Today, I will discuss one of new features in ASP.NET 4.5, it is Asynchronous HTTP Module . And it’s going to be very useful if used meticulously.

First Just to give a brief Idea, why Asynchronous HTTPModules are important ?

As we all know, web is stateless. A Web page is created from scratch every time whenever it is posted back to the server. In traditional web programming, all the information within the page and control gets wiped off on every postback. Every request in ASP.NET goes through a series of events.

Every request is served by am HTTP handler and it goes a series of HTTPModules (HTTPPipeline) which can be read, update the request. A lot of features of ASP.NET like Authentication, Authorization, Session etc are implemented as HTTP Module in ASP.NET. Let’s have a view on the Request Processing.



Now as you can see the request is assigned to a thread T1 from the available threads is thread pool. And the request is passed through several HTTPModules and finally served my HTTPHandler and response is send back with the same thread (T1).

During the entire processing, same thread is engaged in serving the same request and cannot be used by any another request till request processing completes. During the request processing if any HTTPModules depends on some entities like I/O based operations, web services, Databases queries etc then it takes long to complete which makes the thread busy for long which makes asp.net thread will not do anything during that duration and will be useless. In this kind of scenarios the throughput goes down rapidly.

In the above scenario, synchronous HTTPModule can degrade the site performance a lot. So if we can make HTTPModules as asynchronous that can increase the through put a lot. In asynchronous mode, ASP.NET thread get released as soon as the control get passed to another component/module, it does not wait. And the thread becomes available in thread pool and can be used to serve another request. When the component completes its assigned task then it got assigned to new ASP.NET thread which completes the request. The flow can be graphically presented as



In the above picture, An asp.net thread T1 is assigned from threadpool to server the request. When the control got passed to File System to log message, asp.net thread got released and when essage logging got completed, control passed to asp.net and it is assigned to another thread say T2 from thread pool.
In .NET Framework 4.o, there was some major enhancement made for asynchronous programming model. Any asynchronous operation is represents a Task and it comes under the namespace System.Threading.Tasks.Task.

In .NET 4.5, there are some new operator and keyword introduced that makes the life easy for implement Asynchronous feature. One is async keyword and await operator.

These two enables us to write the asynchronous code is similar fashion as we write for synchronous mode.

And these features can be easily used while writing HTTPModules and HTTPHandlers. We’ll be using these enhancements in writing our custom asynchronous HTTPModule.

In my sample as depicted in image, I am creating a module that writes some log messages in a text file for every request made.

So to create a Custom HTTPModule, Create a class library project. And create a class say named LogModule which implements IHttpModule. For this you need to add a reference of Assembly System.Web.

LogModule would contains the methods discussed below.

We need to implement two methods Init and Dispose that are part of IHTTPModule interface.

Here first , I have written an asynchronous method that actually reads the information from the request and writes in the log file asynchronously . For this I have used WriteAsync of FileStream

private async Task WriteLogmessages(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    HttpApplication app = (HttpApplication)sender;
    DateTime time = DateTime.Now;

    string line = String.Format(
    "{0,10:d} {1,11:T} {2, 32} {3}\r\n",
    time, time,
    app.Request.UserHostAddress,
    app.Request.Url);
    using (_file = new FileStream(
        HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(
        "~/App_Data/RequestLog.txt"),
        FileMode.OpenOrCreate, FileAccess.Write,
        FileShare.Write, 1024, true))
    {
        line = line + " ," + threaddetails;
        byte[] output = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(line);

        _file.Seek(_position, SeekOrigin.Begin);
        _position += output.Length;
        await _file.WriteAsync(output, 0, output.Length);
    }

}

Here you can see the await key word, what it means..

As per msdn “ An await expression does not block the thread on which it is executing. Instead, it causes the compiler to sign up the rest of the async method as a continuation on the awaited task. Control then returns to the caller of the async method. When the task completes, it invokes its continuation, and execution of the async method resumes where it left off.“

await is used with some asynchronous method that returns task and is used suspend the execution of the method until the task completes and control is returned back to the caller to execute further. await should be used with the last expression of any code block.

