RIA, Flash & Web-Services

This morning I was getting mad working with a colleague on the deployment of a RIA (Rich Internet Application) application developed targeting Adobe Flash 10

The application calls some web-services to get data from back-end system (data for tracking and telemetry of locomotives but this is irrilevant).

• When the application runs from Flash Player it works fine;
• When the application runs from the ActiveX hosted by IE nothing happened (meaning that we hadn’t crash, just it didn’t do anything…)

Using Fiddler we found that when a flash file is hosted by IE it asks for a crossdomain.xml resource.

Googling and looking to Adobe documentation we discovered that a crossdomain.xml must be deployed (saved) on the root of the web-server providing the web-services (that invoked back-end) and it contains the default policies allowing incoming Flash clients to call the hosted service.

Our crossdomain.xml is:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
   <cross-domain-policy>
    <site-control permitted-cross-domain-policies="master-only"/>
    <allow-access-from domain="*"/>
    <allow-http-request-headers-from domain="*" headers="SOAPAction"/>
   </cross-domain-policy>

 

Don’t forget the last line to allow a SOAP (web-service) interaction.

It allows any incoming request from external Flash clients.

I admit that I’m totally incompetent on Flash and RIA techniques so I’ve lost a couple of hours on that!

[Italian Speaking]Evento Sharepoint + Avepoint @ Roma il 07.05.2009

Volevo segnalare il seguente evento dedicato all'infrastruttura ed alle pratiche operative su Sharepoint:

http://www.decatec.it/Eventi/Decatec-Evento-Sharepoint-Roma-7-Maggio-2009.aspx

L'evento è organizzato da Stefan Demetz un eccellente professionista oltre che un amico e quindi sarà sicuramente sinonimo di qualità.

AvePoint ha delle eccellenti soluzioni per il backup/restore di Sharepoint che operano su base selettiva consentendo quindi di partizionare i contenuti da salvare in maniera semplice ed efficace.

ALM Day & DDG Group - Follow-up

Just a quick note about the last speeches.

• Microsoft ALM Day (Milan and Rome), here are the pdf and xps of the italian presentation;
• Developers Group (London), here are the pps of the englishalian presentation;

I'd also wanna thanks the italian Microsoft Team for the perfect event organization (Francesca, Lorenzo, Paola, Pasquale) and Joanna, Jason and Pete from DDG for hosting me again.

Today the point of no return has been passed (sigh), unfortunately (for me) I've been charged also with a biz-development role in UK...

Just to begin, let me know if someone needs support or mentoring on BizTalk, Sharepoint and TFS, me or someone from my team will be delighted to work with you smiling, at the best of out capabilities and ...uhm ah!  yes providing great value and effectiveness to your solution (...I don't wanna be a sales person sigh)

ALM Day & DDG Group

It's a lot a time from my last note and I was very busy in a lot of different tasks for my company.

I prefer using my blog to write something about the technologies I'm using but I stll writing somethink about the incoming speeches...

This week I'll be in these italian events at Milan (11.03) and Rome (12.03): http://www.microsoft.com/italy/alm/eventi/almday.mspx

To be honest, I'm a little bit proud of sharing the same event with Ivar Jacobson...

The week after the next, I'll speak The Developers Group in Microsoft Cardinal Place (London UK) again on Team Foundation Server and how we use it in TIQ-Industrial. For more information on this take a look to http://www.richplum.co.uk/

[OT]Looking for Microsoft MCPD Enterprise Application Developers

Hi everybody,

One of the companies in my group is looking for certified professionals to get the CDS Competency from Microsoft.

Is anyone interested?

Let me know!

Cheers!

The Developers Group London - 21.10.2009

Yesterday I've took a speech @ The Developers Group in Microsoft Cardinal Place (London UK) Introducing Windows Workflow Foundation (WF not WWF which is copyrighted by World Wrestling Federation and it's another story...)

You can download slides and demos from Speech & Conferences area on the "naked" TIQ-Industrial site (or click here Slides, Demos).

I'm absolutely unhappy with yesterday presentation because I've totally missed the presentation timing that I planned!

I started writing code to much slowly so that I was unable to complete all the demos that I consider to be "a must" to learn the pillars of WF.

The basic things You should know:

• Demo 1 - The editors is totally integrated with the object model of WF. You can draw or code (obviously first option is better...) and you need to know ho to manage exceptions.
• Demo 2 - While, Condition, If, Branches... You must know how to manage your flow
• Demo 3 - Data exchange, you must be able to exchange information between host and your workflow instance and viceversa (it's not the initial parameters passing to the workflow, I haven't the time to show this feature).
• Demo 4 - Custom Activity create your custom components libraries extending the WF basic toolbox (like Sharepoint and TFS 2010 do). Yesterday the problem exposing a property was the default constructor exposed by my Snippet wasn't good for WF.
• Demo 5 - Event State Machine that it's the real added value of WF in modelling real world behaviour (document management, resource management, long running transaction.

For the upcoming sessions from DG Group take a look to http://www.richplum.co.uk/

Virtual-Server: Quick guide to virtualize you servers

Technorati Tag: Infrastructure,Virtual Server

1. Deploy Virtual Server R2 (more information here)
   1. You'll need an Host server for the new virtual machines;
   2. You'll need a Virtualizer server to perform the conversion job;
   3. You "should" have a Target server to virtualize.
2. Add the required components on the Virtualizer server:
   1. Install FULL ADS (more information here). Pay attention to install 1.0 and non 1.1!
   2. Install VSMT (more information on here)
   3. Take a look to VSMT help to understand where to begin...
      Don't expect to find a friendly interface.
      Everything must be  manually done and through scripts!
3. For each Target server that you have to virtualize (moving it on the Host server):
1. Delete unused spaces and defrag local disks.
   If you've Dynamic-Partition you need to convert them back to Basic
   (it's not so easy and PAY ATTENTION you can only virtualize system with Basic-Partions!)
2. Copy locally and Run gatherhw.exe.
   It will generate servername.xml and copy it back to the virtualizer server.
3. Check that everything is fine with:
   VMScript.exe /hwvalidate /hwinfofile:servername.xml
4. On the Virtualizer server run the following command to generate the migration scripts: vmscript /hwGenerateP2V /hwInfoFile:<GuestMachine>.xml /name:<VirtualMachineName> /vmConfigPath:<Your VSMT Directory>\vmconfig  /virtualDiskPath:d:\vmdisk /hwDestVS:<YourVSMcahine> /virtualDiskDynamic /vmMemory:256
5. Check that PXE support on your host server network card is on (to boot from the network)
6. On the Virtualizer server run the following commands:
1. C:\<VMST Directory>\p2v\<GuestMachine>\<GuestMachine>_Capture.cmd
   this will create the image and at the end of the process wil shut-down the Target server.
2. C:\<VSMT Directory>\p2v\<GuestMachinet>\<GuestMachine>_CreateVM.cmd
   this will create the configuration file for the new virtualized server (.vmc).
3. C:\<VSMT Directory>\p2v\<GuestMachine>\<GuestMachine>_DeployVM.cmd
   This will link the configuration to VirtualServer starting the new virtualized server.

Final Note (unfortunately last but not least):

VSMT doesn't support Dynamic-Partition. Every "real" WIndows server system is installed with Dynamic-Partion

...so any consideration is up to you...

The only thing you can do is to TRY to virtualize the disks of you server with WinImage without leveraging VSMT.

There is a lot of work to do for VSMT team for making it suitable for real world scenarios!