DiscountASP.NET Hosting

Telerik Extends TeamPulse Offer

Announcements, Team Foundation Server

Takeshi EtoTelerik TeamPulseWe are always working to partner with leading vendors to help our customers improve their Application Lifecycle Management. So I’m very pleased to announce that our partner, Telerik has extended their offer of 15% off of TeamPulse and the new Ideas & Feedback Portal through the first half of 2012.

TeamPulse helps improve development productivity and with this tool, you can manage requirements, track progress and schedule releases of your applications. I’ve blogged previously about how our team uses TeamPulse for our own development management.

The Ideas & Feedback Portal is an extension to TeamPulse and is a web-based solution for managing customer ideas and feedback. With this tool you can efficiently manage feedback to help your development teams to prioritize and focus on the features that increase customer value.

Here is the coupon code that you can use to get this limited time 15% discount deal on TeamPulse and the TeamPulse Ideas & Feedback Portal:

TEAMCOU-QTWUZZ

This is a limited time offer that expires on June 30, 2012.

For your new year’s resolution, how about ALM productivity!

Why you should care about the SOPA and PIPA legislation

Miscellaneous

Michael PhillipsThere has been a lot of talk recently about SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act (H.R. 3261), which, if passed as it stands, would effectively result in the blocking of web sites that offended the sensibilities of Hollywood movie studios or the recording industry (or anyone with a trademark or copyright and a lawyer).

It seems to go without saying that handing the keys to an Internet blacklist to commercial entities is wrongheaded and very dangerous. Especially considering the MPAA and RIAA‘s history of steamrolling the house to kill a termite. So it isn’t surprising that there is a lot of anti-SOPA action happening. We oppose SOPA as well, and encourage you to make your voice heard if you want to keep the Internet free.

PIPA

But perhaps less frequently discussed is another nasty piece of legislation that is also wrapped up in a name designed to mask its negative aspects; Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011, a.k.a. PIPA or the Protect IP Act (United States Senate Bill S.968).

PIPA has many of the same components of SOPA, with one notable exception. PIPA allows infringed upon parties to bring legal action against hosts over data on their servers, whether they are aware of its presence or not. Internet legal expert and SaveHosting.org founding member David Snead recently estimated the initial cost of the host’s defense of these suits at $50,000 per suit filed (“initial cost” being the operative term here).

Any way you slice it, that’s a large expenditure, and one that could be ruinous to a small host. Not to mention the fact that a host could be hit with multiple suits and be forced to defend themselves in dozens (or more) of such cases. You can see how quickly this legislation could become disruptive and destructive.

There are also a slew of fundamental technical issues the legislation introduces, issues that undermine the stability and freedom of the Internet as you and I know it today. We’re not going to address those here, but they are equally as important as the issues that we are discussing.

Hosting consumers get the shaft

To the point of how this affects you and why you should care, consider this: it is much more than an inconvenience when your host goes belly up. It’s a diminishing of your choices. If we stand by and allow every host that doesn’t have millions of dollars to spend on legal fees to be litigated off the face of the earth, the only choice that is going to be left to you is to buy hosting from one of a handful very large companies.

Not that all large companies are necessarily bad, but anyone with a cell phone or cable television service knows that lack of choice can indeed be a very bad thing. Do you want to live in a world where governmentally empowered multi-billion dollar businesses can control not only your hosting choices, but ultimately what you can access on the Internet? I sure don’t.

And that is not exaggeration or hyperbole, it is the inevitable result of the legislation as it stands.

Unnecessary legislation

Perhaps the most exasperating thing about both of these acts is that they are utterly unnecessary. We have had protection for trademark and copyright holders for more than a decade under the DMCA. The DMCA is a fair system, as the copyright holder is insured quick action when they make a complaint, and hosts such as ourselves are immune from liability as long as we take action against infringing materials in a prescribed amount of time.

SOPA and PIPA have no such “safe harbor,” and as I mentioned, PIPA specifically states that providers will be equally as liable as infringers.

It would appear that DMCA was not enough for the MPAA and RIAA, who want comprehensive and punitive control over sites they don’t like. Which, by some accounts, is no more than a desperate ploy by industries that were too slow and stubborn to adapt to a new world, and now see a massive wave litigation as a reasonable means of exercising control and forestalling inevitable change.

