Blog.BrianLoesgen.com

Missing your Azure AppFabric relay bindings?

2010-06-22T15:09:47Z

I’ve had a couple of people ask me about this in the past week, so I’m thinking this may be a common problem some of you are seeing. I also see two of my colleagues have blogged about it, so I thought I’d help spread the word.

The problem is you install the Azure AppFabric SDK, but the Service Bus bindings we all know and love are not visible. The cause is .NET 4.0 has its own machine.config and the SDK installer does not make the appropriate entries. This will be fixed in the next coming-soon release of the AppFabric SDK.

In the interim, you can read Kent Weare’s post here, and Wade Wegner’s post here to get past this.

TechEd Session Links

2010-06-14T13:40:47Z

For those of you that attended the “Real World SOA with .NET and Windows Azure” TechEd session that John deVadoss, Christoph Schittko and I did last week, I discussed the following reference architecture:

I didn’t have time to do a demo/walkthrough during the session, but as I mentioned, recordings are available:

The first video, which focuses on the on-premise side in detail, is available here
The second video, which focuses on the Windows Azure AppFabric relay aspect and how to implement it, is available here (note that this is #1 of 3 there are three videos and corresponding blog posts in this series that cover bridging between on-premise BizTalk and Windows Azure)

Thanks all that attended, we had fun, and the feedback has been great.

For those that could not be there, it is available on-demand at http://www.msteched.com/2010/NorthAmerica/ASI202.

Our new book SOA with .NET and Windows Azure is now available!

2010-06-08T15:38:17Z

After a long effort, working with Thomas Erl and a very talented team of individuals, I finally got to hold a copy of the latest book I co-authored (and carry it around like a proud new father might) at TechEd in New Orleans.

It’s real, and it’s here now! It is in-stock at Amazon.

If you’re here at TechEd, John deVadoss, Christoph Schittko and myself (we are all part of the author team) will be doing our session tomorrow (Wednesday) at 8:00am. The session is “ASI202 - Real-World SOA with Microsoft .NET and Windows Azure”, so you can see the parallels with the book title. It is an architectural-level presentation that will focus on pain points, patterns and solutions. We will be in room 287.

We will also be doing a book signing tomorrow at the Addison-Wesley/Sams Publishing booth in the expo hall (booth #1942 and 1944) at 2:45 on Wednesday. The way things are set up this year, if you want to get a book signed, you need to go buy it beforehand at the bookstore (on the second floor) and then come and and see us. We’ll be there for 45 minutes or so.

http://www.soabooks.com/net

See you at TechEd North America 2010 in New Orleans?

2010-05-26T04:18:59Z

I’m really looking forward to presenting at TechEd North America 2010 on June 9 2010, and am honored to be co-presenting with John deVadoss (Microsoft, Director, Patterns and Practices) and Christoph Schittko (Microsoft, Global Application Strategist). John and I worked together on the SOA-Manifesto working group, Christoph and I have known each other for years, and we are all co-authors of “SOA with .NET and Windows Azure”, which will also be launching at TechEd (more on this later).

We will be presenting session ASI202 on Wednesday morning, “Real-World SOA with Microsoft .NET and Windows Azure”.

Although I’m late posting this, we as a team have been working VERY hard on this. It should be really good/informative, please join us if you’re going to be there.

BizTalk Server 2010 Public Beta and Windows Server AppFabric RC now available

2010-05-20T18:45:34Z

In case you missed the Application Infrastructure Virtual launch today (you can go watch it on demand), Microsoft has made available:

BizTalk Server 2010 beta, get it here (note that the ESB Toolkit 2.1 beta is on that page also)
The Windows Server AppFabric release candidate, get it here

You can read the official announcement on the BizTalk team blog, and also here at the Endpoint blog.

Make sure you check out the new mapper functionality in the BizTalk, it ROCKS! What seems like a simple problem quick deteriorates into some very complex UI issues, and the team has really done a great job in providing a UI that nicely addresses those challenges, and more.

One of the coolest features of the mapper is the new “indicate match” capability. In the screen shot below, I right-clicked the “PO403” node, the mapper thought “PONumber” was the best match, but that the other “PONumber” and “PODate” were also possible matches. Very very nice!!

Happy downloading!!

San Diego: this Tuesday May 11th 2010, Michele Bustamante on WCF with .NET 4.0

2010-05-09T22:26:45Z

It is my honor and privilege to host my friend Michele Leroux-Bustamante at this week’s special combined meeting of the San Diego .NET user group Connected Systems and Architecture SIGs.

If you’re doing anything with WCF (and if you read my blog odds are you must be!) and are in San Diego, then this is a not-to-be-missed event.

See you there!

