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Browsing ASP.NET

New BlogSvc Release and Oxite

Wow, I believe I’m all caught up on the recent hype around Oxite. Although I can’t help but feel a bit left out in the cold. I mean BlogSvc has been on codeplex much longer than oxite and it never received this much attention. It is a shame because I believe the newest release, BlogSvc 0.8 Wizard Release is solid example of how to build a content management solution using MVC.

I know BlogSvc doesn’t yet have all the fancy administration pages or widgets/plugins yet, but we have a solid foundation to get there. I wish we could bring all the developers together on one solution so we build the next WordPress on ASP.NET MVC. Perhaps combine the best of BlogSvc, BlogEngine.net, dasBlog, SubText all into one super solution and call it SuperPress^TM.

</rant>

Posted by Jarrett on December 24 at 10:20 AM

Comments (1)
ASP.Net MVC Beta Crashing IIS7

With the new beta release of the MVC framework, I updated BlogSvc to compile and run with the new dlls that are now in the GAC. After deleting from the gac and finally copying the dlls to my bin folder I things running smoothly from within Visual Studio. However, when I deploy to IIS7, I am getting a crash.

I’ve tried cleaning out all the applications in my IIS and also restarted the AppDomains, sites, servers. I’ve also tried rebooting. Anyone have any idea’s? Does the beta run on your IIS7 in Vista?

I’ve asked this question on StackOverflow: Why is Asp.net MVC Beta crashing my IIS7?

Update: I toggled data execution preventions (DEP) and a couple a reboots later and the issue cleared up.

Posted by Jarrett on October 16 at 5:33 PM

Comments (2)
Deploy MVC Application

I previously thought Visual Studio.NET only supported automatically deploying “Web Site” projects but it also works with “Web Application” and “MVC” projects. Right-click on your project and choose publish.

After choosing publish it will upload all the files based on your “Copy” choice. You can watch the output window to track the progress:
------ Publish started: Project: WebMvc, Configuration: Debug Any CPU ------ Connecting to ftp://ftp.atomserver.net/wwwroot/... Deleting existing files... Publishing folder /... Publishing folder App_Data... Publishing folder App_Data/www... Publishing folder App_Data/www/blog... Publishing folder App_Data/www/blog/WelcomeToBlogService06... Publishing folder App_Data/www/media... Publishing folder App_Data/www/pages... Publishing folder js... Publishing folder themes... Publishing folder themes/default... Publishing folder themes/default/images... Publishing folder bin... ========== Build: 5 succeeded or up-to-date, 0 failed, 0 skipped ========== ========== Publish: 1 succeeded, 0 failed, 0 skipped ==========

Posted by Jarrett on October 15 at 7:17 PM

Comments (0)
Using the New DateTime Support in .NET 3.5 via MVC & jQuery
I’ve added New Global Date and Time Support to BlogSvc by utilizing the new expanded support for date times with proper time zone support. Some highlights in the MSDN documentation:

The DateTimeOffset structure represents a date and time value, together with an offset that indicates how much that value differs from UTC. Thus, the value always unambiguously identifies a single point in time. A DateTimeOffset value is not tied to a particular time zone, but can originate from any of a variety of time zones. The TimeZoneInfo class makes it possible to work with dates and times so that any date and time value unambiguously identifies a single point in time. Taking advantage of time zone support in the .NET Framework is possible only if the time zone to which a date and time value belongs is known when that date and time object is instantiated.

So the MSDN documentation is not clear on which class can make a date/time unambiguous. However, the last sentence is the best clue. We must capture both the UTC value and an originating time zone.

For an ASP.NET MVC application we can add configuration to associate all date/times to our preferred time zone.

With this configuration, we can now write an HtmlHelper extension to display a DateTimeOffset in our preferred time zone.

Call the extension method and pass it either a DateTimeOffset or a DateTime.

This will result in the follwing html:
```
<abbr title='Tuesday, October 07, 2008 10:01 PM (GMT-06:00) Central Time (US &amp; Canada)'>10/7/2008 10:01 PM - CST</abbr>
```
This gives an abbreviated date/time display at your preferred time zone.

However, you may want to display time relative to the user browsing your website. There are two ways to accomplish this:
- Ask and store each user’s time zone
- Automatically determine user’s time zone using javascript
The first option is commonly used with forums and requires the user to register and choose their preferred time zone. The second option makes much more sense for content websites (such as a blog) since it can occur automatically without registration.

