I just spent the last two hours trying to walk through Microsoft's "Web Services and Identity in Windows Azure Exercise 1: Using Windows Identity Foundation with a WCF Service in Windows Azure" which purports to show how to host a secured WCF service in Azure.
Unfortunately, the walkthrough is ridiculously complicated with a whopping 151 steps. I've tried to complete the first part of the walkthrough 3 separate times but without any luck. I'm pretty sure I'm following the instructions exactly as written but there's so much subtlety in there (certificate setup, configuration chaanges, etc.) that it's likely that I'm missing a critical detail. In either case 151 steps is clearly an order of magnitude too difficult for mere mortals to follow.
Anyway, any help in this rgard would be greatly appreciated....
Check out the BidNow sample. That is a lot less complicated. http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/BidNowSample
Also, check out the samples on http://acs.codeplex.com/
There's a pretty good article walking through this in the December 2010 MSDN Magazine - the fact that it's titled "Re-Introducing the Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service" says a lot. You have to "re-introduce" things that no one understood or used when you "introduced" it. :)
I am working on a website i will like to know the number of people who has visited the website. Can someone tell me what to do?
Use google analytics: http://www.google.com/analytics/
I would give you a code to insert but to be honest the best option is to use something like Google Analytics. It gives you a very good analysis of your website visits and has many features that will take you a very long time to develop
Since you've tagged this with asp.net, I presume you're running on IIS. Make sure logging is enabled for the site you're working with and then you can determine from the log files how many users are coming to your site by IP addresses.
Since it wasn't yet mentioned here in years, let me add that AWStats is very different from Google Analytics, but may anyway be a good web server traffic analysis tool for network administrators.
I have been a developer for 10+ years and so far my IIS knowledge is just enough for deploying stuff on it and get it running. Recently I have been playing with IIS 6 and realize the huge difference on the worker process model. I think I would need some good guide to update my knowledge in this area. Any good article/book recommendation?
IIS Tuner is an open source tool for tuning IIS 6, 7 and 7.5
There are several online resources, starting with this one:
Performance Tuning (IIS 6.0)
www.iis.net - central place for everything related to IIS..
I recently came across this which I thought was very good: Best practices for creating websites in IIS 6.0
David Wang has some great articles on the inner workings of IIS6. For various reasons his blog was split over two sites:
http://blogs.msdn.com/david.wang/default.aspx
http://w3-4u.blogspot.com/
And...Tess who is a MS escalation engineer has some amazing articles on debugging and diagnosing badly behaved/perfoming apps:
http://blogs.msdn.com/tess/default.aspx
My company is planning to start a forum for our software product which the clients can refer for general FAQ's, problems etc.
Right now we are planning to have:-
User manuals.
Best practices for different section's of the application
Frequently faced problems.
Forum where user can discuss issues with development team.
Any other ideas?
Edit:-
We have RSS and E-mail notification subscription to the forum.
Forum where user can discuss issues
with development team.
I don't know if this is a euphemism for "issue tracker" but if not, make sure you include a way for people to submit bug/feature/enhancement reports and track them to completion. Nothing is worse than not being able to submit a bug report or being able to submit a bug report but only into a black hole.
Communication is key.
If you add an issue tracker as suggested by Kevin, your list seems pretty ok to me.
I'd also suggest that you do not start out with too many different services that require interaction from your side (e.g. your developers) at first - I've seen (too) many good initiatives die simply because nobody in the company had enough time e.g. for regular answering of the forum questions.
In your case, I guess "best practices", "frequent problems" and the forum will all consume regular time from your dev team if you want to keep them alive and up-to-date, especially in the beginning. So I would not add more services at the beginning but make sure to get these right (and you can always add more services later on if you find that the users need them :-).
You.
Show that you care about your customers.
Many useful tips at Creating passionate users blog.
I am looking for a simple system to manage inbound emails from a support mailbox for a group with about 3 support people. I've looked at OTRS which seems to have the features that we need. Unfortunately, so far the UI still looks like a confusing mess.
