Are you interested on the strategies and tools that will help you to manage WCF services? Struggling to keep up with your WCF configuration? Looking for a service registry/repository solution that works seamlessness with WCF? Wondering how to effectively…(read more)
| Today I’m happy to announce the availability of a new Feature Builder based template for Windows Server AppFabric and WCF Data Services. This template is an evolution of the previous AppFabric-enabled WCF Data Service (C#) template. |
WCF Data Services enables the creation and consumption of OData services for the web (formerly known as ADO.NET Data Services). Windows Server AppFabric provides tools for managing and monitoring your web services and workflows.
The AppFabric WCF DataService template brings these two products together providing the following features:
Get It
Some people have asked me “Why are you so high on building these new templates with Feature Builder?” Sure I can create a blog post to tell you how to configure your WCF DataService to work with AppFabric but what happens 6 months from now when you can’t remember and can’t find that blog post?
If you have the guidance and the template along together in one package you simply add a new AppFabric WCF Data Service to your project and everything you need to know shows up right in Visual Studio – how cool is that?
So go download this template today and give it a go
| Ron Jacobs | |
| blog | http://blogs.msdn.com/rjacobs |
| @ronljacobs | |
Don’t you hate it when things go wrong? Most of the time on endpoint.tv, I show you when everything is working properly. On this episode, however, I’m going to show you some tools and techniques for troubleshooting what happens when you invoke a proxy with the wrong service address.
Ron Jacobs
blog http://blogs.msdn.com/rjacobs
twitter @ronljacobs
A couple months ago I wrote a post on how to host WCF services in IIS that expose themselves as endpoints on the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus. The principal challenge in this scenario is that IIS/WAS relies on message-based activation and will only launch the host after the first request comes in. However, until […]
A couple months ago I wrote a post abouta dirty way of aborting a Commerce Server catalog import which involved stopping SQL Server and various other invasive procedures. Tonight I found out there is at least one but maybe twoways ofdoing this, one supported and other basically a hack. First for the supported […]
Here’s an interesting one: I was installing the ESB Toolkit 2.0 on a Win 7 x86 machine the other day, and during install got an error from Visual Studio saying “The operation could not be completed.”:
If you choose OK, the ESB Installer finishes with a success message, but then the Itinerary Designer doesn’t work in Visual Studio (you get an error about a missing assembly when you try and add a new itinerary to a project).
There was nothing…
There are times when a workflow can’t be persisted safely using a SqlWorkflowInstanceStore. The reason isn’t so much saving the state of a workflow to disk, that could be done at any time, but the result when a workflow would be reloaded from disk in that state.
An easy example is a workflow handling a WCF request with a Receive and SendReply activity pair. Suppose you would save the workflow state after the message had been received but before the response had been send. No problem there. Now suppose the workflow is aborted just after the response is send and later the saved state is reloaded. The first action of the reloaded workflow would be to send the response again. But where? The connection is long gone and the client has seen the original response and is happy. Clearly this would fault the workflow again and for that reason the workflow is in a no persist zone starting at the Receive and ending at the SendReply activity.
But wait. The SendReply activity has a property named PersistBeforeSend, surely that means it will be persisted before the reply is send? Actually it doesn’t and it persists after the response has been send. So the property name is wrong? Not quite, although I believe it is poorly named, as the Persist activity is actually scheduled just before the response is send. But due to the asynchronous nature of workflow execution it doesn’t execute until after the response has actually been send and we are at a point where it would be save to reload the workflow.
So what happens of you try to persist a workflow in a no persist zone? You will get an exception with the following message:
Persist activities cannot be contained within no persistence blocks.
In this case all I did was drop a Persist activity between a Receive and SendReply activity pair, I didn’t even add or configure the SqlWorkflowInstanceStore itself.
Checking for a no persist zone
So how can we check if we are currently in a no persist zone? It turns out the NativeActivityContext has a property called IsInNoPersistScope that will tell us that, unfortunately the property is internal so we can’t use it [:(].
