Phil Leggetter – Software Consultant

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• Windows Azure - 503 Service Unavailable

  Phil Leggetter 12:44 am on August 28, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: .NET (9), ASP.NET MVC (2), Software Development, Windows Azure (2)

  I finally got around to trying out ASP.NET MVC and while I was at it I thought I’d also give Windows Azure a whirl. Windows Azure doesn’t support ASP.NET MVC out of the box but Jim over on MSDN Blogs has written up the details of how to get ASP.Net MVC Projects running on Windows Azure.

  Problem

  So, I followed the instruction from the blog and uploaded the package and configuration file, waited for the staging application to get into a runnable state, and clicked on the staging link…

  Windows Azure – 503 Service Unavailable

  Clearly not a good thing! In addition to this error I occasionally got a random network error or a full-on connection error reported by the browser.

  I tried googling for this error but there was nothing about this problem after deploying to the real Windows Azure hosting (the cloud). As far as I can tell there’s no way of getting any debug information or logs to work out what’s going wrong. Maybe this is something that Microsoft will add later on?

  Solution

  Then it struck me that I hadn’t actually set up any kind of TableStorage on my Windows Azure hosting so I removed all mentions of storage and database connections from the MVC application. This included editing Web.config and removing the following.

  • The <section name=”authenticationService” type=”System.Web.Configuration.ScriptingAuthenticationServiceSection, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35″ requirePermission=”false” allowDefinition=”MachineToApplication” /> section element.
  • The <connectionStrings> element
  • The <membership>element
  • The <authentication mode=”Forms”> element
  • The <profile> element
  • The <roleManager>element

  Update: I’ve found that without the <authentication>element I started getting the error below so you may want to instead replace it with :

  CCT: Role instances did not start within the time allowed. Please try again. If you continue to encounter this behavior please try shutting down the Development Fabric.

  I’m guessing that not all of these elements actually need to be removed but doing so resulted in the MVC ASP.NET application working in Windows Azure.

  Update 2: ServiceDefinition.csdef

  If you happen to get network timeouts or 404 network connection issues it’s worth checking your ServiceDefinition.csdef to make sure that you’ve got port 80 configured. I noticed that mine had updated to port 8080 so obviously I couldn’t access the staging site on port 80 like I was trying. If you do have the port set to something else other than port 80 you can use that port to access your application but the ServiceDefinition.csdef does have a comment in there telling you your application should be on port 80 so you are probably best to stick with that.

  <!– Must use port 80 for http and port 443 for https when running in the cloud –>
  <InputEndpoint name=”HttpIn” protocol=”http” port=”80″ />

  
  

  
  
  
  
  
   

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• Bing.com round table

  Phil Leggetter 10:56 am on June 27, 2009 | 2 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Bing (3), Internet (12), Microsoft (4), real-time web (15), Social Media (7), Software Development, web 2.0 (4)

  On Monday between 19:00 and 21:00 I’m going to a Bing roundtable (round table) in London. The event is being organise by Colin Mercer and is described as:

  a small round-table event to discuss Bing and since we saw your recent tweet regarding comparative search results between Bing and Google, we thought that you might be interested in coming along. The idea would be to get your initial thoughts and you’ll get an update on the future steps for Bing which are being developed specifically for the UK. During the session you’ll have the chance to talk with Microsoft representatives and other people from social media like yourself, who have expressed some early opinion.

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• Caplin Systems Blog Post - What is the real-time web?

  Phil Leggetter 4:27 pm on April 28, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Caplin Systems (2), comet (3), Internet (12), real-time web (15), Software Development, web 2.0 (4)

  About a week ago I wrote a blog article at work entitled “What is the real-time web?“. I’m seeing even more tweets and posts about the real-time web and I’d love to hear if other people agree with my opinion on what the real-time web is.

  View the What is the real-time web? article here.

