oEmbed format makes content in your site easy to share

oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites.

What does it mean?
For example, if you are sharing the youtube in Facebook status, you simply copy and paste the  youtube Url and Facebook app knows how to embed it nicely with preview picture and video description.

What does it mean for developer?
You can apply it for two things.
1> If you are trying to make sharing the contents in your site easy for users to allow them to share and embed in other sites, you can implement oEmbed API service interface for others sites to consume it.
2> If you are trying to allow users to embed contents in other sites like Youtube, Flickr, etc in your site, you can consume API interface of those sites which provides the oEmbed data for you to nicely present them in your site.

To find out more:
http://www.oembed.com
http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/09/tech-behind-new-twittercom.html

DLL missing with .RDLC ReportViewer deployment on Microsoft Azure hosting

I hit problem deploying my asp.net web app using .rdlc ReportViewer when I deployed it to azure cloud hosting.

The problem was because of the three missing dependency dlls  required by ReportViewer which doesn’t exist in Azure host Global assembly cache(GAC).

1. Microsoft.ReportViewer.WebForms.dll 
2. Microsoft.ReportViewer.Common.dll
3. Microsoft.ReportViewer.ProcessingObjectModel.dll

So, make sure the ReportViewer assemblies are available locally for your application. You can do this by "Add Reference" in your project and configure them to be copied locally into bin folder (Copy Local = True).

But for the 3rd dll (Microsoft.ReportViewer.ProcessingObjectModel.dll), you will not be able to find it from assemblies list in Visual Studio add reference. You will need to browse it in C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_MSIL\Microsoft.ReportViewer.ProcessingObjectModel and add reference

Here is reference I got from MSDN

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg430128.aspx