Turns out that duplicating this behavior is quite easy though. Whenever a no persist zone is started a NoPersistProperty is created and stored in the NativeActivityContext Properties collection. The NoPersistProperty is also internal but that is no problem as all we need to do if check if there is a object stored under the name "System.Activities.NoPersistProperty", something we can do with the following activity:
public class CheckForNoPersistZone : NativeActivity
{
public OutArgument<bool> IsInNoPersistScope { get; set; }
protected override void Execute(NativeActivityContext context)
{
var prop = context.Properties.Find("System.Activities.NoPersistProperty");
IsInNoPersistScope.Set(context, prop != null);
}
}
Creating our own no persist zones
Sometimes it might be required to stop a workflow from persisting and we can do so by creating our own no persist zone. There is no standard activity to do so but creating a pair of activities to do so isn’t hard. The basic building blocks are a NoPersistHandle and calling Enter() and Exit() on it to start and end the no persist zone. This could easily be done through a composite activity or through two separate activities. In the code below I have chosen for the approach with a single composite activities.
public class NoPersistZone : NativeActivity
{
private Variable<NoPersistHandle> NoPersistHandle { get; set; }
[RequiredArgument]
public Activity Body { get; set; }
protected override void CacheMetadata(NativeActivityMetadata metadata)
{
NoPersistHandle = new Variable<NoPersistHandle>();
metadata.AddImplementationVariable(NoPersistHandle);
base.CacheMetadata(metadata);
}
protected override void Execute(NativeActivityContext context)
{
var noPersistHandle = NoPersistHandle.Get(context);
noPersistHandle.Enter(context);
context.ScheduleActivity(Body, OnCompleted);
}
private void OnCompleted(NativeActivityContext context, ActivityInstance completedInstance)
{
var noPersistHandle = NoPersistHandle.Get(context);
noPersistHandle.Exit(context);
}
}
Another nice activity to have for a generic toolbox.
Enjoy!
www.TheProblemSolver.nl
Wiki.WindowsWorkflowFoundation.eu
I have been reading through BizTalk 2010 Technical Review and noticed that a few things have been changed in BizTalk 2010 compared to current 2009 version. SQL Adapter has been removed and one should now turn to WCF-SQL Adapter that is a part of BizTalk Adapter Pack 2.0. Although in my BizTalk Server 2010 Beta environment on VPC, I still see the SQL Adapter.
In forums I notice still a lot of people use the standard out-of-the box SQL Adapter and they will have to make the shift towards WCF-SQL Adapter in future.For anyone who likes wants to learn more, the article on Packt Publishing by Richard Seroter called New SOA Capabilities in BizTalk Server 2009: WCF SQL Server Adapter is a good starting point and as a follow up my previous post WCF-SQL Table Operations discusses how to set it up the adapter and how CRUD operations on tables in SQL Server work.
Another change is that BizTalk Explorer tool in Visual Studio 2010 is not available for BizTalk Server 2010. Any administrative task you as an administrator of developer wants to do with a Graphical UI is BizTalk Server Administration Console. I think a lot of people stop using this feature in 2006 as Administrative Console came available.
In the Administration console you will also find the BizTalk Server Settings Dashboard, and this is a new feature. Performance settings previously managed through the registry and other locations, are now been centralized in this dashboard. To manage settings (i.e. performance) for the group, hosts, and host instances, you can now use this dashboard. These settings control throttling, thresholds and other runtime parameters in a single location and all settings can be exported and imported to move them between environments. Thiago has written an excellent post on this called BizTalk Server 2010 Beta: Settings Dashboard and Latency control per host.
Cheers.
Technorati: biztalk biztalk server 2010
I had an XSLT style sheet that used a C# method to return a multi line string. I wanted it to include the HTML <BR></BR> tag ad specific places within the string but not as literals. After some searching around I found that instead of trying to get the <BR></BR> tag to not be literal, I could simply use the <pre></pre> tag within my HTML and it would force it to recognize the “/r/n” returned from the C# method.