Build 2014 - Day 2 (Notes)

Keynote

• 57% of fortune 500 companies are using Azure. More than 300 million active directory users. Over 1 Million SQL Databases.
• Azure powered the NDC Sochi olympics live media streaming
• Support for Puppet and Chef infrastructure configuration tools
• New features on Azure IaaS
  • Create and Manage VM’s from Visual Studio
  • Enable Debugging from VS and attach it to the VM
  • Azure portal now has plugins and agents for Puppet and Chef integrated in the VM Creation wizard
  • Puppet Enterprise Console demo (load a class for microsoft-sysinternals)
  • Speech from CEO of Getty Images. They use puppet and azure heavily.
  • Autocale feature is now available
• New features on Azure Paas
  • Web
    • Azure websites will now support “Java”
    • Azure websites “Staging” feature
    • Traffic Manager support. Intelligent customer routing. It will work with websties as well virtual machines.
    • New options on the VS ASP.net web project creation screen to create websites directly from there
    • Sync CSS changes from IE DOM Explorer to Visual Studio CSS file. This works in Chrome and IE
    • Sync the editing of HTML tag values with HTML files in Visual Studio. (LIVE !!!!)
    • JsHint integrated for VS JavaScript debugging
    • WebJobs can be simple console applications which can listen to events fro Queue and Blob updates
    • Free SSL certificates for Websites
    • CDN generally available now
  • Mobile
    • Mobile services now support Active Directory
    • New VS Project Template for creating Mobile Service
    • Support for Local and Remote debugging for Mobile Services
    • New Mobile Services .Net API’s which can be used in all apps.
    • Demo of win 8 app with portable library + sharepoint document upload + xamarian to port the app to iOS
    • Demo of “DocuSign” app on iPhone. Built using ,Net and SQL Server.
    • “Offline Data Sync” features for Mobile Services
    • Azure AD Premium offerings
    • Kindle support for Notification Hub
  • Data
    • SQL Azure Database now supports 500 GB + 99.95% SLA
    • Self Service restore feature ( for emergenices like DELETE from tablename ) is now builtin
    • Active geo replication feature. Primary and Secondary region data replication.
    • Updates to HDInsight. Supports Hadoop 2.2
    • YARN support
• Programming Languages & Tools
  • .NET compiler platform (“Roslyn”)
    • It is Open Sourced now. http://roslyn.codeplex.com/
    • Demo of adding a new language feature
    • New .Net Foundation launched. (www.dotnetfoundation.org)
• The New Azure Management Portal (https://portal.azure.com )
• Reimagined modern design with live breadcrumbs to navigate easily
• Extensible design
• Integrated TFS Work Items, Check-in views, Code views, Application Insights.
• Integrated Code Editor for complete DevOps lifecycle
• Resource Groups (group of resources which are running an application)
• New Azure Powershell cmdlets to publish resource templates
• Export the entire script of the resource group in a ,json file. Similar to infrastructure scripts
• Azure Resource Manager preview available
• Visual Studio Online GA
• Screenshots:
  
  
  
  

• Part 2 of Keynote
  • Key developer concerns/questions
    • Support Existing Investments
      • Classic Desktop apps. Demo of WPF connected Office 365 Calendar API’s
      • Demo of old VB6 apps transformed to a Web App using WebMap
    • Mobile and Cloud First
      • Demo of geofencing component for foursquare
      • Demo of Heapsylon Sensoria capturning the foot sensor data and showing live feed on a windows phone
      • Launch of new “App Studio” to generate Windows 8 apps from Websites.
      • New Offline support using the HTML5 Index DB to cache the browsed data

Building services for Connected Devices

• Key Aspects
  • End to end asynchronous data flow
  • Direct HTTP based connectivity and inbound messaging
  • Queue drien message processing
• General Purpose IoT Architecture
  • Device
  • Protocol Gateway (Ingest)
  • Messaging and Eventing
    • Embedded Devices + Mobile Devices
    • Message Processing
    • Bulk Storage & Latent Analytics
    • More Stuff
• Sample fast food outlet application
  • Updates published to central server every minute (~5Kb XML files)
• Solution –> Azure web role as ingest and Message Queue + Azure workerrole
• Ingest and Protocol Management
  • Device almost always has to initiate connections
    • Firewalls, NATs, dynamic IP, general network weirdness
  • Socket Management, Hold Sockets open, keep alives – latency on push notifications
  • Protocol – HTTP, AMWP, MQTT, TCP, custom (bluetooth etc)
  • Direct connectivity vs concentrator/local gateway
    • Smart Grid / Power meters
  • Message response
• VS Code demo
  • ServicePointManager configurations for improving latency and concurrent connections with Storage
    • UseNagleAlgorithm
    • DefaultConnectionLimit
    • Expect100Continue
  • Queue “CreateIfNotExistsAsync” method should only be called once. Use factory method which initializes this
  • Unbound concurrency can bring down the system. E.g. Task.Run in a for loop
  • Use a Task.WaitAll outside the for loop. Inside the for loop just add Tasks to a task list.
  • In memory queue –> .GetConsumingEnumerable() API is a friend
  • Managing configuration settings between Worker Role and Web Role can cause issues. Instead of using app.config and web.config use the Role configuration to store the settings.

