I have recently started using a shared-host for my clients so see project progress or to play with a new technology for myself. I seems like every time I deploy a new project that runs fine locally, I run into something new on the shared-host.
Do you have a shared hosting deployment checklist?
What are the common problems you run into when deploying to a shared host?
Medium Trust. If you are developing code to go into a shared host, you should set your local application to run in medium trust otherwise you can almost guarantee you'll get security issues with code that executes fine in full trust but dies in a medium trust environment.
This MSDN article explains about medium trust in more detail:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms998341.aspx
They don't always offer you direct access to the database (Enterprise Manager / Management Studio).
You end up using some weird web GUI for creating database entities, which does not accept otherwise valid SQL syntax and you have to update all your queries and stored procedures to accommodate their custom changes and restrictions.
One of mine is file IO permission problems. An example being writing to a file on the web server from ASP.NET. You have to use a provided online tool to allow permission to do more than reads.
No preview site.
That is, a host based path to your web application without actually pointing the DNS to it.
Example:
http://www234.your-shared-host.com/preview/user/bla/default.aspx (don't try it, it's just an example..)
Inconvenient cancellation procedure
In some of the shared hosts I used, I found out that for cancellation I must make a phone call. Nothing over the web, not even an email.
I bet the host thinks most people won't bother calling until it's really needed. They're right.
Related
We have developed a website. This will be deployed in IIS in server machine of a network. n number of people will access our website from their allocated pc's. What happens now is, if the browser is left open for an extended period of time, it is getting crashed, then i will have to reload the page to get access to my site. What should i do to overcome this problem?
Please advise on this.
Thanks
Venkat
You havent provided much information here so cant really comment anything specific (for e.g. runtime env, database servers, any specific tech. in use such as TCP/IP, web sockets.
There can be number of things that you could look into.
For the start you could look into resources that are not being disposed properly. For e.g. Database connection, large in memory .NET objects for e.g. file streams. Now this could be something as simple as using statements or exception handling(if .NET).
You could use profiler applications such as MiniProfiler (do google), Again if its Microsoft then you could use Microsoft Load Testing to see where the problem is.
Try using fiddler to see if it shows anything.
If you are using TCP/IP communication for e.g. push notifications from server side using websockets or node.js then you need to investigate if there are any threads/connections not properly closed/disposed.
list is sort of endless.. good luck
Ok, so here's the thing.
I'm developing an existing (it started being an ASP classic app, so you can imagine :P) web application under ASP.NET 4.0 and SQLServer 2005. We are 4 developers using local instances of SQL Server 2005 Express, having the source-code and the Visual Studio database project
This webapp has several "universes" (that's how we call it). Every universe has its own database (currently on the same server) but they all share the same schema (tables, sprocs, etc) and the same source/site code.
So manually deploying is really annoying, because I have to deploy the source code and then run the sql scripts manually on each database. I know that manual deploying can cause problems, so I'm looking for a way of automating it.
We've recently created a Visual Studio Database Project to manage the schema and generate the diff-schema scripts with different targets.
I don't have idea how to put the pieces together
I would like to:
Have a way to make a "sync" deploy to a target server (thanksfully I have full RDC access to the servers so I can install things if required). With "sync" deploy I mean that I don't want to fully deploy the whole application, because it has lots of files and I just want to deploy those new or changed.
Generate diff-sql update scripts for every database target and combine it to just 1 script. For this I should have some list of the databases names somewhere.
Copy the site files and executing the generated sql script in an easy and automated way.
I've read about MSBuild, MS WebDeploy, NAnt, etc. But I don't really know where to start and I really want to get rid of this manual deploy.
If there is a better and easier way of doing it than what I enumerated, I'll be pleased to read your option.
I know this is not a very specific question but I've googled a lot about it and it seems I cannot figure out how to do it. I've never used any automation tool to deploy.
Any help will be really appreciated,
Thank you all,
Regards
Have you heard of the term Multi-Tenancy? It might be worth look that up to see if that applied to your "Multiverse" especially if one universe is never accessed by another...
