Looking for a way to have your rollback logic in VSTS or TFS 2015 Release Definitions? Well you are in luck.

The https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-devlabs.utilitytasks extension provides a nice set of features and the best one I like – Rollback

The issue so far has been that Release Management does not have pre-defined variables that indicate the status of the tasks executed in the job. That makes using an intelligent rollback script difficult. Rollback task facilitates exactly that. You can author a PowerShell script for reverting/ fixing the changes done to your environment by the deployment.

After installing this extension, you would see “PowerShell for rollback” task in the catalog.

You can use this for enabling rollback on failure of a deployment as follows:

1. Configure the environment deployment as you normally would.

2. Author a PowerShell script for rollback. To know which task failed in deployment, you can use an environment variable “Release_Tasks” that would be available for the script.

A sample of how to use this environment variable in the script is as follows. You can extend this to build the complete rollback script.

try

{

$jsonobject = ConvertFrom-Json $env:Release_Tasks

}

catch

{

Write-Verbose -Verbose "Error converting from json"

Write-Verbose -Verbose $Error

}

foreach ($task in $jsonobject | Get-Member -MemberType NoteProperty) {   

$taskproperty = $jsonobject.$($task.Name) | ConvertFrom-Json

Write-Verbose -Verbose "Task $($taskproperty.Name) with rank $($task.Name) has status $($taskproperty.Status)"

}

3. Add a PowerShell for rollback task to the environment for executing the rollback script.

4. Ensure that you enable “Run Always” control option for the rollback task, so that it shall be executed after any of the tasks fail. By default, no tasks shall be run after the first task fails unless marked “Continue on failure”.

The utility does come with other handy tasks like Tokenizer for managing your configuration, Zip & Unzip for well Zipping and Unzipping Its interesting because with these you can now tokenize your Web.Config even if they are inside a web deploy package. But the Rollback is what gets the cherry as per me.

I have always loved the new Release Management platform and this makes me love it even more.

I was recently working on helping someone localize their ADFS 3.0 login page. They had changed the theme and had some custom text like their organization name and some instructions to login. The challenge was localizing this custom text when people from a different country say France with their language set as French (FR) tries to access the site.\

Maybe there are better ways to this is ADFS. I am no ADFS expert but I was told that you got to use it using the exported OnLoad JavaScript method. So I thought of writing something in JavaScript to help identify the default language. I initially tried to use the navigator to get the language

var language = window.navigator.userLanguage || window.navigator.language;
alert(language);

Soon I understood that this wont work since its returning the language of the browser itself as in if you installed English version of Chrome, it would return EN. This is not what I wanted. So what I had to do was extract it from the Request Header. The header would look something like this:

Connection: Keep-Alive
Accept: text/html, application/xhtml+xml, image/jxr, */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, peerdist
Accept-Language: fr-FR, fr; q=0.8, en-US; q=0.5, en; q=0.3
Cookie: glimpsePolicy=On; shopper=7cc14a57-c195-498b-b8f8-825d61434119
Host: localhost:57350
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0) like Gecko
DNT: 1
X-P2P-PeerDist: Version=1.1
X-P2P-PeerDistEx: MinContentInformation=1.0, MaxContentInformation=2.0

The highlighted header is what we are interested in. Since we can get this from the JavaScript, I wrote a simple Web API and hosted in Azure.

public class LanguageController : ApiController
    {
        // GET api/Language
        public IEnumerable<string> Get()
        {
            return Request.Headers.AcceptLanguage.ToList().Select(lang => lang.Value).ToList();
        }
    }

This API is hosted in http://detectbrowserlanguage.azurewebsites.net/api/language and as you can see it returns an array of all accepted languages. The rest is simple CSS and JQuery to do the trick. One other thing was I could not have references the JQuery using script tags so I ended up adding JQuery through my JavaScript itself. Looks something like this:

<html>
<head>
<style>
   p {
    display: none;
   }
   body:lang(en) p:lang(en) {
    display : inline;
   }
   body:lang(cz) p:lang(cz) {
    display : inline;
   }
   body:lang(en-US) p:lang(en-US) {
    display : inline;
   }
</style>
<script>
 
    function loadScript(url, callback) {

        var script = document.createElement("script")
        script.type = "text/javascript";

        if (script.readyState) { //IE
            script.onreadystatechange = function () {
                if (script.readyState == "loaded" || script.readyState == "complete") {
                    script.onreadystatechange = null;
                    callback();
                }
            };
        } else { //Others
            script.onload = function () {
                callback();
            };
        }

        script.src = url;
        document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(script);
    }

    loadScript("http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-2.0.3.min.js", function () {       
         // Send an AJAX request
        $.getJSON("http://detectbrowserlanguage.azurewebsites.net/api/language")
         .done(function (data) {
            // On success, 'data' contains a list of products.
            if(data && data.length>0){
                $('body').prop("lang",data[0]);
            }
           
            $.each(data, function (index,language) {
              // Add a list item for the product.                           
              //$('body').prop("lang",language);
            });
        });
    });
</script>
</head>
<body class="cz">   
   <div>
     <p lang="en">Hello</p>
     <p lang="cz">Ahoj</p>
     <p lang="ru">Privet</p>
   </div>
</body>
</html>

This loads the appropriate greeting text to match the default language of the end user. Of course this does not support all languages but you get the point.

Hope this helps if you are trying to get something similar done.

There is a page dedicated to providing the roadmap and release timelines for both VSO and VS and this is quiet amazing that we have such information out there for general viewing.

Visual Studio Features Timeline

Visual Studio Online Features Timeline

Hope this will help answering some of your questions on when you can expect certain features to make the cut to the environment.

This while exercise was for a demo which I can giving to a customer. Once the demo was over, I deleted the VSO accounts and then wanted to delete the Azure Account. This is where the issue was. When I try deleting the AD, it refused that action saying I cannot delete it unless all users and Apps were removed and there is no way to remove VSO and O365 Management API app associations even though all the Linked VSO accounts were unlinked.

The only way I could do this is using Azure AD PowerShell. You would have to follow Install the Azure AD Module before attempting this PowerShell. Also make sure you REALLY REALLY want to delete the AD.

Connect-MsolService  - This will prompt you to login. You would have to use an AD user account a nd not your Microsoft one.

Get-MsolServicePrincipal | Remove-MsolServicePrincipal - This will remove the VSO association from the AD from which it can. Make sure you have logged in using an account who is an Admin in the account you want to delete.

For more details on removing Service Principal, refer https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/dn194113.aspx

I was really stuck on this and I hope this helps others who might be stuck.

Firstly, this is a continuation of my previous post Optimizing ASP.Net Application – The Presentation Layer (Part 1)

I am gonna discuss some other techniques and maybe introduce to some cool tools which will help you improve your site’s performance further.

Optimizing Images

This is one simple thing you could use to make your sites run faster. You site would definitely have multiple images and all of them can actually be optimized. Even if you create your own images using your favorite image editor like Photoshop, you can further optimize those images. The million dollar question would obviously be how ? Use Smush.IT or any similar tools which will trim off everything which is not required from your images, helping you reduce the image size a sizable chunk. You also have an offline version of this tool available at http://smushmysite.codeplex.com. I have personally not tried this offline tool but look like it works pretty much like the online one. http://punypng.com/ is another great service which you could use for “smushing” your images.

Now you can also do this from within your visual studio environment by using the Image Optimizer plugin

Remove Entity Tags

Entity tags (ETags) are a mechanism that web servers and browsers use to determine whether the component in the browser's cache matches the one on the origin server. (An "entity" is another word a "component": images, scripts, stylesheets, etc.) ETags were added to provide a mechanism for validating entities that is more flexible than the last-modified date. An ETag is a string that uniquely identifies a specific version of a component. The only format constraints are that the string be quoted. The origin server specifies the component's ETag using the ETag response header.