High-performance web platform

• The Physics of FAST (Physical factors in performance )
  • Network Utilization and Limits  (bandwidth in mbps)
    • 2G  (0.1)
    • 3G  (1.8)
    • 4G HSPA+ (3.4)
    • WiFi (6.1)
    • 4G LTE  (7.5)
  • We can increase the bandwidth but latency might still be the issue (clap and response clap demo)
  • Speed and Responsiveness
    • CPU Utilization  / Elapsed Page Load
    • Real and Perceived performance
  • Memory Utilization
    • important when targeting low-cost devices with your sites and apps
  • Power Consumption
    • Let it rest !
    • CPU Utilization, GPU Utilization and VSync
    • Thermo mitigation (won’t charge since the device is too hot)
    • 5 Watt for Phone devices
  • Targets Devices Matter
    • Priortize those
• Web Runtime Architecture
  • Networking cache
  • Parsers
    • creates internal data structures
  • DOM Tree (DOM API, JavaScript, CSS Cascade)
    • JS is sent to a sandbox
  • Formatting
  • Layout
  • Display Tree
  • Painting
    • DirectX services
  • Compositing
    • Handing over to GPU
  • Input / Hit Testing / DMANIP
• Event Tracing for Windows (ETW)
• Measuring Performance
  • F12 Developer Tools (UI Responsiveness uses the ETW events)
  • Windows Performance Toolkit
• Performance in the Real World
  • Network Optimization
    • Navigation Timing (F12 Console –> window.performance.timing)
    • Average Payload
      • 93 resources, 16 hosts
      • 6 requests per host
      • 1.7 MB total size, 46% cacheable (on Mobiles)
      • Majority of the size is around “Images”
    • How to optimize Images
      • Right-size your images
      • Reduce # of downloads (use sprites and minified images)
      • Use a CDN
  • Speed and Responsiveness
    • Defer Script execution (scripts in bottom)
    • Reduce # of Frameworks (single frameworks or libraries)
    • Coaleasce style and layout changes
      • jittering of a control as we scroll
      • instead of updating the screen on every mouse event
      • just use css to paint it after the event is done
    • Use CSS Animation
  • Memory
    • Download size vs Memory Size
      • 557KB image –--->  Memory = width * height * 4
      • Process
        • Download Image
        • Decode
        • GPU Copy  (here the CPU and CPU is not doing anything)
        • GPU render 
      • Image Formats Matter (for both memory and CPU utilization)
        • JPEG is encoded to YCbCr and then decoded by CPU to JPEG for rendering (IE10)
        • GPU’s can render YCbCr so decoding is not needed for JPEG. (IE11 uses GPU for image rendering)
        • Use JPEG when possible instead of PNG (as they are much faster)

Building Services for Mobile Apps using ASP.net Web API 2.1

• Mysteries of building backend services for mobile apps
  • SOAP ? REST ? ODATA ?
  • which framework ?
  • hosting?
  • security ?
  • consuming ?
  • offline ? notifications ? etc..
• SOAP is not mobile friendly (If you need SOAP then use WCF)
• HTTP and mobile – made for each other
  • Ubiquitous
  • Interoperable
  • Scalable
  • Flexible
  • Mature
  • Simple
• Many faces of HTTP frameworks in .NET
  • WCF Web HTTP (underlying it sends XML so its kind off SOAP)
  • WCF Data Services
  • ASP.net MVC
  • ASP.net Web API
    • A framework for creating HTTP services that can reach a broad range of clients
• Why ASP.net Web API
  • First class modern HTTP programming model
  • Easily map resources to URI’s and implement the uniform interface of HTTP
  • Rich support for formats and HTTP content negotiation
  • Request validation
  • Enable hypermedia with link generation
  • Separate out cross cutting concerns
    • authorization
    • caching
    • message header
  • Help page generation
  • Flexible hosting
    • can be hosted outside IIS within an EXE
  • Light-weight, testable, scales
  • 2.0 features
    • OWIN Integration
    • Request batching
  • 2.1 Features
    • Global error handler
    • attribute routing improvements
    • BSON formatter
    • Portable query building and parsing
• Samples and Docs http://www.asp.net/web-api
• Code at http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com
• REST and OData
  • REST is an Architectural style for distributed sytems
    • Defined by set of constraints (client-server, stateless, cacheable, layered, uniform interface)
    • Induces properties: performance, scalability, evolvability, reliability, transparency
    • Do a the Web does
  • OData
    • Is a protocol for interacting with REST-based data services
    • Solves common issues (querying, paging etc)
• Web API 2.2 #NEW# features
  • Model aliasing
  • functions
  • enums
  • model query annotations
  • $format
  • Etags
  • Singletons
  • containment
  • See details on http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webde/
• Build client logic as “Portable Libraries” (share code between Desktop, Phone and Windows)
• Security for Web API’s
  • User Authorization filters (ex [Authorize])
  • Implement your authorization logic
    • derive from authorizationfilterattribute or implement IAuthorizationFilter
• Make Web API’s secure with OAuth 2.0
  • Authorize requests using OAuth 2.0 Bearer tokens
• Get tokens from a trusted authz server
  • Host your own
    • MS OWIN for simple server implementation
    • Use thinktecture full server implementation
  • Use Existing one
    • Azure active directory
    • ADFS on windows server 2012
    • Azure mobile services

