Integrating Cloud Storage with AutoCAD Add-ins

JERRY WINTERS: All right. Let's get started. My name is Jerry Winters. My company is VB CAD. My title now is grandpa. We had a grandbaby about a week ago

And this is my PowerPoint presentation. That's the leading slide, and that's the second slide. And that's it.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]

I'm not a big fan of PowerPoint because PowerPoint has a tendency to-- well, maybe rephrase that. At Autodesk university, I'm not a fan of PowerPoint because, frankly, if you can get the exact same experience sitting at home, by watching a recording, then why come here? And so, rather than just have a PowerPoint and read the same thing that you're reading, and all that stuff, I prefer to just show code and work that way. So, hopefully that's amenable to everybody.

You're probably already bored of PowerPoint, tired of PowerPoint at this point. It's Thursday.

Anyways. Today we're talking about taking our AutoCAD audience that needs some kind of a storage solution, and using the cloud in order to satisfy that storage solution. OK? So, we might have a variety of reasons why we might want to make files accessible.

So, the primary thing is that, with the cloud, we can make our files accessible to everyone, everywhere. While having replication, which is not the same as backup. Having replication available, as well. And doing it very inexpensive without a bunch of infrastructure and stuff like that. That's what we're talking about here. OK?

So, let's take a look. And I'll be using the handout helping us to walk us through everything today. And we're going to start by talking about the pros and cons of cloud-based storage for AutoCAD audience. OK.

Pros inexpensive startup costs. You can go home today and start for free. OK? You can create a new Azure storage account, it won't cost you anything to get started. And Microsoft, they have different promotions go on and go off and things like that, OK? So, based on whenever you happen to do this, you might get a $50 credit, or $100 credit. Right now, I think it's a $200 credit. It's what the amount is, right now. So, you can go home, get started, take what we go over today and actually try it out and use it. All right?

So, the startup cost right now is free, but even after now, the startup costs are very small because you don't have to go through the process of buying servers, buying software, having the manpower to get them installed and implemented, and all that stuff. Dealing with an additional static IP address, dealing with those kinds of things. We don't have to go through those costs, OK?

Now, one of the other pros there, is that they're globally accessible. OK? Immediately. If you have a server in your office that's already there, a physical server, and you want to make files on that server accessible to everyone, what do you have to do?

AUDIENCE: Push it.

JERRY WINTERS: Push it to what?

AUDIENCE: Push it to other servers.

JERRY WINTERS: To other servers? That are already out there?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

JERRY WINTERS: Let's pretend you're not there, yet. Let's just pretend you just have a server, and you think to yourself, "I've got this AutoCAD add in, it would sure be nice to make these files accessible to other people". What would you have to do?

AUDIENCE: Get it through your firewall.

JERRY WINTERS: So, firewall. First thing, right? Get it to through the firewall, somehow. Are we going to use FTP or are we going to use some other kind of just a web site, that people can download from. A variety of things there, right? But getting through that firewall, how amenable are IT departments to opening up another port on the firewall? Generally, not terribly amenable to that. And for good reason, OK? So, just the fact that it's globally accessible immediately is great.

I put bragging rights on here just for fun, but when we get together with people, we talk about things and just say, "Yeah I got x number of bytes, or megabytes, or terabytes, or petabytes up on the cloud for this kind of thing". It's kind of fun and we will talk about those things, and see what other people are doing.

That's one of the benefits to coming here to Autodesk university, is we have the opportunity to meet other people in similar or even dissimilar fields, and talk about what they're doing with the technology. How we're using AutoCAD. "I'm using it this way", "Oh really? That's interesting. I'm using it this way", "Oh, that's way interesting. I should try that". So, just the fact that you're here at Autodesk university tells me that, hopefully, you're talking with other people and getting ideas from them, as well.

Can be implement it without IT department red tape. That gets back to the port issue and gets back to buying servers, and things like that. I'm not suggesting you totally completely circumvent the IT department, if that's what you have going on in your company. But it might be worth considering, as was mentioned earlier. Try it out, get your own account. Try it out, see how it works. It's not going to cost you anything. Then, bring a person or two over from other departments, have them take a look at it. And you can do that without having to go through months and months of meetings and approvals, and sign offs, and all the rest. So, the fact that we can kind of implement some things without a lot of IT department red tape is kind of nice.

