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European ASP.NET MVC 3 Hosting - Amsterdam :: It is an error to use a section registered as allowDefinition='MachineToApplication' beyond application level. This error can be caused by a virtual directory not being configured as an application in IIS.

clock September 18, 2013 09:14 by author Scott

I write this blog post as I saw many people get this error message when deployed their MVC 3 application:

Error 1 It is an error to use a section registered as allowDefinition='MachineToApplication' beyond application level. This error can be caused by a virtual directory not being configured as an application in IIS.

You can find the resource error on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5161511/mvc3-strange-error-after-switching-on-compilation-of-views or forums.asp.net.

Its always a good idea to compile your Razor views. The reason being that errors within a view file are not detected until run time.

To let you detect these errors at compile time, ASP.NET MVC projects now include an MvcBuildViews property, which is disabled by default. To enable this property, open the project file and set the MvcBuildViews property to true, as shown in the following example:

After enabling MvcBuildViews you may find that error above.

Turns out that this problem occurs when there is web project output (templated web.config or temporary publish files) in the obj folder. The ASP.NET compiler used isn't smart enough to ignore stuff in the obj folder, so it throws errors instead.

The fix was a modification to the MVC Project File as shown below:

Under the <Target Name="MvcBuildViews" AfterTargets="AfterBuild" Condition="'$(MvcBuildViews)'=='true'"> node, add the following :

<ItemGroup>


  <ExtraWebConfigs Include="$(BaseIntermediateOutputPath)\**\web.config" />

  <ExtraPackageTmp Include="$([System.IO.Directory]::GetDirectories(&quot;$(BaseIntermediateOutputPath)&quot;, &quot;PackageTmp&quot;, System.IO.SearchOption.AllDirectories))" />

</ItemGroup>
<Delete Files="@(ExtraWebConfigs)" />
<RemoveDir Directories="@(ExtraPackageTmp)" />

Hope this helps!



European ASP.NET MVC 4 Hosting - Amsterdam :: Securely Verify and Validate Image Uploads in ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC

clock September 17, 2013 10:01 by author Ronny

One of the more interesting things had to do as part of building XAPFest was handle bulk image uploads for screenshots for applications and user / app icons. Most of the challenges here are UI-centric ones (which resolved using jQuery File-Upload) but the one security challenge that remains outstanding is ensuring that the content uploaded to your servers is safe for your users to consume.

Fortunately this problem isn't too hard to solve and doesn't require much code in C#.

Flawed Approaches to Verifying Image Uploads

Here's what usually see when developers try to allow only web-friendly image uploads:

  1. File extension validation (i.e. only allow images with .png, .jp[e]g, and .gif to be uploaded) and
  2. MIME type validation.


So what's wrong with these techniques? The issue is that both the file extension and MIME type can be spoofed, so there's no guarantee that a determined hacker might not take a js. file, slap an extra .png extension somewhere in the mix and spoof the MIME type.

Stronger Approach to Verifying Image Uploads: GDI+ Format Checking

Every file format has to follow a particular codec / byte order convention in order to be read and executed by software. This is as true for proprietary formats like .pptx as it is for .png and .gif.

You can use these codecs to your advantage and quickly tell if a file is really what it says it is - you quickly check the contents of the file against the supported formats codecs to see if the content fits into any of those specifications.

Luckily GDI+ (System.Drawing.Imaging), the graphics engine which powers Windows, has some super-simple functions we can use to perform this validation. Here's a bit of source you can use to validate a file against PNG, JPEG, and GIF formats:

using System.Drawing.Imaging;
using System.IO;
using System.Drawing;
namespace XAPFest.Providers.Security
{
    ///
    /// Utility class used to validate the contents of uploaded files  
    ///
    public static class FileUploadValidator  
    {    
     public static bool FileIsWebFriendlyImage(Stream stream)   
     {
            try
            {
                //Read an image from the stream...
                var i = Image.FromStream(stream);
                 //Move the pointer back to the beginning of the stream
                stream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
                 if (ImageFormat.Jpeg.Equals(i.RawFormat))
                    return true;
                return ImageFormat.Png.Equals(i.RawFormat)|| ImageFormat.Gif.Equals(i.RawFormat);
            }
            catch
            {
                return false;
            }
        }
     }
}

All this code does is read the Stream object returned for each posted file into an Image object, and then verifies that the Image supports one of three supported codecs. This source code has not been tested by security experts, so use it at your own risk. If you have any questions about how this code works or want to learn more, please drop me a line in the comments below or on Twitter.

