@robdmoore

One of the things that you need to live with if you are creating a metro-style application is that you are in a sandbox and consequently you don’t have the full .NET runtime available to you. Thus, when I wanted to do some signing using a pfx certificate in my Windows 8 application I was sad, but not surprised to see that the awesome System.Security namespace isn’t available. Instead you need to deal with the Windows.Security namespace, which is a cut-down set of cryptographic functionality with a completely different API to what you might be used to!

Most of the code samples I could find were demonstrating how to create a new public/private keypair and then use that to perform the signing etc., but that wasn’t useful for me in this instance because I wanted to use a private key we already had (and trusted).

The trick of course was to try and load our certificate in, and looking through all of the classes and methods in the namespace it wasn’t immediately clear how to do that. I originally tried using the CertificateEnrollmentManager.ImportPfxDataAsync method, but apart from the fact I wasn’t able to figure out how to get my pfx file data into a format that method would select I eventually realised this wouldn’t help me. This method imports the certificate into the sandboxed certificate store the app has, but this isn’t helpful because:

1. There is no way to use the certificates in the store programmatically
2. I managed to figure out the store is just for using HTTP client certificates rather than as a general certificate store

The solution

Firstly you need to grab your pfx and convert it to CSP format (I did this in LinqPad):

var cert = new System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates.X509Certificate2(@"c:pathtomypfx_file.pfx", "password", System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates.X509KeyStorageFlags.Exportable);
var privateKey = cert.PrivateKey as System.Security.Cryptography.RSACryptoServiceProvider;
var cspBlob = privateKey.ExportCspBlob(true);
Console.WriteLine(Convert.ToBase64String(cspBlob));

Then put the resultant text in a .txt file in your metro app and mark the file as content and the following code should work (this example for signing, but the same applies for using the CryptographicEngine to decrypt, encrypt etc.):

    public async Task<IBuffer> Sign(IBuffer toSign)
    {
        var file = await (StorageFile.GetFileFromApplicationUriAsync(new Uri("ms-appx:///path/to/my/csp_key.txt")));
        var contents = await FileIO.ReadBufferAsync(file);
        var contentsAsArray = contents.ToArray();
        var base64Contents = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(contentsAsArray.ToArray(), 0, contentsAsArray.ToArray().Length);
        var algorithm = AsymmetricKeyAlgorithmProvider.OpenAlgorithm(AsymmetricAlgorithmNames.RsaSignPkcs1Sha1);
        var key = algorithm.ImportKeyPair(Convert.FromBase64String(base64Contents).AsBuffer(), CryptographicPrivateKeyBlobType.Capi1PrivateKey);
        return CryptographicEngine.Sign(key, toSign);
    }

If doing this you should note that you are storing the private key in a non-encrypted form inside your app package, which isn’t secure if you don’t trust the machine that the app will be deployed to.

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This post outlines how I managed to get a FlipView control working inside of a Semantic Zoom when developing a Windows 8 metro-style application using C# / XAML.

An aside about XAML vs HTML for Windows 8 development

As anyone following me on Twitter would have seen I’ve found myself fortunate enough to be in a situation where I’m not only (finally) learning XAML, but also creating a Windows 8 “metro-style” proof-of-concept application.

While I come from a web background I was recommended to use C# XAML rather than HTML 5 to create the application. While creating the application I’ve come across a fair bit of documentation and sample applications using HTML 5 / JavaScript rather than XAML / C#. While I haven’t done any windows 8 apps in JavaScript yet, I suspect that using XAML is more powerful and expressive, even if it’s a little bit more verbose and slightly less convenient to style. Regardless, at this point that’s just pure conjecture on my part.

What I wanted to achieve and why

Back to the point: One thing I wanted to demonstrate in my proof-of-concept application was the use of semantic zoom because I think it’s a very powerful user interface concept and led quite naturally to provide that little bit more convenient and natural navigation to the application I was creating.

At the same time I was adamant that I wanted to use a flip view because I had a small number of discrete items that I wanted to each take up a page. While there is a concept of providing a context indicator control I wanted to also have an app bar and felt that the semantic zoom provided a cleaner way of providing that high level navigation (as well as there were few enough items in the list and they were always the same that the user always knew where they were so didn’t need any indication).