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multitenancy
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479086.aspx
UPDATE:
If the application and database is the same for each client (or Tenant) I believe there are applications that may help in providing the same code/db as an SaaS application? ie another application/configuration layer on top that can handle the deployments etc?
I think these are called Platform as a Service (PaaS) applications:
see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_as_a_service
Multi-Tenancy in your case may be possible, depending on client security requirements, with a bit of work (or a lot of work):
Option 1:
You could use the one instance of the application, ie deploy the site once and connect to a different database for each client. You would need to differentiate each client by URL to isolate content/data byt setting a connection string for each etc. (This would reduce your site deployments to one deployment)
Option 2:
You could create both a single instance of the application and use a single database. You would need to add a "TenantID" to each table and adjust all your code to accept a TenantID to ensure data security/isolation. Again you wold need to detect/differentiate the Tenant based on the URL to set the TenantID for the session used for every database call. (This would reduce your site and database deployment to one of each)
I make an application for querying from and inserting data to the database using ASP.NET 3.5 linq to SQL.
It works fine in the development server.
But after deploying to the staging server, after the first few requests, the application seems unresponsive no matter what I type in the URL. The whole IIS application is frozen. I know I can restart the application to fix that. But I don't want it to happen again in the future.
What are the possible causes of this?
I've just found a ref about this problem:
http://blogs.msdn.com/lucascan/archive/2009/04/14/troubleshooting-an-unresponsive-web-server-iis-part-1-of-2-gathering-the-data.aspx
http://forums.iis.net/p/1154624/1893546.aspx
It's not easy to provide an exact cause since we have no idea how the application was written, what dependencies exist, whether service packs/patches are installed etc. What we could help with is debugging the application.
Things I would start with:
Find out if other applications have the same problems.
Review the server event logs on both servers.
Memory, CPU usage etc on the server with Performance Monitor (perfmon.exe)
See what SQL is being generated with SQL Profiler.
Use an HTTP Analyzer like Fiddler to find out if the server is running anything in particular but the browser is not displaying it.
As BrianLy says this is one of those tricky to pin down situations. We had several problems with ASP.NET apps taking seemingly forever to start, this was down to our corporate firewall blocking crl.microsoft.com.
It's probably a stab in the dark, but it might be worth investigating. The chances of your issue being this sound slim though.
A quick test to see if it is something related to this is to add 127.0.0.1 crl.microsoft.com to your hosts file.
We have a web application that uses AJAX to talk to an ASP.NET web service. We would like to write another version that can be used offline. We need to be able to re-use our existing code as much as possible. What approaches should we consider?
The app is currently using XmlHttpRequest to get dynamic data from the server. Obviously the offline version will not be able to talk to the server, but it does need to talk to something! I'm sure installing IIS or Cassini on the client would work, but I was hoping for a simpler solution. Is there no other way for JavaScript to talk to some external code?
There are plenty offline web apps nowaday. It simply evolve from AJAX.
For example:
WoaS (wiki on a stick / stickwiki), Tiddly Wiki,
Google doc and Gmail is going to be offline.
You don't need a webserver to run these webapps in offline mode. Just store the required data, scripts on the client side (usually as XML).
One of the possibilities would be to use Cassini. This is a web server that acts as a host for the ASP.Net runtime. You can host Cassini in a Windows application or a Windows Service. In this scenario you do not have to rewrite the web app and the web service.
Most other solutions do require a rewrite of both your web app and your web service. Depending on the way you have written the existing app you can reuse more or less code.
Have you considered HTML5 with application cache and offline storage?
If you hope to create an "offline" version of your package your biggest issue by far will be the need to install your site into a local copy of IIS (registering a virtual directory, etc.). I pursued this briefly a few years ago and gave up in frustration. It can be done: a number of software vendors such as DevExpress do this so you have local copies of their demonstration projects. Indeed, I was able to do this. The problem was the classic "it works on my computer" syndrome. There was simply no way to guarantee that most of my end-users had anywhere near the technical proficiency to make this work.
