Stackoverflow : Neat set of badges

Seems somewhat symmetric ...

100 bronze badges - achievement unlocked :-)

Enjoy!

Azure : Web site FTP credentials

In an Azure web site, in the portal under the dashboard on the RHS, you'll see a whole link of links e.g. the link to the site, ftp links, log links etc.

To access these, you need credentials which you can set further up that page on the RHS i.e. "Reset your deployment credentials".

So you pick a name like "myftpusername" and a password.

Then you use something like FileZilla to FTP to the site using the FTP link, you type in the credentials and get "Access Denied"! WTF?

The reason is that you have to add the actual site to the user name. So if the site name is "AnAzureWebSite", then the user name needs to be:

AnAzureWebSite\myftpusername

Enjoy!

Misc : Zooming the ZoomIt window

ZoomIt is a fantastic tool for presentations. You'll find it at:

ZoomIt

But I've always battled to get it to display exactly where I want and tracking around the zoomed screen is a nightmare.

Then I figured out that before you hit "Ctrl / 1" to zoom, put the cursor at the middle of the section you want to zoom.

Then zoom.

You can make minor adjustments by moving the mouse, use the trackwheel to zoom in / out, click the left mouse button to "stabilise" and then you are in the "Ctrl / 2" window by default so "Ctrl / Shift" will draw an arrow etc.

And it would be remiss of me not to point out that you can do this in Windows via the built-in commands. In a browser, type "Windows key" and then "+" to zoom out and then  "Windows key" and then "-" to zoom back in. This is in fact the Magnifier tool.

Enjoy!

ADFS : Getting certificate data from metadata

A number of times I've needed to get information about the certificate e.g. to update the WIF thumbprint in the web.config and I've battled to extract this out of the metadata.

For ADFS, you'll find it at:

https://someserver/FederationMetadata/2007-06/FederationMetadata.xml

For Azure Active Directory, you'll find it at:

• Click on "Active Directory" in the menu on the LHS of the Azure Portal.
• Click on your tenant name.
• Click on the "Applications" tab at the top.
• Click on "View Endpoints" at the bottom.
• Then navigate to the "Federation Metadata Document" link.

Then I found an easy way to do this based on a post I read.

Open the metadata file in Notepad++ or whatever your particular flavour is and then search for the "X509Certificate" tag.

Copy all the information between that and the closing tag. It's base64 encoded so it will normally end with an "=" sign.

Copy / paste this into a new Notepad++ window. Remove all trailing spaces.

Save the file somewhere with a ".cer" suffix.

Then double-click on the file.

Viola - it opens up the certificate window and you can grab whatever you want.

The thumbprint is found under the "Details" tab - scroll down to the bottom.

Enjoy!

Visual Studio : Unable to locate NuGet.exe

Actual message is:

Error - Unable to locate 'C:\.....\.nuget\NuGet.exe'   

You sometimes get this when building a project that you cloned from GitHub.

Under .nuget/nuget.Targets in your project, change:

<DownloadNuGetExe Condition=" '$(DownloadNuGetExe)' == '' ">false ...

to 

<DownloadNuGetExe Condition=" '$(DownloadNuGetExe)' == '' ">true ...

Enjoy!