Month: April 2016

Capturing and Tracing All HTTP Requests in C# and .Net

Modern applications are complex and often rely on a large number of external resources increasingly accessed using HTTP – for example most Azure services are interacted with using the HTTP protocol.

That being the case it can be useful to get a view of the requests your application is making and while this can be done with a tool like Fiddler that’s not always convenient in a production environment.

If you’re using the HttpClient class another option is to pass a custom message handler to it’s constructor but this relies on you being in direct control of all the code making HTTP requests and that’s unlikely.

A simple way of capturing this information without getting into all the unpleasantness of writing a TCP listener or HTTP proxy is to use the System.Diagnostics namespace. From .net 4.5 onwards the framework has been writing HTTP events to the System.Diagnostics.Eventing.FrameworkEventSource source. This isn’t well documented and I found the easiest way to figure out what events are available, and their Event IDs, is to read the source.

Once you’ve found the HTTP events it’s quite straightforward to write an event listener that listens to this source. The below class will do this and output the details to the trace writer (so you can view it in the Visual Studio Debug Output window) but you can easily output it to a file, table storage, or any other output format of your choosing.

To set it running all you need to do is instantiate the class.

If you’d like to see this kind of data and much more, collected, correlated and analysed then you might want to check out my project Hub Analytics that is currently running a free beta.

Changing the App Service Plan of an Azure App Service

To allow a number of App Services to scale independently I needed to pull one of them out of an App Service Plan where it had lived with 3 others to sit in it’s own plan – experience had shown me that it’s scaling characteristics are really quite different from the other App Services.

You can do this straightforwardly and pretty much instantly either in the Portal (there’s a Change App Service Plan option in Settings) or with PowerShell (with the Set-AzureRmAppServicePlan cmdlet).

Super simple – but I did encounter one gotcha. This doesn’t move any deployment slots you might have created and so you end up in a situation with the main App Service sat in one App Service Plan and it’s deployment slots in another which probably isn’t what you want and, in any case, Azure won’t let you swap slots in different service plans.

The solution is simple: you can also move them between App Service Plans in the same way.

 

Serving Static Markdown Content from ASP.Net MVC to JavaScript

I recently moved a bunch of documentation into the Markdown format as I wanted to render it into multiple output formats and inside multiple hosting technologies – including an AngularJS based single page applicaiton.

While doing this I decided it would make sense to have a single source of truth for these files and so placed them as content inside my MVC 5 based website that is entirely public access. After dropping them into the website the first step is to configure ASP.Net to serve the content which involves adding the below to a web.config file:

This enables the Markdown to be served to a browser but if you try and download it from JavaScript you find it blocked by CORS. I solved this with a small ASP.Net module that is installed in the web.config above and the code for which is below:

Hope it’s useful to you.

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