Multiple geolocated options. When you create an account, you can specify where you want those files stored. I've got a friend from Alaska that's here at Autodesk university, Carl. And he deals with remote areas in Alaska. And internet in those remote areas of Alaska, if they have it, are the things that you and I joke about now. It's the 56k, you know, 14.4k. Do you remember that? K used to be-- we used the word K a lot, right? 14.4k. 56k. Right? And then, ISDN came out. Whoa, that was incredible. We're talking about whole hundred-- it was 128k, or whatever it was.

Anyways. So, just making it globally accessible makes it easier because in some areas, they don't necessarily have the ability to download at 50 megabits per second. So, the more leaps it has to take to get from point A to point B, the sorer things are.

All right. Cons. Surrendering control. I like the idea of having a box sitting in front of me that I can grab onto and shake. I like the ability to say, "I need more storage. I'm going to slap it another drive". I like that idea of having that control. I like the idea of someone saying, "Hey, I need a backup of something". "OK. No problem". I'll just plug in a thumb drive here and do that. It's in the cloud, it's out there. Can we get those files back? Of course we can. We'll be talking about that today. But sometimes it's nice just to be able to plug in a thumb drive, copy and paste, and be done with it. And we don't have those options.

Next, is performance. What is it going to be? If I have a server and I want better performance out of that server, I might get additional processors, or processors with more cores in it. I might increase the RAM, I might swap out some drives for SSD's. I've got options there. When it comes to cloud storage, I'm not quite sure what I've got, frankly. I don't know if I'm dealing with a little 8088 computer. Some of you know what that is. I don't know if I'm dealing with that, or a TRS80 a VIC20, Commodore 64. I don't know if I'm dealing with those, or if I've actually got a machine that's got a little bit of guts behind it. I don't know.

The files out there are accessible, I know that. And the bandwidth might seem to be pretty good. But in terms of the actual performance of the machine, not quite sure where that's going to be.

Last con here. Without the internet up and running, the files are inaccessible. Now, that is a worry and a concern that seems to be going away more and more, because you almost can't go anywhere, at least in the continental US, that doesn't have a Wi-Fi signal somewhere, or within walking distance of where you are.

And that in and of itself, has pros and cons. But you need to have access to the internet to be able to talk to these files here on the cloud. All right? So those are pros and cons.

Anyone have any questions about that? Or any other thoughts on pros and cons of cloud? Yes.

AUDIENCE: Is it a con something we are facing is intellectual property and security.

JERRY WINTERS: OK. So one of the cons mentioned here is intellectual property and security, there. How do we do that? How do we guarantee? So, if you have a box in your office that you're running, you have a little more sense of well-being that this is secure. Why do we know that? Because we have done the security on it, right? Is that kind of what you're thinking? But when it's out in the cloud, then you have the same, let's say a file, let's say you're worried about a file, OK? Or email. We have the same file that's in multiple locations, potentially. And who can just walk in and plug-in a thumb drive and download that file, right? What can happen there? So, that's a legitimate question and a legitimate concern.

So, the cloud companies that take care of cloud things like Microsoft, like Amazon, Google, these companies, they have two fundamental guiding principles in everything they do when it comes to the cloud. The first one is uptime, sustainability, etc. OK? Because if you live in an area where the power goes out all the time, that gets frustrating, right? And with your or my data, if the data is up, now the data is down, now the data is up, no it is down. The cloud is falling, right? It's up, it's down, it's up, it's down. If that's happening, nobody's going to use it. So, that's the first thing, is keeping things up and running.

And the second one has got to be security. Now, I don't have any insider knowledge on exactly what they do and how they do it to keep things secure. We'll talk today about things that you can do to keep things secure on the cloud. But, that has to be of paramount importance to them, to keep things secure. I think more and more what's going to happen, is people will just become a little bit more comfortable with the idea.

