I have a small solution that is composed out of 2 main projects a Mvc4 Web Api and a silverlight 5 Application. I've configured and deploy the application initially on the Azure platform and it all went great, but ever since when I deploy again the silverlight project does not get pushed and the online site has the old version.
I should mention all works great with the azure simulator on my local dev machine.
Anybody had a similar issue?
Regards,
I would suspect first (as Simon suggests) that the browser likely still has the previous client cached and loads that instead of downloading your new client.
You can use the version number in the code on your page that hosts the silverlight app to help. While it's easy for you to clear the cache - you don't really want to have to tell users to do that whenever you update.
Set the version to whatever your latest assembly version is (silverlight client project assembly), this will force the browser to download the client if the cached version is a lower number.
<param name="source" value="AppPath/App.xap?version=2.0.0.6"/>
Ok,
So after pulling my hair out, I finally figured out.
I have to change the build configuration to release in VS do a rebuild and then do publish because apparently the azure project does not do rebuild on the project when you publish it.
To solve this issue you'll need to identify the source of the problem (is it a client side problem where you have a caching issue or not). Even though you say caching isn't the problem we'll need to be sure about this first.
What I suggest is that you do the following first:
Activate Remote Desktop on your role
Connect through RDP and save this file to the role: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/841290 (fciv.exe)
Find the *.xap file (usually in E:\sitesroot) and get its checksum (using fciv.exe)
Modify the Silverlight project locally (maybe change a label or move around an element) to make sure its hash has changed.
Redeploy the application
Connect through RDP and use fciv.exe to get the checksum of the *.xap file once again
Compare both checksums
If the checksums are different, then it means that the deployment worked correctly and the Silverlight xap has been updated. If the checksum is the same, the problem lies with the deployment.
Please let us know the result so we can help you find the solution.
Related
I have a web application project in VS2012 which I'm publishing using a "Web Deploy Package". I want this package to include app-pool settings, specifically creating an IIS app-pool and assigning the newly created application to it.
I'm familiar with the option "Include application pool settings used by this Web project" available when the project is configured to use an IIS instance (not IIS Express), but IIS configuration is not part of the project file, and thus not source controlled. What happens when somebody builds a deployment package on a machine that hasn't had IIS meticulously configured? Not ideal.
How else then, can I go about getting AppPool settings into my web deploy package? I understand that the appPoolConfig provider is IIS7+ only, I'm fine with that limitation. I've banged my head against this issue in the past and never found a solution. 18 months later, we've got a new VisualStudio version, and a new web-publishing-pipeline, are there new options to address this? Or maybe something I missed when I first tackled this problem?
Edit
OK, I'm seeing the following as options:
Configure my project to sync settings from an IIS instance. As mentioned, I'm not a fan of this given that it puts settings outside of the project, meaning the environment has to be meticulously configured to build + publish. Plus it drags along other IIS settings I don't want included.
Inject something into the web-publishing-pipeline (WPP) to modify the archive.xml. I've toyed with this in the past and had limited success. One problem is the pipeline isn't exactly co-operative with working directly on the archive.xml file, another problem is some of the more cryptic attributes involved, like MSDeploy.MSDeployProviderOptions which appears to have some Base64 encoded binary? No idea what to put in there.
Find an existing "provider" that can do what I want. I might be out of luck here, the appPoolConfig provider only seems to want to read / write IIS, not, say, an XML file of settings. Does anybody know otherwise?
Write my own "provider" to produce manifest output entries. I'm not sure, is it possible to write a custom provider that writes to a manifest using the name of an existing provider? As in, MyCustomPoolProvider writes appPoolConfig sections into a manifest? This sounds like a potentially painful exercise that may or may not work. Would I still need to figure out the encoding of whatever is going into MSDeploy.MSDeployProviderOptions?
I get the feeling that the fundamental obstacle with Web Deploy for what I'm trying to accomplish, is how strictly it leans on "providers". The pre-existing providers are largely designed for IIS synchronisation, not primary development and publication. It so happens that some of these providers can be relatively easily hooked into via MSBuild, but the majority insist on pulling data from IIS, and that's that.
You are correct in your understanding of the appPoolConfig provider, in that it can only sync between App Pools and can't be provided with the configuration directly. What you could potentially do is keep a copy of the appPool in question in package form (ie. msdeploy -verb:sync -source:appPoolConfig=PoolName -dest:package=apppool.zip) and attempt to hijack the pipeline so that the MSDeploy call adds the application content into the package, leaving the existing content there.
