I'm using VirtualBox on a Windows 10 machine along with Docker to deploy ASP.NET websites to local Linux Containers. To be clear, this isn't accessing websites with http://localhost, this is accessing locally an VirtualBox virtual network.
For example, my local IP and subnet is here, but my VirtualBox is here:
Make sense? A Linux VM running Docker containers is then http://192.168.99.100, for example, on various ports.
Strangely, however, I was unable to access these VirtualBox-hosted websites with Microsoft Edge, while they worked on Chrome and Firefox. I wanted to fix this. Just saying "use another browser" isn't enough, I like to figure it out.
I ended up trying this, and oddly, I was right. Go to Start, type "Internet Options" then then the Security Tab, then click Local Intranet, then Sites. Add your Virtual Machine's IP (in this case, the Docker Host) in that list and you're golden.
Now about the WHY....I have no idea. I'll report back as I keep poking around.
Sponsor: Big thanks to Infragistics for sponsoring the feed this week. Responsive web design on any browser, any platform and any device with Infragistics jQuery/HTML5 Controls. Get super-charged performance with the world’s fastest HTML5 Grid - Download for free now!
About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
Web Apps - This is the Azure Web Sites that you use today. .NET, node.js, Python, Java, PHP, and more.
Mobile Apps - libraries and runtimes for iOS/Windows/Android/Mac, plus offline sync support, notifications, and more
Logic Apps - Workflow in the cloud (like IIFTTT but hosted and controlled by you) that can orchestrate business processes within your App Service
API Apps - RESTful web services, connections to lots of SaaS systems like Dropbox, Office365, etc, plus security and automatic versioning.
In April the Azure team added isolated App Service Environments. An App Service Environment provides a isolated and fully dedicated environment for securely running all of your apps including Web Apps, Mobile Apps, API Apps and Logic Apps. Your apps run on virtual machines that only run your apps. You aren't on a pool of shared machines like much of the cloud. These dedicated App Service Environments can also scale much larger than the standard App Service. App Service Environments always run in their own private virtual network that you control.
Today at the Convergence Conference in Spain, Bill Staples announcedPowerApps. The team I work on doesn't just make ASP.NET, we also make tools and services for Azure App Service and for the last year the team has been building PowerApps. PowerApps makes it easy to quickly create new business apps, connect systems and then share those apps with anyone on your team.
You should go check out http://www.powerapps.com to learn about the creation process for business users (like, folks who use Office but don't program), but I decided to focus more on how a professional developer would use Azure App Service and PowerApps, so I made a video to demonstrate a real example.
A Real Scenario
I wrote an app something like 13 years ago for Pioneer Courthouse Square here in Portland. The square is the Center of the City and it's covered with bricks that have the name of the people who donated to have the square built. There's tens of thousands of bricks and they are hard to find. There was an Access Database and a paper map but that was lame, so I put together an ASP app and a SQL database to generate a printable map that gets visitors within ten or so feet of their brick.
This is a real legacy app that has been running - happily and unchanged - for over a decade. We don't like to admit apps like this exist but the world is full of them. This apps was created before the iPhone, before ubiquitous connectivity, before web services, and before federated security. I thought it would be cool to make this legacy data available as a JSON-based web service, secure it's admin access with Azure Active Directory, build a CRUD mobile admin app with PowerApps for iOS, Android, and Windows, and then, just for fun, also create a native Android app with Xamarin 4 and the Azure Mobile Apps libraries so that volunteers can manage requests for photographs of bricks.
What does this all mean? What's changed?
PowerApps is the business application creation side. Think of it as a new member of the Office Family. It's not a Visual Studio thing. Apps made with PowerApps are sharable with in your organization as easy as sharing documents and they run on Windows, Android, and iOS. A business user could build a new workflow app and share it with everyone. They can auth that new app against APIs like Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, Dropbox, Twitter, Google Drive, and OneDrive. For example, my example app takes photos of the bricks and puts the result in Azure Storage, but I could just as easily drop them in Google Drive or OneDrive.
However, for Visual Studio developers, or any developer, you still use the language of your choice (C#, F#, node.js, PHP, etc) and write Web APIs and Apps and host them in Azure App Service as you always have. But, if you want, those APIs can live in a new gallery that is specific to your organization so that anyone in your org (developer or business user alike) can use in their applications. My legacy BrickFinder is now an authenticated API living in an Azure App Service Environment. The API is being used by a website, an Android app written with Xamarin, and also an application created with PowerApps, running everywhere.