Simple example, Facebook. You know, x number of years ago, and that will be different from person to person. It was like, "I'm not going to put pictures of my kids on Facebook, there's creeps out there". Right? But as time goes on, people get used to the idea of it happening. They realize that, generally, their kids are not being targeted because they have a picture up on Facebook of them. Things like that. So, culturally, we're just going to naturally become more accepting of them.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] as well.

JERRY WINTERS: Yes, yes.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] Intel and Google, and Tesla. They don't want their information on the cloud.

JERRY WINTERS: Understood, understood.

AUDIENCE: And if they don't want it, what can happen?

JERRY WINTERS: Well, and frankly, Microsoft doesn't want their stuff on the cloud, either. Right? I mean, they've got their own cloud storage platform here, and they don't want their stuff on the cloud. So, yeah. How do you deal with that? You assess people's comfort level, and if they're not there, I guess you don't do it. You come up with other mechanisms. But one thing you can do, is do an honest, sincere evaluation of security, as it is.

I have clients that have raised concerns about security. And I walk into their office and take a look around. And I'll know, if I have a thumb-drive in my hand here, and I have 30 seconds, I can get to someone's computer, copy a file to my thumb drive and get back to the front office without anyone seeing me. 30 seconds. If I go in at 7 o'clock in the morning, before people arrive for work, the front door is probably unlocked, and I can probably walk in and pick up a physical computer, and walk out the front door with it.

And so, security. Helping people to understand what that really means, yes. It's easy to say, "What about security?" it's very easy to say that, but helping people to appreciate what that really means, and getting the right people to appreciate that, is a challenge, and it's an ongoing challenge, it will continue to be a challenge until everyone adopts it. Which will probably never happen. So, it's an excellent question to raise. And, yeah, it's out there. It's a legitimate question.

AUDIENCE: I think one of the other plus, as far as pros goes, most of the internet, many companies have, they have a larger down than up. So, once you're close to a file where, let's say you are sharing it, you can take that at one time. You can upload it to a central place. At that point, your network is no longer [? taking a hit. ?] As opposed to if you distributed that file to 15 people, all 15 are-- you are uploading from the network, which is generally at slower speed.

JERRY WINTERS: Great thought. Great thought. So, just for recording purposes here. A benefit to the cloud is you upload the file once, and if 15 people want to download it at the same time, your company is not taking a hit on their bandwidth. Because bandwidth, generally speaking, your download speeds are faster than your upload speeds. And, so a great thought. Great point on that.

All right, should we move on? Let's move on.

Creating a new storage account for SQL Azure is as simple as Google searching Azure storage account. Let's just do a quick little search on that, here. Come here. Come here.

And, generally speaking, if you do that, the first thing that's going to come up is an ad from Microsoft. This is one time when it's actually useful to see that ad from Microsoft, OK? So, we click on that. And then, it's going to come in and say, OK, look at this. Hey, free account. Look at that. And so, it's giving to us information, credit container hosting solution, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Let's click on Free Account, and see what happens next. So, here's what I was mentioning before, about the actual bonuses here. Today, as of this recording, we got a $200 credit. Now, they're not going to send you a gift card in the mail of $200. But, basically, what they're saying is, you've got $200 worth of processing time, storage space available to you without you spending a penny. OK. So that's pretty good stuff.

So what you do is, you click on the Start Free here, and it comes in and asks you to sign in with your Microsoft account. If you don't have one, it will ask you to create one. And then, you're good to go. All right? That's about it. That creates the account. After that, is when the fun actually happens and starts. And so, that's what we're going to jump into next, here.

Now, we're going to be using an account I already have set up here, just to keep things simple for us. We saw that. All right.

Once we log into our account, if we want to create a new storage account, we're going to click over here on New, and pick storage. Then, we're going to pick the storage account that we actually want. OK? That's what we're going to do. So we're going to pretend for a moment that's already happened. Because it has. When we create a new storage account, it wants to know what do you want to name this thing. The store account I created here is AU2016.