The problem

SemanticZoom only allows you to use a GridView or ListView within it and while there are posts out there about how you can come up with custom controls they only seem to apply to HTML / JavaScript and not XAML.

As explained above I didn’t want a continuously scrolling control, I wanted to use the FlipView Control. Initially I tried this by nesting a FlipView directly inside a GridViewItem and a ListViewItem, but that looks really ugly because of the default hover, selection and click semantics on those controls. As well as that, the items weren’t being bounded to the parent and thus my content was being cut off.

The solution

What I ended up doing was the following.

MyView.xaml

            <SemanticZoom>
                <SemanticZoom.ZoomedOutView>
                    <ListView HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center">
                        <ListView.ItemsPanel>
                            <ItemsPanelTemplate>
                                <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal" />
                            </ItemsPanelTemplate>
                        </ListView.ItemsPanel>
                        <ListViewItem Background="#E30000" Style="{StaticResource SemanticZoomListItem}" Tapped="Category1Selected">
                            <Grid>
                                <TextBlock Text="Category1" Style="{StaticResource SemanticZoomListItemTitle}" />
                                <Image Source="ms-appx:///Assets/Category1.png" Style="{StaticResource SemanticZoomListItemImage}" />
                            </Grid>
                        </ListViewItem>
                        <ListViewItem Background="#FF6400" Style="{StaticResource SemanticZoomListItem}" Tapped="Category2Selected">
                            <Grid>
                                <TextBlock Text="Category2" Style="{StaticResource SemanticZoomListItemTitle}" />
                                <Image Source="ms-appx:///Assets/Category2.png" Style="{StaticResource SemanticZoomListItemImage}" />
                            </Grid>
                        </ListViewItem>
                        <ListViewItem Background="#009600" Style="{StaticResource SemanticZoomListItem}" Tapped="Category3Selected">
                            <Grid>
                                <TextBlock Text="Category3" Style="{StaticResource SemanticZoomListItemTitle}" />
                                <Image Source="ms-appx:///Assets/Category3.png" Style="{StaticResource SemanticZoomListItemImage}" />
                            </Grid>
                        </ListViewItem>
                        <ListViewItem Background="#006BE3" Style="{StaticResource SemanticZoomListItem}" Tapped="Category4Selected">
                            <Grid>
                                <TextBlock Text="Category4" Style="{StaticResource SemanticZoomListItemTitle}" />
                                <Image Source="ms-appx:///Assets/Category4.png" Style="{StaticResource SemanticZoomListItemImage}" />
                            </Grid>
                        </ListViewItem>
                    </ListView>
                </SemanticZoom.ZoomedOutView>
                <SemanticZoom.ZoomedInView>
                    <GridView ScrollViewer.HorizontalScrollMode="Disabled" ScrollViewer.VerticalScrollMode="Disabled"  SelectionMode="None" IsItemClickEnabled="False" IsHoldingEnabled="False" IsSwipeEnabled="False" CanReorderItems="False" CanDragItems="False" ItemContainerStyle="{StaticResource ZenGridViewItemStyle}">
                        <GridViewItem>
                            <FlipView x:Name="FlipParent">
                                <FlipViewItem x:Name="Category1FlipView">
                                    <Controls:Category1 />
                                </FlipViewItem>
                                <FlipViewItem x:Name="Category2FlipView">
                                    <Controls:Category2 />
                                </FlipViewItem>
                                <FlipViewItem x:Name="Category3FlipView">
                                    <Controls:Category3 />
                                </FlipViewItem>
                                <FlipViewItem x:Name="Category4FlipView">
                                    <Controls:Category4 />
                                </FlipViewItem>
                            </FlipView>
                        </GridViewItem>
                    </GridView>
                </SemanticZoom.ZoomedInView>
            </SemanticZoom>

