Microsoft Azure VPN: Error 0x8007274c whilst trying to connect

When trying to connect you are getting the below error message:

A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.
 (Error 0x8007274c)

try to upload the root certificate again.

Microsoft Azure: Reducing Cost

If you plan to use IaaS make sure you have a sound monitoring strategy that you have reporting on the load and performance of your Virtual Machines.

 
As the above graph shows that the virtual machine is not used during the last 7 days. This is a very good candidate to look a little bit deeper into. After doing some root cause analysis it is a standard small vm running linux costing your company around € 33.25 / a month. If we would scale down this application from Standard to Basic we would save € 5.54 / month which would be a cost reduction of ~17%. Since it seems that this virtual machine is underutilized for most of the time (CPU anyways) we could scale it down from S to XS bring down the cost even further from € 27.71 to € 9.98 which would save us an additional 64 %. Doing this it would mean that we would bring down out monthly cost from €33.25 to € 9.98 saving us 70%.
If we would take it a step further we could investigate the type of application that is running on this serer and maybe migrate it to a PaaS solution bringing the cost even further down. In this case the VM was running a very simple website hosting this in a shared website we could even bring the cost further down to € 7.21 which would our bring our total savings to 92%.

The cloud is not only about up scaling it is all about optimizing cost! This means that if needed you can scale up and or out but it means you can scale down and in as well saving your company money. This is a very very simple example. But if you would closely analyze usage and optimize your scaling strategy, the potential cost savings can be quite significant. This was a case which I came across in my company, the figures are representative and taken from the Microsoft pricing calculator which can be found at: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/, not taken into account any EA reductions.

 

Disabling Caching on ajax calls using JQuery or javascript

disabling cache of a single call
you can as well enable caching site-wide

Problem Running application in IISExpress in Visual Studio over SSL

I Currently set up an Azure VM to use as a development machine, I used MSDN's Default Visual Studio 2013 Image.

When I try to run my web application locally Internet Explorer gives me a "This page can't be displayed" error... firefox gives me "The connection was reset".
When browsing to the default non https port everything works as expected though...


so the solution:

1. uninstall iisexpress 8.0 (Control Panel > Uninstall a program)
2. mmc.exe, Add/Remove snapp-in, Certificates, select  Local Computer (Click Next), Finish
   here look under Personal, Certificates and delete the certificate Friendly Name = "IIS Express Development Certificate"
3. Reinstall IIS Express 8.0
4. following actions outlined in step 2. find the new "IIS Express Development Certificate", double click and goto details, find the thumbprint and copy the hash: ‎38 b3 05 a5 d2 1c ba 8b cb 45 fa 03 06 9a d4 b6 94 00 97 f9
5. remove the spaces from the hash: ‎38b305a5d21cba8bcb45fa03069ad4b6940097f9
open an elevated command prompt.
netsh http show sslcert > sslcert.txt

look for the entry matching your port. In my case it was this:

    IP:port                      : 0.0.0.0:44303
    Certificate Hash             : f5584bb1e88d4240d962bec7120e5a90302ff3b9
    Application ID               : {214124cd-d05b-4309-9af9-9caa44b2b74a}
    Certificate Store Name       : MY
    Verify Client Certificate Revocation : Enabled
    Verify Revocation Using Cached Client Certificate Only : Disabled
    Usage Check                  : Enabled
    Revocation Freshness Time    : 0
    URL Retrieval Timeout        : 0
    Ctl Identifier               : (null)
    Ctl Store Name               : (null)
    DS Mapper Usage              : Disabled
    Negotiate Client Certificate : Disabled

run:
netsh http delete sslcert ipport=0.0.0.0:44303
netsh http add sslcert ipport=0.0.0.0:44303 appid={214124cd-d05b-4309-9af9-9caa44b2b74a} certhash=38b305a5d21cba8bcb45fa03069ad4b6940097f9

references:
Hanselman's blog

Bootstrap: 404 Not Found on .woff files

When using bootstrap I got the following message in my firefox console:

"NetworkError: 404 Not Found - http://jellebens.azurewebsites.net/fonts/fontawesome-webfont.woff?v=4.0.3"

Add the following lines to your web.config

references:

• http://ideasof.andersaberg.com/idea/23/quick-fix-iis-woff-font-file-404-not-found-in-aspnet-mvc

Windows Identity Framework Signing out

When using claims based security and you implement the sign out functionality do not forget to delete the sessions cookie... otherwise when playing around with the back button you are able to sign in again... this is something you don't want...

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MVC: Intellisense for custom HtmlHelpers or if you want to avoid @using to import namespaces

If you write custom HtmlHelpers its quite tedious to have to add @using your.namespace.to.your.htmlHelpers on top of each page. To be able to use your newly written htmlhelpers

to avoid this just find the web.config in your views folder and locate the following section:
<system.web.webPages.razor>
        <host factoryType="System.Web.Mvc.MvcWebRazorHostFactory, System.Web.Mvc, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" />
        <pages pageBaseType="System.Web.Mvc.WebViewPage">
            <namespaces>
                <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc" />
                <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc.Ajax" />
                <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc.Html" />
                <add namespace="System.Web.Optimization"/>
                <add namespace="System.Web.Routing" />
                <add namespace="SharpSolutions..MvcApplication.Helpers.BootStrap"/>
                <add namespace="SharpSolutions.MvcApplication.Helpers"/>
            </namespaces>
        </pages>
    </system.web.webPages.razor>

and add your custom namespace to it.

After you have done this reload your mvc project (or close Visual Studio and reopen it).

Windows Azure Logging not working Trace.TraceError throws: Not running in a hosted service or the Development Fabric.

I had the following line in my web.config:

<system.diagnostics>
    <trace>
      <listeners>
    <add type="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics.DiagnosticMonitorTraceListener, Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35"
   name="AzureDiagnostics">
     <filter type="" />
    </add>
      </listeners>
    </trace>
  </system.diagnostics>

After removing this: it created WAWSAppLogTable as expected.
More info can be found here: www.windowsazure.com


for local debugging I left the line untouched... I created a new config transformation where I added:

<system.diagnostics>
  <trace>
   <listeners>
    <add name="AzureDiagnostics" xdt:Locator="Match(name)" xdt:Transform="Remove" />
   </listeners>
  </trace>
 </system.diagnostics>

Which is quite logic since Azure websites is not hosted in the AppFabrik

Team Foundation 2012: Run xUnit unit tests

Currently I am using https://tfs.visualstudio.com/ and writing my unit tests with xUnit. To enable this follow the steps outlined on MSDN.


You can find the binaries in the packages folder in your solution directory

Windows 8 RDP with blank password

If you want to enable Remote Desktop with a blank password on window 8, this is the same procedure as enabling rdp on windows 7 instructions can be found here

As a collegue suggested enabling this is a security risk.