There is already a great plugin for jQuery that can display fuzzy times that are directly relative to the user. It is called the Time Ago Plugin. To use it, lets create another helper extension that utilizes a micro-format:

This creates abbreviations in the html, that when activated through jQuery show times that will be automatically updated even after the user has loaded the page.

This DateTime display is much more recognizable and personable to the casual user.

Head on over to the BlogSvc website to download the code.

Update: here is a bonus function that will allow you to format the date (with access to the time zone information) anyway you’d like.

Call it like:
Posted by Jarrett on October 08 at 10:24 PM

Comments (1)
MVC is Cool

I've recently spent many late nights learning (by implementation) ASP.NET MVC and I'm very pleased with the new framework. The old web forms model of programming was great for quick and dirty web apps but it really took too much control away from those developers who have a deep understanding of web technology. With MVC, it really lets web developers go back to their roots. For example, you are no longer dealing with “asp” controls but directly with the classic html input controls.

As part of my learning process, I converted BlogService over to Preview 5 release. The conversion went smoothly. For me, there was only a small learning curve as I’ve been tracking in MVC for a long time. It is a quite popular topic right now especially with the announcement of jQuery being included out of the box with .NET. How great!

Check out the latest release of BlogSvc to see the code: BlogService MVC Release 0.6

Posted by Jarrett on October 06 at 9:44 PM

Comments (0)
New jQuery Rater Plugin for Star Ratings
The jQuery Star Rating widget is a neat control to add to your website. It has many options that allow you to easily customize it. However, it’s usage is based on a fully degradable form submission model which means you must use markup containing an option list. Unfortunately, this means it becomes quite complex to support a rating model that fires off an ajax request to submit a new rating. Therefore, the developer is left to worry about:
- Writing code on the server to generate the option list only for users that have not already rated
- If the user has already rated, the server must generate different markup, or set the widget to disabled
- The developer must write javascript to handle the widget callback and build an ajax request
- No built in support for rating count and updated rating result
- No built in support for a failed rating
To make life easier, I wrote the jQuery Rater Plugin that should reduce the complexity of implementing an ajax rating scenario.

jQuery Rater Plugin Demo

Features
- Auto Ajax posting
- Supports rating update and rating count
- Shows previous rating before user has rated
- Markup is same for rated and unrated
- Supports step ratings (partial stars)
View the Demo Page

First, lets take a look at the markup which is contained in an ASP.NET user control. However, you could write this in your server language of choice. There are three things being set below. The width of the stars, the current rating, and the count of ratings.

The only markup elements required by the plugin are the “ui-rater-starsOff” and “ui-rater-starsOn” spans. Also, they must be contained within an element that has an id you can reference.

We only need to activate the plugin when the user has not already rated the entry.

The only option I’ve set is the address to post the rating to. When the user performs a rating, the plugin will automatically build an ajax request to the postHref. It includes the id and chosen rating value in the form post data.

This plugin does more with less code than the existing jQuery Star Rating Widget because it foregoes the degrade-ability in favor of ajax.
- Previous Javascript size: ui.core.packed.js 4KB + ui.stars.pack.js 4KB + rate.js 2KB = 10KB
- New Javascript size: jquery.rater.js 3KB (unpacked)
View the source code

To see a full server implementation, see the source code of BlogSvc.net.

Download jQuery Rater Plugin (javascript + demo html + image + sample server page)

Found this plugin useful? Please kick it -
Posted by Jarrett on September 29 at 1:37 AM

Comments (14)

New BlogSvc Release 0.2

This release includes an implementation of Atom Publishing Protocol on WCF 3.5. In the words of Tim Bray:

An Atompub implementation lets you create, retrieve, update, and delete (CRUD) Web Resources. ... Atompub starts with a Service Document, which contains one or more named Workspaces, which contain Collections, which are what you actually POST to in order to start up the CRUD process. So the idea is simple; have a collection that when you POST to it, creates a new publication.

The object model is based off of the Atom Syndication Format and the AtomPub specs. All of the objects are based off of Xml or the new XElement. Propeties are used to support strongly typed access to the data.

Atom Syndication Format	Atom Publishing Protocol
AtomCategory	AppCategories
AtomContent	AppCollection
AtomEntry*	AppControl
AtomFeed	AppService
AtomGenerator	AppWorkspace
AtomLink*
AtomPerson	Atom Threading Extension
AtomSource	ThreadInReplyTo
AtomText	* Extended

This release should work in IIS6 or IIS7 with .NET 3.5. Also the SVC handler must support all verbs. Since AtomPub is RESTful, you'll need PUT and DELETE to go along with the usual GET and POST verbs.

