Amazon Web Services release Microsoft SQL, .Net support

Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS) has announced new managed services for Windows developers with the worldwide launch of Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for Microsoft SQL Server and ASP.NET support for AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

Businesses can now take advantage of the managed database and application services to deploy, manage and scale SQL Server databases and ASP.NET applications using familiar Microsoft tools. Amazon RDS currently supports SQL Server 2008 R2 and plans to add support for SQL Server 2012 later this year.

Deploying and managing databases is one of the most complex, time-consuming, and expensive activities in IT. Amazon RDS removes this complexity and makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database by managing database administration tasks such as software installation and patching, monitoring, and back-ups for disaster recovery. Businesses of all sizes have taken advantage of Amazon RDS to offload the operational responsibilities of their MySQL and Oracle databases. With this launch, Amazon RDS brings the same benefits to SQL Server customers. Amazon RDS supports Express, Web, Standard and Enterprise Editions of SQL Server.

“Amazon RDS now supports three of the most popular relational database engines, giving businesses the flexibility to launch a managed Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle or MySQL database based on the needs of their application. With Amazon RDS, customers no longer have to become experts in database set-up and management and can shift their focus to building and improving the capabilities of their applications,” said Charlie Bell, Vice President, Amazon Web Services. “We’re excited to give Windows and ASP.Net developers new options for taking advantage of AWS to quickly deploy and easily manage their databases and applications in the cloud.”

New customers can get started with Amazon RDS for SQL Server with a Free Usage Tier, which includes 750 hours per month of Amazon RDS micro instances with SQL Server Express Edition, 20GB of database storage and 10 million I/O requests per month. After the Free Usage Tier, customers can run Amazon RDS for SQL Server under two different licensing models - "License Included" and Microsoft License Mobility.

Under the “License Included” service model, customers do not need separately purchased SQL Server software licenses. “License Included” pricing starts at $0.035/hour and is inclusive of SQL Server software, hardware, and Amazon RDS management capabilities. The Microsoft License Mobility program allows customers who already own SQL Server licenses to run SQL Server deployments on Amazon RDS. This benefit is available to Microsoft Volume Licensing customers with SQL Server licenses covered by active Microsoft Software Assurance contracts. The Microsoft License Mobility program is suited for customers who prefer to use existing SQL Server licenses or purchase new licenses directly from Microsoft.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk gives developers an even easier way to quickly deploy and manage their Java, PHP and as of today, their ASP.NET applications in the AWS cloud. Developers simply upload their application, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring. Because Elastic Beanstalk leverages the familiar IIS 7.5 software stack, existing ASP.NET applications can be deployed with minimal changes to the underlying code. To get started, developers can use the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio or the AWS Management Console to create applications and environments. There is no additional charge for Elastic Beanstalk, and customers pay only for the AWS resources needed to run their applications.

How Microsoft blew its own RIA invention

Cast your mind back to the year 2000. Microsoft has just announced its .NET Framework, complete with a new language called C# - that was in July, at the Orlando Professional Developers Conference.

A couple of months later, Mark Anders and Scott Guthrie from Microsoft's ASP+ team turned up at the Wrox Web Developer Conference in Las Vegas. Remember ASP+? This was the pre-release name for what became ASP.NET, the web application framework built on .NET.

Anders and Guthrie presented their new technology in the Wrox keynote, following which I interviewed them. They were absolutely the key people. "We started the team about two-and-half years ago. At the beginning it was just the two of us, working on it," said Guthrie.

Was ASP+ based on .NET from the beginning? "No," said Anders. "There were a number of groups around Microsoft that were looking at how we could move the programming model forward. We were on the IIS team; we had just shipped IIS 4.0, and thought we could do a lot better for web development. The tools team thought that they needed to make things simpler. We came up with some stuff, showed it to the tools team. They were working with the runtime team, we liked what the runtime team was doing, and started doing it like that."

Anders later revealed that the first ASP+ experiments were done in Java.

