. Click on Show Me More.

Step 3

Now you need to choose the language you want to work with. You can develop application in any of the language given in option and deploy it on the Microsoft managed datacenters. Below are the available languages.

To start developing using .NET, click on .NET.

Step 4

You will be navigated to Home Page of .NET Developer Center. You will get all the resources related to .NET development on Windows Azure here. Now click on Install to install Windows Azure SDK. I am assuming here that you are already having VS2010 on your machine.

Windows Azure SDK and tools are available to install via Web Installer. Click on the Install in the dialog window.

Next dialog windows will prompt you to agreement. Select I Accept option to proceed.

You will be getting dialog window indicating Windows Azure SDK being installed.

After successful installation you will get confirmation dialog windows as below.

Now click on Finish and Exit.

Congratulation by now you has installed Windows Azure SDK on your machine.

Developing First Application

Open Visual Studio 2010 as administrator and create a new project. Open File -> New->Project. From Cloud tab select Windows Azure Project.

Next you need to click on your preferred language. You can use any of the three languages to develop application to be deployed on Windows Azure. I am choosing language Visual C#. After clicking on the language you will get options to select as either Web Role or Worker Role.

Before we proceed further, let us stop by and try to understand what are the Web Role are Worker Role?

Web Role takes HTTP input and Process it. It gives output as HTTP Response. It takes input from user via a user interface.

Web Role can be summarized as below,

You create any application as Web Role instance. For example,

If you want to create a Web Application using ASP.Net then you will be choosing an ASP.Net Web Role in the project template
If you want to create a WCF Service and deploy it on Azure then you will be choosing WCF Service Web Role.
If you want to create ASP.Net MVC application then you will be choosing ASP.Net MVC Web Role.

Worker Role runs in the background. It is used to perform some background task. It does not take input from user. It takes input from Azure Storage or web Role.

Worker Role can be summarized as below,

Let us get back to creating first web application to be deployed on Windows Azure. Go ahead and select ASP.NET Web Role and click on arrow button. If you want you can change name of the Web Role. Since this is your first application so for the simplicity leave default name. After selecting Web Role click on Ok.

On exploring solution explorer you will find that there are two projects. One project is Widows Azure Project and other is ASP.Net Web Role.

Let us explore Windows Azure Project. Project got two Service Configuration files. Extension of Service Configuration file is cscfg

One Service configuration file is for local deployment and one contains configuration details to deploy to Microsoft Data Center. On opening service configuration file, you will get below XML.

Below information’s are provided in service configuration file.

Operating system version
Operating system family
Connection string settings
Instance counts

By default instance count is set to 1. It means there will be one instance of Web Role will be running for the deployment. Let us go ahead and increase instance count to 2. Change value to 2 in Instance count entry as below and save the file.

Next important file is Service Definition file. Extension of Service Definition file is csdef

On Opening service definition file you will get below XML

Service definition file contains information about binding and different sites. It contains information about EndPoints and default port number. In normal scenario, you may not need to edit this file.

Next important file is WebRole1. If you remember we did not change name of the Web Role while creating it in previous step.

When you click on WebRole1, you will get below UI.

In this UI you can,

Manage Settings
Configure Web Role
Configure local storage
Manage settings
Configure End Points
Manage virtual networks

In later post we will go into details of each of the section of this UI. As of now we can proceed with default values.

Now we have a bit understating on different files in Windows Azure project in the solution. Other project is normal ASP.NET Web Application project with one extra file called WebRole.cs. This file is used to host web application in Windows Azure.

Let us open default.aspx and modify it as below, I have deleted all the default codes from MainContent and put one H1 tag as below.

By this, we have created a simple ASP.Net Web Role Application to be deployed on Windows Azure.

Deploying Application Locally

You deploy application in two steps. First you deploy it locally to do testing that if everything is working as expected. You can debug application deployed on local development fabric. A Windows Azure emulator run locally is also known as Windows Azure Development Fabric.