And Init method would be like

Public  void Init(HttpApplication context)
{
       // It wraps the Task-based method
       EventHandlerTaskAsyncHelper asyncHelper =
       new EventHandlerTaskAsyncHelper(WriteLogmessages);

       //asyncHelper's BeginEventHandler and EndEventHandler eventhandler that is used
       //as Begin and End methods for Asynchronous HTTP modules
       context.AddOnPostAuthorizeRequestAsync(
       asyncHelper.BeginEventHandler, asyncHelper.EndEventHandler);

}

So apart from above these methods, we need to implement the dispose method.

Now compile your class library and use the reference in your ASP.NET website . Now as you must be knowing that we need to need to add the entry in the config file. So it’ll be as

<system.webServer>
<modules>
<add name="MyCustomHTTPModule" type="MyCustomHTTPModule.LogModule, MyCustomHTTPModule"/>
</modules>
</system.webServer>

Now when you run your application, you will see the logs are created in a text file in App_Data folder as
mentioned path in the code.

Hope you all have liked this new feature.

Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortal does. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.

In ASP.Net 4.0, Microsoft added the ability to override the default encoder. This is specifically focused on the HTMLEncode, HTMLAttributeEncode, and URLEncode functionality. These functions are used, in the eyes of security, to help mitigate cross-site scripting (XSS). The problem with the built in .Net routines is that they are built on a black-list methodology, rather than a white-list methodology. The built in routines use a very small list of characters that get encoded. For example, the .Net version of HTMLEncode encodes the following characters: <,>,”,&. The Microsoft Web Protection Library (previously known as the Anti-XSS Library) instead determines all characters that don’t need encoding, a-z0-9 for example, and then encodes all the rest. This is a much safer approach to encoding.

In this post, I will show you how to use the Web Protection Library as the default encoder for an ASP.Net 4.0 application. The first step is to download the Web Protection Library. In this example, I use version 4.0 which can be found at: http://wpl.codeplex.com/.

Next, you will need to have an application to implement this. You can use an existing application, or create a new one. Add a reference to the AntiXSSLibrary.dll found in” Program Files\Microsoft Information Security\AntiXSS Library v4.0”.

To use the library, it is time to create a new class. You can see the code in my class in Figure 1. I named the class “MyEncoder” and this is just a sample. (THIS IS NOT PRODUCTION CODE) There are two important factors to this class:

1. The class must inherit from System.Web.Util.HttpEncoder.

2. You must override each Encode Method you want to change.

If you only wanted to update the HTMLEncode and leave the other methods alone, just leave them out of the class.

using System;
using System.Web;

public class MyEncoder : System.Web.Util.HttpEncoder
{
  public MyEncoder(){}

    protected override void HtmlEncode(string value, System.IO.TextWriter output)
    {
        if (null == value)
            return;       

output.Write(Microsoft.Security.Application.Encoder.HtmlEncode(value));

    }
    protected override void HtmlAttributeEncode(string value, System.IO.TextWriter output)
    {
        if (null == value)
            return;    

output.Write(Microsoft.Security.Application.Encoder.HtmlAttributeEncode(value));
    }
}

The final step to implementing this custom encoding is to update the web.config file. To do this, modify your httpRuntime element to have the “encoderType” attribute set, as seen in Figure below.  Change “MyEncoder” to the name of the class you created.  If you do not have the httpRuntime element, just add it in.

  <system.web>
    <compilation debug="true" targetFramework="4.0"/>
    <httpRuntime encoderType="MyEncoder"/>
    .....

Although it would be really nice if the .Net Framework would just start using the Web Protection Library, they are just not ready for that yet.  It is important that plenty of testing is always done when working with output encoding.  Different encoders produce different outputs and may cause display defects.  It is also important to note that this only effects items that get auto-encoded by the framework.  For example, a text property of a textbox.

This is just a small example of modifying the default encoding type of your application.  There is much more that you could potentially do with this.  This is just a sample and this code is NOT FOR PRODUCTION USE. 

Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortal does. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.

ASP.Net request validation is a feature that automatically protects ASP.Net applications from XSS attacks. Request validation in asp.net triggers error when it found HTML markup in any of the input data. But some real life applications still require HTML data in some of the input fields. For e.g. When receiving feedback from user, you may need to get the feedback as HTML. Prior to 4.5 the developers have the ability to switch off the request validation either in page level or for the entire application. Even though this was helpful, for accepting HTML markup from any one field in the page, you were required to disable the validation for entire page or disable it for entire application.

