Tagged: ASP.NET
CloudDays™ – Quick Start to Azure Redis Cache
Azure Redis Cache helps your application become more responsive even as user load increases and leverages the low latency, high-throughput capabilities of the Redis engine. This separate distributed cache layer allows your data tier to scale independently for more efficient use of compute resources in your application layer.
Redis is an open source, BSD licensed, advanced key-value cache and store. It is often referred to as a data structure server since keys can contain strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets, bitmaps and hyperloglogs. Redis supports a set of atomic operations on these data types.
Microsoft Azure Redis Cache is based on this cache and store. It gives you access to a secure, dedicated Redis cache, managed by Microsoft, providing the best of both worlds: the rich features and ecosystem of Redis, and reliable hosting and monitoring by Microsoft.
You can use Redis from most programming languages used today.
Azure Redis Cache leverages Redis authentication and also supports SSL connections to Redis.
The purpose of this article is to help you decide if Azure Redis is the right technology for your project. The Azure documentation is pretty good to help you get started, but is spread all over the place, so this article focuses on the steps to get started, and gives you a peek into what your code looks like. (If you are like me, you can often tell if the technology is a good fit by seeing code.)
NOTE: Of course, you can use Redis without Azure. For more information on that, see Distributed Caching using Redis Server with .NET/C# Client.
Snippet – Setting MIME Types (Font Awesome or Custom Fonts or Json File Extensions Doesn’t Work When Deployed on Windows)
When using custom fonts on Windows Azure, users have reported issues. For example, Font Awesome icons would not display. Or even if the fonts do display, it might not display correctly on some devices, such as Windows Phones.
In other cases, you may have a file type that does not map to the right MIME type.
In fact, I exposed most of the JSON files with the .txt extension just to avoid the issue of IIS not serving up .JSON files as expected.
It turns out — the issue is that IIS 7 – 8.1 serves up the wrong MIME type for web font files. So you need to be sure the right MIME types are being served up for your font files, as shown here: Proper MIME type for fonts.
When deploying to an IIS servers you need to add MIME support.
WebSocket Using SignalR
SignalR offers a simple and clean API to write real time web applications where the server needs to continuously push data to clients. Common applications are chat, news feed, notifications, multiplayer games.
SignalR will use WebSockets under the covers when it’s available, and gracefully fallback to other techniques and technologies when it isn’t, while your application code stays the same.
HTML5 Tutorial – WebSocket Server (on ASP.NET)
WebSocket, introduced of as part of HTML5, defines a full-duplex single socket connection over which messages can be sent between client and server.
WebSocket is not just another enhancement to HTTP. The WebSocket standard simplifies much of the complexity around bi-directional web communication and connection management.
While the client side coding is fairly straight forward, implementing WebSockets on some development platforms involves writing a large amount of code just to provide basic functionality. A lot of the functionality could and should be provided by the framework, leaving you to focus on your application.
There are several WebSocket server implementations. Here are are few that may help meet your needs.
Microsoft has implemented WebSocket on different places in Windows 8 and .NET 4.5 Stack. These include an implementation for WCF and one for ASP.NET and another with SignalR.
Each has trade-offs.
In this post, you’ll get an overall understanding on how you can get started on several platforms. I’ll provide an overview where you can get started should you want to build your own framework in WCF and ASP.NET.
And I’ll implement the echo service that will work with the client in my previous post using Microsoft.WebSockets.
DevDays® 