Comparing HTTP and HTTPS URIs

Working with URIs is a regular exercise when we crawl the web. Consequently, comparing HTTP and HTTPS URIs quickly becomes an interesting challenge. Fortunately, .NET has us covered with the Uri.Compare(Uri, Uri, UriComponents, UriFormat, StringComparison) Method

[TestMethod]
public void CompareHttpAndHttpsURIsTest()
{
    var http = new Uri("http://www.microsoft.com");
    var https = new Uri("https://www.microsoft.com");

    var result = Uri.Compare(http,
        https,
        UriComponents.Host | UriComponents.PathAndQuery,
        UriFormat.SafeUnescaped, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase);

    Assert.IsTrue(result == 0);
}

The next challenge, will probably be around comparing query strings. Because this gets complicated quickly, I’ll leave this one for another time.

Deploying Nano Server to Azure

Based on the current builds, compared to Server, Nano Server has 93 percent lower VHD size, 92 percent fewer critical bulletins and 80 percent fewer reboots!

I’ve been curious about Nano Server for a while now. And I recently noticed that it was available on Microsoft Azure. This post is definitely from a developers point-of-view. It goes through the steps required to create a functional Nano Server Virtual Machines (VM) on Microsoft Azure.

Nano Server is ideal for many scenarios:

• As a “compute” host for Hyper-V virtual machines, either in clusters or not
• As a storage host for Scale-Out File Server.
• As a DNS server
• As a web server running Internet Information Services (IIS)
• As a host for applications that are developed using cloud application patterns and run in a container or virtual machine guest operating system.

The Adventure

Nano Server is a remotely administered server operating system (OS). Wait. Let me repeat this because it’s important… Nano Server is a remotely administered server operating system (OS). Developers, Nano Server is a server OS optimized for clouds and data centers. It’s designed to take up far less disk space, to setup significantly faster, and to require far fewer restarts than Windows Server. So why does this matter? Well it means more resources, more availability and stability for our Apps. And it also means that it’s time to learn new skills, because there is no local logon capability at all, nor does it support Terminal Services. However, we have a wide variety of options for managing Nano Server remotely, including Windows PowerShell, Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), Windows Remote Management, and Emergency Management Services (EMS).

Using Remote PowerShell on Azure

When we have hundreds of Virtual Machines to manage, manual tasks just don’t cut it. they’re error prone and can be quite boring to carry out.

On Azure, there are two approaches to automation for Windows Virtual Machines. The first is PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC). This approach is well suited for the initial configuration of complex environments. The second is Remote PowerShell, and this blog post will focus on this approach.

The underlying connection was closed

For the past weeks I’ve used PowerShell to test REST APIs exposed over HTTPS. Everything was wonderful until I had to execute my script against a local instance of the service. My machine is not setup with proper certificates and PowerShell doesn’t see to like that. When ever I execute an Invoke-RestMethod command I get the following error message:

The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel

Looking around I was fortunate to find this one-liner that fixes everything!

[System.Net.ServicePointManager]::ServerCertificateValidationCallback = {$true}

By turning off certificate validation you are disabling security. Beware that this one-liner is a patch, and should not be used for anything else than development purposes.