Ektron really slow to startup on local host, how to improve this? - ektron

We're developing a solution which uses Ektron. As part of our solution we all have local IIS instances (localhost) and deploy to this local instance as part of the development life cycle.
The problem is that after a deployment and once dll's are replaced IIS restarts and the app pool is recycled, this means that Ektron dll's need to reload themselves.
This process takes an extended amount of time.
Is there anyway to improve the loading time of "Ektron"

To some extent, this is the nature of a large app running as a website rather than a web application. Removing the workarea from your local environment is one way to get this compile time down, though this will naturally not work depending on your workflow, for example if you are not using a separate dev DB or if you are storing the workarea in source control.
I have seen some attempts to pre-complile the workarea and keep the working code in a separate project (http://dev.ektron.com/forum.aspx?g=posts&t=10996) but this approach will only speed up your builds, not the recompilation of individual pages that will occur after a build as a result of running as a web site.
The last (and least best-practice) solution is to simply avoid making code changes that cause a recompile, like modifying app_code. Apps running as websites are perfectly happy to recompile a single page's codebehind without regenerating DLLs, which is advantageous for productivity but ultimately discourages good practices like reusing code in libraries. Keep in mind that this is terrible advice, but if you have a deadline and are staring at an ektron page loading every 30 minutes it can be useful to know.

Same problem here. I found this: http://brianpereras.blogspot.com/2013/06/ektron-85-86-workarea-is-slow-compared.html
That says that the help documentation was moved to be retrieved from an online source (documentation.ektron.com). We're running Ektron 9, and I just made this change and it seems much faster on first load (after iisreset).
The solution is to set documentation.ektron.com to 127.0.0.1 in your hosts file.

There is not, this is just how IIS works. Instead of running a local instance of Ektron it's a good idea just to point your web.config file to the database of your test database and copy the /workarea folder to your local PC. You can't edit ektron locally but you can change the data on your test server and it will show up locally.

Related

Browserlink for Azure Service Fabric .NET Core App

I'm finding the iterative development cycle quite slow on service fabric as opposed to a standalone .NET Core web application. It does not look like browser link works, hell even refreshing the page doesn't update HTML. From what I can see, you need to restart the whole fabric to update HTML changes.
There has to be something I'm missing.
We have this feature in the pipeline. Will be a few months out, but is coming.
To enable quick iterations on static files and other files that do not need build time compilation, the current hack is to start debugging your app or deploy it to the cluster so it's running. Find the files in the cluster node directory (Typically C:\SfDevCluster\Data\_App\_Node_0\....) edit them there and refresh your browser. Remember to copy changes over to your source before stopping debugging or removing the app, as this will delete those files.
Make sure to set you local cluster in one-node mode, to ensure you only have the files being served from one directory.

Change Azure App API in real time

Prior to migrating from Mobile to App Services I could change node.js APIs in real time. Now changes seem to take an undetermined time to go live. I don't know if they're now being compiled or cached anywhere along the way. Ideally I would like to regain the ability to effect immediate change.
Technically, there is a file watcher that watches a subset of the files in your site - when you change one of those files, the site is meant to restart, thus making your change go live. This is configured in the web.config file which is a part of your site.
Make sure that the web.config is configured to watch the files you are interested in.
Restarting the site manually is a backup step that is effective.

Inherited a Silverlight/WCF application need to fix WindowsAuthentication

I've inherited a Silverlight/WCF application. (Having worked on .net MVC, and SPA for quite a while)
I tried switching the IIS website folder to see if a tweak to the code and a fresh build would work, it didn't work and I switched back and although the website is functional it has a number of faults.
For some reason the Windows authentication appears to have stopped working, this authorises a number of the admin functions. I think this is broken and so not enabling the functionality in the Silverlight app.
The server I've inherited has the applications as folders in the default website, which is new to me, and quite constraining. I've gone through IISAdmin videos, and learnt a lot, but not enough to fix the issue.
I am unable to get the software to run in VS2013, quite a bump after working on Single Page Applications.
I'm stumped as to how the same code put back no longer works; I've learnt my lesson, but I still need to fix the system. I am not sure whether IISReset would make a difference since the AppPool is recycled every 29 hours. I've found out what the harm in trying is, and so I am proceeding with caution.
So my main goal would be to get the Windows Authentication working again.

How to recognize programmatically that application is installed vs development mode?

I'm trying to get information about license info of my app and MSDN docs (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh694065.aspx) advice to use Windows.ApplicationModel.Store.CurrentAppSimulator class for that purposes during development/testing and when submitting app to store replace that class with Windows.ApplicationModel.Store.CurrentApp.
I wonder if there is any way to check in code (javascript in my case) if app is already installed from store so my code should use proper class and I won't have to remember every time I submit update of app to store to replacing those classes properly.
As far as I know, I could not find such thing. In fact, LicenseInfo is what provides information about the store listing.
I use a config.js file to keep settings at place which change between development and production. For example - if your app talks to a service, service URL also will likely change between development and production; the service might be running at localhost for development and for production in azure environment. I keep a bool in here and change by hand.
I have not automated it fully. but it is likely possible. need to dig through the msbuild logs for the build created for the store. if there is configuration setting found, then project can have two config.dev.js and config.release.js and msbuild need to conditionally pick the right file. I haven't looked into this yet.
I think I found at solution as described here WinJS are there #DEBUG or #RELEASE directives? . Not ideal, but works for me.

Restarting only a portion of a rack/Sinatra app

The great thing about PHP is that if you have something like
clothes.com, clothes.com/men.php, clothes.com/women.php
Then if you only edit the men's page, only that particular "app" will be restarted.
But on rack/Sinatra I have to touch the restart.txt file to restart the ENTIRE website.
Is there a way around this problem, so that users browsing other parts of the site wont have any problems while another part of the site get edited?
(i'm using mod-passenger on Apache, not that it's important..)
This would be true in all cases anyway for editing (non-inline) views (not layouts).
Aside from that, if you're really worried about this then I'd suggest using versioned folders to hold the application code. When you do a deployment, change the proxy to point at the newer version. Those who had already made requests will remain on an instance of Apache and the application that is already running, as long as their request remains alive, and seemlessly (unless you've broken something with the code) move to the new code on the next request.
It's also a convenient way to rollback to the/a previous version quickly and easily.
Check out the sinatra reloader from sinatra contrib