How Do Make Sure Files Are below [X] Filesize

Since had this source code lying around anyway, We thought we would share it: 

Super-simple, like we said, but it gets the job done. Express the maximum allowable size as a long and compare it against the length of the stream

public static bool FileIsWebFriendlyImage(Stream stream, long size)
        {
            return stream.Length <= size && FileIsWebFriendlyImage(stream);
        }
    }
The other important catch to note here is that move the Stream's pointer back to the front of the stream, so it can be read again by the caller which passed the reference to this function.



European ASP.NET MVC 4 Hosting - Amsterdam :: Asynchronous Controllers in ASP.NET MVC 4

clock September 6, 2013 12:01 by author Scott

One of the most important features of ASP.NET MVC 4 is the introduction of the new ASP.NET Web API, which simplifies REST programming with a strongly typed HTTP object model. In addition, ASP.NET MVC 4 takes advantage of the new asynchronous programming model introduced with .NET Framework 4.5 to allow developers to write asynchronous action methods. It is important to understand the advantages and disadvantages of the new asynchronous methods to use them whenever they will provide a benefit.

(ASP.NET MVC 4 also includes many enhancements focused on mobile development, such as jQuery Mobile support and selecting views based on which mobile browser makes requests. If you work with previous ASP.NET MVC versions and you target multiple mobile devices, the new display modes are worth moving to ASP.NET MVC 4. In addition, the bundling and minification framework makes it simpler to reduce HTTP requests for each page without having to use third-party tools.)

Asynchronous controllers ASP.NET MVC 4

Asynchronous execution is the future of Windows development : it has been largely demonstrated during the //Build conference two weeks ago.

In previous versions of ASP.NET MVC it was possible to create asynchronous controllers by inheriting the AsyncController class and using some conventions :

- MyActionAsync : method that returns void and launches an asynchronous process
- MyActionCompleted : method that returns an ActionResult (the result of the MVC action “MyAction”, in this case)

To allow the MVC engine to manage asynchronous operations and pass the result to the view engine, developers had to use the propery AsyncManager of the AsyncController. The “completed” method parameters was passed by the MVC engine through this object.

For example, the controller that is defined bellow allows to get a Json-serialized list of movies – asynchronously – from an OData service :

public class MoviesController : AsyncController
{
    public ActionResult Index()
    {
        return View();
    } 

    public void GetJsonMoviesAsync(int? page)
    {
        const int pageSize = 20;
        int skip = pageSize * ((page ?? 1) - 1);
        string url = string.Format("http://odata.netflix.com/[…]&$skip={0}&$top={1}",
            skip, pageSize); 

        //the asynchronous operation is declared
        AsyncManager.OutstandingOperations.Increment(); 

        var webClient = new WebClient();
        webClient.DownloadStringCompleted += OnWebClientDownloadStringCompleted;
        webClient.DownloadStringAsync(new Uri(url));//the asynchronous process is launched
    } 

    private void OnWebClientDownloadStringCompleted(object sender,
        DownloadStringCompletedEventArgs e)
    {
        //the asynchronous process ends
        //"movies" result is added to the parameters of the AsyncManager
        //NB : it's the name of the parameter that is take by the
        //GetJsonMoviesCompleted method
        List<Movie> movies = null;
        if (AsyncManager.Parameters.ContainsKey("movies"))
        {
            movies = (List<Movie>)AsyncManager.Parameters["movies"];
            movies.Clear();
        }
        else
        {
            movies = new List<Movie>();
            AsyncManager.Parameters["movies"] = movies;
        } 

        movies.AddRange(Movie.FromXml(e.Result)); 

        //the ends of the asynchronous operation (launches the call of "Action"Completed)
        AsyncManager.OutstandingOperations.Decrement();
    } 

    public ActionResult GetJsonMoviesCompleted(List<Movie> movies)
    {
        //on retourne le résultat Json
        return Json(movies, JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);
    }
}

It’s not really complicated to create an asynchronous controller but ASP.NET MVC 4 and C# 5 with the new async and await keywords will make it easier !

public class MoviesController : AsyncController
{
    public ActionResult Index()
    {
        return View();
    } 

    public async Task<ActionResult> GetJsonMovies(int? page)
    {
        const int pageSize = 20;
        int skip = pageSize * ((page ?? 1) - 1);
        string.Format("http://odata.netflix.com/[…]&$skip={0}&$top={1}",
                    skip, pageSize); 

        var webClient = new WebClient();
        string xmlResult = await webClient.DownloadStringTaskAsync(url);
        return Json(Movie.FromXml(xmlResult), JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);
    }
}

As you can see in the previous code snippet, in ASP.NET MVC 4 you always should inherits from AsyncController but there is no more naming conventions, no more Async/Completed methods, no more AsyncManager and the action returns a Task instead of an ActionResult !

 



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