The WCF service is built using the new Web Programming Model available in 3.5. However, it is designed to support normal web services as well (more on this in a future post). A neat WCF feature with this release is the support of media entries allowing a user to post images to a collection. I found the trick to supporting raw data on Carlos' blog. However, there is a catch. Anytime you want to accept unknown content types and known content types, you must only deal with Stream objects. For example, although CreateEntry will always return an AtomEntry document you must specify a Stream because the input could be an AtomEntry or say a JPG image.

[ServiceContract]
public interface IAtomPub
{
    [WebGet(BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.Bare, UriTemplate = "{workspaceName}/{collectionName}/{entryName}/media")]
    Stream RetrieveMedia(string workspaceName, string collectionName, string entryName);
    
    [WebInvoke(BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.Bare, UriTemplate = "{workspaceName}/{collectionName}")]
    Stream CreateEntry(string workspaceName, string collectionName, Stream stream);

    [WebGet(UriTemplate = "{workspaceName}/{collectionName}/{entryName}")]
    Stream RetrieveEntry(string workspaceName, string collectionName, string entryName);

    [WebInvoke(BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.Bare, UriTemplate = "{workspaceName}/{collectionName}/{entryName}", Method = "PUT")]
    Stream UpdateEntry(string workspaceName, string collectionName, string entryName, Stream stream);

    [WebInvoke(UriTemplate = "{workspaceName}/{collectionName}/{entryName}", Method = "DELETE")]
    void DeleteEntry(string workspaceName, string collectionName, string entryName);

    [OperationContract]
    [WebGet(UriTemplate = "service")]
    AppService RetrieveService();

    [WebGet(UriTemplate = "{workspaceName}/{collectionName}/category?scheme={scheme}")]
    AppCategories RetrieveCategories(string workspaceName, string collectionName, string scheme);

    [WebGet(UriTemplate = "{workspaceName}/{collectionName}")]
    AtomFeed RetrieveFeed(string workspaceName, string collectionName);
}

You can direct it to a strongly typed implementation by checking the content type.

public Stream CreateEntry(string workspaceName, string collectionName, Stream stream)
{
    string contentType = WebOperationContext.Current.IncomingRequest.ContentType;
    AtomEntry entry;
    if (contentType == Atom.ContentType || contentType == Atom.ContentTypeEntry)
    {
        entry = new AtomEntry();
        XmlReader reader = new XmlTextReader(stream);
        entry.Xml = XElement.Load(reader);
        entry = CreateEntry(workspaceName, collectionName, entry);
    }
    else entry = CreateMedia(workspaceName, collectionName, stream);
    return GetStream(entry);
}

IDs and Hrefs

Blog.svc WCF Service
UriTemplates
Handling Entry or Media Resources
WebLinks
Object Model over .Net 3.5 SP1 Object Model

Test AtomPub and Atom and Threading auto links.

Posted by Jarrett on August 04 at 8:30 PM

Comments (1)

WCF Adds Root Node on IXmlSerializable Object

Has anybody else had trouble with WCF adding a root node on their objects that implement IXmlSerializable?

Here is the setup:

Create a class that implements IXmlSerializable

public class Entry : IXmlSerializable
{
  public XElement Xml { get; set; }
  public void ReadXml(XmlReader reader)
  {
    Xml = XElement.Load(reader, LoadOptions.SetBaseUri);
  }
  public void WriteXml(XmlWriter writer)
  {
    Xml.WriteTo(writer);
  }
}

Create a WCF service that returns the object.

[ServiceContract]
[XmlSerializerFormat]
public interface IService
{
  [OperationContract]
  [WebGet(BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.Bare, UriTemplate = "{a}/{b}/{c}")]
  Entry RetrieveEntry(string a, string b, string c);
}

public class Service: IService
{
  public Entry RetrieveEntry(string a, string b, string c)
  {
    return new Entry
    {
      Xml = new XElement("test", a + "/" + b + "/" + c);
    }
  }
}

When hitting the service located at http://localhost/EntryService.svc/one/two/three, I expect to get the following xml:

<test>one/two/three</test>

Instead, I always get the above xml wrapped in a root node as shown below:

<Entry xmlns="http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/EntryTest">
  <test>one/two/three</test>
</Entry>

I've set the BodyStyle to Bare
I've set the [XmlSerializerFormat] attribute
I've tried putting [XmlRoot(null)] on the Entry class

The only thing that seems to work is changing the return type to XElement. This is really odd behavior of WCF. I can't find anything in the documentation as to why it is doing this.