Combined Connected Systems & Architecture SIG Meeting

Tuesday, May 11th

Michele Bustamante

WCF Made Easy with Microsoft .NET Framework 4
and Windows Server AppFabric

Topic

WCF is a flexible and powerful platform for building service-oriented applications, and with that flexibility comes some complexity. As of .NET 4 - configuring, securing, hosting and managing WCF services has never been easier! WCF 4 and Windows Server AppFabric come together to help developers and IT administrators overcome the complexity. Come find out how much easier it is to configure WCF services in .NET 4 including alignment with the ASP.NET configuration model and a reduced configuration footprint. Also learn Windows Server AppFabric features for the IT administrator, finally making it easier for IT administrators to easily access settings they care about such as security and throttling features; providing control over the hosting lifecycle of WCF services; and giving new visibility into faults, exceptions and tracing and diagnostics features to help you manage your service deployments in production un-intrusively.

Speaker

Michele Leroux Bustamante is Chief Architect at IDesign (architecture consulting and training, www.idesign.net) and Chief Security Architect at BiTKOO (providing authorization and identity management software, www.bitkoo.com ). She is also Microsoft Regional Director for San Diego, and a Microsoft MVP for Connected Systems. Michele specializes in scalable and secure architecture design, federated identity, and cloud computing. Michele is a frequent conference presenter at technology conferences such as Tech Ed, PDC, Dev Connections, and NDC; and regularly publishes in several technology journals. Michele wrote the best-selling book Learning WCF - O'Reilly 2007 ( www.learningwcf.com) and is currently working on the second edition to be published in 2010. Visit her blog at www.michelelerouxbustamante.com , or follow her tweets @michelebusta.

Application Infrastructure Virtual Launch Event

2010-04-26T20:52:34Z

If you read my blog then you have an interest in BizTalk Server, Windows Server AppFabric, Azure, Windows Azure AppFabric, WCF, etc… That means that you would also be really interested in the virtual launch event coming up on May 20th 2010 (8:30AM Pacific Time). Details are below, the event site is http://www.appinfrastructure.com.

See you there!

================================================

Application Infrastructure: Cloud Benefits Delivered

http://www.appinfrastructure.com

Want to bring the benefits of the cloud to your current IT environment? Cloud computing offers a range of benefits, including elastic scale and never-before-seen applications. While you ponder your long-term investment in the cloud, you can harness a number of cloud benefits in your current IT environment now.

Join us on May 20 at 8:30 A.M. Pacific Time to learn how your current IT assets can harness some of the benefits of the cloud on-premises—and can readily connect to new applications and data running in the cloud. As part of the Virtual Launch Event, Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst Yefim Natis will discuss the latest trends and biggest questions facing the Application Infrastructure space. He will also speak about the role Application Infrastructure will play in helping businesses benefit from the cloud. Plus, you’ll hear some exciting product announcements and a keynote from Abhay Parasnis, GM of Application Server Group at Microsoft. Parasnis will discuss the latest Microsoft investments in the Application Infrastructure space aimed at delivering on-demand scalability, highly available applications, a new level of connectivity, and more. Save the date!

ESB Toolkit 2.0 Architecture Poster Available

2010-03-25T04:16:47Z

To complement the existing series of posters that show various parts of BizTalk’s architecture, there is now one available for the ESB Toolkit.

You can get it here.

San Diego:Windows Azure Conference is Tomorrow!

2010-03-05T18:59:38Z

San Diegans, time is running out, the Windows Azure conference (I blogged about it here) is *tomorrow*. This is a great opportunity to ramp-up quickly on what Windows Azure is, and how it can be used in the real world. Come see why everyone is so excited, and why everyone agrees that this is a major shift in our industry. This is not future-tech, the cloud isn’t vapor anymore :) – this is live and production-ready today.

I will be presenting on Windows Azure platform AppFabric, and specifically how to leverage it to bridge between on-premise and off-premise (or, from–one-premise-to-another-premise).

Hope to see you there!

Windows Server AppFabric Beta 2 now available

2010-03-02T05:38:11Z

The AppFabric team hit another milestone today with the public availability of AppFabric Beta 2. Congrats team!!!

Now, because I know there must be some confusion out there, AppFabric is a brand, as I blogged about here. I’ve been doing some posts here lately about extending BizTalk ESB to Windows Azure AppFabric, but that’s not the AppFabric this is about, this is Windows Server AppFabric. It brings together what was formerly codename “Dublin” and codename “Velocity”, and provides a host for WF/WCF. This is a really interesting set of new capabilities that .NET developers are about to get, and I’ll start blogging more about it soon, as the SOA implications are significant.

You can learn more and get the beta here.

