Sitecore Gives Marketers and Developers Advanced Tools to Target Campaigns and Segment Audiences Across Digital and Mobile Channels

Sitecore, a leading web content management and customer experience management software company, today announced availability of a new version of its Content Management System software (CMS).

Sitecore CMS 6.6 offers enhanced mobile support to build engaging mobile web interactions and applications, advanced targeting and segmentation of customers, and a premier development environment with native Model View Controller (MVC) support. These new features provide greater flexibility to quickly create personalised customer experiences.

“The latest version of our software provides the tools that developers and marketers require to consistently and continuously engage with customers through any interaction channel,” said Darren Guarnaccia, senior vice president, product marketing, Sitecore. “We have enabled our developer community to work with the latest development technologies while offering marketers enhanced ways to use customer behavior data to better segment and target marketing campaigns. The result for businesses is a consistent, engaging customer experience that helps create customers for life.”

Catering to the Small Screen Businesses need a way to understand how website and marketing campaign content and offers will appear on the multitude of devices in use including iPhone, Android and Windows smartphones. Sitecore’s device simulator shows marketers how content will appear on mobile devices and in different browsers. It provides an accurate view, via screenshots, on how the website will display using the browsers and devices selected.

In addition, Sitecore mobile software developer’s kit (SDK) facilitates the development of native mobile applications and supports Apple’s iOS platform. The embedded browser allows marketers to leverage their Sitecore powered content, while tapping the powerful user experience of native mobile applications.

Premier Development Approach Sitecore now offers native support for ASP.NET MVC to complement its existing support for web forms based architectures. By natively supporting both in its platform and allowing use interchangeably, customers have the flexibility to use the right approach for any task while achieving all the modern development benefits of using MVC design patterns.

ASP.NET MVC includes many features that enable fast development for creating sophisticated applications that use the latest web standards and Sitecore customers can start to incorporate these new capabilities without extensive site redevelopment or migration.

Advanced Targeting for Multichannel Campaigns Marketers are often challenged with targeting campaigns to segments of their audience for better engagement. With CMS 6.6 marketers can create a list of visitors that match certain criteria by defining one or more conditions to define a segment. Segments allow for dynamic evaluation rather than having a static list of visitors, and can be built from both demographic and behavioral data. Segments can also be built from both demographic information as well as behavioral data. Marketers do not need to be CRM experts to target campaigns to specific audiences and segments can be built on any of the web, email or CRM details that have taken place.

Source: cfoworld

Microsoft Release New REST API Framework as Part of .NET 4.5

As part of the recent Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 launch, Microsoft formally unveiled its new web services framework called the ASP.NET Web API. Included as part of the ASP.NET MVC 4 offering, the open-source ASP.NET Web API is designed to simplify the development and consumption of RESTful services.

In a post called “Where does ASP.NET Web API Fit?”, Rick Strahl of West Wind Technologies explains the purpose and benefits of the ASP.NET Web API.

ASP.NET Web API differentiates itself from the previous Microsoft in-box HTTP service solutions in that it was built from the ground up around the HTTP protocol and its messaging semantics. Unlike WCF REST or ASP.NET AJAX with ASMX, it’s a brand new platform rather than bolted on technology that is supposed to work in the context of an existing framework. The strength of the new ASP.NET Web API is that it combines the best features of the platforms that came before it, to provide a comprehensive and very usable HTTP platform. Because it's based on ASP.NET and borrows a lot of concepts from ASP.NET MVC, Web API should be immediately familiar and comfortable to most ASP.NET developers.

Strahl points out the core capabilities that make the ASP.NET Web API a natural fit for both existing users of the the ASP.NET MVC framework, and developers who need to build HTTP endpoints.

Strong Support for URL Routing to produce clean URLs using familiar MVC style routing semantics
Content Negotiation based on Accept headers for request and response serialization
Support for a host of supported output formats including JSON, XML, ATOM
Strong default support for REST semantics but they are optional
Easily extensible Formatter support to add new input/output types
Deep support for more advanced HTTP features via HttpResponseMessage and HttpRequestMessage
classes and strongly typed Enums to describe many HTTP operations
Convention based design that drives you into doing the right thing for HTTP Services
Very extensible, based on MVC like extensibility model of Formatters and Filters
Self-hostable in non-Web applications
Testable using testing concepts similar to MVC
Microsoft already has an existing a web services framework called Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) which lets developers build contract-first services that leverage transport protocols such as TCP, HTTP and MSMQ. Originally built for SOAP-based services that want WS-* capabilities, WCF eventually added a handful of REST-friendly capabilities. While the ASP.NET Web APIs were initially aligned to the WCF framework, they were eventually shuffled over to the ASP.NET team as described in a Code Project article by Web developer Ido Flatow.