To run Windows Azure Web Role application locally makes sure that Windows azure project is set as startup project and press F5. To make Windows azure project as startup project right click on that and select set up as startup project

After setting startup project press F5 to run application on local development fabric. After pressing F5 you can see that in bottom you are getting messages like initializing the Windows Azure storage emulator etc.

On successful deployment you should be getting Ready message at bottom

After successful deployment browser will get launched and you can see your Windows Azure Application running on local development fabric.

You can see application is running on port 81 and default start page is default.aspx. Let us explore local development fabric. To open local development fabric from the task bar right clicks on Windows Azure icon.

Right click on the Windows Azure icon and select Show Compute Emulator UI. You will get Windows Azure Compute Emulator UI. In emulator you can see health of the Web Role instances. There are two instances running since we configured two instance of Web Role in service configuration file.

On right clicking on the Web Role instance you can set logging level and can open local store.

In further post we will get into details of logging and health of Web Role instances. As of now we have seen the way to create Windows Azure Web Role Application and deploy it locally. Now let is deploy created application in Microsoft Data Center or on real cloud.

Deploying Application On Windows Azure Portal

To deploy application on Microsoft Data Center you need to have a Windows Azure Account. Windows Azure is a paid service however you can start with free trial. To register for free account follow the below steps.

Register for Free Account

Step 1

Go to official site of Windows Azure at link http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/

Step 2

In right hand side click on free trail

Step3

Next click on Try it free.

Step 4

You will be asked to login using Live ID. Provide your live id and login. If you don’t have live ID create one to work with Windows Azure Free Trail

Next proceed through the screen to create free account.

After successful registration you will be getting a success registration message. After registration go back to visual studio and right click on Windows Azure Project and select Package.

Next choose Service Configuration as Cloud and Build Configuration as Release and click Package.

After successful registration for free account again browse to https://www.windowsazure.com/ and click on Management Portal from Account section in bottom.

You will be navigated to live login page. Provide same live id and password you used to create Free Trial. After successful authenticating you will be navigated to Management Portal.

To deploy on Microsoft Data Center, first you need to create Hosted Service. To create Hosted Service from left tab select Hosted Service, Storage, Account and CDN

In top you will get three options. Their purpose is very much clear with their name.

Click on New Hosted Service to create a Hosted service. Provide information as below to create hosted service.

Choose Subscription Name. It should be the same as your registered subscription of previous step.

Enter name of the service
Enter URL of the service. This URL need to be unique. On this URL you will be accessing the application. So this application will be used at URL debugmodemyfirstservice.cloudapp.net
Choose a region from the drop down. In further post we will get into details of affinity group.
In Deployment option choose, Deploy to production environment.
Give a deployment name.

Next to upload package select browse locally. On browsing navigate to folder YourFolderName\MyFirstWindowsAzureApplication\MyFirstWindowsAzureApplication\bin\Release\app.publish and choose files.

As of now for simplicity don’t add any Certificate and click on Ok to create a hosted service with package of application created in last step. You will get a warning message. Click Yes on warning and proceed.

Now you need to wait for 5 to 10 minutes to get your application ready to use. Once service is ready you can see ready status for the Web Role.

After stats are ready, you are successfully created and deployed first web application in Windows Azure. Browse to URL http://debugmodemyfirstservice.cloudapp.net/ to see your application running from Microsoft Data Center.

In this way you can start developing for Windows Azure. In further post we will go into many details. I hope this post is useful. Thanks for reading.

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Select ListBox Item on the Hold event in Windows Phone

I was working on an application and I had to select a List Box Item on the hold event. My List Box was as below,

You see in the List Box, I have put an Image control and binding Source and Tag dependency property of the image to the data source.

At the code behind, I got an entity class Photo as below,

Finally, I am setting ItemsSource of ListBox as below. lstPhotos is list of Photo.