ASP.Net 4.5 brings some improvements to the request validation features. There is a new attribute introduced to httpRuntime element called requestValidationMode. You can set value for this attribute to 4.5 so that new improvements will be applied to your application.

<httpRuntime requestValidationMode="4.5" ... />

When you set this in your web.config, the request validation will be triggered only when your code access the data. So if you are not accessing the data, it will not be validated, which is an improvement and you are not supposed to disable the request Validation.

Now the next question is what will happen when you need HTML data from controls? ASP.Net 4.5 allows you to access request data that is not validated from a new collection named “Unvalidated”. Once you set the requestValidationMode to 4.5, you can access the unvalidated data by the following statement.

context.Request.Unvalidated.Form["Your_Column_Name"];

I am going to demonstrate these new improvements in the remaining part of this article. First I am going to demonstrate the request validation prior to ASP.Net 4.5. Then I will demonstrate the request validation in ASP.Net 4.5 with HTML input controls and then with ASP.Net server controls.

Let us evaluate an ASP.Net application prior to version 4.5. I have created ASP.Net 3.5 application and placed 2 text box controls in the page, with a submit button. The design mode for my page in Visual Studio looks similar to following.



I executed the page and enter some data in the text boxes. See the snapshot of my input.



See the comments Text box have some HTML markup, which will not be allowed by default. When clicking on the submit button, the following error page will appear.



Now Since I am using ASP.Net 3.5, there are 2 options for me.

1. Set the ValidateRequest to false in the @Page attribute of your page



2. Set the ValidateRequest to false in the Pages section of web.config



Once you do any of the above changes, the above error will vanishes. But there is a danger that all fields in your page can still cause XSS attacks as you disabled it for entire page. Disabling it from the entire application using web.config is more danger as it will switch off the validation feature for your application. Developers need to properly parse/validate all the fields in the page to safeguard from XSS attacks.

Now let us evaluate the improvements in ASP.Net 4.5. I opened Visual Studio 2011 developer preview and created ASP.Net 4.5 web application.

In my application I have included two text boxes and a submit button. The markup for the form controls are as follows.



See, I have used normal HTML controls, not HTML server controls/ASP.Net server controls. I shall discuss the input validation for ASP.Net server controls in the later part of this article.

I executed the page and placed some HTML in the comments field.



When I clicked the submit button, there was no error.

If you check the web.config, you can see the below setting in the web.config



Now let me try to access these values from my code. I added onclick event handler for the button. The code for the button click event hander is as follows.



Now When I click the button from the ASP.Net page, after entering value <b>No Comments</b> in the comments Text box, the below error page appears.



As mentioned in the introduction of this article, you can use Request.Unvalidated collection to access the unvalidated data from the code behind. I have updated my code as follows



Now When I pressed the button, the page does not throw any error.



You must be noticed that I have used HTML input fields not ASP.Net server controls. When using ASP.Net server controls ASP.Net uses the posted data to maintain the view state, so even if you didn’t use the server control data in the code behind, you will get error.

See the sample. I have created the ASP.Net controls as follows



See the output of the page. I placed some markup in the comments field and pressed enter. No matter whether I am using the value in my code behind or not, it will throw the error.





This is because; ASP.Net tries to access the data from text box for the purpose of maintaining view state. For managing request validation for ASP.Net controls, the framework introduced a new attribute named “ValidateRequestMode”. If you want any control to submit HTML markup, set the ValidateRequestMode to “disabled”, so that the data from this control will not be validated. In the background ASP.Net might take the data from the unvalidated collection if ValidateRequestMode set to disabled.

See the sample



Now run the page and enter some markup for the comments field and press the submit button, it will not trigger any error as you already disabled the validateRequestMode.



See the output of the page.



ASP.Net 4.5 gives you the ability to control the request validation from item level. For each server control you can disable the request validation. Still all the other controls in the page is validated so your page is not open for XSS attacks. Make sure you apply necessary logic to parse/validate the data from unvalidated controls to protect your application. Only disable request validation when it is necessary.

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You have captured the login name and computer IP address in your ASP.NET page and you want to use the login name and IP address in your Silverlight XAML page for display, logging or access control. To implement this, you will need to pass the user name and IP address from the ASP.NET page to the Silverlight XAML.