In other words, they have clearly been unable to stem the tide of piracy using technology, creativity or lawsuits against individuals (those suits turned into a P.R. nightmare for the record industry), so they are falling back on a sledgehammer approach of legally bullying the hosts (deeper pockets) and tampering with the DNS system.

Am I opposed to protecting the work of creative people? Absolutely not. I am one of those people, and I’m not particularly anxious to give my work away to pirates. But an objective analysis of the proposed legislation will lead most thinking people to a negative conclusion. The scope and effect of SOPA and PIPA are vast and frightening. It is very important that we do not allow the legislation to pass without opposition.

For more information, or to get involved, please visit:

AmericanCensorship.org
SaveHosting.org

* * * * * Read part 2 of this article. * * * * *
Add Michael Phillips to your Google+ circles.
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Red Gate Extends SQL Source Control Offer

Announcements, Team Foundation Server

Takeshi EtoRed GateOur partner, Red Gate has agreed to extend their special offer of 20% discount on their very cool product SQL Source Control. The offer has been extended until June 30, 2012.

DiscountASP.NET customers can get more information about how to redeem this offer in their control panel marketplace.

Previously, Joe blogged about how you can source control your SQL database using SQL Source Control and our TFS Hosting service. If you haven’t checked this post out, you should. Very cool stuff.

Top 10 Things we Accomplished in 2011

Inside DiscountASP.NET, Team Foundation Server

Takeshi EtoWow, another year just flew by. Hard to believe that I’m posting another Top 10 list for the year. The last Top 10 feels like it was yesterday.

While the staff here is working hard on our day-to-day and future stuff, at the end of every year, I like to reflect back on the things we accomplished during the year. When you sit and look back its always amazing to see all the stuff we’ve accomplished.

But before I get started, I wanted to first talk about a little bit about Microsoft. 2011 was a very interesting year as Microsoft took a major pivot and went through a huge internal reorganization effort.

The result of Microsoft’s pivot caused some delays in the cadence for new technology releases and at worst caused some confusion among developers due to Microsoft being tight-lipped about what was going on.  But Microsoft’s strategic future direction with Windows 8 was finally revealed at the //BUILD conference (we were there and did a blog post on //BUILD).

So back to DiscountASP.NET – we took the opportunity in 2011 to invest in our Team Foundation Server hosting service, work on expanding our USA data center footprint, and also kicked off some other R&D projects which will lead to enhancements you will be hearing more about in 2012.

So with that, here is my top 10 for 2011….

1. Launched two technology preview programs
In keeping with our mission to empower .NET developers, we launched two technology preview programs so developers can get an early jumpstart on testing and experimenting with upcoming technologies:

  • SQL Server 2012 - DenaliFREE SQL Server 2012 beta hosting sandbox for our web hosting customers. Customers can activate SQL 2012 databases from their Control Panel.
  • webmatrix v2 betaFREE WebMatrix v2 beta hosting sandbox for the developer community. Check out our Labs Site for information and signup.

2. Launched Team Foundation Server (TFS) Build Server solutions
We launched TFS Build Server solutions in our USA-based and Europe-based data centers. With this solution, customers can get a hosted TFS Build solution that is capable of continuous integration, gated check-ins and scheduled builds without the hassles of managing the server on-premises.

3. Launched Managed TFS hosting solutions
visual studio team foundation serverWe launched premium Managed TFS hosting solutions in our USA-based and Europe-based data centers. Our Managed TFS solution gives the customer their own instance of TFS on a dedicated VM that is not shared with any other customer. With the Managed TFS service we expanded the TFS configuration options with support for Sharepoint and Reporting.

4. Revamped our Affiliate Program
In 2011, we completely revamped and enhanced our Affiliate Program. With our legacy Referral Program, only our web hosting customers were able to join as the sign up was done through the Control Panel. With this new Affiliate Program, we have separated everything so that non-customers and customers alike can join the Affiliate Program.

We also took the opportunity to increase referral commissions, added the ability to get commissions from Team Foundation Server hosting sales, and revamped the Affiliate Manager with enhanced advertising campaign management, enhanced reporting and tools to gain insights into campaign performance with advanced advertisement metrics. You can get more information about the Affiliate Program on our website.