Alternatively, you could always keep the packages separate and deploy them with different calls to MSDeploy.
FYI, MSDeploy.MSDeployProviderOptions is simply an encoded version of the parameters supplied to the provider when it was packaged. For example, -source:dirPath=c:\,ignoreErrors=0x10293847 -dest:package=package.zip would package the ignoreErrors value.
I have a 3rd party web page screen capture DLL from http://websitesscreenshot.com/ that lets me target a URL and save the page to a image file. I've moved this code into my Azure-based project and when I run it on my local sandboxed dev box and save to the Azure blob, everything is fine. But when I push the bits to my live server on Azure, it's failing.
I think this is because either MSHTML.dll and/or SHDOCVW.dll are missing from my Azure configuration.
How can I get these libraries (plus any dependent binaries) up to Azure?
I found the following advice on an MSFT forum but haven't tried it yet. http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsazuredevelopment/thread/0344dcff-6fdd-4479-a3b4-3e89750a92f4/
Hello, I haven't tried mshtml in the cloud. But generally speaking, to
use a native dll in a Web Role, you add the dll to the Web Role
project just like adding a picture (choose add existing items). Then
make sure the Build Action is set to Content. This tells Visual Studio
to copy the dll file to the output package.
Also check dependencies carefully. A lot of problems related to native
code are caused by missing dependencies, such as a particular VC++
runtime dll.
Thought I'd ask here first before I burn a day or two on an unproven solution.
EDIT #1:
it turns out that our problem was not related to MSHTML.dll or SHDOCVW.dll missing from the Azure server. They're there.
The issue is that by default new server instance have the IE security hardening feature enabled, and this was preventing our 3rd party dll from executing script. So we needed to turn off the enhanced IE security configuration settings. This is also a non-trivial exercise.
In the meantime, we just created a server-side version of the feature on our site we need to make screen captures from (e.g. we eliminated JSON-based rendering of UI on the client), and we were able to proceed.
I think the solution mentioned in the MSDN forum thread is correct. You should put them as part of your project files, so that the SDK will package and deploy them to the VM on the cloud.
But if they are COM and need to be registed you'd better call the register command via the Startup feature. Please check http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/hh351539
HTH
I am using a custom Api Token implementation using WCF Web API on Azure. This uses FormsAuthentication.Decrypt in order to obtain a FormsAuthenticationTicket. To make sure that the decrpyt process works across multiple instances, I have provided a MachineKey in my web.config.
However, I've noticed that the MachineKey doesn't seem to be working on Azure because it looks like Azure is using a random machinekey and overwriting the one I specificed in the web.config I'm using the latest Azure SDK 1.5 (or 1.6?)
I am well aware of this issue with Azure SDK 1.3 and I believe this was rectified in 1.4. Is there a chance that this issue has since re-appeared on Azure SDK1.5/1.6?
I was having the same problem where my FormsAuthentication tickets were not validating across sub domains after the recent Microsoft .Net 4.0 Security upgrade KB2656351.
My FormsAuth tickets are generated from my dedicated servers and read on sub domains on Windows Azure.
In order to get all sub domains to decrypt the tickets I made sure all my dedicated servers were patched with the latest .Net updates via Windows Update. Then I upgraded my Azure project to version 1.6 and selected the latest Azure OS after deploying. This seemed to do the trick.
Here are some articles about the issue:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2011/12/28/asp-net-security-update-shipping-thursday-dec-29th.aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms11-100.mspx
cheers
Francesco
Windows Azure already synchronizes machine keys across the same role in a deployment. As such, you should be fine to completely ignore the MachineKey setting in web.config and just let Windows Azure handle it for you (the web farm scenario is well supported). Your scenario is supported on Windows Azure out of box with no modifications (just call Decrypt).
The issue that you might be talking about was a 1.3 issue where the web.config files were being modified directly to sync the machine keys. This failed when the file was read-only (i.e. TFS source control) and caused deployment failures. That was fixed some time ago.
I think I finally found the solution. This had nothing to do with Azure or MachineKeys but had more to do with the way the app was being tested. The encrypted key that was stored on my Phone App was encrypted on a different web server (however, the machine key used was the same). I just un-installed and re-installed my app thereby forcing the server to generate a new key.