Now, if you are fast, you'll be able to go home and actually use my storage account here, if you'd like. OK? If you want to try uploading some files, downloading some files. That kind of a thing. We're going to see in a little bit, there's going to be a hash key that's there. So just email me and say, "Hey, what's the current hash key?". I'll reply to you and give that to you. And so, even if you don't want to create your own storage account you can kind of mess with this a little bit, if you want to try the code out. OK?

So, it needs a name. It needs a deployment model. The account kind, general purpose, there's the standard, premium. Quick hint, premium costs more than standard. Replication, Read access, georedundant. So, just some various things here, pay as you go subscription. Storage location, right now, using West US. OK. If you're over in Europe, you don't want to use West US. If you're creating a storage account specifically for another part of the world, use an account that's generalized over there.

Now, this says West US. What does that tell us? Is it in California? I don't know. Oregon? Don't know. Washington? Who knows. It's somewhere in West US. Yes?

AUDIENCE: Can admin change after you set up? So, if you want to set it up, work on it here, and then-- but it is for someone in Europe, can they just change?

JERRY WINTERS: Great question. So, yeah. These things can be changed pretty much at any time. Great question.

And after we do all that, we click on this Create button here. We click on the Create button and then we wait.

Now, while we're waiting, you're going to see this little thing pop up here that says Deployment Started. It might say the time of day that it is. And you're going to see this little thing scrolling across here. It takes about a minute or so. Before that new account will show up here. And this. Please ignore this storage account here. All right? [LAUGHS] Wrong conference here to have that one on there.

And this is what we get. Once we have a storage account set up, we can now go in and create these things called Containers. Now, we'll be talking about two different kinds of containers today. We will be talking about file containers and blob containers. All right?

So, a file container contains files. A blob container contains what?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JERRY WINTERS: Glad you asked. It might be a binary large object. It might be a blitter object. It might be a Biologically Liberated Organo Beasties. I have no idea what that is. Might be a Big Lump On Board, which apparently is a military reference to a non-crew person sitting in a military aircraft. It could even be a Bum Lying On a Bench. I did not come up with those. That's from some acronym website that I hit to find some things there. But I'm pretty sure we're looking at a binary large object, OK?

So, the device the files and blobs. When you think about files, think about Windows Explorer, OK? When you think about files, think about Windows Explorer. When you think about blobs, think about a single directory in Windows Explorer that has lots and lots, and lots, and lots, and lots of files in it. OK.

So, that's really what we're dealing with. When you go to a file container, you can actually create subdirectories and we will see that today. When you go to a blob, it's a blob, it's there. It has a name, but it's just there. And you can put lots and lots of stuff in there. Lots and lots of files in there. But it's a blob, OK?

So, that's one distinction between the blobs and the files. The other distinction is this. If you have a drop box type of an account, or share like that, the file account-- there are other sharing opportunities available if you create a file account. So, if your sole purpose in going to the cloud here for storage, is so that your program can access files as needed, or give access to people certain files as needed, if that's your sole reason for doing it, then go with the blob.

If there might be a benefit to having some other kind of a sharing option, in terms of people being able to go down and browse through folders and things like that, then go with the fileshare. Good enough?

All right. So, we're going to create a new container called User Downloads. OK. User Downloads. And this I think is going to be the binary large object. Now we have our blob container created, we can try uploading a file. So that's what the interface looks like.

So, if I come over. Which one we're looking at, here? We're looking at User Downloads. So, I come here, and come here. And let's go to our user downloads. You can see we've got an upload button right here, right? You can click on that. And over here, it says, Select a File. So I select a file.

Let's go to AU2016 and pick our cloud storage PDF file. And we'll upload that.

Block size. What descriptions they have here? Blocks, and Append Blocks. You can place a block. This block can support up to 5,000 blocks. 50,000 blocks. So, larger files the larger block size. There's probably also a performance benefit to having larger block size for larger files.

We'll click the Upload button here and it says Upload Completed. Well, that was fast. That was fast. All right. Now, if I come here to-- move into the cloud and click on that button, which is-- no, it was Integrated Storage Cloud. So, this is our class here, today. The handout will actually have this move into the cloud for SQL, as you're here. We'll take a look at this one, though.