Are there any good FOSS tools that would meet this need? I've heard murmurings that something called fooogzeeebugzo might have similar features, but it seems quite expensive for such simple needs.
Did you try IssueBurner? It was designed for this purpose. You can forward your mailbox (e.g. support#yourcompany.com) to a IssueBurner group and you can track the inbound mails until they are closed.
Here is a link to their video: http://issueburner.com/a/video
I have to agree, Fogbugz is probably the best out there. I have used both the hosted version and the purchased version which I hosted. It is top-notch.
BugTracker.NET is free, open source, and widely used. It has integration with incoming email. In other words, it will accept an incoming email and turn it into a support ticket.
My company recently started using Mojo Helpdesk: www.mojohelpdesk.com. It's a hosted service, not FOSS, but it's pretty cheap and the interface is slick.
TicketDesk- C# issue tracking system and support system
http://www.codeplex.com/TicketDesk
TicketDesk is efficient and designed to do only one thing, facilitate communications between help desk staff and end users. The overriding design goal is to be as simple and frictionless for both users and help desk staff as is possible.
TicketDesk is an asp.net web application written in C# targeting the .net 3.5 framework. It includes a simple database with support for SQL 2005 Express or SQL Server 2005. It can leverage SQL server for membership and role based security or integrate with windows authentication and Active Directory groups.
RT - Request Tracker handles inbound mail. I'm working to add inbound mail support to TicketDesk, but that might be a little while before that makes it into a release.
FogBugz is great as others have mentioned. I use it for my bug/feature tracking system, but I like to separate out my support ticketing system for my support staff to use. Another tool that has great email integration also is called HelpSpot, they have hosted and non-hosted versions for purchase, depending on your budget. It has a lot of great features, that make the prices worth it. Take the tour and see for yourself.
Scope out SmarterTrack, Help Desk Software from SmarterTools:
We use FogBugz...er, "fooogzeeebugzo"...and while it may be a bit expensive for your needs, it works very well.
bugzilla is more of an issue tracker than a request tracker, but it can be configured to handle email-based status tracking. That said, I think Steven has it- RT is the standard recommendation for this that I've seen.
The on-demand version of Fogbugz is a pretty cheap option for just a few people, and works really well. We did that for a while before moving it inhouse.
I've used fogbugz for over 12 months now and more and more I'm finding one of the most valuable features is the in built email support. I've got an on demand account and I'm finding more and more that I don't even check my email in the morning as all my business correspondence is put straight into fogbugz.
I realize that FOSS is your primary desire and I definitely agree with this. If I were to limit myself to FOSS, I would go with RT 3.8, http://blog.bestpractical.com/2008/07/today-were-rele.html#screenshots
However, if you are willing to entertain commercial solutions and are looking for a Helpdesk-"ish" application. I just deployed WebHelpDesk with great success at my current employment, where I am the primary sysadmin and Corporate IT person. They just released a new version, 9.1.1 and it is very well done. The email integration is superb and beyond what I have seen with most other FOSS and commercial issue/bug trackers, given that it is built to run a Helpdesk and not be a software or source code issue tracker. It runs on Windows and *nix, they have a great demo and you can obtain a 30 day trial installer. I have become a big fan of this software and think it has a reasonable price of $250/year/technician (support person).
If you want more info on how we deployed it, please email me and I'd be happy to discuss it at length. I have no more connection with them than I am a very happy customer.
Thanks for all the tips. For the moment, I am looking heavily at eTicket as it was trivial to setup and seems to be developing nicely at the moment. I may look at RT as well, though.
I'll second the suggestion for RT. See my post here for more thoughts and details on our setup.
From my personal experience I can recommend using Bridgetrak.
It works pretty smooth in our environment and includes rich helpdesk functionality for powerful tickets tracking.
I have a lot of experience using this tools - feel free to ask any questions!
As most of the answers are a little bit outdated, I would definitely recommend OsTicket (http://osticket.com/), a great open source project that offers lots of customization and a user friendly interface.
I have been using it for the last two years and I would rather choose OsTicket than OTRS or RT.