October, 2010

A key challenge while designing and deploying Web Services is access control and this blog post is the first in a two part series focused on leveraging Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) to secure Services hosted in Windows Server AppFabric. In this first blog post we focus on securing both WCF and Workflow Services and also delve into using ‘delegation’. Delegation is an interesting challenge, especially in scenarios wherein it’s important to maintain a caller’s original identity...

Scenario During recent years, I had the chance to work with many customers and I realized that one of the most recurring problems they usually experience is due to long start-up times: indeed, this is not a BizTalk specific issue, it’s rather a problem affecting any .NET application, regardless if it’s a Windows Service, a Web Application or an IIS hosted WCF service. When a BizTalk host process starts, it performs some warm-up operations like creating AppDomains, loading assemblies,...

I always have a sense of satisfaction when I find out that there is less tweaking or tuning needed to make my applications perform as expected under high throughput workloads (or that the tweaking is easier to do).  I had this sense of satisfaction just this week with some new insights on WCF 4.0 (and while tuning BizTalk Server 2010 using the shiny, new BizTalk Server 2010 Settings Dashboard ) . It's very common for my team to receive questions on why a certain WCF service can't receive...

At the PDC, the volume of announcements on product updates, new offers and emerging technology can be so high that details can be easily lost. While there are those who pride themselves on detecting every nuance, my guess is there are developers, customers...

During the last few months, I’ve been very fortunate to have the opportunity of collaborating closely with the StreamInsight product team. One of the things that impressed the most about that team (in addition to their talent) is their mindset and commitment...

For those of you who may have missed Sriram’s blog post , there will be a CTP of the Integration as a Service version of BizTalk appearing in Azure sometime before July 2011 (interestingly, the blog entry was posted at 10am on October 28 th , i.e. an...

Microsoft just announced the new BizTalk Server 2010 AppFabric Connect for Services which is a set of tools used to expose BizTalk services to the cloud. Specifically, you can expose BizTalk endpoints and LOB adapter endpoints to the Azure Service Bus...

The following post is intended to offer you a set of best practices centered around the development of reliable SQL Azure client applications. The primary focus of this paper is positioned towards handling transient conditions, namely, those intermittent faults, errors and exceptions that need to be accounted for when developing reliable applications for high-density multi-tenant environments such as SQL Azure . Background The developers who have already had the opportunity to start working with...

This blog post provides a quick introduction to Windows Server AppFabric Caching. You might also want to watch this short video introduction . As mentioned in the previous post announcing the Windows Azure AppFabric CTP October Release , we've just introduced Windows Azure AppFabric Caching, which provides a distributed, in-memory cache, implemented as a cloud service. Earlier this year we delivered Windows Server AppFabric Caching , which is our distributed caching solution for on-premises applications...

Today’s an exciting day!  During the keynote this morning at PDC10, Bob Muglia announced a wave of new building block services and capabilities for the Windows Azure AppFabric.  The purpose of the Windows Azure AppFabric is to provide a comprehensive cloud platform for developing, deploying and managing applications, extending the way you build Windows Azure [...]

What’s next for BizTalk?  As excited as we are about the recent announcement that we shipped BizTalk Server 2010 ( see blog post ), we know that customers depend upon us to give them visibility into the longer-term roadmap; given the lifespan of...

This webcast will look at the implementation of a source control plug in for Visual Studio that uses Azure storage as a repository. The use of Azure table storage and blob storage to store the source files and project, file and check-in information. The...

Event Driven Updates If I can't have magic then I want something easy. I'd like to have changes that occur on certain tables be reflected in AppFabric Cache. I'd also like this to occur in an event based manner. "Use SqlDependency and be done with it" you say? That's certainly one answer but it also creates a coupling between your application and managing cache refreshes or it means you're deploying yet another domain specific service. External Activator is an engine...

Based on a thread today on the MSDN forums I tried working with BizTalk 2010 RTM and the Commerce Server 2007 adapters. These are the same adapters used for Commerce Server 2009. I had worked with these adapters on a recent project with BizTalk 2009. I just wanted to post that the adapter install went [...]

A new version of the Windows Azure AppFabric SDK V1.0 is available for download starting 10/27. The new version introduces a fix to an issue which causes the SDK to rollback on 64 bit Windows Server machines with BizTalk Server installed. The fix is included in the updated SDK download . If you are not experiencing this issue, there is no need to download the new version of the SDK. The Windows Azure AppFabric Team

While I’ve been involved with the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in the past (keynote in ‘08, breakout in ‘08, and breakout in ‘09), I’ve never been as personally vested and involved as I am this year.  Whether you look at as a perk or curse, it’s one of the jobs I signed up for when [...]

Any of you who have been writing WCF front-ends for BizTalk services will know about one of ASP.NET’s failings: first request latency. A service (or application) hosted in IIS doesn’t start-up and JIT itself fully until the first request is received....

WF enables you to separate workflow definition from business logic. You can develop your entire workflow by using code, where you specify the workflow structure and logic in the Microsoft Visual C# development tool or the Microsoft Visual Basic development system. The typical workflow-authoring scenario in Visual Studio provides a designer to specify the workflow definition and then uses code in Visual C# or Visual Basic to represent business logic in separate code-behind pages. read more

A WF workflow enables you to model a real-world process using a procedural approach. You begin by identifying the key steps in the process and any human interaction in those steps. You can then model your workflow based on those steps and include functionality for the human interaction required. read more

WF includes visual designers for use in Visual Studio 2008, which enable you to quickly design and develop workflow applications. By using workflow classes and custom data types, you can also define your workflow structure programmatically and develop the entire solution in code. The following table shows some of the commonly used namespaces in WF. read more