What I want you to notice is there is a little button here to copy the link. OK? If I copy that link, and then I come up here to my web browser. And do Control V to paste. That file just came off the cloud. OK?

Now, the cool thing is, it's pretty fast. I can upload a file, OK? And it's now on the cloud. It's available for anyone. If you were to use your phone and type that in, then you would also be downloading that same file from the cloud. OK. So the file we just barely uploaded. Now, the downside is, my file name has spaces in it. So, there's a special thing called . That, every time there's a space, instead of putting a space, you need to put a in there. OK? I mean, you could try without that, and see what happens. It might be OK. But it translated the into spaces when I pasted it in there, so it may work with , or with spaces, and may need the s in there.

So, how easy is it to actually get a file on the cloud? If you are starting totally from scratch. In about five minutes, you can create a new Azure storage account, create a new container that's available publicly, and click the Upload button and pick a file, and it's up there. In about five minutes or less. OK?

And, how long would it take to get IT-- and I'm not banging on IT, it sounds like I am, maybe a little bit, but how long does it take to get an IT department to get a server for you? To get the software installed, get an IP address, to get a port opened up on the firewall? It's going to take more than five minutes in most scenarios. OK? More than five minutes.

So, this is kind of an API class, kind of. So, let's take a look at what it takes to programmatically get that same file, or actually the previous file that I put up there, down. OK?

I'm going to switch over now to Visual Studio here. And let's just skew on up here. Let's change our font size, that might be a little easier on your eyes. Right? Fonts. Let's go to. Let's try 14. See what that does for us. All right. A little better? All right. We're going to ignore all the rest of the stuff here. And just focus on this one line of code.

One line of code is all it takes to download a file from the cloud. In the way that we just did it. If you can copy and paste a file name, or URL in a browser, you can use this. My.Computer.Network.Downloadfile call. You don't have to reference anything. You can just use that call right there. And that will download any file that's out there on the internet. OK

If you see a picture you like, right click on it, look at the properties of it, copy the URL, plug it in here, and that can download that file for you. OK If it's a PDF, you can download it. WAV file, MP3, whatever it is you want to do, you can download it using this My.Computer.Network.Downloadfile. OK? Very simple.

The other nice thing is that not only do you download it, but you tell that file where you want it to be stored and what you want it's name to be. So, if you want to simplify that file, as well, the file name, you can do that, as well. And that's part of the call.

Here's a file where it is, and here's where I want that file downloaded to, including the filename. All right? So, one line of code. We can handle that, right? Most of us can handle one line of code. And it's simply a matter of getting that URL and copying and pasting it.

Now, regarding security. One thing to consider. Ignorance is the best security measure out there. OK? Many of you will be going home today or tomorrow, or the next day, and many of you might go home on an airplane. You're going to go into an airport, you're going to go through this massive security thing, your bodies will be scanned, your pictures put on the internet, just kidding. They're going to scan you, they're going to check you, they might frisk you, they might go through your stuff. Once you get past that initial harassment, necessary evil in today's society, unfortunately. Once you get past that, if you look for it, you will see ignorance as a security measure all around you. OK?

If I physically tried to run through that security area, and just knock people over so they could not search me and frisk me, and make me go through metal detectors, that might be a big challenge. But if I, once I get past that, it's all about ignorance. You'll see doors with little keypads on them. Not scanning RFID chips, but just keypads all over the place. You pop in four digits and you're now on the tarmac.

OK? What is keeping people from getting on the tarmac? Is it someone standing there with a gun? It's ignorance. It's lack of knowledge of what that four digit code is. Perhaps a concern for their own health and safety maybe, as well. But, generally speaking, it's ignorance.

So, we just put a file on the cloud. How many people have downloaded that file, so far? I just did. I just did. But how many other people around the whole wide world? Hackers galore, trying to pound things, trying to hit things, right? What would it take for a hacker to be able to get this? Up here. How long would it take a random generator to come up with that? Brute force attack. How long would it take to come up with that? Probably a little while. OK?

