As I was walking down the hallway minding my own business, I noticed an unusual box of paper in the billing office.
Who knew that Dunder Mifflin products had made their way to Pasadena.
Hey, don’t let this post give you the idea that this is a slow news day.
I mean, it is, but don’t tell anyone.
Happy new year from everyone at DiscountASP.NET!
Recently Microsoft took down their popular Silverlight.net web site. At first the URL was redirected to MSDN and then the underlying content was removed breaking all the backlinks to the site.
When all the backlinks broke we saw a resurgence of the “What’s the future of Silverlight” and “Silverlight is Dead” content in the blogosphere. Mary Jo Foley wrote “Microsoft pulls the plug on its Silverlight.net site” and Tim Anderson wrote “Microsoft Silverlight: shattered into a million broken URLs”.
There is no official word about the future of Silverlight from Microsoft but the level of activity around Silverlight has definitely decreased.
One of the indicators of the level of activity around Silverlight can be observed with the product’s End-of-Life commitments. If you check on the Microsoft Silverlight Lifecycle page, you will see that all versions between Silverlight 2 and Silverlight 4 had mainstream support for 2-3 years. However, Silverlight 5 which was released quietly in 2011 has its end of life 10 years later in 2021.
So the good news is that Silverlight 5 will be supported for a while so any investments in this should be relevant for the lifetime of most apps. However, the bad news is that judging from previous end-of-life commitments on earlier versions, it doesn’t look like a new version of Silverlight is in the works any time soon.
In addition, the popular MIX conference where many of the new Silverlight features were unveiled was cancelled in 2012.
So how does that translate to what we are seeing in our web hosting services?
We conduct many surveys and we ask our customers what kind of technologies they use for their web presence. In the earlier days of Silverlight, due to the excitement, rapid release cadence and customer interest, we published research papers about the State of Silverlight adoption and we also reported on seeing Silverlight overtaking Flash among our customer base web sites. We also released a Silverlight Control Panel Starter Kit as starting point for those that wanted to build custom solutions that interacts with our control panel.
Gathering our survey results form February 2010 to October 2012 – from a total of 7 surveys, we see a bell-curve rise and fall of Silverlight adoption over time.
At it’s highest point 30% of our customers were using Silverlight in February 2011. Today we are seeing similar adoption levels as back in February 2010 – back in the Silverlight 3 days.
In order to gain technology adoption, the results show that the vendor really needs to keep pushing forward with new releases and must keep the conversation and excitement alive. It was the end of October 2010 when it was reported that Microsoft’s Silverlight strategy had shifted which upset many Silverlight developers. Within a year of the strategy shift announcement we start to see the Silverlight adoption levels start to decrease.
We’ll keep an eye out on technology adoption trends among our customers and will let you know if we see anything interesting.
Recently Microsoft took down their popular Silverlight.net web site. At first the URL was redirected to MSDN and then the underlying content was removed breaking all the backlinks to the site.
When all the backlinks broke we saw a resurgence of the “What’s the future of Silverlight” and “Silverlight is Dead” content in the blogosphere. Mary Jo Foley wrote “Microsoft pulls the plug on its Silverlight.net site” and Tim Anderson wrote “Microsoft Silverlight: shattered into a million broken URLs”.
There is no official word about the future of Silverlight from Microsoft but the level of activity around Silverlight has definitely decreased.
One of the indicators of the level of activity around Silverlight can be observed with the product’s End-of-Life commitments. If you check on the Microsoft Silverlight Lifecycle page, you will see that all versions between Silverlight 2 and Silverlight 4 had mainstream support for 2-3 years. However, Silverlight 5 which was released quietly in 2011 has its end of life 10 years later in 2021.
So the good news is that Silverlight 5 will be supported for a while so any investments in this should be relevant for the lifetime of most apps. However, the bad news is that judging from previous end-of-life commitments on earlier versions, it doesn’t look like a new version of Silverlight is in the works any time soon.
In addition, the popular MIX conference where many of the new Silverlight features were unveiled was cancelled in 2012.
So how does that translate to what we are seeing in our web hosting services?
We conduct many surveys and we ask our customers what kind of technologies they use for their web presence. In the earlier days of Silverlight, due to the excitement, rapid release cadence and customer interest, we published research papers about the State of Silverlight adoption and we also reported on seeing Silverlight overtaking Flash among our customer base web sites. We also released a Silverlight Control Panel Starter Kit as starting point for those that wanted to build custom solutions that interacts with our control panel.
Gathering our survey results form February 2010 to October 2012 – from a total of 7 surveys, we see a bell-curve rise and fall of Silverlight adoption over time.
At it’s highest point 30% of our customers were using Silverlight in February 2011. Today we are seeing similar adoption levels as back in February 2010 – back in the Silverlight 3 days.
