Using Azure Application Insights to monitor a self-hosted WCF service – Part 2

 .net, Application Insights, Azure, Programming, WCF  1 Response »
Dec 082015
 

azureappinsightsIn the first part of this series I wrote about what Azure Application Insights (AI) can do and how to add extra information to the tracking telemetry your application sends to AI.

The solution that I wanted to add AI tracking to was a Windows Service with self-hosted WCF services. One service is the server side of a SOAP service where the caller defined the SOAP WSDL, and the other WCF service is a single method that receives raw XML as a http POST message. To track each request to the WCF service, I decided to use a message inspector.

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Using Azure Application Insights to monitor a self-hosted WCF service – Part 1

 .net, Application Insights, Programming, WCF  No Responses »
Dec 032015
 

Application Insights is a service in Microsoft Azure for Application Performance Monitoring. See more here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/application-insights/ .

I’ve previously (1, 2, 3) posted about Application Insights when it was part of Visual Studio Online. It has been moved to the Azure portal, and now has a slightly different API.

It can be used to detect crashes, tracks performance issues and usage of mobile apps, web apps and more.
I’ve used it on a few web sites hosted in IIS or on Azure, and it works great.
For ASP.net web sites, it’s really easy to set up and get going. There the VS2015 integration to it makes it really seamless, and if you can follow a few wizard steps, there is no additional setup needed.

However, if you don’t have a mobile app, an ASP.net site on Azure or local IIS or a J2EE application, then there are no wizards, and no easy setup.

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Setting up Visual Studio Online build.vnext to publish an Azure Cloud Service

 .net, Azure, Programming, Visual Studio Online  3 Responses »
Jun 232015
 

I have an Azure Cloud service which consists of web and worker roles. To make it quicker to update the cloud service whenever I’ve made changes to it, I want to deploy it from Visual Studio Online.

I already use VSO for source control for this project, and I have previously used the XAML based build process in VSO. Since I was going to move the project from one Azure account to another (from my play/test account to the business account), I decided to change the build process.

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Setting up an on-prem build agent for Visual Studio Online build

 .net, Azure, Programming, Visual Studio Online  No Responses »
Jun 192015
 

Visual Studio Online (VSO) has a new build system that will eventually replace the old XAML based system.

VSO now also lets you perform builds using an on-prem build agent (or one hosted in a VM on Azure etc.).

I haven not been able to find information about this, but I assume that using on-prem agents will not count against the VSO build minutes. I assume that running builds are “free” contrary to using hosted agents, where there are 60 minutes included in VSO, and then you have to pay for additional.

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Shared Nuget package repository for different Visual Studio Solutions

 .net, NuGet, Programming  No Responses »
Sep 092014
 

To avoid having the same Nuget packages in a development project, when the project consists of multiple Visual Studio solutions (.sln files), it is possible to configure Nuget to use a shared repository.

This is done by changing the default packages path to something else.

For existing solutions and projects depending on packages in the default path, the hintpath in the C# projects files (.csproj) needs to be changed to point to the new packages folder.

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MMS Opsætning af Lumia 630 dual SIM med Windows Phone 8.1 på TDC og Yousee

 Telephony, Windows Phone  No Responses »
Aug 212014
 

Jeg har haft en del problemer med at få MMS opsætningen på min Nokia 630 Dual SIM til at virke. For det første er den ikke til salg i Danmark, så der er ikke nogen operatører der har vejledninger på præcis den telefon. For det andet er TDCs og Yousee’s vejledninger til Windows Phone opsætning misvisende eller forældede og direkte forkerte.

Med lidt trial and error er det lykkedes mig at kunne sende og modtage MMS’er på begge SIM kort (det ene er til arbejde, det andet er privat).

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Visual Studio Application Insights – part 3

 .net, Application Insights, Programming  No Responses »
May 272014
 

In my last two posts, I described installing the Microsoft Monitoring Agent and how to enable Visual Studio Application Insights for a web application.

It seems like a lot of work, and as yet you haven’t seen what you gain by installing the agent on your web server and adding a strange configuration file to your web application. You might wonder why you should do all of that.

This is why:

image_thumb7

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Visual Studio Application Insights – part 2

 .net, Application Insights, Programming  No Responses »
May 272014
 

In my last blog post, I talked about installing the Visual Studio Application Insights monitoring agent.

That’s all very nice. But you don’t actually gain much by just installing the agent. You need to tell it what to monitor. This post describes how to do that.

If you have web applications running in IIS, and you want to monitor their performance, you are pretty much all set by simply installing the monitoring agent, and adding a single config file to your project. The config file ApplicationInsights.config lets the monitoring agent know that you want this web application monitored, and it allows you to configure some settings about what you want monitored.

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Visual Studio Application Insights – Part 1

 .net, Application Insights, Programming  No Responses »
May 202014
 

Visual Studio Online has a relatively new feature called Application Insights. It’s currently in preview, but it already has lots of nice features for gaining insights into what is going on with your web app (or Windows Phone app or Azure web site).

I’m planning to do a few blog posts on this subject. This first part is about installing the monitoring agent and getting the first Application Insights information from my apps to the Application Insights portal.

In my current main project, we have a lot of WCF services hosted with my company’s hosting branch. We don’t have a lot of information about the service health and their use, other than what monitoring services we have built ourselves. Since that is not our main business, we decided to use a third-party service to monitor those things.

We have evaluated a few options, and decided to go further with VS Application Insights, as it seemed to be enough for our needs – and while we evaluate, its free. I guess it will come at a cost when it gets out of preview.

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Leaking dynamic assemblies

 .net, Programming  No Responses »
Apr 022014
 

We have a .net library that communicates with a web service over a “REST-like” interface. To send data to the interface, we need to PUT or POST XML data.

The library is a few years old and uses the WCF REST implementation that existed before it became a part of the .net framework. It was called the WCF REST Starter Kit, and has since been superceeded by built-in classes, but it works, and we haven’t had the inclination or time to change code that works.

The communications library was originally used by a server-side Windows Service which was only used by a few users at a time, and its PUT or POST operations are rarely used.

Recently, we started to use the communication library in a new project where it is used in a multi-tenant server with many simultaneous users, and its PUT and POST operations are called much more often. This new usage made a memory leak much more significant than before.

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