Now, selling a CEO of a major corporation that ignorance is our best weapon, that's not something you will ever see on any logo. [LAUGHS] OK? Hey, come to Jerry's Security, where ignorance is our best weapon. You know? That's just not going to sell anything, I understand that. But in reality, if someone doesn't type in those letters and spaces, and all that stuff as it is up there, they're not going to get the file. OK? They're not going to get it. So, just something to consider on the security side of things.

All right. So, I've now got this files as downloaded. That's really groovy, that's really nice. That's really neat. Am I allowed to say the word "Groovy"? Let's jump down here. We just did that. We just download that file. There is the URL there. I'll leave that for a second. If anyone wants to typing that into their phones, good luck. I did it, just to make sure it works. Just so you know. OK? But that really, [LAUGHS] really held me up. , 20%, stuff. All right? OK. Let's continue.

I should have put a QR code up there, so you could just hit it, right?

All right, let's talk about access keys. One of the things that we do with a storage account, and this is the AU2016 storage account, is we create something called an access key. Now, you can see on the screen here, there are actually two access keys that are here. And what the recommendation is, is that you choose whether it's key 1 or key 2. There's nothing special about key 1 or key 2. But you choose one of them to be your prominent. This key never changes key.

And on the other one, it's one that you change from time to time. If we store our files in the cloud here. In such a way that it requires an access key to get to it, that's our first level of security. Now, once again, that's a pretty long string there. The I/EU9E+NT, that's a pretty long thing, it would take a while for a random generator or a brute force to come up with that. OK? But when you distribute applications, when you distribute things like that, that key needs to be somewhere and needs to be acquired somewhere.

At some point, there has to be some kind of an authentication that kicks things off. Whether it's a username and password that queries a database for today's access key, if that's the way you want to do it, you could do that. But now there's going to be a username and password, right? So now, you have these two things out here. So, at some point, there is a point of entry into this.

Borrowing a username/password type scenario that we write into our programs, we'll just have this access key that we deal with.

AUDIENCE: That key is controlling access? It's not encrypting the file?

JERRY WINTERS: It's not encrypting the file. When you create your containers, you can actually specify whether or not you want them encrypted. But that's not an encryption key. That was just an access key. Great question. All right. So, those were access keys. Now, honestly, I've been playing around this obviously, because we're getting ready for a presentation here and everything, so I don't know if my code is going to work, I might have to change the access key. But what do with that access key, is you put it into a connection string of sorts. And then we use it.

So, we have the first one that I created that allows us to put stuff up there that's available to everyone. Now, we're going to create a new file share. So, we click on New File Share. And this is going to be-- the first one was User Downloads, this one is User Uploads. And we click on the Create button. Pretty simple, pretty straightforward stuff. The next thing we're going to do is in our account, or our program that we're creating here. in Visual Studio, we're going to add a new reference to the Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage. OK?

One reference is all we have to add to our project. So, whether I say standalone windows forms application, or an AutoCAD add-in that we will compile to a .dll, we select this one reference. And now the cloud is ours. OK? The cloud is ours.

Now, I have not tried this. I don't necessarily recommend this, but you might want to try this. We talked about the whole brute force thing, right? If you wanted to, you could always get this reference in your application, and just try hitting up a bunch of storage accounts. Try to come up with what their names might be. I mean, you could always do that. Right? So, we're going to add a new reference to our project, here.

And then we say OK. And once that's in there, we need to create this little access, I'll call it connection string here. OK? Our stored string has the protocol. How are you going to get this file? An account name, AU2016, you saw that. An account key. This is the key that we saw just a moment ago. The access key. OK? So, by having a single string in our application, a single variable, I should say, that stores that access key, we don't have to have that copied and pasted all over the place. OK?

So, whatever your authentication mechanism is, you basically get the key in here somehow. Whether you're reading it from a text file, or a database, or some kind of an encrypted file that you're now decrypting when it comes into the application, that's the key that you need. So, with those pieces of information, specifically the account name, the account key, with those two pieces of information, we can actually get in and start working with the files on the cloud.