In order to gain technology adoption, the results show that the vendor really needs to keep pushing forward with new releases and must keep the conversation and excitement alive. It was the end of October 2010 when it was reported that Microsoft’s Silverlight strategy had shifted which upset many Silverlight developers. Within a year of the strategy shift announcement we start to see the Silverlight adoption levels start to decrease.
We’ll keep an eye out on technology adoption trends among our customers and will let you know if we see anything interesting.
We explored the social media usage among DiscountASP.NET users in our last two surveys conducted in March and October of this year. We thought it would be interesting to check out trends on which social media services our customers are using.
We received 701 responses in the March survey and 822 responses in the October survey from our U.S. based customers. In both surveys, we asked our users to rate how active they were in using Google Plus, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook and to select from four options, including “Do Not Use,” “Set up account, but never use,” “Use occasionally,” and “Active User.” Similar to our previous post, we only show the percentage of the “Active Users” for each of the social media services.
Both our March and October results showed that Facebook remains the top social media site actively used among our customers. In the October survey 39% of our clients indicated they were active users of Facebook, compared to March which was at 43%, a drop of 4%. We don’t know the reason for this drop; however, this may be an interesting question to ask in our next survey.
LinkedIn captured the second spot with 27% of our clients using the social media services for enhancing their business and personal development in our October survey. Overall, LinkedIn usage increased among our clients as compared to March which was at a 20% level resulting in an increase of 7% within the past six months.
Twitter took the third spot with 24% of our clients being active users according to our October survey. Similar to LinkedIn, Twitter usage increased 8% between the March and October survey. While Google Plus is the newcomer to the social scene, Google Plus usage was unchanged over the past six months. Only 8% of our clients are active users.
In summary, more DiscountASP.NET customers are using LinkedIn and Twitter in recent months, while Facebook experienced a bit of a drop in usage. Even with all the buzz, Google Plus remains in the last spot among the four social media services.
By comparing the two surveys, we see some interesting results on how the usage of these social media sites has changed within the past several months. We’ll keep an eye out on the future trends as it should be getting more interesting as Twitter prepares to launch their photo app, with Facebook acquiring Instagram, and the relative newcomer Pinterest attracting a large number of new users. In the next survey we may add those emerging sites into our survey questions.
This year went by fast! At the end of every year, I try to reflect back on the things we accomplished in the current year and when I look at it – it always amazes me. If you want to check out our previous Top 10 lists, here they are for 2011, 2010, 2009, and 2008.
1. Windows 2012 Hosting
This year was a big one for Microsoft. After much delay, they finally launched their Windows 8 operating system. Along with it they launched the new Windows Server 2012 and IIS 8 which were generally available on September 4, 2012. As always, we engaged with Microsoft as early as we could and I believe we were the first host to offer a shared hosting solution on Windows 2012.
With our Windows 2012 hosting platform launch we increased the memory allocation to 300 MB. In addition, to make it easier for our customers to migrate to the new platform, we developed an automated migration system and made it available in our control panel. I believe we are the only host to have such a tool for customer site migration.
2. SQL 2012 Hosting
Microsoft launched SQL 2012 in April and we launched SQL 2012 hosting at General Availability (GA) as a new optional add-on to our base hosting plan. We increased the SQL disk space to 1000 MB as well. With our SQL 2012 implementation we support partially contained databases as described by Dimitri.
3. Shared TFS 2012 Hosting and Managed TFS 2012 Hosting
Microsoft released a new version of Visual Studio on September 12, 2012 and with this product they launched Team Foundation Server 2012. Because we engage early with Microsoft, we were able to launch shared TFS 2012 hosting a week earlier than general availability and then we subsequently launched Managed TFS 2012 hosting a month later in our USA-based data center. We are working on getting Managed TFS 2012 in our UK-based data center, and that will be a future announcement. Michael posted a new getting started video on TFS 2012.
4. FREE TFS Proxy Servers Around the World
With our TFS hosting service we know that we host customers with development teams that are located in different parts of the world. So to help them, we set up TFS Proxy servers in five global locations and made them available to all our TFS hosting customers for FREE!
Joe posted on his results from some personal tests that show how TFS Proxy speeds up connectivity.
5. Hosting support for ASP.NET 4.5, MVC 4, and Web API
Microsoft released ASP.NET 4.5 this year and we chose to launch ASP.NET 4.5 hosting on our Windows 2012 hosting platform.
We also launched support for MVC 4 and Web API.
We could have upgraded the existing Windows 2008 servers with ASP.NET 4.5 but since this was an in-place upgrade (meaning no rollback) we thought it was too risky since our customer’s applications could potentially break without a safety net. There is no way for us to test every application out there, so we went with our experience and gut on this one and we called it right. Sure enough, we started to see reports about incompatibilities coming in from other hosts who unfortunately went through with the upgrade and messed up customer sites.
