Surfing .NET

Azure User Management

Dimosthenis Stellakis — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 07:22:42 GMT

Have you ever been a co-admin in an Azure subscription, but later this subscription became inactive and you would prefer not to be displayed in the list of your subscriptions?

You can use the User Management feature of the Windows Azure Portal, to select which subscriptions appear on your Hosted Services, Storage and Database lists. Just click on the "Hosted Services, Storage Accounts & CDN" on the bottom left part of the tool and select "User Management". Select your Windows Live ID (the one that says "You" next to it) and click on the "Manage Co-Admin" button on the top toolbar.

From there you can select the subscriptions that you want to be co-admin. Hit ok and refresh the browser, and you will see that the list of subscriptions that appear has been reduced.

The downside is that if you remove a subscription, only the administrator of the subscription can add you again as co-admin in it.

LogParser GUI

Dimosthenis Stellakis — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 07:09:25 GMT

If you ever tried to analyze IIS Logs, you might be familiar with the LogParser tool from Microsoft, which allows you to make sql-like queries to many text-based log files, such as IIS logs and XML files, and also on other windows data sources, like the event log, registry, file system and Active Directory.

Unfortunately, this great tool comes as a command-line utility without a user interface, making its use difficult. Fortunatelly, I have come across a nice graphical user interface tool called Log Parser Lizard GUI.

Log Parser Lizard GUI uses LogParser under the scenes to provide a much better user experience, while maintaining the power of LogParser. Some of its features include an sql query editor window, results pane, multiple queries, export to multiple formats, charts, and the ability to save your queries for later use.

IE8 Search Provider

Dimosthenis Stellakis — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 22:24:01 GMT

Recently, I was building an open search provider for a client's web site. By building a search provider for your website, you give the ability to the users to use Internet Explorer's search box to quickly search your web site for the desired content. A search provider is also installed as an accelerator, thus providing even more search power and ease of use to the end user.

MSDN has a very comprehensive article on building search providers for Internet Explorer 8. I wanted to include support for visual search suggestions, which is a fairly easy proccess, one has to create a page or handler that returns an XML (or JSON) response, based on the search term provided. This XML would look like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<SearchSuggestion xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/Search/2008/suggestions">
  <Query>xbox</Query>
  <Section>
    <Item>
       <Text>Xbox 360</Text>
       <Description>The official Xbox website from Microsoft</Description>
       <Url>http://www.xbox.com</Url>
    </Item>
    <Item>
       <Text>Xbox cheats</Text>
       <Description>Codes and walkthroughs</Description>
       <Url>http://www.example.com/xboxcheatcodes.aspx</Url>
    </Item>
    <Item>
       <Text>Xbox 360 games</Text>
       <Description>Games and accessories</Description>
       <Url>http://www.example.com/games</Url>
    </Item>
  </Section>
</SearchSuggestion>

So, I went on and created a handler that returns the search results as an XML document like the sample above. Unfortunately, I couldn't make it work in Internet Explorer; no matter what I typed in the search box, I always got a "An error occured" error message, and no results were shown.

After spending a lot of time in debugging the handler, I finally figured out what was going wrong; I was omitting the namespace declaration in the <SearchSuggestion> element. I found many blog posts that were also omitting the namespace declaration on their samples, so I didn't think this would be the problem. So, if you are also getting the same error, check the namespace declaration, maybe this will do the trick for you as well.

Also, you will want to make sure that the <Query> element has as text the actual query phrase as entered by the user, because if not Internet Explorer will again show that error message.

Azure Storage

Dimosthenis Stellakis — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 13:56:18 GMT

Recently, one of our clients wanted to host a web site on Windows Azure. Our solution would consist of the actual web site and our content management tool to allow for content changes in the web site, so we would have two different web applications hosted on Azure.

One spec was that the web site admin should be able to upload photos and images that would show up in the site. The problem was that Azure doesn't allow for file I/O operations, so you can't upload a file and then save it on the disk.

When thinking of how we could implement this feature, we though of using Azure Storage, which is Azure's way of providing hosted applications with storage space. Included in the Azure SDK is a tool named Azure Drive, which is intended to allow applications to use Azure storage as they would use a local drive, so that they could read and write to Azure whithout changes in their code. The drive is implemented as a Windows Azure Page Blob containing an NTFS-formatted Virtual Hard Drive (VHD).

One limitation with Azure Drive however was that a drive could only be mounted by one VM for read/write access at any given time. So, the admin could upload the images, but the web site (which was a different web application) would not be able to mount the drive and show them.

The solution we came up with was using the Azure storage API directly to manage our files. In effect, using the provider pattern, we created a StorageProvider and provided three provider implementations, a FileSystem provider, for normal fiel system access, a DBFileSystemProvider for storing files in a database, and an AzureFileSystemProvider for storing files in Azure storage.

Having done that, all we needed to do was change the System I/O calls to our provider interface calls in the code, and just like that by changing the web.config our web applications were now able to read and write files in Azure.

New Beginnings

Dimosthenis Stellakis — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 13:19:04 GMT

For a while now I've been thinking about being my own employer, but I was a bit afraid to take the big step and start my own job. Fortunatelly, a good friend and long-time co-worker of mine, Kostas Pantos, gave me the chance I was looking for by working together for our common goal.

I have been working in the software industry for 10 years now, and I was fortunate enough to participate in a lot of big and challenging projects. From my first job, which was working for in.gr, the leading news portal in Greece, up to now, I have done content management, document management, e-commerce, booking systems, all using state of the art technology.

In Techaholics we plan to use our knowledge and experience to create better software, software that we would enjoy using.