When will the Casablanca bits be refreshed?

Question

We've received some questions about when there will be a refresh of the Casablanca bits.

We are planning one, but are not ready to announce a date for it. The internal team has been growing, and the refresh will have some significant improvements, but we're not quite ready to release it yet.

What is coming:

    Streaming HTTP message bodies.

    Cleanup of our string / wide-char string APIs

    Support for client authentication

    Azure Tables

    Deepened Azure Blob and Queue support

Niklas

Answer 1

No plans for HTTPS ?

Does Client Auth include support for PKI?

Answer 2

Client-side HTTPS support was added in June, so that's not "new" per se. Server-side, the plan remains to rely on IIS for the HTTPS support. Currently, no support for client-side certificates, except on Windows 8 / WinRT where the underlying HTTP stack is supposed to handle that automatically.

Regarding auth, we will be supporting what the underlying HTTP stack supports, which on Windows 7 / Windows 8 desktop means

WINHTTP_AUTH_SCHEME_NEGOTIATE

WINHTTP_AUTH_SCHEME_NTLM

WINHTTP_AUTH_SCHEME_PASSPORT

WINHTTP_AUTH_SCHEME_DIGEST

WINHTTP_AUTH_SCHEME_BASIC

 

 

Answer 3

A note on the upcoming refresh:

The refresh will only work with the final versions of Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012, not any of the preview versions. If you are still on Windows 8 RP or VS 2012 RC, you will have to upgrade.

The support for Visual Studio 2010 and Windows 7 remains in place and is unaffected by the refresh (except that there's a bunch of new functionality :-)).

Niklas

Answer 4

Looking forward to Table Support. I have parts of a new application written in C#/.net just for the azure storage sdk using table storage thats waiting to be moved to native. What are the plans on OS X support?

Thank you for your great work!

Philipp

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www.timecockpit.com

Answer 5

>> What are the plans on OS X support?

We currently haven't made such plans. Our first non-Windows platform will be Linux.

Niklas

Answer 6

Given that it's the13th today, and we still have a number of bugs to fix, and scenarios to test, it's now clear that we won't be issuing the refresh tomorrow.

It will be sometime next week, instead.

Niklas

Answer 7

Philipp,

I'm glad to hear that you are looking to use our Table APIs. Please do try it out and give us your honest feedback on it. We'll probably not have a lot of iterations left until we will ship, and getting the API right is important.

Niklas

Answer 8

Hi Niklas,

looking forward to the refresh and will try it out as soon as possible!

Philipp

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www.timecockpit.com

Answer 9

In the interest of full disclosure, here's an update on the refresh:

Things are looking pretty good for a end-of-week release of the refreshed bits.

The last feature (a redesign of asynchronous streams) is in the check-in queue. (As I wrote this, I got the email notification that it went through! :-))

Some docs that require changes are still out for review, but we should have them ready later today.

We have to do a full manual test pass on the final bits, which will take at least a day-and-a-half.

A possible long-pole item will be support for VS 2012 Express, but we may resolve that by updating the VS 2010 and VS 2012 (commercial) installs this week and delay the VS Express support into next week, so that at least some of you may get it as soon as possible.

Niklas

Answer 10

Niklas,

Any news? :)

Answer 11

Yes, actually!

We will have the bits on the site later today. It will require VS 2010, VS 2012 (final). Also, support for VS Express 2012 will be added (both versions), but 2010 will continue to require a commercial license of VS. Also, it will require the RTM of Windows 8 if you want to do any App Store-style applications.

There will be an announcement here and on the VC++ blog when the bits are ready, which should be later today, probably this morning.

Niklas

Answer 12

Also, I would add that it will be a good idea to re-read much of the documentation.

There will be a lot of changes, mostly added functionality, but also some breaking changes of existing APIs. For example, support for HTTP streaming is added, but that also means that the extract_xxx() functions on http_request and http_response are now asynchronous, returning task<xxx> instead of xxx.

Stay tuned,

Niklas

Answer 13

The links on the site have now been updated to point to the new, refreshed, bits. To verify that you are not getting something from a file cache, you can verify the date of the digital signature of the MSIs. It should be stamped Saturday, September 22.

The DevLabs site will continue to refer to Windows 8 Release Preview and VS 2012 RC for a little while -- please disregard this and note instead that this refresh requires the final, release versions of both Windows 8 (for App Store development) and Visual Studio.

The links to the MSIs for Visual Studio 2012 Express are not yet available, but will be when we update the DevLabs site later today. At that time, we will post a note here and also on the VC++ blog.

Thanks,

Niklas