      HTTP/1.1 200 OK
      Last-Modified: Tue, 12 Dec 2006 03:03:59 GMT
      ETag: "10c24bc-4ab-457e1c1f"
      Content-Length: 12195

Later, if the browser has to validate a component, it uses the If-None-Match header to pass the ETag back to the origin server. If the ETags match, a 304 status code is returned reducing the response by 12195 bytes for this example.

      GET /i/yahoo.gif HTTP/1.1
      Host: us.yimg.com
      If-Modified-Since: Tue, 12 Dec 2006 03:03:59 GMT
      If-None-Match: "10c24bc-4ab-457e1c1f"
      HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified

The problem with ETags is that they typically are constructed using attributes that make them unique to a specific server hosting a site. ETags won't match when a browser gets the original component from one server and later tries to validate that component on a different server, a situation that is all too common on Web sites that use a cluster of servers to handle requests. By default, both Apache and IIS embed data in the ETag that dramatically reduces the odds of the validity test succeeding on web sites with multiple servers.

So how do we remove them? Well you could do this in the web.config by adding the following :

<httpProtocol>
  <customHeaders>
    <add name="ETag" value=" "/>
  </customHeaders>
</httpProtocol>

There are other things you could so as well like refer images as Data Uri and not the actual Image source, This will minimize the number of requests further.

You could also implement page caching for pages which hardly changes or changes in a predictable time interval.

Well that’s it for now I guess. I will add on a part 3 if I really come across something important.

Happy Coding !!

Today I delivered a talk to the .Net developer community on optimizing ASP.Net applications. The talk was primarily focused on optimizing the presentation layer (HTML, JavaScript, CSS, …)

So how do we go about optimizing the presentation layer ? I am not gonna talk about View State or Session as it has been discussed all over the web time and again and by now people you would have already implement view state selectively and should be handling sessions with care and also implement GZIP compression over the session (Visit ASP.Net 4.0 enhancements if you are not doing this already).

When you request for any web page, there are two things which happens:

1. The HTML (including data) is downloaded from the server
2. All the other resources (JavaScript, CSS, Images, ..) gets downloaded from the server

Most of the times when you talk about optimizing your ASP.Net sites, you would look into things like how fast you could get the data from the database and how you could implement things like App Fabric Caching, etc.

What you miss out is the fact that almost 75 % of your page load time would be attributed to downloading and rendering the so called resources and not the actual HTML + data. At least that what the statistics says.

So what can you do about this ? First you need to understand what to fix. If you are using IE 9 as the browser, you can use the developer tools to understand how does your page statistics look like. I created a simple application which has an image control and some image thumbnails. You click on a thumbnail and it loads that image on the image control. All using a very simple JQuery. I ran the developer tools to see the network profile and I was shocked to see the results:

Alright I have a clear problem with my website and the high load time is because of my resources. Now what ?

Well go fix them. To help with this better, you could use Yahoo YSlow or Google Page Speed. Unfortunately you don’t have a version of these that will work with IE, so you would have to use Firefox or Chrome even though you know IE is the best browser .

Once you run this tool against your page, it would tell you what the issue is. Here are the major ones which will impact your performance greatly:

Location of CSS and JavaScript

One of the most common error I’ve seen in my career is that people conveniently include all their script references in the Head section. Well this is not a great practice. Always try and put then after the page’s UI content. Only CSS references should be provided in Head and not Script. If at all you don’t want to cut all those lines and put them down, use the defer property.

<script type="text/javascript" src="Scripts/jquery-1.4.1.min.js" defer="defer" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="Scripts/main.js" defer="defer" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="Scripts/modernizr-latest.js" defer="defer" />

The defer attribute specifies that the execution of a script should be deferred (delayed) until after the page has been loaded.

Add Expires Header

Always try and cache the local resources in the browser so you would not have to download them every single time. This can very easily be done for your ASP.Net application.

Jut go to web.config and add the following to <system.webServer>

<staticContent>
  <clientCache httpExpires ="Fri, 29 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMT"/>
</staticContent>

What happens is that all static content will now have an expires HTTP header set to the year 2020. Static content means anything that isn’t served through the ASP.NET engine such as images, script files and styles sheets.