6. Hosting support for node.js
What it means to be a .NET developer is evolving. So we are constantly evolving our hosting platform. We launched support for node.js on our Windows 2008 and Windows 2012 hosting platforms. Raymond posted on getting started with node.js.
7. WebSockets Support
With our Windows 2012 launch, we also added support for WebSockets. Michael did a blog post for his Presedential Dial-o-Meter powered with WebSockets. Check it out and the post has all the source code too.
8. Internet Infrastructure Coalition Charter Membership
Remember when the Internet went dark over SOPA and PIPA legislation in January? DiscountASP.NET did our part along with other hosting organizations that came together with the Save Hosting group.
We know that this is not the first time legislation will be considered that affects the hosting industry and which will in turn affect hosting customers. So when the originators of the Save Hosting group founded the Internet Infrastructure Coalition, we joined as an early charter member. The i2Coalition organization provides a public policy voice for companies like us who make up the Internet’s infrastructure.
9. Microsoft Gold Partner Renewal and Visual Studio Partner Program Membership
We successfully renewed our Microsoft Gold Partner status this year and I mention this because it is not trivial to keep Gold Partner status. Last year Microsoft toughened the requirements making it much more difficult to maintain Gold status and many hosts lost their status as a result. We’ve updated the Gold Partner logo on our site and you can check our status at the Microsoft PinPoint site.
DiscountASP.NET also joined the Visual Studio Partner program this year. With our acceptance into the VSP program, we join a group of about 200 elite partners who develop components, controls, Visual Studio plug-ins that help developers and development teams be more productive. We are proud to be the first TFS hosting and web hosting provider to join the VSP program.
10. More Participation at Code Camps and other events
Every year we do our part to help out Code Camps and many other events by sponsoring them. This year we made more effort to try to have a table at some of these events so that we can meet the attendees. This year we manned tables at all three of the SoCal Code Camps and I was at the Arizona Day of Scott. We also were at the Silicon Valley Code Camp and the first JavaScript Saturday event. We basically focused on the events in California and those in nearby states.
Thank You! Thank You! Thank You!
So that’s my Top 10 for 2012 and I want to end it with a BIG THANK YOU! Thanks for reading through this rather long post and thank you to all of our hosting customers – thanks for trusting and investing in us.
As you can see from our Top 10 list, we work hard to provide cutting-edge hosting solutions that empower the Microsoft developer and we try to do this as quickly as possible. We also do our best to give back to the community. We promise to continue these efforts in the next year.
Have a great holiday and we will definitely have some exciting stuff to announce in 2013! Please stay tuned…
In the early days of web hosting things were very simple. A web server contained everything needed to host multiple web sites; the web server itself, an email server, database server(s), log analyzing programs for visitor statistics, and a number of other more specialized gimmicks and gizmos.
Simple and inexpensive, but ineffective. If a database spins out of control or someone dumps half a million email messages into the queue, the entire server is affected. Meaning your site slows, your database slows, your email slows. Then you contact the host and say, “What the hell, man?” and the host responds with something profound like, “Ah, well, you know…”
So in order to combat that kind of rickety infrastructure, most hosts began running discreet, application-based servers. So your web site would live on a box that was strictly a web server, your database on a separate piece of hardware, your mail, etc., all separate but equal. So if there’s a problem with one service, the others stay up and running.
That was a vast improvement over the old way of doing things. But it multiplied costs and potential points of failure. And it left us with many of the same problems. For instance, if your database driven web site is up but your database server is down, that web server isn’t doing you much good.
Around the turn of the century a new option became available; virtual machines (VMs). A virtual machine is, to put it simply, a computer within a computer. The VM runs an operating system just like a hardware machine, but it’s possible to run multiple VMs on a single piece of heavy-duty hardware.
You may have used something like VMWare to run Windows on your Mac computer, or Linux on your Windows machine, etc. Web hosts use VMs in much the same way, but usually the VMs are all identical operating systems running different applications, depending on the host’s specialties.
It might not surprise you to learn that performance on early commercial VMs was not equal to the discreet, application-based servers that most hosts were running. It also may not surprise you to learn that many hosts adopted them anyway, in an effort to cut costs.
That resulted in VMs getting a reputation as a lesser service. A reputation that spread to web hosting consumers, who, when shopping for a new host would often ask, “You aren’t running your web servers on VMs, are you? I don’t want anything to do with those things!”
But a lot has changed in the past decade. As the Internet has grown, data centers have been forced to become a lot more stingy with power. Five years ago if we needed to add racks of servers to our data centers all we had to worry about was space. Now they’ll give us all the space we want, but we have to negotiate a price for additional power. And that power has become more expensive (surprise!) as a result.