1. In your ASP.NET page code behind, declare a property named InitParams



2. In your ASP.NET Page_Load event, capture login name and IP address, and assign them to the InitParams property.



3. In your ASP.NET page, set the value of initParams to the InitParams property.



4. In your Silverlight App class, declare properties named LoginName and IPAddress.



5. In your Silverlight App Startup event handler, retrieve values from initParams and assign them to the properties of LoginName and IPAddress.



6. In any Silverlight XAML page, retrieve LoginName and IPAddress from the properties of App class.



Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortal does. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.

Output caching means that your code runs once to provide the output, then doesn’t run again until the caching period has expired. In my example, that meant it would run four times for my different circumstances, but not again for each individual circumstance until the timeout had expired. But it turns out that isn’t sufficient to my needs. If the user is logged in, the code needs to run every time.

CocktailsRUs is a community site. Anyone can join, and when they join, they can mark cocktails as favorites for ease of access. Every time they view a cocktail, they can choose to add it to (or remove it from) their favorites, and thus be presented with the appropriate button to add or remove a favorite.



So how do we stop the site from using output caching with authenticated users?

One quick and (very) dirty approach would be to use the GetVaryByCustomString() method to assign a unique value (a timestamp or a GUID) as the cache key for authenticated users. That would ensure the code runs every time, but would also lead to a plethora of unwanted pages in the cache.

Fortunately, there is a much better solution. The Output Cache exposes a callback that allows you to decide whether to return the cached item, or run the code. We can use this callback to determine if the user is authenticated–and if they are, invalidate the cache for this response.

The first thing we need to do is create our own derived version of the Output Cache. That’s straightforward–just inherit from OutputCacheAttribute like so:

Then we need to override the OnActionExecuting() method to set up the callback where we will invalidate the cache:



Now all we need to do is implement our OnlyIfAnonymous() method and tell it not to cache if this is an authenticated user. The signature of AddValidationCallback gives us access to the HttpContext, an optional data object (which we don’t need) and the HttpValidationStatus–which is passed in by reference and allows us to ignore the cache for this request. Here is the completed method:



The one remaining step is to replace the OutputCache directive on our controller method with a reference to our new OnlyUnAuthenticated attribute.



Now we have a solution that caches appropriately for anonymous users, but ensures that the code runs every time for authenticated users.

Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortal does. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.

Good news for all Asp.net Developer who were keen to know the new feature of asp.net 4.5. Now you can bind your model same as the features available in MVC in Asp.net 4.5.

It becomes easy to perform any CRUD operation with any of the data source such as LINQ, Ado.net or Entity framework.

Let’s do some practice, here I am going to bind my Drop Down list using this new features called “Model Binding”
Add one drop down in your page and set it’s “DataTextField” and “DataValueField” properties.
Go to Code behind file and Create one method which will return IQUERYable<type> as

/// <summary>
/// Return the City Name
/// </summary>
/// <returns></returns>

public IQueryable  GetCityNames()
{
MyDbEntities ds = new MyDbEntities();
return ds.City;
}

Now Goto design page and set the “ SelectMethod” Property of DropDown

<asp :DropDownList ID="DropDownList1"
runat ="server"
Height ="17px" Width="201px"
DataTextField ="CityName"
DataValueField ="CityID"
SelectMethod ="GetCityNames"
AppendDataBoundItems ="true"
AutoPostBack ="true">
asp :DropDownList>;

That’s It, run your program.

Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortal does. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.

ASPHostPortal is a premiere web hosting company that specialized in Windows and ASP.NET-based hosting, announces the deployment of SQL Server 2012 in its web hosting packages. The SQL Server 2012 is brand new database management software from Microsoft that provides robust solutions for businesses to organize and secure company's data in one large-scale framework.

One of the most powerful and recognized SQL database engines available, Microsoft SQL Server provides many different levels of functionality and feature sets, and the latest release includes greater uptime, enhanced query performance, and improved security features. Also included is the new ‘Business Intelligence’ version of the product, and a more scaled-down ‘Express’ version, featuring the new ‘LocalDB’ functionality.