Now question comes that how to set a particular image from list of images in ListBox on the hold event. When user hold a particular image in ListBox that image should get selected. For that I have raised a hold event on the Image control in List Box and in the hold event need to fetch the selected image as data context.

In above code you cans see that I am getting data context of selected image in instance of entity class photo. In this way you can select a ListBox item on the hold event.

Before I conclude one point keep in mind that you need to raise Hold event on the container inside the ListBox. For example, if you have a StackPanel inside DataTemplate then you need to raise the Hold event on StackPanel. In my case there is no container but an Image so I am raising Hold event on the Image control. Avoid raising hold event on ListBox itself else you will get NullReference exception.

I hope this quick post is useful. Thanks for reading.

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Reviewing Programming Entity Framework : Code First by Julie Lerman and Rowan Miller

Title: Programming Entity Framework: Code First

Number of Pages < 200

Price: $9.99 Kindle Edition

$21.59 Paperback

Buy here

I got an opportunity to get a copy of book Programming Entity Framework: Code First from well-known author, speaker and an authority on Entity Framework Julie Lerman . I was very excited to get book directly from the author. I got amazed seeing how skillfully and with dexterity both of the authors has written such an important and depth topic in less than 200 pages. Book contains all together 8 chapters and If you are developer working on database centric applications then this book is for you. This book focuses on Code First approach of architecting the application. While you flip through the pages of the books, you will experience the authority of Julie Lerman on the subject.

Before I go ahead and write my experience on this this awesome book, let me give a try to make you understand what is Code First?

Most popular way of architecting an application is to design database first. First you model the requirement into database and then using different API like ADO.Net or ORM like LINQ to SQL Class, NHibernate etc. work with the database. This approach of architecting an application is called as Database First Approach

In .NET 3.5 Microsoft came up with ADO.Net Entity Framework, It was helping developers to create conceptual model.

It was creating Conceptual model into XML File.
Extension of XML file is EDMX.
XML file can be seen in designer where developers can edit the design on conceptual model.

ADO.Net Entity Framework was working on concepts of Database first approach where conceptual model gets created on existing database.

One of the most popular ways of architecting your application is to have Model First. You may have mapped database requirement in a XML file and create database from the XML file. This approach of architecting database is called Model First Approach.

In Model first approach you can start working on project without having a database. You can design the conceptual model using Visual Studio designer and later database can be created from this conceptual model.

In .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft came up with new version of ADO.Net Entity Framework version 4.0 and it was supporting developers to architect their application as Model First approach.

Regardless of the approach you use in your application automatically lot of codes get created as classes and you work with the classes. Here comes a third way of creating Database and that is Code First approach. In this you model your requirement in plain classes and then databases gets created from these classes. Developers first create Domain Classes and then later database gets created from these domain classes.

In your application POCO classes are model and they are used to create the database. This approach of architecting an application is called “CODE FIRST”.

Now if you have a basic understanding of Code first approach after reading above paragraph then you should be thanking Julie Lerman rather me because my understating was based on first two paragraph of first chapter of book titled Programming Entity Framework: CODE FIRST

Table Of Contents

By seeing table of contents you must have got an idea that how useful this book would be if you are a developer working on Database centric applications.

About Authors

Julia Lerman is the leading independent authority on the Entity Framework and has been using and teaching the technology since its inception in 2006. She is the author of the highly acclaimed book, Programming Entity Framework, 1st and 2nd editions and is well known in the .NET community as a Microsoft MVP, ASPInsider, and INETA Speaker. Julia is a frequent presenter at technical conferences around the world and writes articles for many well-known technical publications including the Data Points column in MSDN Magazine. Julia blogs at http://thedatafarm.com/blog

Rowan Miller is Program Manager in ADO.Net Entity Framework team at Microsoft.

Conclusion

I strongly suggest to you to read this book and take your expertise to next level. All 8 chapters’ of this book will help you to have a better understating on the Code First approach and codes samples will help you to understand better way of modeling your database from the code.

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