App.xaml

            <ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
                <ResourceDictionary Source="Common/StandardStyles.xaml"/>
                <ResourceDictionary Source="Common/ZenStyles.xaml"/>
            </ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
...
            <Style x:Key="SemanticZoomListItem" TargetType="ListViewItem">
                <Setter Property="Padding" Value="4" />
                <Setter Property="Width" Value="128" />
                <Setter Property="Height" Value="128" />
                <Setter Property="Margin" Value="0" />
                <Setter Property="HorizontalContentAlignment" Value="Stretch" />
                <Setter Property="VerticalContentAlignment" Value="Stretch" />
            </Style>
            <Style x:Key="SemanticZoomListItemTitle" TargetType="TextBlock" BasedOn="{StaticResource BasicTextStyle}">
                <Setter Property="FontSize" Value="20" />
                <Setter Property="FontWeight" Value="SemiLight" />
                <Setter Property="HorizontalAlignment" Value="Left" />
                <Setter Property="VerticalAlignment" Value="Bottom" />
            </Style>
            <Style x:Key="SemanticZoomListItemImage" TargetType="Image">
                <Setter Property="HorizontalAlignment" Value="Center" />
                <Setter Property="VerticalAlignment" Value="Center" />
                <Setter Property="Width" Value="64" />
                <Setter Property="Height" Value="64" />
            </Style>

Common/ZenStyles.xaml

Copied from The taming of the Metro GridView.

MyView.xaml.cs

This bit is the bit I like the least and I’m sure there is a less verbose way of doing it, but I’m happy enough with it for now. This is to get around the fact that we aren’t using the ListView or GridView so we need to manually set the correct FlipViewItem to display when the top level category is selected. I’ll be honest this part is a bit of a hack, but hey - it works!

        private void Category1Selected(object sender, TappedRoutedEventArgs e)
        {
            FlipParent.SelectedItem = Category1FlipView;
        }
        private void Category2Selected(object sender, TappedRoutedEventArgs e)
        {
            FlipParent.SelectedItem = Category2FlipView;
        }
        private void Category3Selected(object sender, TappedRoutedEventArgs e)
        {
            FlipParent.SelectedItem = Category3FlipView;
        }
        private void Category4Selected(object sender, TappedRoutedEventArgs e)
        {
            FlipParent.SelectedItem = Category4FlipView;
        }

Edit 27/08/2012: Changes needed for RTM

I just tried this out in RTM VS 2012 and Wind 8 SDK and noticed that it was broken. The fix was to change from the PointerReleased event to the Tapped event.

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I would like to announce the release of a software library I have written in conjunction with Matt Davies as open source via NuGet / Github: NHibernate.SqlAzure.

When using Windows Azure SQL Database (as it’s now known: what a mouthful! :P) one of the things that you need to account for is transient errors that come up as part of the fact you are using a high availability database.

This essentially involves looking at the error code returned from the database and if it’s one of a set of numbers then retrying the communication (be it a SQL command or a connection establishment) again with some sort of retry pattern. Obviously, you don’t want to just retry every query because the error that comes back might be a legitimate error.

Microsoft have helpfully released a library as part of Enterprise Library called the Transient Fault Handling Application Block that handles these transient errors as well as various retry patterns via the ReliableSqlConnection class.

While there are lots of articles out there about integrating this library with Entity Framework and Linq to SQL there isn’t really any guidance for NHibernate; only a few stack overflow posts and similar.

I’ve been working with Matt over the last few months to develop an NHibernate driver that will automatically make use of the transient connection and command retry logic within the Transient Fault Handling Application Block in an unobtrusive manner. This means that you can add one line of code to your existing applications (be it Fluent NHibernate or XML configuration) to make use of this feature. The library works fine for local connections (since none of the error codes it is looking for will usually get thrown by a non SQL Azure database (and frankly if they did then there is no harm in retrying!).

The other cool thing about this integration is that you can make use of it for other retry situations by specifying a different transient error detection strategy and extending the ReliableSql2008ClientDriver class with a custom implementation. See the Github site for more information about that.

This library was actually fairly tricky to write because of a whole heap of explicit type-casts inside ADO.NET and NHibernate so I’m pretty proud of being able to release this!