"I am very proud today, as we again have been able to exceed expectations by being able to offer this latest version of SQL Server to our customers so quickly after its official release," said Robert Kruger, CEO of ASPHostPortal.com. "We continue to offer significant added value to Microsoft products. We prove our existence in this business."

ASPHostPortal offers hosting packages bundle with the SQL Server 2012, including ASP.NET hosting and also our Reseller Hosting. This is to ensure that its customers can always have the latest technology included in their account. Businesses with all of important data from each department need a framework to manage and secure all of that data. And it can be achieved by implementing the SQL Server 2012. This robust data warehouse development merges everything together and makes sure there is no leakage. SQL Server 2012 keeps every data on its place and works as its best.  

For more information about this new product, please visit our site at http://asphostportal.com/Cheap-SQL-2012-Hosting.aspx.

About ASPHostPortal:
We’re a company that works differently to most. Value is what we output and help our customers achieve, not how much money we put in the bank. It’s not because we are altruistic. It’s based on an even simpler principle. "Do good things, and good things will come to you".

When deploy a ASP.NET application to a new server, error message below shown:

Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.



This is the steps to solve this problem:

1. Copy AjaxControlToolkit.dll and AjaxControlToolkit.pdb version 1.0.61025.0 from my development machine to my ASP.NET App bin folder. (i install my AjaxControlToolkit in C:\Program Files\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions\AjaxControlToolkit)

2. Copy System.Web.Extensions.dll (C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_MSIL\System.Web.Extensions) and System.Web.Extensions.Design.dll (C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_MSIL\System.Web.Extensions.Design) from my development machine to my ASP.NET App bin folder.

3. Run the application and it’s works.

Alternatively, we can solve the problem by installing AJAX.NET and AjaxControlToolkit to the server. Hope it helps

Hello, in this article i have tried to explain, how a web application is deployed on to web server. We can deploy ASP.NET Application in 3 different ways

1. xCopy Deployment
2. Precompiled Deployment
3. Web Setup Project

The choice of best deployment alternative depends upon particular need of each application. Xcopy deployment is the most easiest, and it is often used during development to create copies of an application n different servers for testing purpose. For small application xcopy deployment may be the best choice.

Precompiled deployment has several advantages over XCopy deployment. Eg. Precompiled deployment is always gives better performance for the first users of the site at the same time it is more secure as we don’t need to copy our source code files on to server. If our application deployed on one or few servers then precompiled deployment is usually best choice.

When we are going to deploy our application on number of servers then creating a setup program is a very handy tool. Although creating this setup program is much tedious and involves considerable working, the deployment from this setup program becomes very easier.

xCopy Deployment

To manually copy the files of an asp.net web site to a server. We can use the xcopy command from a command prompt. Then we can use IIS’s (Internet Information Serve management console t o create a virtual directory that’s mapped to the directory that you copied the web site to.

It is easier to create a batch file for the xcopy command. Then after we can run that batch file at given time we make changes to the application and want to deploy the updated code.

We can also perform xcopy deployment from visual studio by using copy website command.

To perform xcopy we use copy web site command. This command lets us to copy website to file system, local IIS, FTP or remote IIS website. At the same time we can copy all or selected files.

How to use this command

1. In visual studio open the website to be deployed and choose the website copy web site command.
2. Then click the connect button to display an open website dialog box that lets to choose the destination to copy the web site to.
3. Click the arrow buttons to copy the files from the source web site to remote web site.

Publish Web Site

The publish web site command lets us to precompile an asp.net application and copy the precompiled assemblies to a target server. This is the easiest way to use the precompiled deployment feature.

1. Deploys precompiled assemblies to the specific server
2. Lets us to deploy the web site without source code files
3. It is done either from publish web site command or from command prompt using the aspnet_compiler command

Advantages

1.Avoids delays caused by compiling web pages when they are first accessed by a user.
2. Finds compile errors before the site is deployed.
3. Can copy just executable files and not the source files to the server.

The build -> publish web site command compiles all of the files makes up an asp.net application, and then deploys the compiled assemblies to the location we specify.

If we check allow precompiled site to be updatable box, the source files are deployed along with the executable files. If we uncheck then source code files aren’t deployed.