All right. We're going to look at two functions now. And let's see here. Let's go ahead and go here for that, to Visual Studio. Our first function is called Upload to the Cloud. Our second function is called Download From the Cloud. Any guesses as to what these things do? Hopefully, it's relatively self-explanatory. OK? That's it. Two functions. And now, you can upload and download at your will and pleasure. OK?

Now, I've done something to these functions that you may or may not want to do. It might be interesting to you, you might find it ridiculous, I don't know. But what we're doing here is, we're creating this thing called a GUID. And when I use Upload to Cloud, and I give it my file path, which is C:/temp/test.png, or whatever file it is, It brings that file in. But when I upload it to the cloud, I'm using this GUID as the file name. With the file extension of the file as it came in.

So, if I brought in test1.dwg, if that's the file I'm bringing in, on the cloud itself, the file name is going to be jibberish dot dwg. It's going to be a GUID, OK?

Now, this is done for a couple of reasons. Reason number one. Once again, this may not apply to you, but here's why I'm doing this. Reason number one. If I do this, and I upload a file called test1.dwg today, and I make changes to it, and upload a test1.dwg tomorrow, and then, the next day, I have made changes to it and I upload again, test1.dwg. How many files do I have on the cloud? Three. Because I'm actually changing the name. I'm changing the name to the GUID.dwg OK? And you'll see that in just a minute. OK?

So I'm changing the names. I've got three versions that file. Now, is that useful? It may or may not be to you. Don't know. OK? But that's what I'm doing in this example, here. OK? The other benefit is, how difficult is it to guess a GUID? OK? Great question. What is a GUID?

Another great question. I'm glad you asked. Let's take a look at the definition here. And a little thing on GUIDS, here. "A Globally Unique Identifier, GUID, is a unique reference number use as an identifier in computer software. The term GUID typically refers to various implementations of the Universally Unique Identifier Standard. GUIDS are usually stored as 128-bit values, and are commonly displayed as 32-hexadecimal digits, with groups separated by hyphens, such as et cetera, et cetera. They may or may not be generated from random or pseudo random numbers. GUIDs generated from random numbers normally contains six fixed bits. These indicate that the GUID is random, and 122 random bits, so locally, the total number of unique such GUIDs is--" there's more than 2,122 GUIDs, I'll tell you that. Something got lost in the copy and paste on that one.

That's going to be a 10, I think.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JERRY WINTERS: Yes. It's going to be 10 to the 2112 power, approximately 5.3 times-- why do they do that? Anyways, sorry about that.

"Assuming uniform probability, for simplicity, the probability of one duplicate would be about 50% if every person on Earth, as of 2014, owned 600 million GUIDs". So, if every single person on earth was given 600 million GUIDs, the probability is 1 out of 2, 50%, that someone on Earth would have the same GUID as someone else on the Earth. OK?

So, security wise, if someone's trying to guess a filename, they might be able to guess a file name, possibly. Like, DoNotOpen.txt you know? Or Payroll.mdb or something like that, OK? That kind of thing could be guessed. But these kind of GUIDs are fairly unique, as we can see here.

AUDIENCE: How do you find it?

JERRY WINTERS: How you-- great question, I'm glad you asked. [LAUGHS] Let's take a look at something, here. Yeah. Well, that's exactly what we're going to demonstrate here. So, let me go here. Let me just make sure I get a break point here. Let's create a break point right there, and a break point right here.

I'm going to use my Upload to Cloud, and Download From Cloud, OK? That's what I'm going to use here. And so, that's buttons two and three. Let's run this here. And let's try-- now, I'm totally dependent on the internet connectivity here, hopefully it works. Boom. That's done. Congratulations, I just uploaded Test.png to the cloud. A new file is on the cloud. A star is born. OK?

How do you find it? Great. I don't know. I just created a GUID. What's the chance of finding that GUID, or recreating that GUID? Not very good, OK? Bad code. Bad, bad code. OK? Button two is bad code. All right?

Let's take a look at another example here, though. There's a slight improvement here on button three. And when we go to button three, here. What we're going to do, and I'll put a break point right here, is, Upload to Cloud as a function that goes in here and it returns a string. Let's see what that string is. Oh, that might be useful.