It seems that decrypting this key on a different server was causing problems. I'm a little worried if this will cause problems in the future. Shouldn't using the same Machine Keys ensure that encrypt/decrypt works across boxes?
Anyways, I apologize for the inconvenience caused.
We seem to have the same problem as well. We set machinekey set in the web.config file. Things were fine until a couple of days ago when Decrypt started returning null. The decryptionkey and validationkey are identical on all machines. Not sure what the problem is.
EDIT - Azure v1.6 does seem to respect the machinekey we set in the config file. We figured out how to solve our problem - Maybe this would help you - we were seeing that decrypt on the cookie does not work on our Windows 7 64 bit dev machines. Then we checked pending updates and there were a couple of .NET updates related to security. We ran the updates and voila things started to work again.
OK so I had the problem as described above in a 3-server NLB group.
It looks like the Windows Automatic Updates had installed KB2656352, KB2656358 and KB2657424 on two of the three servers.
I'd put money on the fact that it's because some of the servers are running with the patch and some aren't. I guess machines that have been patched don't like decoding things encoded by a non-patched machine (and/or vice-versa).
Anyway, I've installed all three patches on the remaining machine and put it back into the NLB group. It seems to all work fine.
The following issue just crept up on me. The steps mentioned below had worked just fine until about 2 days ago.
When I deploy a update to a solution (of web parts) to a SharePoint 2010 server I don't see the update. The solution does get installed, but from what I can tell the installed web parts are over a month old (nothing new is installed).
I do the following steps through PowerShell:
retract the solution from the web app
remove the solution
add the solution
install the solution to the web app
I have tried restarting the Web App, restarting IIS and also restarting the server. Nothing seems to work.
I notice that after I remove the solution it does get removed from the GAC. After I add/install it the solution does reappears in the GAC.
Am I missing something? Am I overlooking a step that I should be doing? Something to try?
I never deactivated/reactivated the Feature.
After following the same steps I mentioned in my question I just deactivated, then reactivated, the Feature and everything started to working fine.
This is an easy thing to I can start to implement with my solution updates. However, why did I never have to do this step before?
In general, you should check your ULS log to see which version of your solution is running. If you see the old one, then you can be sure that your activated site feature is still bound to the old version. In this case you have to Inactivate the site feature indeed to loose that tie and then Activate to bind to the new one (it appears Activate always ties the site feature to the newest version of the solution).
Maybe you had not to do this earlier, because you did not change the version number of your solution, appearing as the same version in GAC on the server. In this case you had your site feature already pointing to the correct version of your solution, therefore didn't have to reset the feature.
You have probably checked, but just in case. Make sure that the powershell script is not adding a month old package.
Is the problem in the web part code or the configuration? The configuration usually unghosts itself sooner or later and refuses to update from the solution - you can update the file in the gallery manually if anything has changed there. For most updates there won't be any changes because existing web parts won't get updates applied anyway - they will use new code but old configuration.
If the problem is the code itself, does the assembly appear to the system to be unchanged? All the hardcoded full name references in SharePoint config files mean that usually you are deploying a new assembly but with the same version numbers. This can mean that the system doesn't bother making the update. I have found it very useful to update AssemblyFileVersion (which does not affect binding) on every build and have a page in _layouts that displays the file versions of all the loaded assemblies so I know exactly what is running.
When I deploy my web part locally everything is fine. The web part is registered as safe, and is completely usable.
When I deploy the wsp to another server the web part comes back with the following error although everything appears to be deployed correctly (and the SafeControls appear within the web.config). :
Web Part Error: A Web Part or Web Form Control on this Page cannot be displayed or imported. The type XXXXX could not be found or it is not registered as safe.
It is almost the exact same issue as this question. The only difference being that when I look at my web.config on the server I am deploying to I DO see the SafeControls.
Any thoughts on things that I could try to fix the issue? Server settings, how I package or deploy, etc.
I was able to solve my issues by manually removing the solution from the GAC. Then I just tried to add the solution again and everything works well.
I had added the web part in question after the initial upload of the solution (sorry about leaving that part out of the description). Before doing this I was trying to retract and delete from the Central Admin then retry the addition. Apparently this didn't actually delete the solution from the GAC.
The site was using the old version of the solution which did indeed not include a SafeControl for the new web part. Once the old version was removed the addition of the new version went without a hitch and all is well.
Thanks to all for their suggestions.