As time passed, the WCF Web APIs had a lot of trouble adapting WCF to the “native” HTTP world. As WCF was primarily designed for SOAP-based XML messages, and the “open-heart” surgery that was required to make the Web API work as part of WCF was a bit too much (or so I understand from people who were involved in creating the Web APIs). On the other hand, the ASP.NET MVC infrastructure with its elegant handling of HTTP requests and responses, and its support of easy-to-create controllers seemed like the proper way to go for creating this new type of services.

WCF remains alive and well in the latest .NET 4.5 release and Flatow identifies some of the decision criteria for choosing between WCF and the ASP.NET Web API.

If your intention is to create services that support special scenarios – one way messaging, message queues, duplex communication etc, then you’re better of picking WCF
If you want to create services that can use fast transport channels when available, such as TCP, Named Pipes, or maybe even UDP (in WCF 4.5), and you also want to support HTTP when all other transports are unavailable, then you’re better off with WCF and using both SOAP-based bindings and the WebHttp binding.
If you want to create resource-oriented services over HTTP that can use the full features of HTTP – define cache control for browsers, versioning and concurrency using ETags, pass various content types such as images, documents, HTML pages etc., use URI templates to include Task URIs in your responses, then the new Web APIs are the best choice for you.
If you want to create a multi-target service that can be used as both resource-oriented service over HTTP and as RPC-style SOAP service over TCP – talk to me first, so I’ll give you some pointers.
The ASP.NET Web API is included in Visual Studio 2012 and is also available as a download for Visual Studio 2010 users. Developers looking to get started with the framework will find many example projects available on the team’s Codeplex site.

Telerik Sitefinity 5.1 Adds Native Support for ASP.NET MVC

New Release Offers Enhanced Tools for Developer Productivity, Plus Radically Redesigned Email Campaign Management for Marketers.

Telerik, an end-to-end provider of software application, lifecycle and content management solutions, today announced several key enhancements to its award-winning ASP.NET Content Management System (CMS), Sitefinity. These include full ASP.NET MVC and Razor support, as well as a redesigned email campaign management tool, continuing Telerik’s commitment to deliver the most advanced Web content management platform to developers, marketing end-users and IT managers, while maintaining an extreme focus on usability and productivity.

Native Support for ASP.NET MVC
In order to accommodate evolving trends in web development, the Sitefinity 5.1 release adds native support for the ASP.NET MVC web application framework, together with its Razor rendering engine. This framework mandates the separation of the three building blocks of an application – presentation (View), logic (Controller) and data (Model) – ensuring clean separation of concerns between application layers, making it easier for developers to organize and manage their apps.

ASP.NET MVC enables developers to completely control the markup of web pages, as the abstractions provided by the Control class are gone. With the explosion in popularity of JavaScript, client-side frameworks and AJAX, this developer control is increasingly critical.

With this release, Sitefinity also becomes the first CMS to let developers switch freely between Web Forms and MVC. Each Sitefinity page and template has 3 modes: Web Forms, MVC and hybrid mode - where MVC controllers and Web Forms controls can exist on the same page. These techniques can be mixed-and-matched within a single Sitefinity project, enabling existing projects to be gradually transitioned to MVC if desired.

Enhanced Tools to Increase Developer Productivity
The Sitefinity 5.1 release includes enhancements to Sitefinity Thunder, its Visual Studio plug-in that increases developer productivity. Using Sitefinity Thunder, developers can now work directly with their Sitefinity website through Visual Studio, enabling them to stay in the tool where they work, and centrally manage connections to all of their projects in one place.

With Sitefinity 5.1, developers can directly access and modify their website’s widget templates and, because these templates contain full IntelliSense-support, developers can spend more time coding and less time reading documentation. Furthermore, developers can fast-track their Sitefinity development by utilizing templates for widgets, widget designers, field controls, layouts and themes. This simplifies the process for developers to create a suite of Sitefinity extensions and then re-use these extensions in multiple projects.

Redesigned Email Campaign Management
The 5.1 release also adds a radically redesigned email Campaign Management Tool to help businesses meet their marketing objectives. The email tool enables marketers to effortlessly launch new email campaigns, then track the effectiveness of the campaign through detailed analytics. Each message can be personalized and then refined through sophisticated A/B testing. Furthermore, because these features are fully integrated into Sitefinity, companies can create effective email marketing that blends seamlessly with their other online marketing efforts.

