Ozzie.eu

After having the setup needed to start developing code, keep track of it’s changes and deploy the resulting application, all resorting to Microsoft Cloud resources, it’s time to start building the proof of concept.
So, open up Web Matrix and from the startup screen choose “New > Template Gallery”:

On the template selection, choose “Personal Site” and give it a name of your liking:

You can create a site on Windows Azure where you’ll later deploy the web site on, if you skip this you can do it later at deploy time:

After the template has completed the installation and configuration steps, you can start by adding it to source control, using the “Use TFS” on the source control section of the ribbon:

Insert your Team Foundation Service URL and press connect. Afterwards choose the project where you’d like to keep version control of you web application:

Check in all the files of the initial version of your site (basically as-is from the template installation):

Afterwards, you might want to check on the TFS Web portal if the changeset has been successfully checked in:

Continue to edit the personal site, following Microsoft’s instructions on how to place your personal data into to web pages. Test it on the local machine, here’s how mine looks like:

If all is well, check in your changes to TFS once again. Next, let’s publish the site onto Windows Azure:

Pick the site you created upon starting, or create one now:

Confirm the publishing operation, if all goes well you’re done:

The site is live on Microsoft’s cloud platform. The URL of my testing site is: http://ozziepersonalsite.azurewebsites.net/
Happy coding!

Microsoft has been very persuasive pushing Windows Azure as a cloud hosting alternative. It’s a broad range of services that one can use to support many kinds of scenarios: web applications, mobile apps, databases, content distribution networks and more.

I will finally get around to test drive Windows Azure for Web application development. I’ll be using the following tools and services from Microsoft:

• Web Matrix 3 (still in beta at the time of this post): a free, lightweight, cloud-connected web development tool.
• Team Foundation Service: Your source code and work items are stored in the cloud. Plan projects, collaborate with your team, and manage your code online from anywhere.
• Windows Azure: Microsoft’s cloud platform.

To use the free TFS service you have to register your Microsoft account here. This free service includes:

• Up to 5 users
• Unlimited number of projects
• Version control (TFVC or Git)
• Work item tracking
• Agile planning tools
• Feedback management
• Build (still in preview)
• Test management (still in preview)

For a free trial of Windows Azure services, you also have to register your Microsoft account here. Your free trial contains:

• virtual machines & cloud services / 750 compute hours per month
• SQL server / 750 hours of web, standard, or enterprise
• web sites / 10 web sites
• mobile services / 10 mobile services
• relational database / 1 SQL database
• SQL reporting / 100 hours per month
• storage / 70 GB with 50,000,000 storage transactions
• backup / 20 GB
• data transfer / unlimited inbound & 25GB outbound
• media services encoding / 50 GB (input & output combined)
• cdn / 20 GB outbound with 500,000 transactions
• cache / 128 MB
• service bus / 1,500 relay hours and 500,000 messages

To download and install Web Matrix you don’t need any extra registration. Be aware that version 3 is the one used here to take advantage of the Azure and TFS integration.

In conclusion, the working setup for the Azure test-drive will be:

• Team Foundation Service for source code version control;
• windows Azure account to deploy applications and services on;
• Downloaded and installed Web Matrix to build a Web application, add it to Source Control and deploy it from there.

On a daily basis, developers use versioning control software like Microsoft's Team Foundation Server. A problem that arises from time to time is a pending checkin from a user that has left the company, or worse yet, a computer that is missing either because it was damaged or taken away.
On TFS, to solve these issues, you can use the TF.EXE command line tool. To use it you should open a command prompt window:

After opening the command prompt, you need to have identified the following information:

• Name of the computer where the workspace used to be hosted;
• Windows username used to logon to Team Foundation Server;
• The TFS Web URL

Graph Databases, published by O’Reilly Media, discusses the problems that are well aligned with graph databases, with examples drawn from practical, real-world use cases. This book also looks at the ecosystem of complementary technologies, highlighting what differentiates graph databases from other database technologies, both relational and NOSQL.
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While searching for documentation about how to install, configure and administer the latest Microsoft Sharepoint released, I found two very relevant documents that combined give a really good work basis for deploying a fresh install of a server farm or maybe just a standalone development server.
First came the Deployment guide for SharePoint 2013 Preview. It’s the preview version but it has useful information on, for example, how to use a network share to install the software prerequisites. It looks a bit like a work in progress documentation, but it has some bits and pieces that are gone from the definitive guide.
Second, came the definitive Deployment guide for SharePoint 2013. It’s an official free eBook to learn how to install and configure SharePoint Server and SharePoint Foundation. It comes in several formats and it’s a downloadable source of the content available at the TechNet Sharepoint Library.
The first guide is really nice if you’re an experienced administrator that comes from the 2010 version, but lacks some specific guidance. The second one is a complete guide and covers the operation and maintenance aspects very well.
Download the Deployment guide for SharePoint 2013 Preview here.
Download the Deployment guide for SharePoint 2013 here.

Advanced Persistent threats are a hot security topic lately. According to Wikipedia, APT usually refers to a group, with both the capability and the intent to persistently and effectively target a specific entity. The term is commonly used to refer to cyber threats, in particular that of Internet-enabled espionage using a variety of intelligence gathering techniques to access sensitive information.
A modern attack performed by APT is the “Pass the Hash”. According to a whitepaper from Microsoft, while performing a PtH attack, an attacker obtains elevated read/write permission to privileged areas of volatile memory and file systems, which are normally only accessible by system-level processes on at least one computer. Second, the attacker attempts to increase access to other computers on the network by:

1. Stealing one or more authentication credentials (user name and password or password hash belonging to other accounts) from the compromised computer.
2. Reusing the stolen credentials to access other computer systems and services.
   This sequence is often repeated multiple times during an actual attack to progressively increase the level of access that an attacker has to an environment.

Returning to the subject of this post, while going through Microsoft’s community information, I gathered quite interesting resources regarding security tools and guidance.
Regarding free assessment tools from Microsoft, as well as protection software, there’s a really nice compilation on the “Irish IT Professional” technet blog. You get to know tools like Microsoft Security Compliance Manager, Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer and Microsoft Security Assessment Tool.
Regarding security tools for footprinting, internal auditing anf guidance, you should check out the Security Tools Community Edition page, on Microsoft’s Technet Wiki.
Finally, you might want to follow the Microsoft Security Blog.
Photo Credit: JustEvents via Compfight cc

While installing a third party software on my laptop running Microsoft Windows 8, the operating system informed me that it required to download and install the .NET Framework 3.5. After my consent, it failed to download the package to install. I thought nothing of it and left the task for later.

However, this began to be a recurring episode. Even the very .NET Framework setup program would fail. While installing Windows Live Essentials (I really love Live Writer), the error happened again:

The error code 0x800F0906 wasn’t something I knew about and the support link is an awful article which suggest an over the top work around.

So I tried some common sense and analogy. If you’re used to administering Windows 2008 Servers you should know that the Microsoft .NET 3.5 Framework is installed from the feature selection on the add/remove role operation for the Application Server. Windows 7 itself has features that are essential for system administration like Telnet, and yet you have to add them manually.

With these aspects in mind I went to the Windows 8 Start screen and typed “Features”. Afterwards I selected “Settings” in the search bar and the desired option appeared, called “Programs and Features”:

From the list, you just choose the .NET Framework 3.5 and choose to download from Windows Update:

Now just wait for the installation to complete:

I was all set to go. You should be too .