Windows App Studio (Beta)

• Now available at http://appstudio.windows.com

Cross Domain AJAX Calls and SharePoint Apps on Office 365

To give a bit of background, I have been exploring architectures and various components needed to create a multi-tenant SharePoint App. So far I have settled on using SharePoint only, as a frontend layer and using external services to drive the entire backend, including storage.
Given this high level design the first interesting item that I came across was while posting data to the backend Service from a SharePoint Hosted App. The classic client side Cross-domain security issue. Here are some of the solutions out there for this issue:

• Using the JSONP hack
  • Due to its nature, this only works for ‘GET’ requests and I wanted to do a ‘POST.
• Using the default SharePoint 2013 Web Proxy
  • I was able to make the ‘GET’ requests work with this approach but not the ‘POST’ requests.
• Creating a Custom Proxy
  • Worked but involved quite a few hoops and a remote web page, which I did not want to create.
• Enabling Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) in WCF Services
  • Worked perfectly !!!

For simple requests we can enable CORS by setting some response headers like Access-Control-Allow-Origin, Access-Control-Allow-Methods and Access-Control-Allow-Headers with the value ‘*’. 
But all requests from Office 365 contain special headers and hence they are ‘Preflighted’, which means they would first send an http request with “OPTIONS” method to check the domain and then send the actual request. (More details on Preflighted requests here) For Preflighted requests we need to write some extra code along with adding the response headers. Here is a good article with sample code that explains this and below is the snap shot of the code:



And here is the snap shot of the sample app working on Office 365:


Additional Resources on CORS and Multitenant Applications with Azure:

• Enabling CORS
• Developing Multi-tenant Applications for the Cloud, 3rd Edition
• Designing Multitenant Applications on Windows Azure
• Building Big: Lessons learned from Windows Azure customers - Part I

Diving & Exploration

I was busy with PDC so this post is coming a bit late. Here are some of the gems that I had explored lastly:

• Developing SharePoint Applications : A series of articles from the patterns and practices developer center on building Collaborative Applications using SharePoint. One of my college Todd Baginski has also contributed to these articles
• SharePoint 2010 Sandbox Solutions : Yet again excellent article series from Sahil Malik explaining all the details that you would possibly need to develop Sandbox Solutions in SharePoint 2010.
• ASP.net Performance and Microsoft AJAX CDN.
• ASP.net 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 Web Development Beta 2 Overview:  Whitepaper explaining the new changes coming in ASP.net in .Net framework 4.0.
• What’s new in WCF 4.0 : 3 Part series explaining some of the new features of WCF 4.0.
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Course: Yet another **FREE** training course form channel9 with lots of videos and hands-on-lab.

Diving & Exploration

Gems which I found last month :

General:

• 24 JavaScript Best Practices for Beginners
  
• 40+ Essential Front End Web Developer Cheat Sheets
  
• How to make IE 8 open new tabs faster
  
• Content Based Routing With WCF
  
• Three Dimensions of a Software Programmer: How to get things done

Security :

• The Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL): Process Guidance
  
• Microsoft Code Analysis Tool .NET (CAT.NET) v1 CTP - 32 bit
  
• Identity Developer Training Kit (May 2009)
  
• Top Ten Web Hacking Techniques (2008)

Webcasts on Oslo, WCF, WF (.net 4.0) & Dublin

Just found these 2 webcasts by Alan Smith reviewing some of the recent bits provided from PDC 08 :

• Oslo Technologies
  -Repository Database
  -“M” Modelling Language
  -“Quadrant” modelling tool
• .net 4.0
  -Sequence Designer
  -Flowchart Designer
  -Declarative Services
• Dublin
  -Process Server Management Console
  Oslo - PDC-08 CSD Bits Review
  Oslo - Data Modelling in "M"

Enjoy Learning !!!