Minimize the number of requests

Consider that your site has 15 JavaScript files including jQuery, Mordenizr or any other helpers as well and may be 10 style sheets. This alone would amount to 25 requests to your server effectively reducing the performance. How can this be helped. Obviously, you need to minimize the number of requests. But how on earth is this possible? simple, merge all style sheets into one and do the same with JavaScript.

You could write custom HttpHandlers to do this or you could use something already available like SquishIt

this lets you easily bundle some css and javascript so you can download one CSS and one JS instead of 10 – 15 of them independently. You would have to change the markup by commenting CSS and Script references and replacing them with something like this:

<%= SquishIt.Framework.Bundle.Css()
            .Add("~/Styles/Site.css")
            .Add("~/Styles/styles.css")
            .Render("~/Styles/combined_#.css")
%>

and

<%= SquishIt.Framework.Bundle.JavaScript()
            .Add("~/Scripts/jquery-1.4.1.js")
            .Add("~/Scripts/main.js")
            .Render("~/Scripts/combined_#.js")
%>

Minify CSS and Javascript

Another technique to reduce the load time on the client is to make sure that all your JS and CSS resources are minified. This allows you to reduce the size of your resources. One of the minifiers I have come across is the Microsoft Ajax Minifier. It’s a command line utility which also provides API so you can minify your resources at the time of deployment or even dynamically by using the API.

There are few other techniques which I will talk about in the next part of this post.

Happy Coding !!

Windows Azure Toolkit for Android has been released along with significant updates to the Windows Azure Toolkits for Windows Phone and iOS.

The purpose of these toolkits is to make it easier for mobile device developers – across multiple device platforms – to build applications that use Windows Azure to run services that power their device experiences. The toolkits include native libraries, project templates, sample applications, and documentation that make it easy for developers quickly get started build device applications that use Windows Azure.

Get the toolkits here: Windows Phone | iOS (iPhone & iPad) |Android

What’s New?

Some of the more notable updates shipping today are:

• First release of the Windows Azure Toolkit for Android, which includes native libraries (for storage and authentication), a sample application, and unit tests.
  • Support for SQL Azure in the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone.
  • Store both membership data and MPNS channels.
• Simple sample demonstration binding to SQL Azure data through OData.
• Full support for Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 1.4 and Windows Developer Phone Tools 7.1 RC.
• Upgraded the web application to ASP.NET MVC 3.
• Shipped the full source code to BabelCam, which is now available in the Windows Phone Marketplace.
• Significant updates and restructuring of the Windows Azure Toolkit for iOS.

For more details, please refer to the following posts:

• The Official Microsoft Blog: Microsoft Releases the Windows Azure Toolkit for Android
• Windows Phone Developer Blog: Building Windows Phone Applications Using Windows Azure
• Windows Azure Team Blog: NOW AVAILABLE - Windows Azure Toolkit for Android
• Wade Wegner’s Blog: Windows Azure Toolkits for Devices: Now With Android!

You can also watch this video on Channel 9, which covers all updates released today:

Have fun coding !!

Access this training course @ https://channel9.msdn.com/Learn/Courses/Silverlight4

Here are some approaches you can use to implement dynamic scalability of you Azure roles.

Performance-Based Scaling:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/gg232759.aspx  
 
Code approach:
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/azurescale
 
Multithreading approach:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ff700243.aspx
 
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/gonzalorc/archive/2010/02/07/auto-scaling-in-azure.aspx
 
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/architectsrule/archive/2010/04/27/dynamic-scaling-windows-azure.aspx
 

• Virtual Machine (VM) Role
• Remote Desktop Access
• Windows Azure Connect
• Extra Small Instance
• Redesigned Management Portal
• Windows Server 2008 R2
• Elevated Privileges for Startup Tasks
• Full IIS in Web Role
• Compute and Storage Emulators
• Code Samples

For the list of known issues and SDK installation requirements, see Windows Azure SDK Release Notes (November 2010).