  
  

  
  
  
  
  
   

• How to read a file into a string using PHP

  Phil Leggetter 2:39 pm on February 28, 2009 | 1 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: code snippet, PHP (2), Software Development, Uncategorized

  	function ReadFile($filename)
  	{
  		$fh = fopen($filename, 'r');
  		$theData = fread($fh, filesize($filename));
  		fclose($fh);
  		return $theData;
  	}
  

  
  

  
  
  
  
  
   

• Problem solving lessons relearnt

  Phil Leggetter 11:06 pm on December 10, 2008 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: best practice, common sense, problem solving (2), Software Development, Whinge (8)

  I’ve had one of those days. I set out early this morning aware that I had a tough task ahead of me at work. By the end of the day I’ve made very little progress.

  

   

   The silly thing is that I know exactly what mistakes I’ve made today that have hindered my progress and what’s worse, I’ve made the same mistakes before.

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• Live Mesh - my experience

  Phil Leggetter 11:52 pm on November 30, 2008 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: .NET (9), Live Mesh, Microsoft (4), Software Development, Synchronisation

  I think that Live Mesh will be really useful. I think it provides great benefit to individual users, such as myself, and has great potential to be used by software solution developers. I’m presently using it to synchronise some files that I want to backup and be available wherever I am.

  

  I originally had a lot of web files being synchronised, around 700MB, but the synchronisation was taking ages and killing my CPU. CPU was sitting at 100% and there was no sign of things completing. I think it was having a problem with the volume of small files.

  To summarise: it’s a great product with bags of potential but something needs to be done to reduce the CPU usage when dealing with the synchronisation of a large volume of small files.

  
  

  
  
  
  
  
   

• How to make a cross domain web request with SilverLight 2

  Phil Leggetter 12:16 pm on October 24, 2008 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: .NET, .NET (9), C# (3), crossdomain, Internet (12), silverlight (7), Software Development

  To make a cross domain web request with SilverLight 2 really isn’t that tough. I did have some problems with RC0 but I have no idea why. I just tried writing a little app to do this and it worked straight away.
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• .NET Obfuscators

  Phil Leggetter 10:45 pm on June 26, 2008 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: .NET (9), Obfusators, Software, Software Development

  As I was cleaning up the contents of my desktop I came across a text file containing a list of links to .NET obfuscator offerings. I created this list when researching options about six months ago. The main criteria was that the obfuscator could be executed as part of an automated build process.

  Here’s the contents of the list:

  • http://www.remotesoft.com/salamander/obfuscator.html
  • http://www.smartassembly.com/
  • http://www.preemptive.com/products/dotfuscator/index.html
  • http://www.9rays.net/products/Spices.Obfuscator/
  • http://www.wiseowl.com/products/products.aspx
  • http://www.eziriz.com/comparison.htm

  
  

  
  
  
  
  
   

• Holiday - Day 1: Bad design gives me an early start to the day

  Phil Leggetter 8:49 am on June 5, 2008 | 2 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Software Development

  I was awoken on the first day of my holiday to a clattering sound and my girlfriend exclaiming “I can’t get the top drawer open”. I turned over and looked at the clock. It read 05:50! Something within the drawer has risen high enough so that when you try to open it it catches and the drawer can’t open.

  

  I then had to spend 30 minutes taking the whole set of drawers apart with a screwdriver to get this drawer open. I don’t know how many times I’ve come across this same problem but still the design of drawers, and more to the point their casing, stays the same. The drawer cavity always has space above the actual drawer to allow things within the drawer to move into this space and then catch when you try and open the drawer.

  My point here is that this has proven time and time again to be bad design with flaws yet this design does not change. The same problem can be seen in other engineering designs including software.
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• How to install Caplin Systems' Liberator Free Edition on Windows

  Phil Leggetter 10:50 pm on May 20, 2008 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Caplin Systems (2), Software Development

  Liberator FE

  I work for Caplin Systems who have recently released Liberator FE which is the Free Edition of their real time Comet server product.

  Liberator is the most performant and fully-featured server currently available for streaming real-time data to web pages. The technology behind many of the world’s leading financial trading portals, it is now available FREE for evaluation and non-commercial use.

  In this post I will detail my experiences when installing Liberator FE on Windows with an aim to being able to create a RIA Client that consumes data from a Capin DataSource.

  Liberator Free Edition comes with a comprehensive client library for integrating with Ajax or Flex, RIAs, a Java server library for connecting to sources of data and building application logic, and full documentation.

  
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