Telerik Adds Tablet Support to Kendo UI HTML5, JavaScript Tool

Telerik announced that its Kendo UI framework for building HTML5 and JavaScript mobile apps and sites now supports both tablet app development and server-side ASP.NET MVC development.

Telerik, a maker of application development software, has announced a major update of its Kendo UI, a unified framework for building HTML5 and JavaScript mobile apps and sites.

This release includes a set of controls and widgets for creating rich iPad user interfaces, as well as the first in a series of server-side wrappers to enable developers to incorporate and configure Kendo UI via familiar server-side programming.

On July 11, Telerik announced Kendo UI Complete, a collection of Web, DataViz and management tools for professional software developers.

In an attempt to avoid fragmentation, more developers are focusing on Web standards such as HTML5 and JavaScript to build software that can run anywhere and reach the largest possible audience. Kendo UI’s unified framework incorporates adaptive rendering capabilities and leverages the latest in CSS3, HTML5 and JavaScript Web standards to automatically adapt a mobile app’s native look-and-feel on any smartphone and tablet device, while delivering broad support for all major browsers.

“With this release, Kendo UI moves beyond mobile phones to help developers create experiences with HTML5 that look native on the iPad and other tablets,” Todd Anglin, vice president of HTML5 Web and Mobile Tools at Telerik, said in a statement. “In addition, we’ve added important updates across the Kendo UI framework, including the first in a series of server-side wrappers that further equip developers to quickly and cost effectively create advanced apps and mobile sites with HTML5 and JavaScript.”

According to IDC, more than 107 million tablets will ship this year, with nearly two-thirds of those expected to be iPads. By adding iPad-specific widgets to Kendo UI Mobile, the company provides developers with a streamlined way to build native-like apps leveraging HTML5 for the market’s No. 1 tablet.

HTML5 is quickly becoming the dominant cross-platform runtime, with ABI Research forecasting the installed base for mobile devices with HTML5 to grow from approximately 500 million in 2011, to more than 2.1 billion in 2016. Gartner further forecasts that worldwide tablet sales will grow by 98 percent in 2012 to 119 million units.

Kendo UI Mobile already helps developers build HTML5 or JavaScript apps that automatically transform to the native look-and-feel of iOS, Android and BlackBerry. With this update, developers can use Kendo Mobile UI’s adaptive rendering to target multiple phone and tablet platforms with a single UI code base, thus eliminating the traditional challenges that developers face of manually researching and then combining all the plug-ins and frameworks and libraries needed to build mobile apps.

This new release also adds server-side helpers for ASP.NET MVC, enabling developers to incorporate and configure Kendo UI via familiar server-side programming, while still producing apps that benefit from the client-side power of Kendo UI and HTML5. While Kendo UI works with any server-side technology, some developers are less comfortable in JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), but feel very capable when working inside a server-side language. These wrappers ensure that developers who prefer to build apps from their own server-side language can do so quickly.

Moreover, developers using the new ASP.NET MVC wrappers can take full advantage of server-side framework features and coding conveniences, while targeting both desktop and mobile devices using the cross-platform power of modern HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. Kendo UI Complete for ASP.NET MVC is the first of what the company plans to be a collection of server-side helpers for different platforms, including Java and PHP, all designed to maximize developer productivity with HTML5.

In addition to the new iPad widgets and server wrappers, there are updates across the entire Kendo UI framework, including new and improved widgets and charts in Kendo UI Web and DataViz, enabling the presentation of rich, touch-aware visual information on any browser and any device.

There are new Popover and Split View controls, as well as Action Sheet and Modal View widgets for Kendo UI Mobile. Telerik added new Donut (or torus) and Bubble chart types, as well as date axis support and additional arrow types for the Radial Gauge in Kendo UI DataViz. And the company added a combined DateTimePicker widget, column reordering and resizing on the Grid, and support for hierarchical and relational data in the DataSource for Kendo UI Web.

Will Microsoft dive into Open Source Ecosystem?

Microsoft has come a long way in its acceptance of open source. And its motto doesn’t seem to be (this time) to embrace and extinguish.

The Microsoft watching will go on. A few illustrious members of the worldwide Microsoft community to share their insights via guest posts on a variety of topics — from Windows Phone, to Hyper-V. Today’s entry is all about Microsoft and open source and is authored by Richard Turner.