5. Renewed our Microsoft Gold Certification under Microsoft’s revamped partnership program
microsoft gold hosting competencyIn any other year, renewals for the Gold Certification was more or less routine, but in 2011 Microsoft revamped their partnership program and increased the difficulty of attaining the “Gold” distinction.

While in the past, there was one Gold Certification that could be attained through the awarding of points gained through demonstrating expertise in different competencies, Microsoft introduced a Gold and Silver level for each of about 29 different competency areas, additional Microsoft Certified staff member requirements, additional exam requirements, revenue requirements, additional customer reference requirements, and a customer satisfaction survey requirement.

Because we believe that it is important for us to demonstrate our expertise in Microsoft technologies, we invested in the renewal and we successfully attained the Gold Hosting Competency. You can validate our standing at the new Microsoft PinPoint site.

6. Offering FREE on-premises Visual SourceSafe to hosted TFS migration services
Microsoft is ending mainstream support for Visual SourceSafe in July 2012 and Team Foundation Server is the replacement.  To help in the transition, we are offering FREE Visual SourceSafe migration services to our TFS hosting solutions. We have TFS Migration information on our site.

Also, I’d like to announce here for the first time that we are are extending our FREE VSS Migration offer until June 30, 2012!

7. Published research
In 2010, we started publishing research papers and articles through our blog based on the customer surveys we take. With the large number of ASP.NET web developers that we host we can gain interesting insights and observe trends that may be different than what is observed in the general public. The research papers are a way to give back to the community.

8. Introduced tiered discounting for TFS hosting
To make hosted TFS solutions more economical to larger developer teams, we introduced tiered discounting.  Find more information on our TFS web site.

9. Expanded our partnerships with leading technology vendors
We are constantly working on partnerships with leading technology vendors to bring our customers technology integrations that will enhance our product offerings and/or provide our customers with special discounts and pricing on services and products. Our hosting customers can find information about these deals in the control panel marketplace. For 2011, I’d like to highlight these vendors:

free google adwords credit Red Gate  Telerik TeamPulse hosted urban turtle and hosted tfs

  • Google AdWords: Our USA-based and Canada-based web hosting customers can get $100 free Google AdWords credit
  • Red Gate: Our hosting customers can get 20% off of SQL Source Control
  • Telerik: Our customers can get a 15% discount on Telerik TeamPulse and their Ideas & Feedback Portal
  • Urban Turtle: We added an Urban Turtle add-on to our TFS hosting service

10. In 2011, we added some more awards to our shelf

devproconnections gold community choice 2011 awardBest ASP.NET Hosting Award - The CodeProjectVisual Studio Magazine Award 2011 - Best Web Hosting Merit

But that’s not all – I’m adding a couple honorable mentions here:

Expanded our community support through sponsorships of Usergroups, Code Camps and Give Camps
We have always been a big supporter of the Microsoft Developer Community because we believe that it is important to give back to the community. In 2011, we put more effort into our community programs and we sponsored many more Microsoft Technology User Groups, Code Camps, and Give Camps.

As part of our sponsorships, we manned tables at many West Coast events and we also presented some sessions at our local SoCal Code Camp. As part of our community programs, we provide free hosting for Microsoft User Groups, Code Camps, Give Camps and Microsoft MVPs. If you have any questions about our community programs, please let us know.

Expanded our Social Media initiative
We understand the importance of social media in today’s world. Today, a company is not “authentic” if they do not participate in social media. These technologies are new ways for us to communicate with and engage with people. But it is also very challenging to manage and is a new frontier from traditional company communication methods of the past.

This year we challenged ourselves to post more frequently on our blog  but maintain the level of relevancy.  Though I’m completely biased, I think we’ve been building a very interesting and informative company blog. We focused on being more active on Twitter and in addition to our official company twitter account we’ve added several official staff twitterers. We also launched our GooglePlus presence with the DiscountASP.NET page.

Additionally, we made great strides in integrating social media communications into our workflow for outages and maintenance communications (of course, this is an ever evolving process which we will continue to improve). We also maintained our FaceBook site and are planning some improvements in 2012. We attended more Social Media conferences and events this year to learn how to be more effective through this new medium.

Thank You
So that’s the Top 10 for 2011. I want to thank everyone who took the time to read through this post. I know it was a long one (hey, we did a LOT!).

I also want to thank all of our hosting customers for trusting and investing in us. We promise to continue to focus on cutting-edge hosting solutions that empowers the Microsoft developer and we will continue to give back to the community.

