papadi Development Blog

.NET and Software Development by Dimitris Papadimitriou 
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Microsoft Most Valuable Professional


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IIS

 
March 23, 2010
 

How to enable SSL for testing and development purposes on Windows 7

I created a small screen cast that shows how to enable SSL on IIS for testing or development purposes. Procedure involves creating a self-signed SSL certificate and then enabling SSL (https binding) on IIS using that certificate.

Filed under  //   IIS   SSL   Windows 7  

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May 15, 2007
 

Windows Communication Foundation - The basics

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF - formerly known as Indigo) encapsulates all previous microsoft technologies for remoting and messaging. It's layered architecture consists of a base that handles asynchronous calls and message handling and a top that handles security, transations, transport and encoding capabilities.

WCF acts as a wrapper of preceding remoting technologies like:

  • ASP.NET Web Services: The Microsoft's implementation for XML web services
  • .NET Remoting: Supports .NET to .NET tight coupled communication in favor of performance.
  • Enterprise Services: One of the oldest remoting technologies, also known as COM+ prior to introducing .NET. Part of it was DCOM and event older remoting method. Supports distributed transactions (eg. transactions among multiple databases and physical computers).
  • WSE: Web Services Enhancements. WCF supports only version 3 of WSE, a set of enhancements for handling stuff like security and routing.
  • MSMQ: Microsoft Message Queue provides guaranteed message delivery and is optimized for unreliable communications or systems that require off-line support.

Being a wrapper of all that techonologies, WCF encapsulates all possible features of them:

  • SOAP (Simple object access protocol is used to create "envelopes" for carrrying messages)
  • Plain XML and RSS (although SOAP is the main protocol for message delivery for WCF, plain XML or RSS are fully supported)
  • Binary XML, MTOM (binary representation of XML files used to transfer large files. Trades message readability and interoperability for performance)
  • WSE Features and may others...

WCF services - applications that expose services using WCF - must be hosted by a process and be ready to accept and respond to requests. These processing could be hosted by:

  • IIS : Internet Information Services provides scalability, manageability and security)
  • Windows Activation Service : Introduced with Windows Vista, is the new process activation mechanism that ships with IIS 7.0.
  • Exe : Any custom .NET executable (eg. Windows Forms or Console application) can host WCF services
  • Windows Service
  • COM+ Component

Filed under  //   .NET   IIS   WCF  

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February 8, 2005
 

Microsoft SQL Web Data Administrator

Tool provided by Microsoft to remotely manage an SQL Server or an MSDE. This tool actually covers the lack of management tools of MSDE. Well... not all functions of Enterprise Manager are supported but it's a good start. The fact that you can execute an SQL statement could compensate, for instance, the lack of backup and restore function.
No IIS?
The fact that it's an Web tool does not mean that you can't use it without IIS. It can also work with the Cassini Virtual Web Server, which is integrated into the package. You can just click on the Program Files shortcut and manage your database directly!
Download!
To download SQL Web Data Administrator click here!

Filed under  //   IIS   sql  

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