Microsoft is increasingly warming to open source. Not only is the company increasingly publishing open-source projects of its own, it’s also developing major parts of its web/cloud infrastructure in the open and is also supporting a variety of external open-source projects. This is great news, but it’s taken a long time and a considerable amount of hard work and damage-repair to make it happen.

Microsoft’s stance on open source began to thaw during the 2000’s as the company grew-up and learned more about open source and how it can significantly benefit all of us.

It would be constructive to share examples that illustrate that Microsoft (and its ecosystem) are serious about mending fences, supporting external open-source projects and opening up development teams and projects.

Here’s the top 10 list:
1. Encouraging the Open Source Ecosystem
The Windows and .NET development community is exploding with home-grown .NET open-source projects and initiatives. Everything from IoC/DI containers such as Ninject, AutoFac, Castle Windsor and StructureMap to testing tools like nUnit. From NOSQL document stores like (the utterly awesome) RavenDB to powerful Content Management Systems (CMS) like Orchard and Umbraco. And let’s not forget IronPython, IronRuby and F# that Microsoft nurtured before transitioning to community ownership in 2010.

These are just a tiny subset of the amazing range of open-source projects built specifically for (or supporting) the .NET/Windows platform.

2. Wheel-Reinventing Reduced
One of the biggest criticisms many have had of Microsoft is its insistence in building its own version of technologies that already exist in the open-source world.

It came as a pleasant surprise, therefore, when Microsoft shipped ASP.NET MVC 3.0 with jQuery and Modernizr included. This was a big step forward (and was the result of a HUGE amount of effort internally) and marked one of the first times Microsoft shipped a major product containing open-source code. In ASP.NET 4.0, Microsoft is continuing the adoption of open-source projects by including jQuery Mobile & JSON.NET.

3. Facilitating With NuGet Package Manager
Almost every active open-source development ecosystem has seen huge growth in the number of open-source utility libraries made available by “package managers” such as Ruby’s Gems, node’s npm, etc. These package managers allow developers to simply type, for example, “npm install express” and the express library will be downloaded and installed into the user’s current project/system.

A package management tool was missing from the Windows/.NET developer’s toolbox until a skunk-works team at Microsoft created NuGet – a package manager for .NET developers. NuGet and its accompanying site, gallery and package feed were adopted by the Outercurve Foundation in October 2010 and is now maintained by the NuGet team and the community. The NuGet gallery currently contains almost 6000 packages including jQuery, Modernizr, JSON.NET, ELMAH, log4net, Ninject, and the vast majority of the libraries most useful to .NET developers.

While many other open-source communities would scoff at “only 6000” packages being available, it’s important to note that the project count is increasing rapidly and that the proportion of really useful packages to frivolous and/or repetitive packages is very small. Let’s hope it stays this way!

4. Making Windows a great platform for open-source
Many of the hottest open-source projects available today were originally built on Linux-based platforms and, as such, are welded to UNIX-style IO, file storage, process management and thread scheduling mechanisms. In order to run on Windows, such projects typically run under CygWin – a POSIX emulation infrastructure that allows most POSIX apps to run unchanged on Windows. While this is a pragmatic approach for non-performance-sensitive code, Cygwin often introduces a significant performance hit in high performance code.

This was the situation facing node – the blossoming asynchronous JavaScript engine – to run on Windows, it had to be run under CygWin, which impacted performance significantly. To solve this problem, Microsoft and Joyent (node’s primary sponsor & employer of Ryan Dahl - node’s creator) agreed to work together to make node run natively on Windows. The work to port node to Windows spawned LibUV – a library that provides a platform-abstraction layer allowing node (and any other open-source project) take full advantage of both *N*X and Windows’ async IO (and other platform dependent differences) with little effort.

In November 2011, Microsoft announced the first stable builds of node, using the new LibUV library, running natively on Windows. Simultaneously, Microsoft built IISNode allowing node to be hosted within IIS (Microsoft’s web server). The code for IISNode is hosted on GitHub and is free and open for all to see and/or modify should you wish to do so. And that’s not the end of the story: LibUV has turned out to be so useful that other open-source projects are now employing it to port their code to run natively on Windows.