New white paper “BizTalk ESB Toolkit: Core Components and Examples”

2010-03-02T05:03:42Z

A new white paper was released a few days ago by Microsoft, written by MVP Jon Flanders, on the ESB Toolkit.

It’s a well written paper that walks through the architecture, and shows examples, and serves as both an overview and a mini-tutorial. Great place to start if you want to come up to speed on this.

He REALLY nails it well in the summary, I would quote it here but that would violate the copyright, so I’ll paraphrase: “hey this is really cool and powerful, and adds tremendous business value”. That doesn’t do it justice though, I’d suggest you go read it for yourself.

You can get it here. Enjoy!

Day-long Azure Conference in San Diego, March 6th

2010-02-26T15:15:25Z

The San Diego .NET User Group will be hosting our first Azure day-long conference on March 6th. This first one will be more overview level, we’re planning at least one other which will be more focused and deeper for later this year, and then perhaps more after that. For this first one, we will be covering:

Azure Intro (David Chou)
Azure Development (Daniel Egan)
SQL Azure (Lynn Langit)
Azure AppFabric (Brian Loesgen)

And yes, the way it turned out, all speakers for this are from Microsoft, and David is a fellow co-author from the oh_so_close_to_done_now book I’ve been involved with for quite some time…. “SOA with .NET and Windows Azure”.

These conferences are usually a lot of fun and great investments, and this one in particular will be a great way to jump-start your Azure knowledge, or fill in some gaps you may have.

The event page with further details is here. As usual, great discounts for user group members.

Hope to see you there!

Azure Integration Part 3 – Sending a Message from an ESB off-ramp to Azure’s AppFabric ServiceBus

2010-01-26T04:10:49Z

This is the third post in this series. So far, we have seen:

In this third post, we will see how to use an ESB off-ramp to send a message to the Windows Azure AppFabric ServiceBus. We will actually be doing the same thing as we did in the second post, however, we’ll be doing it in a different way.

There is an accompanying video for this post (as I did with the others too), which you can find here.

The sequence used here is:

Message is picked up from a file drop (because that’s how most BizTalk demos start:))
An itinerary is retrieved from the itinerary repository and applied to the message
The itinerary processing steps are performed, and the message is sent to the ServiceBus
The message is retrieved by the receive location I wrote about in my previous post
A send port has a filter set to pick up messages received by that receive port, and persists the file to disk

The last two steps are not covered here, but are shown in the video.

In this case, we’re not using an orchestration at all, we’ve specified in the itinerary that all processing happens at a messaging level.

The first part of this is the itinerary selection, which is as shown below. As you can see, I’ve “hard-wired” this receive location, and anything coming through it will get the “ServiceBusTest.OrderRelayNetTcp” itinerary applied to it.

The itinerary itself is also quite simple (this one is slightly different than the one shown in the video, but they are functionally equivalent).

All of the magic happens in the “SetProperties” resolver. In this case I am using a STATIC resolver, however, that just means I have statically specified the values. The settings are being applied dynamically by the itinerary processing components. Note that I have specified we are using the WCF-Custom adapter provider. As was the case with the first two posts in this series, I have installed the Windows Azure platform AppFabric SDK, which gave me some additional bindings that let me relay messages through the ServiceBus. In the second post, we used one of those bindings along with the WCF-Custom adapter by setting some values on a dynamic send port. In this one, we will set the same properties, but do so using the out-of-the-box ESB Toolkit WCF-Custom adapter provider. Each adapter provider registered with the ESB has a UI that can be associated with it, and you get there by clicking the Endpoint Configuration ellipses:

If you compare the values above to what I set in the second post in this series, you’ll see they are pretty much the same.

And…. THAT’S IT!!!!! That is all we have to do in order for BizTalk to send a message to the Azure platform AppFabric ServiceBus using an ESB off-ramp. As you can see from the behavior specified, this is a secured channel (in this case I am using “shared secret”). The actual security part of this is provided with the Windows Azure platform AppFabric Access Control Service, which is tightly integrated with the ServiceBus.

Note also that in this example I used the netTcpRlayBinding, which is a high performance .NET-to-.NET, but also requires TCP/IP ports be open, which could be an issue depending on how locked down your network is.

For my demo purposes, I use the ws2007HttpRelayBinding (also provided with the Azure AppFabric SDK), as that’s over port 80.

In this series of posts I have shown you how to bridge the gap between on-premise and Windows Azure AppFabric ServiceBus using out-of-the-box BizTalk and/or ESB Toolkit components. There is much more that can be done, this is only the beginning. We are entering a really interesting time, and I think that “hybrid” applications, with some part on-premise, other parts off-premise, will become increasingly common. As that happens, having a clean integration solution becomes very important so that we don’t create “Point-to-point Spaghetti 2.0”, a more modern version of the chaos that many experienced integration developers have seen all too frequently.