One other interesting point to note is that PowerApps pricing isn't consumption based, it's user-based pricing. Pay by the head, rather than prices fluctuating by consumption. For companies with public facing apps like my startup, I like pricing that changes with the popularity and usage of my app. For enterprise and large companies, simple pricing that's per-user makes more sense and is easier to budget for.
Check out the launch videos. PowerApps is in private preview now (go sign up at http://www.powerapps.com if you like), but you'll be hearing more about it in the months to come.
Sponsor: Big thanks to Infragistics for sponsoring the feed this week. Responsive web design on any browser, any platform and any device with Infragistics jQuery/HTML5 Controls. Get super-charged performance with the world’s fastest HTML5 Grid - Download for free now!
About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
The .NET Core and the Core Libraries are open source and run on Windows, Mac, and Linux. In fact, you can run them with support, today, in production on Windows and Linux (Mac is for development, not production).
Head over to http://get.asp.net to get ASP.NET 5 with .NET Core on any platform. Also get the free cross platform editor Visual Studio Code as well.
Because .NET Core runs anywhere, there are things that it doesn't have. It doesn't have a UI layer (no WinForms, for example, because that makes no sense on Linux) or Registry Access (that's only on Windows, so it's simply omitted). While these omissions make sense, others don't exist because of lack of times, changing priorities, or peoplepower.
Currently, as of the time of this blog post's writing, .NET Core has no good built-in option for image resizing or image generation/creation. There is no System.Drawing because there is no Win32 GDI. There are some options, that I'll point out later, but this clearly hasn't been a priority so it's not done yet. There has been some work on System.Drawing.Graphics, but it seems stalled.
Is this wise? Honestly... I don't know. I could be writing code that may be suddenly obsolete. There has been little feedback on questions I've asked but it's a nice learning process if anything and I will definitely be releasing the code for consumption.
Enter, you, us, the community. Jim has asked for help, and I'm also asking for help. Is Server-Side graphics manipulation in ASP.NET 5 important? Jim asks:
Please... Spread the word, contribute algorithms, submit performance improvements, unit tests. Help me set up CI for nightly releases.
Performance is a biggie, if you know anything about the new vector types and can apply some fancy new stuff with that it would be awesome.
There's a lot of developers out there who could write this stuff a lot better and faster than I and I would love to see what we collectively can come up with so please, if you can help in any way it would be most welcome and beneficial for all.
Sponsor: Thanks to RedGate for sponsoring the blog this week. They're offering a free .NET eBook! Discover 52 tips to improve your .NET performance! Our new eBook features dozens of tips and tricks to boost .NET performance. With contributions from .NET experts around the world, you’ll have a faster app in no time. Download your free copy.
About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
It was a huge day in New York today as I got to join Scott Guthrie and the team at the Connect() 2015 event as they announced a bunch of stuff, including, but not limited to:
ASP.NET 5 RC1 is out with .NET Core and has a Go Live License. This means you can go into production with ASP.NET 5 on Windows or Linux and Microsoft will support you.
You can get ASP.NET at, wait for it, http://get.asp.net. Yes. This lively URL is a mini-site that will look at your OS and show you Linux, Mac, or Windows (try visiting it on a mobile phone for fun, too) and tell you how to get ASP.NET.
If you insist, you can visit https://get.asp.net/OtherDownloads for a list of all the packages and combinations available. There is a .pkg for Mac and a .tar.gz and some instructions for Linux. In the future I hope/expect we'll have .NET in some popular OS package managers.
Node.js Tools 1.1 for Visual Studio was also released. A lot of folks don't realize how cool Node.js development is in Visual Studio. Node.js Tools for VS is free and open source AND works with the Visual Studio Community, which, ahem, is also free.
If you don't have Visual Studio, I'd recommend you grab Visual Studio Code which is a non-threatening size and runs on any OS, then if you're a command line person you can do this on Windows:
We had so much fun making our "parade" of cool cloud demos. I get tired of doing demos around product catalogs and such, so we build a connected Health Clinic. We pulled data in from thousands of (simulated) Microsoft Bands, as well as my actual physical Band 2 that I wear every day. We combined my heart rate data with my actual live and historical glucose data and ran it through Azure Machine Learning to create a "Hanselman Stress Index" to get a sense of how stress and my schedule affects my heart rate and blood glucose. You should really watch the video to get the full effect.