One last note - I’ve been able to prove with automated tests that the library does actually handle transient errors by continuously pausing and restarting the SQL Express service while the test is running and it works beautifully!! :)

Enjoy!

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I’ve been a ardent supporter of continuous delivery since I first learnt about it from a presentation by Martin Fowler and Jez Humble. At the time I loved how it encouraged less risky deployments and changed the decision of when/what to deploy from being a technical decision to being a business decision.

I personally think that embracing continuous delivery is an important intermediate step on the journey towards moving from technical agility to strategic agility.

This post was first written in August 2012, but has since been largely rewritten in February 2014 to keep it up to date.

This post forms the introduction to a blog series that is jointly written by myself and Matt Davies.

1. Intro
2. TeamCity deployment pipeline
   • TeamCity deployment pipeline (part 1: structure)
   • TeamCity deployment pipeline (part 2: TeamCity 8, build once and UI tests)
   • TeamCity deployment pipeline (part 3: using OctopusDeploy for deployments)
3. Deploying Web Applications
   • MsDeploy (onprem and Azure Web Sites)
   • OctopusDeploy (nuget)
   • Git push (Windows Azure Web Sites)
4. Deploying Windows Services
   • MsDeploy
   • OctopusDeploy
   • Git push (Windows Azure Web Sites Web Jobs)
5. Deploying Windows Azure Cloud Services
   • OctopusDeploy
   • PowerShell
6. How to choose your deployment technology
   • Microsoft’s hidden gem: MSDeploy

Continuous Delivery with TeamCity

One of the key concepts in continuous delivery is the creation of a clear deployment pipeline that provides a clear set of sequential steps or stages to move software from a developer’s commits to being deployed in production.

We have been using TeamCity to develop deployment pipelines that facilitate continuous delivery for the last few years. While TeamCity is principally a continuous integration tool, it is more than adequate for creating a deployment pipeline and comes with the advantage that you are then using a single tool for build and deployment.

We have also tried combining TeamCity with other tools that are more dedicated to deployments, such as OctopusDeploy. Those tools provide better deployment focussed features such as visualisation of the versions of your application deployed to each environment. This approach does create the disadvantage of needing to rely on configuring and using two separate tools rather than just one, but can still be useful depending on your situation.

There are a number of articles that you will quickly come across in this space that give some really great advice on how to set up a continuous delivery pipeline with TeamCity and complement our blog series:

• Continuous Integration & Delivery For GitHub With TeamCity
• Continuous Delivery to Windows Azure Not Only Microsoft Style with TeamCity
• Continuous Delivery with TeamCity
• You’re deploying it wrong! TeamCity, Subversion & Web Deploy part 1: Config transforms
• Continuous Delivery with psake and TeamCity
• TeamCity Build Dependencies
• Continuous Delivery to Windows Azure Web Sites (or IIS)

Purpose of this blog series

The purpose of this series is three-fold:

• Document any findings that myself and Matt Davies have found from implementing continuous delivery pipelines using TeamCity that differ from the articles above;
• Outline the techniques we have developed to specifically set up the TeamCity installation in a way that is maintainable for a large number of projects;
• Cover the deployment of Windows Services and Azure Roles as well as IIS websites.

Our intention is to build of the work of our predecessors rather than provide a stand-alone series on how to set up continuous delivery pipelines with TeamCity.

Other options

TeamCity is by no means the only choice when it comes to creating a deployment pipeline. Feel free to explore some of the other options:

• Thoughtworks Go!
• Jenkins
• Bamboo
• RedGate Deployment Manager

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Just a quick post to say that I have left Curtin University and I’m now working for a very cool company called Readify as a Senior Consultant.

Readify won the 2012 Microsoft Software Development Partner of the Year Award and has been on the BRW top 50 Best Places to Work in Australia list for the last three years running. To say I’m excited and humbled to be working for them is an understatement.

Readify has some very clever people working for it (I have already had the fortune to work with a couple of their consultants in the past, hence how I knew about them) and I’m extremely excited about all the amazing things I will learn working with them!

Curtin has been an excellent place to work and I will certainly treasure my time there :)

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