This post aims to provide you with an introduction into monitoring the health and activity of your WCF- and WF-based applications with Windows Server AppFabric. More specifically, the post will outline the AppFabric tooling features that are built into IIS Manager as well as outline some basic strategies in using these features to monitor your applications. Introduction At the center of AppFabric’s monitoring tools is the Dashboard, which provides a centralized gateway to view the health of WCF and...

Today we deployed an incremental update to the Access Control Service in the Labs environment. It's available here: http://portal.appfabriclabs.com/ . Keep in mind that there is no SLA around this release, but accounts and usage of the service are free while it is in the labs environment. This release builds on the prior October release of the Access Control Service, and has a few changes: Improved error messages by adding sub-codes and more detailed descriptions. Adding primary/secondary flag...

A former student approached me with a problem related to the Web programming model using WCF in .NET 3.5. In short, he was using a custom IErrorHandler to create a custom fault message, but the client was always receiving a generic error. Even more of a problem was that the custom error was an HTML formatted message, despite having set the response format on the service to JSON. This caused big problems for the AJAX client trying to reason over that response. I knew that WCF REST Starter Kit and...

This blog post demonstrates how Windows Azure developers can leverage the Windows Azure Service Bus to enable asynchronous inter-role communication in cloud-based solutions using Service Bus topics and subscriptions. This post and its associated code sample offer a complete solution, one that enables simplified, scalable, loosely coupled communication between role instances on the Windows Azure platform. More » Blog Post by: Valery Mizonov

This article provides information on working with the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus from the Ruby programming language. This article assumes that you are familiar with Ruby, and have access to the Windows Azure AppFabric labs site (AppFabricLabs.com.) For more … More » Blog Post by: Suren Machiraju