We'll do some cleanup of the slides and code and try to get it all on GitHub soon(ish) so please be patient with us.
I also want to point out the documentation for ASP.NET 5 RC1 over at http://docs.asp.net. This documentation is hosted and built at ReadTheDocs using Python and Sphinx and managed as source in GitHub using reStructuredText.
Contributing to the docs is a great way for YOU to get involved in Open Source, especially if you are a FirstTimer! Check out this great video on how to contribute to the ASP.NET documentation. The community can contribute by:
Visual Studio adds a cloud subscription purchase options
This is kind of like how you can get Adobe Creative Cloud or Office 365, if you're familiar with that. You pay a monthly or yearly fee like Office 365 and get Visual Studio and a bunch of other benefits.
Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 RTM will be available on Nov. 30.
And if you're doing really serious IoT or embedded work, native Android libraries, Linux kernel modules, or small boards like Raspberry PIs, check out http://visualgdb.com which is an amazing and very complete 3rd party add in for Visual Studio!
If you're doing Arduino development, check out http://www.visualmicro.comwhich has a brand new version and really lights up Visual Studio with some powerful features like an automatic Arduino Board Downloader.
It means that you can build basically whatever you want, however you want. You can use the editor you like, the OS you like, and the languages you like. VSCode on a Mac doing Node and deploying to Azure? Check. ASP.NET 5 with C# to Docker Containers in a bunch of VMs created in Azure and managed with Microsoft Operations Manager? Check. And on and on. Node.js on VS, C to Raspberry Pi's in C in VS, whatever you dig. It's a whole new world.
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Build servers are great at compiling code and running tests, but not so great at deployment. When you find yourself knee-deep in custom scripts trying to make your build server do something it wasn't meant to, give Octopus Deploy a try.
About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
I posted a rant back in 2012 called "Everything's broken and nobody's upset." Here's another. Lots of people commented on that first post and a number agreed with the general premise. Some were angry and thought that I was picking on particular companies or groups. Sure, it's easy to throw stones, and criticism is a great example of stone throwing. So, in the years since I posted I made a concerted and focused effort on a personal level to report bugs. By this, I mean, I REPORT BUGS. I take screencasts or videos, I email reproductions (repros) and I fill bug issues anywhere and anytime I can because a Bug Report is a Gift.
Fast forward a few years, and I think that we as an industry are perhaps still headed in the wrong way.
Technology companies are outsourcing QA to the customer and we're doing it using frequent updates as an excuse.
This statement isn't specific to Apple, Google, Microsoft or any one organization. It's specific to ALL organizations. The App Store make it easy to update apps. Web Sites are even worse. How often have you been told "clear your cache" which is the 2015 equivalent to "did you turn it on and off again?"
It's too easy to ship crap and it's too easy to update that crap. When I started in software we were lucky to ship every 6 to 9 months. Some places ship every year or two, and others still ship once.
I see folks misusing Scrum and using it as an excuse to be sloppy. They'll add lots of telemetry and use it as an excuse to avoid testing. The excitement and momentum around Unit Testing in the early 2000s has largely taken a back seat to renewed enthusiasm around Continuous Deployment.
But it's not just the fault of technology organizations, is it? It's also our fault - the users. We want it now and we like it beta. We look at software like iOS6 and say "it feels dated." I even overheard someone recently say that iOS9 felt visually dated. It JUST came out. Do we really have to restyle our sites and reship our apps every few months to satisfy a finicky public?
As with many rants, there isn't a good conclusion. I think it's clear this is happening. The question for you, Dear Reader, is do you agree? Do you see it in in your own organization and in the software and hardware that you use every day? Is the advent of the evergreen browser and the always updated phone a good thing or a bad thing?
Sound off in the comments.
Sponsor: Thanks to Infragistics for sponsoring the feed this week. Responsive web design on any browser, any platform and any device with Infragistics jQuery/HTML5 Controls. Get super-charged performance with the world’s fastest HTML5 Grid - Download for free now!
About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
A Real Scenario