5. Forking and Maintaining Ports
In a sign of increasing maturity in how it works with open-source communities, Microsoft has now begun (appropriately) forking and maintaining open-source projects: In November 2011, Antirez announced that Microsoft had provided patches to port Redis to run natively on Windows, using LibUV. While Antirez decided NOT to accept Microsoft’s patches into the Redis core (yet, for reasons he articulated in the post linked to above), he encouraged Microsoft to create their own Windows fork of Redis. Microsoft worked with others in the community to create a Windows fork of Redis which became the first project officially published by the newly formed Microsoft Open Technologies Inc. subsidiary formed in 2012 and is run by Jean Paoli.

6. Supporting Apache, PHP and Ruby on Windows
In 2008, Microsoft began helping upgrade Apache and PHP significantly update their projects in order to support the newer and far more effective Visual C++ 2008 VC9 compiler. This work resulted in native builds of both the Apache web server and the PHP engine which consumed less RAM and performed much better than before.

In 2008, alongside the new and improved PHP, Microsoft also released support for FastCGI within IIS. This enabes IIS to reliably host non-threadsafe code such as PHP and Ruby, alongside .NET code and native IIS handlers and modules within the same website if required. This means that IIS can now safely and reliably host PHP-based websites and services including Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.

7. Supporting open-source platforms in Azure
At Mix09, Microsoft announced official support for PHP, Java and Ruby on Windows Azure.

Since Windows Azure Web Role instances are essentially Windows Server VM’s, this should come as no surprise since Microsoft had already released FastCGI support for IIS.

What this announcement introduced, however, was the fact that not only was Microsoft supporting PHP, Ruby and Java on Azure, but that they were also in the process of providing comprehensive API’s for each environment, allowing developers to access all of Azure’s service control & configuration capabilities, table, blob and queue storage, message-bus infrastructure, etc. from their preferred language/platform.
Then, in December 2011, after the work to port node to Windows was completed, Microsoft announced that node is now fully supported in the Windows Azure cloud platform, along with a node Azure SDK providing programmatic access to the Azure environment and storage and message-bus infrastructure.

8. Backing Hadoop
In late 2011, Microsoft and HortonWorks announced they were teaming-up to port Hadoop to Windows. This is a big deal; not only did Microsoft decide to plow effort and resources into porting Hadoop to Windows, they decided to abandon their own home-grown big-data solution in the process. Microsoft’s adoption of Hadoop can only result in good things – particularly to end-users who will be able to analyze colossal datasets using familiar tools such as Excel and PowerView.

9. Becoming A Top-20 Contributor To The Linux Kernel
In 2011, Microsoft became one of the top 20 contributors to the Linux kernel … the same Linux that CEO Steve Ballmer described as a “cancer” just over 10 years previously. My, how times change!

Microsoft’s contributions largely center around drivers they submitted to enable Linux to be hosted within Hyper-V – Microsoft’s OS virtualization technology. The drivers Microsoft submitted to the Linux kernel project provide a significant performance boost to Linux VMs’ storage, networking and video-subsystems.

10. Open Sourcing ASP.NET MVC4.0, WebAPI and Razor View Engine
Perhaps the biggest news related to Microsoft and open source came when Microsoft announced that:

ASP.NET 4.0 MVC, Web API and Razor View Engine would be made open-source
The ASP.NET team will consider accepting changes to ASP.NET submitted by the community
The ASP.NET team would continue development of ASP.NET “in the open”, submitting all future code changes into a public-facing GIT repository hosted by the Outercurve Foundation’s CodePlex site.
It clear that Microsoft has finally turned a corner and is now increasingly following a path towards greater acceptance and support for open-source. This is a GIGANTIC step forward.

Microsoft is leading by example and sending a strong message to their legions of developers that open-source need be feared no longer and that publishing open-source code benefits everyone. Hopefully, this will result in a gradual, but eventually sizable increase in the volume of high-quality, reusable code being made available as open-source for us all to enjoy, learn from, help improve and adopt.

Now, the time is Come. Welcome to the open-source world, Microsoft. Please Hop-On.

Syncfusion Releases Essential Studio 2012 Volume 2 with Project Wizard for ASP.NET MVC

Syncfusion, Inc., a leading provider of components for Windows development, announced today the release of Essential Studio 2012 Volume 2, which includes many new ASP.NET MVC features for both the mobile and desktop platforms. This announcement comes on the heels of the successful launch of its Metro Studio 1™—a suite of more than 600 vector-based Metro icons that are free to use and easy to customize.

The new Syncfusion Project Wizard for ASP.NET MVC saves developers time by enabling them to create starter projects that have all Syncfusion library references automatically added into the project files. With this wizard, developers can create a Syncfusion project from scratch or convert an existing ASP.NET MVC project into a Syncfusion project.