Luckily, at the same time that power has been harder to come by, VMs have become much more stable and reliable, and their core functionality – multiple servers on a single physical machine – actually decreases power consumption. You could go so far as to say that VMs are “green.”
But aside from being less resource hungry, VMs provide another critical and wonderful advantage; they are easily and quickly replicable. In the past, if we had a hardware failure, the server would be down until we could drive over to the data center and fix or replace it. If it had to be replaced, you could be in for an outage of several hours. With VMs, and entire dead server can be “moved” in minutes.
It is that capability to quickly replicate – along with the power savings as a bonus – that made us decide a few years ago to pursue virtualization. It took a long time to get a system in place that we were satisfied with, but we feel like we’ve got just such a system now.
We started off virtualizing some of the database servers that were running on older hardware that we wanted to retire. When that was successful, we put a plan in place to virtualize all of the older Windows 2003/IIS 6 web servers. That started in September and is still ongoing. When we finish with those early next year, more than 50% of the DiscountASP.NET servers will be running on VMs.
Will we eventually virtualize everything? Probably. We’re confident that we can continue to provide the same high quality service that we have become known for (or provide even better and more flexible service), so it makes sense on just about every level.
But we run a lot of servers, and virtualization, at least at the moment, isn’t a good fit for all of them. Mail servers, for instance, typically have high I/O, memory and storage requirements, and VMs don’t outperform physical hardware in those circumstances.
Also, virtualization of a server that’s actively being used by hundreds or thousands of users takes a lot of time to do properly and with the least amount of disruption. But it’s something that we’re committed to, so we’ll likely be at it for some time to come.
Here’s to the virtual world! Sometimes it can be a great and glorious thing to be a part of it. We continue to live in interesting times.
One of the key highlights of Team Foundation Server 2012 is an improved experience when you’re working offline and you would have to wonder: If it’s mentioned as a key feature, how bad was working offline previously?
If you’ve avoid opening a solution under source control in offline mode, you’re extremely fortunate. But for those that have to experience it with Team Foundation Server 2010, you might hear that it’s easier to call it a day than continue working.
Before going further, it’s important to discuss and understand what’s allowed the improvement: the local workspace. A workspace is a critical feature of Team Foundation Server since it’s what allows the differentiation between the changes that have been made against the data stored on the server and your working copy of files.
Prior to Team Foundation Server 2012, the only type of workspace that was available was a server-side workspace which has drawn plenty of criticism since an active connection to a TFS server was essentially required so that synchronization could occur. While the ability to make changes to files was available, it was an extremely tedious and cumbersome process.
The local workspace was introduced with Team Foundation Server 2012 as the default workspace type and it follows the Edit-Merge-Commit system – any changes that are made are noted and then synchronized with the TFS server at check-in.
There are some advantages and disadvantages between the workspace types so you may want to determine how a workspace will be used against a particular project.
Server workspaces have the following advantages and disadvantages:
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
Local workspaces have the following advantages and disadvantages:
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
The default setting for a workspace is set to local but if you need to alter an existing workspace or create a new workspace, you’ll find the option under the “Add Workspaces” window.
To get an idea of what using a server workspace is like in offline mode, let’s take a quick walkthrough.
1. To make sure that there was no connectivity to a server, I used the most effective method of guaranteeing no connection – I unplugged the network cable. After verifying that no network connectivity was available, I opened an available solution in offline mode.
2. In a sample application that I had available, I updated two files, About.vbhtml and Index.vbhtml and then saved my changes. Here’s what you’ll see every time a file is saved.
3. I decided to add a new file.
4. To simulate a restored connection to the server, I just plugged the network cable back in and attempted to go online.
Note: The file that was added is not detected as a change.
5. The new file will need to be manually added to source control and then checked-in.
1. For working offline with a local workspace, I used the same high tech method that I used for the server workspace and opened the solution in offline mode. Here’s what the Solution Explorer window looks like:
2. I opened and updated the Web.config file and then saved. I was not prompted to overwrite an existing file that was set to read-only and the change was noted immediately:
I continued working and just made a simple change to the Index.vbhtml file.
3. I reconnected the cable and went online. All of the changes that I had made were recorded as pending changes.
4. I recreated the disconnected environment, added a new file and then went back online. Unlike the server workspace, the change was detected:
While not everyone may find themselves in a situation where working offline is required, the introduction of the local workspace is a much appreciated and welcomed enhancement.
Red Gate has extended their 20% discount offer on their awesome tools for database source control – SQL Source Control and their SQL Connect.
To learn more about the power of SQL Source Control and SQL Connect check out Joe’s blogs about Using Red Gate’s SQL Source Control and with our TFS Hosting service and Using Red Gate SQL Connect with DiscountASP.NET Team Foundation Server.
DiscountASP.NET hosting customers can find out more information about these Red Gate offer in their Control Panel Marketplace. The offer expires on June 30, 2013.