We also discussed how.NET components hosted in the browser might become a more secure alternative to ActiveX. "That is there today," said Anders. "If you create controls using WinForms, those can be hosted in IE [Internet Explorer] and run within the security sandbox. It's not through ActiveX hosting.

"As your binding to code within one of those components that comes down in the browser, if it's not present on the machine it will be downloaded. We have a great incremental download and deployment story. We expect it to be very popular."

Good idea, but it never really happened. Microsoft got security cold feet, and ended up crippling the feature in the 1.0 Framework so that Windows Forms controls did not run at all in the default Internet Zone. This was fixed in 1.1, but web developers disliked the .NET dependency and the fact that it only worked with IE and Windows.

Read More..

ASP.NET Is The Latest Version Of ASP Technology

ASP.NET is the next generation ASP, but it's not an upgraded version of ASP. ASP.NET is an entirely new technology for server-side scripting. It was written from the ground up and is not backward compatible with classic ASP.ASP.NET is the major part of the Microsoft's .NET Framework.
ASP.NET is a server side scripting technology that enables scripts (embedded in web pages) to be executed by an Internet server.

•ASP.NET is a Microsoft Technology
•ASP stands for Active Server Pages
•ASP.NET is a program that runs inside IIS
•IIS (Internet Information Services) is Microsoft's Internet server
•IIS comes as a free component with Windows servers
•IIS is also a part of Windows 2000 and XP Professional

ASP.NET 2.0 improves upon Asp.Net by adding support for several new features and ASP.NET 3.0 is not a new version of ASP.NET. It's just the name for a new ASP.NET 2.0 framework library with support for Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation; and Windows Card Space.

Benefits of ASP.Net

•ASP.NET has better language support, a large set of new controls and XML based components.
•ASP.NET provides increased performance by running compiled code.
•ASP.NET code is not fully backward compatible with ASP.
•Event-driven programming
•User authentication, with accounts and roles
•Higher scalability
•Easier configuration and deployment


Read More..

Improving Web Development Using Virtualization

Most web developers have a particular development environment on their computer. They may have the .NET Framework version 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 installed, along with Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3. In a perfect world this environment would be static and the developer would not need to install beta or old versions of software that may or may not allow side-by-side installation with the current version. But in the real world, the site needs to be tested against Internet Explorer 5.5, 6, and the beta version of version 8, as well as against Firefox 2. And the developer may want to install the the ASP.NET Futures, which provide an early preview of future functionality for ASP.NET.


Read More..

GridView Control

In MySQL, you would need to supply the LIMIT keyword in order to get a specific set of rows. With GridView’s paging feature enabled, everything is done for you. Neat huh. Took me like a day in getting this one to work though because I had problems with the update and delete function. Since I am using MySQL, turns out when you do parameters in your query commands, the @ sign does not work because it is only for MS SQL. You would have to change the @ to ?.

Read More..

Using URL Rewriting With Web Parts

Web parts are a great new system for allowing personalization of web sites by end users that was introduced in ASP.NET 2.0. However, it isn't useful when used in combination with URL rewriting.

URL rewriting allows you to respond to requests from dynamic URLs by redirecting the handling to a different .ASPX file on your server. This can be used to make your URLs more readable and improve your search engine optimization (SEO), instead of using long query parameters.

Some example systems for implementing this are UrlRewriter.net and UrlRewriting.net.

When you use web parts in combination with a rewritten URL, the web parts will all be shared by all of the URLs that are rewritten to the same .ASPX file. This library corrects this by replacing the WebPartManager with RewritableWebPartManager and the SqlPersonalizationProvider with RewritableSqlPersonalizationProvider.

It also provides additional functionality in the form a personalization levels. This allows you to share common personalization settings amonst multiple URLs. When a user is browsing, if no personalization is specified at a particular level, the personalization defined at a higher level is displayed instead. For example, in a web store scenario you can allow the store operators to provide shared personalization that all users will see. Using levels, they can set personalization
that will appear on all item pages, such as a disclaimer, and then override that personalization with a different disclaimer on a specific item's page.

Read More..