In addition to the project wizard, this release also includes:
1. PivotGrid control for Windows Forms—offers high performance and great features
2. Custom XlsIO pivot engine—for the run-time manipulation of pivot tables
3. Support for Quartet FS' ActivePivot engine

“Quartet FS’ ActivePivot engine is widely used for in-memory analytics. Our support comes in response to requests from our business intelligence studio customers. Now, developers can build awesome information portals that take advantage of the data analytics offered by the ActivePivot platform,” said Director of Business Development, Marissa Keller Outten.

Web Frameworks, MVC, and ASP.NET

After nearly a year as a community tech preview, Microsoft has released the first true beta of the ASP.NET MVC framework. ASP.NET MVC is a radical departure from the WebForms technology has promoted in the past, and in the opinion of many, a return to mainstream web programming. The MVC pattern provides the cornerstone for web frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and Java's Spring Framework.

MVC web frameworks should not be confused with their namesake, the Model-View-Controller pattern first proposed by Trygve Reenskaug. Under Reenskaug's pattern, the view and controller were tightly bound to one another with a one-to-one mapping between each view and controller. With a MVC web framework, the view and controller are loosely coupled and it is not unheard of for multiple views to be tied to a single controller.

Regardless of which definition of MVC you prefer, the model remains an independent representation of data that has no knowledge of what is using it. This is in contrast to WebForms, where it is common for data to be stored in the UI elements themselves in the form of viewstate. Read More...

Run ASP.NET MVC on Windows Azure

If you’ve purposefully been ignoring the announcements out of PDC, I don’t blame you one bit. Everybody knew it would be the unveiling of Microsoft’s “cloud computing” initiative, and just about the only thing we didn’t know was the official name of it: Windows Azure. And of course I pronounce it wrong every time (I say “ah-jour”, as in “soup-de-jour”). It’s hard to call it “initiative” when they’re the 3rd one to bring a product to the table. ;)

One thing I was looking forward to was hearing about the ASP.NET MVC story on Azure. So color me surprised when I found out there wasn’t one. Since ASP.NET MVC is bin-deployable it shouldn’t be impossible, and doing some quick searches didn’t retrieve any results showing anybody else having tried this. Of course later I discovered that Phil and Eilon had whipped up a sample app that ran ASP.NET MVC on Azure, but was pleased to find out that the downloadable sample app didn’t work. In fact, it seemed to just be MVC stuff slapped into a WebRole project. (I’m guessing something got “lost in translation” since it wasn’t Phil or Eilon that posted the code.)

Anyway, here’s how you can get ASP.NET MVC up and running on Azure. I’ve created a Visual Studio template for this to make it easy to set up - download it here. To avoid distributing code that isn’t my own (i.e. Windows Azure SDK Samples) there are a few steps you’ll have to take. I’m presuming that you’ve already installed the Windows Azure SDK and the Azure Visual Studio tools.

One thing that running a web application “in the cloud” means is that you can instantly scale higher by adding more “instances”. This means the leaky-as-a-sieve abstraction of “session state” isn’t immediately available (finally!) since any given HTTP request could be going to a different server. The default session state provider for ASP.NET is an in-memory provider. This assumes that every request comes to the same physical machine. Session state providers have varied in their reliability and handling of scalability, but the other built-in providers include an out-of-proc provider (still same machine, but more resilient to IIS going up and down) and a SQL Server provider. None of these are enabled on the Azure platform, for good reason.

Read More..

Web Frameworks, MVC, and ASP.NET

After nearly a year as a community tech preview, Microsoft has released the first true beta of the ASP.NET MVC framework. ASP.NET MVC is a radical departure from the WebForms technology has promoted in the past, and in the opinion of many, a return to mainstream web programming. The MVC pattern provides the cornerstone for web frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and Java's Spring Framework.

MVC web frameworks should not be confused with their namesake, the Model-View-Controller pattern first proposed by Trygve Reenskaug. Under Reenskaug's pattern, the view and controller were tightly bound to one another with a one-to-one mapping between each view and controller. With a MVC web framework, the view and controller are loosely coupled and it is not unheard of for multiple views to be tied to a single controller.

Regardless of which definition of MVC you prefer, the model remains an independent representation of data that has no knowledge of what is using it. This is in contrast to WebForms, where it is common for data to be stored in the UI elements themselves in the form of viewstate. Read More...