Update (7/27): It appears you must use the XmlRootAttribute to accomplish this. Your WriteXml(XmlWriter writer) method can check to see if the root node was already added by the serializer, and if not add it:

public void WriteXml(XmlWriter writer)
{

    //only start document if needed
    bool start = false;
    if (writer.WriteState == WriteState.Start)
    {
        start = true;
        writer.WriteStartDocument();
        writer.WriteStartElement("root", "http://example.com");
    }
    //TODO: custom serialization here

    if (start)
    {
        writer.WriteEndElement();
        writer.WriteEndDocument(); 
    }
}

This allows the WriteXml to be usable even when the object isn't being serialized by the WCF serializer.

Posted by Jarrett on July 26 at 10:27 PM

Comments (0)

BlogSvc - New Blogging Service for .NET 3.5
Update: BlogService now has it’s own website, see http://blogsvc.net

I've started a new project on CodePlex called BlogService. Eventually, it will have it's own website at blogsvc.net. The point of this project is to provide a robust back-end for a blog site. It uses the provider model design pattern for abstracting the data layer similar to ASP.NET providers. I've uploaded a design diagram of the major classes. It also contains a WCF service that will expose multiple endpoints (soap, rest, json).

To kick things off, I created a community preview release that includes the following functionality:
1. BlogProvider
2. XmlBlogProvider
3. Business (Blog, BlogSite, BlogComment, etc.)
4. Configuration
5. Unit Tests
6. WCF Service
7. Multi-site support
This release provides most of the functionality needed to support a front-end blogging site. It does not include web pages yet.

BlogSvc Release 0.1
Posted by Jarrett, Jarrett on July 21 at 11:15 PM

Comments (0)
Comments Security Hole in BlogEngine.NET 1.4
I found a hole in BlogEngine.NET that allows anyone to delete and approve comments.
UPDATE 7/11: Fixed in 1.4.0.12
Verify the Hole
- Add a test comment to your blog
- Refresh the blog posting to retrieve latest source
- View source of blog posting
- Find guid of comment to delete (see line 103 below)
```
<div id="id_9c2b8578-1dde-421e-94ff-5ea7e0d82012" class="comment">
  <p class="date">7/10/2008 4:13:35 PM</p>
  <p class="gravatar"><img src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/b642b4217b34b1e8d3bd915fc65c4452.jpg?s=80&amp;d=..." alt="Test3" /></p>
  <p class="content">asfasdfafdasd sa afsdfdsaas </p>
  <p class="author">
    Test3
    <img src="/blogengine/pics/flags/us.png" class="flag" alt="us" />
  </p>
</div>
```
- Request a POST to BlogPostUrl.aspx?deletecomment=guid
- Refresh the page and notice comment is deleted
Patch the Hole

You can patch the hole by updating the Page_Load event in the CommentView.ascx.cs file by checking for an authenticated user (lines 117,118, & 127)
```
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
  if (Post == null)
    Response.Redirect(Utils.RelativeWebRoot);
  
  if (!Page.IsPostBack && !Page.IsCallback)
  {
    if (Page.User.Identity.IsAuthenticated)
    {
      if (Request.QueryString["deletecomment"] != null)
        DeleteComment();
      
      if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(Request.QueryString["approvecomment"]))
        ApproveComment();

      if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(Request.QueryString["approveallcomments"]))
        ApproveAllComments();
    }

  string path = Utils.RelativeWebRoot + "themes/" + BlogSettings.Instance.Theme + "/CommentView.ascx";
```
Repeat the steps given above to verify that the hole has been patched.

In the process of adding OpenID support to the comment system in BlogEngine.NET I found myself deep in a rabbit hole of refactoring. This comment security issue is just one of the things I've found during my journey. I've reported the issue on the BlogEngine.NET Issue Tracker. I think it is important to point out that the patch above is just a quick fix. The proper solution is to put authorization checks in the business layer (the BlogEngine.Core.Post business object in this case).
Posted by Jarrett on July 10 at 5:06 PM

Comments (0)

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.net, c#, asp.net, linq, htpc, woodworking

Browsing ASP.NET

New BlogSvc Release and Oxite

ASP.Net MVC Beta Crashing IIS7

Deploy MVC Application

Using the New DateTime Support in .NET 3.5 via MVC & jQuery

MVC is Cool

New jQuery Rater Plugin for Star Ratings

New BlogSvc Release 0.2

WCF Adds Root Node on IXmlSerializable Object

BlogSvc - New Blogging Service for .NET 3.5

Comments Security Hole in BlogEngine.NET 1.4

Verify the Hole

Patch the Hole

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