Thus, I would strongly recommend that you not pursue this path unless you have very technically proficient users and a huge support staff.
But there is one more very important question: did you abstract all data access code to a DAL? If not, then you have a lot of work to do in managing data access as well.
Update: user "Rine" has recommended Cassini. I just wanted to let you know that I pursued Cassini and another 3rd-party web server as well. I think that there are licensing issues with Cassini but may be wrong - it has been awhile. However, I do distinctly remember running into barrier after barrier with this approach and very little documentation to help me out.
if you want a web application run offline, you need a webserver (IIS for ASP) bound to the localhost (127.0.0.1) address. After this so can access your web application by typing http://127.0.0.1/ in your web browser the same way as you do online.
If your AJAX relies on XMLHttpRequest's, you can:
Make the static versions of XML's you get over XMLHttpRequest and put then into a folder on disk.
Rewrite your XMLHttpRequest URL's so that they point to files on disk.
Rewrite your XMLHttpRequest's so that they don't check status (it's always 0 for the file:// protocol.
All JScript works on file:// pages as well as on http:// ones.
Of course it's not the best way to develop static pages, but it may save you some time on rewriting.
I havent come across any framework specifically built for asp.net like the ones available for PHP or RoR.
Here is a good article by Steven to get you started with HTML 5 and ASP.Net Creating HTML 5 Offline application
Obviously the offline version will not be able to talk to the server, but it does need to talk to something!
Enter HTML5 LocalStorage. It works like a database and enables you to put data on your client. Indeed you have to rework parts of your code in javascript and transmit it to the client, but then it would work offline.
Local Storage works like this:
- Setter: window.localStorage.setItem(KEY, VALUE)
- Getter: window.localStorage.getItem(KEY)
- Remove: window.localStorage.removeItem(KEY)
To get the main page working offline you need to create a manifest. This is used to store complete sites on the client. Please refer to this for more information about manifests:
http://diveintohtml5.info/offline.html
You want to build a web application to work offline?? It can't be done.
You could split the interface code from the rest (in diferent dlls) and create a windows application to mimic the behaviour of your web application. This way you have 2 distinct user interfaces but the same code for business rules and data access.
I don't really see any other way...
I have a web app which queries a Lucene index and it works just fine in a W2K3 server in my network. Now I got my azure code so I wanted to test the service uploading the app. In order to do that I had to install Vista (I did it in a Virtual machine) cause the Azure SDK won't install on an XP box.
I created my Cloud Service, added the files from my app but when I run it (just F5) I get a SecurityException, when I call Lucene to query the index, saying:
The application attempted to perform
an operation not allowed by the
security policy. To grant this
application the required permission
please contact your system
administrator or change the
application's trust level in the
configuration file.
I've been googling around and the solutions I've found concern modifying the machine.config file which is something I won't be able to do "in the cloud".
Could anybody help on this?
Ok, in case somebody is facing the same issues, this is the correct answer which I got from the Azure forum:
This is because of the trust policy
for the Windows Azure CTP. The
enviroment variablies TEMP and TMP are
avaliable and set up appropiately.
However, System.IO.Path.GetTempPath
and System.IO.GetTempFile do not work
as they require unrestricted
environment permissions. I would
suggest you contact the Lucene
developers to see if they can modify
the code so it runs properly in medium
trust environments.
Thanks to Daniel C. Wang for the answer.
I also found a question regarding my same issue and how if was fixed.
Here the link: Lucene.Net fails at my host because it calls GetTempPath(). What’s the work around?
You can change trust in the web.config, unless that has been disallowed in the machine.config (which it often is in shared hosting). inside your put and see what happens.
If you are not allowed to do that, see if you can get your control GACd by talking to your provider. If that doesn't work, sorry to say but you are out of luck. Sometimes you can find workarounds that don't require full trust for a specific method, but if a third party dll requires it there is not much you can do
Haven't done this but isn't it possible to have a desktop version of the Live Operating Environment? This would seem a good start for troubleshooting.