Today I presented an introduction to the Azure Service bus here at Software Passion Summit. As a part of that presentation, I promised to upload the code and PPT to the blog, which is what I am doing here. I am pretty sure that the PPT is pretty useless as it contains very little useful information, but I thought I would put it here anyway.
One little note though. To be able to test the code, you have to get your own Service bus namespace as I have removed my details from the code. Reason? Well, I only have limited free usage of the bus, and I really don’t feel like getting a big bill because someone wrote some code that hammered my namespace with requests… I hope that is understandable…
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9. January 2012
ZeroKoll
Azure , WCF
As you might have noticed from previous posts, I am somewhat interested in the Azure Service Bus. Why? Well, why not? To be honest, I don’t actually know exactly why, but I feel that it offers something very flexible out of the box, and without to much hassle.
One of the later feature that was added to it is the support for load balancing when using message relaying. (You can read more about message relaying here)
It is pretty cool, and just works… And by just works, I mean it really just works. If you have a service using message relaying today, adding another instance will automatically enable the feature. But remember, the messages are delivered to ONE of the services, not both. So if your service cannot handle that, make sure you change the implementation to make sure that only one instance is running at any time.
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8. November 2011
ZeroKoll
Azure , Security
I believe it is time for a really heavy blog post, and if you have ever read one of my other blog posts you are probably getting scared now. My posts are normally big, but this might actually be even bigger… Sorry! But it is an interesting topic with many things cover…
But before we can start looking at code, there are 2 things I want to do. First of all, I want to thank my colleague Robert Folkesson (warning, blog in Swedish) for getting me interested in this topic, and for showing me a great introduction.
And secondly, I want to give a quick run-through of what federated security and claims based authentication means…
Federated security means that an application relies on someone else to handle user authentication, for example Windows Live or Facebook. These identity providers are responsible for authenticating the user, and returning a token to the application, which the application can use to perform authorization.
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1. November 2011
ZeroKoll
Azure
Configuring your application when running in Azure can be a little confusing to begin with, I agree. However, it isn’t really that complicated as long as you understand what config goes where and why.
In Azure, you have 3 places that affect your configuration. Actually it is in more places than that if you count machine.config files and stuff like that, but I’ll ignore that now… And to be honest, it is only 2 places, but you need to tweak 3 places to get it to work…
When you create a new Azure web application project, you get 2 projects in your solution, one “cloud project” and one Web Application Project for example, and both have some form of configuration going.
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27. October 2011
ZeroKoll
Azure
Putting applications in the cloud is great, and offers a lot of benefits (as well as some complications). We get great scalability, elasticity, low cost of ownership etc. One problem however, is that the cloud is very public. I guess this isn’t a problem in most cases, but if what you are putting up there is supposed to be secret, or at least needs to limit who gets to use it, it becomes an issue.
I am currently working on a project like this. I am not going to talk about the project as such as it is under NDA, but the fact that it is is a service in the cloud that should only be used by certain clients is not uncommon.
The service has a front end that consists of WCF services, hosted in a web role, which is what we need to secure. The worker roles behind the web roles are by default secure as they do not communicate with the outside world at all.
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24. October 2011
ZeroKoll
Azure
I have recently posted a few posts on how to use some of the new features of the Azure Service Bus. They seem to have been somewhat popular, which is fun. They are however very light weight introductions, and not that I am going to dig a whole lot deeper at the moment, but there are a few little things I want to mention.Mainly around brokered messages.
As you know from the previous posts, a brokered message, is a message that is sent to the bus from a client, and picked up by a service at some point. The message can contain a body, which could be more or less any class that you would like, as well as metadata about the message. The only thing to remember with those things, is the fact that the message size is limited to 256kb.
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I guess it is time for another Azure Service Bus post. The previous ones has been relatively popular, so I thought I would do one more post to cover one last feature in the bus. (I say one last now, but I am pretty sure I will be back…)
Topics and subscribers are the basic units behind the Service Bus implementation of the pub/sub pattern. And as expected from a “simple” pattern like this, it should be simple to implement, and it is. The basics would be, create a topic, add subscribers that subscribe to messages from the topic, and finally push some messages to the topic, which are then relayed to the subscribers. Simple as…
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I guess it is time for another look at the Azure Service Bus. My previous posts about it has covered the basics, message relaying and relaying REST. So I guess it is time to step away from the relaying and look at the other way you can work with the service bus.
When I say “the other” way, it doesn’t mean that we are actually stepping away from relaying. All messages are still relayed via the bus, but in “the other” case, we utilize the man in the middle a bit more.
“The other” way means utilizing the message bus for “storage” as well. It means that we send a message to the bus, let the bus store it for us until the service feels like picking it up and handling it.
There are several ways that this can be utilized, but in this post, I will focus on queuing.
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I am now about a week and a half into my latest Azure project, which so far has been a lot of fun and educational. But the funky thing is that I am still excited about working with the Service Bus, even though we are a week and a half into the project. I guess there is still another half week before my normal 2 week attentions span is up, but still!
So what is so cool about the bus, well, my last 2 posts covered some of it, but it is just so many cool possibilities that open up with it.
This post has very little to do with what I am currently working on, and to be honest, the sample is contrived and stupid, but it shows how we can use REST based services with the bus.
29. September 2011
ZeroKoll
Azure , WCF
My last post was a bit light on the coding side I know. I also know that I promised to make up for that with a post with some actual code. And this is it! Actually, this is one of them. My plan is to walk through several of the features over the next few posts in the n00b kind of way.
That is, I am going to go through the basics for each of the features I deem interesting, making it easy to follow for people who are new to the Service Bus. And please don’t be offended by the “n00b” comment. We are all “n00bs” at some point in every thing we do.
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