The syntax of aspnet_compiler command
The aspnet_compiler command is located in the asp.net framework directory,
c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727

aspnet_compiler –v virtual-directory [-u] [-d] [-f] [target-directory]

where

· -v name of virtual directory of existing web site

·  -u precompiled website will be updated

·  -d debug information is included in compiled assemblies

·  -f overwrite target directory if exist

Eg.
Precomplies existing website
Aspnet_compiler –v test d:\test

In same place
Aspnet_complier –v test

With debugging information
Aspnet_compiler –v test –u –d d:\test

If we specify target directory the precompiled web site is stored in the specified directory else the website is precompiled in place

Setup Deployment

1. It uses a web setup project to build a windows setup program used to deploy website onto server.
2. Useful for deployment on multiple servers.
3. Can be used to deploy precompiled assemblies and can be configured to include or omit the source code.
4. The installed application can be removed by using add or remove programs dialog box from control panel

How to create a setup

Choose the file -> add -> new project command to display the add new project dialog box. Then, choose setup and deployment. Select web setup project as template, enter a name for websetup project click ok. 

In the solution explorer right click the web setup project and choose the add-> project output command to display the add project output group dialog box, then click ok to add the content files from you website to the web setup project

Use the buttons that are displayed at the top of the solution explorer when web setup project is selected to access setup editors that lets us to customize various aspects of the web setup project.
 
Visual studio creates files named setup.exe and setup.msi. setup.exe is the file we will run to install the application and setup.msi contains all of the files to be installed.

The setup.exe and setup.msi files are stored in the web setup project’s debug or release folder.

Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortal does. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.

The actual version number for .NET 4.5 assemblies is 4.0.30319. If that looks familiar it is because that is also the version number for .NET 4.0 assemblies. Much to the chagrin of developers, Microsoft will be updating core assemblies “in-place”. Aside from making much harder to determine which version of .NET the user actually has installed, it creates numerous pitfalls for developers targeting .NET 4.0 with machines that have 4.5 installed.

While Visual Studio is quite capable of keeping developers from accidentally using .NET 3.0 or 3.5 assemblies in projects targeting .NET 2.0 the same cannot be said for individual methods. Within the IDE there is no warning that method in a common library such as mscorlib.dll or System.dll didn’t exist in the older version. Unless a static analysis tool is used to programmatically check for such mistakes, the error will probably not be detected until the code fails at runtime. A good example of this is EventWaitHandle.WaitOne, which has overloads that were added via a service pack that shipped with .NET 3.5.

While this is still a theoretical problem at this time, there are also several breaking changes in .NET 4.5 that will need to be accounted for.

Unhandled, unobserved exceptions

In .NET 2.0 the semantics for unhandled exceptions changed. Prior to this version exceptions on a non-UI thread would simply be discarded and the associated thread terminated. As of .NET 2.0, unhandled exceptions would cause the entire application to crash. While this greatly reduced the possibility of data corruption and undetected errors, it also meant that all calls made on back-ground threads were handled a top-level exception handler.

When the Task Parallel Library was introduced it followed this model. If a Task is faulted, its Exception property must be read before the Task is garbage collected. Failing to do so will cause the finalizer to terminate the application on the grounds that it had an unhandled exception.

In .NET 4.5 the rule for Tasks will change to be like the pre-2.0 rule for threads. While a global event will be raised for logging purposes, faulted Tasks will no longer crash the application.

System.Net.PeerToPeer.Collaboration

The namespace System.Net.PeerToPeer.Collaboration is not available and no explanation was given why.

These libraries were only available on non-server versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7 and are an extension to the Windows Peer-to-Peer Infrastructure. Being a rarely used subset of a rarely used technology, there is very little information on this namespace and it is unlikely to affect more than a handful of developers.

WCF

When the maxRequestLength or maxReceivedMessageSize quota is exceeded the HTTP status code has changed from 400 (Bad Request) to 413 (Request Entity Too Large).

WPF

The default value of TextBoxBase.UndoLimit has been changed from -1 (unlimited) to 100. No explanation was given, but presumably this offers a performance advantage over storing an indefinite number of prior versions of the text box contents.

XML/XSLT

Validation errors throw by XDocument will now include the line number and position if LoadOptions.SetLineInfo was passed to the Load method.

Forward compatibility mode for the System.Xml.Xsl.XslCompiledTransform class has been fixed.

Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortal does. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.