So, Upload to Cloud returns a string, which tells me, this is the name of the file that's out there. OK. Now, what do I do with that name? That name could then be put in a database somewhere on a text file, text it to myself, email it to myself, that kind of a thing. OK? Now, once again, this whole GUID thing, it may or may not be useful for you. May or may not be helpful for you. OK?

But that's just what happened here. So, we upload the file of the cloud, we get back the return value, which is good. And now I can take that return value and immediately use it here to download that same file from the cloud. When I download it, in my code I'm saying, I want you to go to the temp directory, wherever that is. It's not SQL/temp. OK? And so, in my Download from Cloud, this tells me where it is. C:/users/Jerry/appdata/localtemp and then, the file name. OK? That's why I downloaded it to two, now. And why did I do that? Because everyone has a temp directory somewhere.

If I hard code a path to SQL/temp, it might work 80% of the time, it might work 50% of the time. I don't know. But everyone has a temp location. That's read right that I can write to. So, that's why I did that. All right?

Now, do you have to do that way? Of course not. You might say, "Oh, I changed the function to where you say this the file I want it downloaded, and this is where I want it downloaded to". You could have it download to a specified location. All right?

So, let's just take a quick look at that code again. Which is up here. Upload to Cloud. Download from Cloud. OK? They're both functions, they both return a string.

So, the first thing I do when I'm uploading, I say, "Hey, does this path, does this file even exist?". So, you put it into a file info object and then say, does this actually exist. Then we say, OK, if it does exist, then it's time for it to start going here.

First off, we need to get our cloud storage account. And we used that storage string, that was the one that had that key in it, the access key. Right? Here is the account name, here is the access key. So, create a storage account. Then, we get a file client. Then, we go to the specific file share call, User Uploads. We go to the root directory of that. And this is where the GUID is is created. OK? Whoops.

So, we just say, Declare a Variable as a GUID equals GUID.newGUID. that's it. There is a thing called a cloud file. And then we use the Upload From File. Now, if this technology is interesting to you and you start looking around, you're going to find that there are actually a lot of overloads to this. Cloud file, a lot of ways to get files up there. Reason being is because this can be used for many different things.

MyCloudFile. Upload from byte array. Upload from byte array asynchronously. Upload from file. Upload from file asynchronously. Upload from stream. Upload from stream asynchronously. Upload text. Upload text asynchronously. OK? I think the upload from file, because that's what I have. I've got a file.

Let's say I just copied a bitmap from a website to my Windows clipboard. Do I have a file? No. What I actually have is a byte array. If we go to the clipboard and get the data of what's on there, I actually have a byte array. OK? So without going through the process of trying to take that, create a new bitmap out of it, save it, and then say, Upload the File, I can simply upload my byte array. OK? Does that makes sense to anyone? Hopefully? Good. Any questions right now?

For our listening audience at home, there are actually people in the audience here, there are no questions. OK.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHS]

We will continue. We will continue. So, once you get the source code, you'll see a lot of stuff in here. A lot of stuff. OK? Lots and lots of stuff to work with, here. One of my goals here at AU is to make things really straightforward and simple. I mean, that is, from line 34 to line 48, that is 15 lines of code. Right? If your thinking it's 14 lines, it really is 15 lines. Just count them, if you want to. Trust me. It works. 15 lines of code, OK? One, two, three, four, I think there's 15 lines of code. OK. 15 lines of code to take a file, upload it to the cloud, pretty good.

You will find code examples out there, that are much, much, much, much more than 15 lines of code. OK? So this is a simplified version. It works. All right.

Downloading from the cloud, same thing. From line 49 to line 62 is, what's that? 13, 14 lines of code. All right? So, very simple things.

Now, hard coded in here, is the name of the container that we put up there. User Uploads. That's part of the code. All right? If I wanted to make this a little bit better, what could I do? Make that a parameter of the function, right? That way I got a little bit of leeway as to which one I want to upload to. Do I want User Uploads? Do I want User Downloads? Do I want User Side Loads? What do I want? And so, that would be something that could be done here.