Have a great holiday season and we are looking forward to another exciting year of hosting in 2012! We promise that the best is yet to come…

Search has splintered too

Hosting Industry, Internet

In Gartner’s 2011 Hype Cycle trend tracking, this year they devoted an entire Hype Cycle just on “THE CLOUD” and I blogged about this previously. In the year before, “THE CLOUD” was broken down to three categories, namely; Cloud Computing, Cloud Web/Platforms, and Private Cloud. But in 2011, Gartner shows how “THE CLOUD” has splintered into 30+  segments/categories.

While “THE CLOUD” enterprise  is still early in the hype cycle and will take years to fully mature, we also see other technology industry segments and services experiencing a splintering effect as they mature. Search, for example.

While Google may have been the dominant force in search for a long time, users now use different services for different types of search – for example, if you want to find a review of that new Sci-Fi flick that just came out, you would probably use Twitter, if you want to find a job, you might use LinkedIn, if you want to find a video, YouTube, if you want to find a person, you would use Facebook, etc.

Clearly, user behavior has changed around “Search” and different services have come to dominate the mindshare of users around different search activities.

But it’s not a static landscape either, and all search services are working hard to evolve to stay relevant to its users and make their services more sticky and attractive to new users. GooglePlus is a great example.

This is the constantly changing world of the Internet. A world where technology and ideas propel the entire industry forward and have the potential to change the world.

Silverlight 5 Hosting is Here

Internet, Technical

Michael OssouSilverlight 5 is finally here. With all the talk about HTML 5, Silverlight has kind of taken a back seat. In real life however, using the right tool for the right job is more important than doing what is in vogue. There are many scenarios where Silverlight is still the better platform to choose.

This latest release takes that a step further by making some major improvements. You can see the complete list of whats new in Silverlight 5 over at MSDN. But I wanted to mention some key features that I think are really noteworthy.

– My absolute favorite is the Pivot Viewer Control.  If you haven’t seen this thing in action, you are really missing out. This is one of those super cool things that can actually be useful in real life.

– The addition of hardware accelerated 3D graphics using XNA. Here is a great tutorial on building a Silverlight 5 3D box that you can host on your account. I should also mention, low latency sound can be achieved using XNA’s audio classes. I can’t wait to see some Silverlight drum machines!

– There are some major performance improvements as well. The one that I think will make most people happy is that HTTP web requests now occur in a background thread. The JIT also has multi-core support. So the start up times of a Silverlight 5 application are much faster.

– 64 bit browser support! Need I say more?

You have a hosting account already, so why not try to build something fun with Silverlight 5? If you build something, put a link to it in the comments section below, because we would love to see it!

– Michael Ossou, Developer

Add Michael Ossou to your Google+ circles.
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How to build and deploy a report using Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services Report Builder 2.0

How-to, Technical

Oliver EmoryDeploy your reports in 10 simple steps

This post is in relation to a tool that can be used to upload your reports to your reporting server.  A lot of time this can be a difficult task, but I hope my explanation helps when you are performing this task on our servers.

Step 1:  Download Report Builder 2.0.

Step 2:  When you open Report Builder you should see a screen similar to the one below:

Step 3:  Select the option “Table or Matrix” to start building a table. Add a Data source as you will see this selection next.  See the following screen shot:

Step 4:  Select “New” as the data option and you will see the following:

Select the option “Build,” and specify your connection type.

This will allow you to specify the type of data source you have.

Step 5:  Specify your connection properties.  If you are using a database provided by DiscountASP.NET you may need to login to the control panel and retrieve the connection URL. Use the entire URL as it appears in Control Panel. Select the option “Save My Password.”

Step 6:  Build your report.

Step 7:  Deploy the report to the server by selecting the following “connect” URL:

Note:  This is likely at the bottom left corner of the program.

Step 8:  Use the information provided in Control Panel to connect to your specific reporting server.  It should look similar to this: “https://rs2k801.discountasp.net/ReportServer”.

Step 9:  Provide the login credentials for the reporting server.

Step 10:  Select the “Save As” option to save the report to the server.  Once this is done you should see the option “recent sites and servers.”  This will display your directories on the report server.  You can navigate to the proper location for saving this report and once this is done you should be able to login to the report server and view the actual report.

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