Prerequisites ASP .NET 3.5 ASP .NET MVC, http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=140768&clcid=0x409 Your favourite versioning tool, eg. Tortoise SVN, http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ Access to MS SQL database or SQL database express Windows Azure SDK (if you want to run on Windows Azure)   You then need to create a folder on your drive somewhere containing the folders pesta ... [More]

Finally managed to get pesta running under Windows Azure. It wasn't too difficult actually. The July CTP of Windows Azure SDK supported MVC projects as a web role out of the box. No hacking necessary. However, when I first got it running, pesta did not seem to inject the javascript libraries and gadgets were not rendered properly. It turns out that when deploying the MVC project, the CloudService... [More]

Raya 0.2.2 addresses the following issues since the release of Raya 0.2 edit profile button only shown for owner fix exception when composing new message clear facebook connect cookies on invalid session key fix delete button in apps gallery remove unused files set username session value for facebook connect logins fixed exception on failed login Internal widgets Included since the ... [More]

Raya 0.2 has been released. What's new with this release  New User Interface Raya has been given a new look. Yes it does look a little like facebook but expect the UI to evolve more in the near future. OpenID support Allows users to login using their OpenID, Yahoo!ID, Google Account. Internal widgets Allows the creation of internal OpenSocial widgets. Included is an OpenSocial widget to... [More]

It has been awhile since my last post. Initially, I was looking into getting pesta working on Windows Azure. While at it, I thought I might as well upgrade it to support OpenSocial 0.9. And then while upgrading it, I looked into simplifying the serialization and deserialization of the various OpenSocial data representations for the REST API.  Previously, the serialization process to and from... [More]

Recently, I have been looking into automatically minifying the javascript files being served by the gadget server in pesta. Before this, there were manually copied over from java shindig. For those needing a good introduction with creating custom tasks using msbuild, this link gives a pretty good introduction and also explains how to set up msbuild as an external tool so that you can edit .proj f... [More]

What I thought would just take a few minutes to do turned out to be one big adventure. While working on raya, I was irritated by the slowness of the project. From firebug, it seems that the browser was still asking for and getting all the static files again at every page refresh. I had use StaticFileHandler.cs from the blog entry here. This page also explains in more detail about the code.The prob... [More]

OpenSocial allows authenticated exchanges between the container and gadget server using either security tokens, OAuth or with no authentication. OAuth allows exchanges to be signed using either symmetric keys via HMAC-SHA1, or asymmetrically via RSA-SHA1 or just in plaintext. Currently, pesta supports all specified methods. Allowing Unauthenticated Requests To allow unauthenticated ... [More]

I will be taking a break from working on pesta and raya while working on an ecommerce project. This is also until the next OpenSocial v0.9 specification stabilises. Therefore, I have decided to create default releases for the OpenSocial sample site based on .NET, raya. Default releases for pesta and pestaserver has also been released here. A short explanation of the relationship of these releases ... [More]

Prerequisites - ASP .NET 3.5, - ASP .NET MVC, download - Your favourite versioning tool, eg. Tortoise SVN - Access to MS SQL database or SQL database express - FREE Visual Web Developer Express or Visual Studio   Installation Create 3 folders on your drive somewhere called - pesta (shared dll) - pestaserver (gadget server) - raya (sample site) Then, check-... [More]