I hope you’ve enjoyed these posts and videos, and that they help you as you explore the new and exciting world of Windows Azure.

Azure Integration – Part 2: Sending a Message from BizTalk to Azure’s AppFabric ServiceBus with a Dynamic Send Port

2010-01-24T20:31:39Z

In a previous post, I wrote about how to extend the reach of an ESB on-ramp to Windows Azure platform AppFabric ServiceBus. This same technique also works for any BizTalk receive location, as what makes it an ESB on-ramp is the presence of a pipeline that includes some of the itinerary selection and processing components from the ESB Toolkit. In that post (and accompanying video) I showed how to use InfoPath as a client to submit the message to the ServiceBus, which subsequently got relayed down and into a SharePoint-based ESB-driven BizTalk-powered workflow.

In this and the next post, we’ll look at how to send messages in the other direction, and in this post, I’ll show how to do it using a BizTalk dynamic send port. If you’re used dynamic send ports with BizTalk, you’ll know they’re a powerful construct that let you programmatically sent endpoint configuration information that will subsequently be provided to a send adapter. This is a great way to have a single outbound port that can deliver messages to a variety of endpoints. And, dynamic ports are a key concept behind ESB off-ramps, but more on that later.

The video to go along with this post can be found here.

The sequence used here is:

Message is picked up from a file drop (because that’s how most BizTalk demos start:))
A BizTalk orchestration bound to that receive port is instantiated
The orchestration (in an expression shape) sets properties the adapter will use
The message goes to the dynamic send port and is dispatched
The message is retrieved by the receive location I wrote about in my previous post
A send port has a filter set to pick up messages received by that receive port, and persists the file to disk

The last two steps are not covered here, but are shown in the video.

Our orchestration is proof-of-concept simple, as you may have expected:

In our message assignment shape, first we create and work with the message:

Then, because the outbound port in our orchestration is a dynamic port, we set a couple of properties on that:

And…. THAT’S IT!!!!! That is all we have to do in order for BizTalk to send a message to the Azure platform AppFabric ServiceBus. As you can see from the behavior specified, this is a secured channel (in this case I am using “shared secret”). The actual security part of this is provided with the Windows Azure platform AppFabric Access Control Service, which is tightly integrated with the ServiceBus.

Note the value of the WCF.BindingType (netTcpRlayBinding). This is just one of the ServiceBus-related bindings you get when you install the Azure platform AppFabric SDK. This particular binding is high performance .NET-to-.NET, but requires TCP/IP ports be open, which could be an issue depending on your network.

I’ve always loved the flexibility that the WCF-Custom adapter provides, and here is yet another example. Another team issues an SDK well after the current release of BizTalk, and because we’re all leveraging WCF it makes it trivial for us to take advantage of the new capabilities.

The next post and video in this series will show how to provide message sending capabilities using the components provided with the ESB Toolkit. Stay tuned….

I’ll be presenting a new session next week: Bridging from On-premise ESB to Windows Azure

2010-01-23T03:31:00Z

I will be doing a brand-new, never-seen-before presentation at the Code Camp in Fullerton next week. I’m late signing up as I wasn’t sure if my schedule would permit it, but it all looks good, so I’ll do it.

The session will encapsulate some of the cool stuff I’ve been doing spanning the two environments. This will be a powerful (and I would say essential) presentation for BizTalk developers as it highlights some of the new patterns we now have at our disposal. However, I this is also an important session for anyone deploying services to Azure and calling them from on premises, as many will not have an integration background and as such will run into the typical pitfalls that experienced integration devs know to avoid.

I’ve done one post about bridging on-premise to Azure here, and there are more videos working their way through MSDN that should be live any time now. Once they go live, I’ll post accompanying blog posts.

I’ll be presenting at 2:45 on Sat Jan 30th. Hope to see you there if you’re attending this Code Camp.

Title:

Bridging the Gap between On-premise ESB and Windows Azure

Abstract:

Having attained the plateau of productivity, companies worldwide are enjoying the benefits and efficiencies that can be realized through a well-defined and implement SOA strategy. In addition, many are also realizing the business value and agility improvements that come from have an Enterprise Service Bus in place as a messaging backbone to support their SOA infrastructure.

With the recent “go-live” of Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform, intriguing new architectural patterns for distributed applications are being made possible. In this session we will look at what it means to bridge from the on-premise ESB to the Windows Azure platform. In addition, we will cover the value-add that an ESB brings to Azure usage. We will take a pragmatic approach, showing you what can be done today, with the tools available to you right now.