CloudCasts Blog

Azure Service Bus - Two Day Course in Stockholm

Alan Smith — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 16:36:32 GMT

As I was working on “The Developers Guide to AppFabric” e-book I also started developing a training course on the Azure Service Bus. The first delivery of this course is scheduled for May 3-4 in Stockholm. I’m really looking forward to delivering this, it will be exciting to be working with emerging technologies. The course will be updated on regular bases to cover the new features as they pass through CTP and into release.

The course details are here.

If you have any questions about the course, or are interested in an on-site delivery, feel free to contact me using the form on my blog.

As for the e-book I’m working on the February version now, and will have it out in a couple of weeks. I’ll have to change the title to reflect the changes in branding.

A Great Holiday Season for Azure Developers

Alan Smith — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 09:59:16 GMT

There are a lot of reasons why the 2011 holiday season is a great time to take a look at Azure development. There are a number of offers and releases that allow you to start to explore cloud-based development on the Microsoft platform, best of all; they are all pretty much free to take advantage of.

$0 Spending Limit on Azure Trial & MSDN Accounts

Ever since the introduction of billing for Windows Azure it has always been an issue for many developers wanting to learn Azure that, if you are not careful, you can easily run up charges on the trial accounts when going above the free quotas.

With the “$0 spending limit” available on 90 day trial and MSDN accounts Azure development developers can start to explore the Azure platform without fear of an unexpected bill at the end of the month. You will, however, have to enter credit-card details.

It is great to see this option available, I know it is something that developers have been clamoring for ever since billing was introduced on the platform. Hopefully this will be extended to a fixed-price limit on Azure billing at some point in the future.

Details of the trail offers are here .

No Charge for Azure Service Bus until April 2012

The Azure Service bus provides brokered and relayed messaging capabilities hosted in Windows Azure datacenters. Launched in CTP in 2007 under the name of “BizTalk Services”, then re-branded to “.NET Services”, “AppFabric Service Bus”, and now “Azure Service Bus” the messaging services are a great way to explore the capabilities of Azure when creating hybrid (part cloud, part on-premise) applications.

I’ve spent a lot of time exploring the brokered messaging capabilities of the service bus and am very impressed with the functionality provided. With four months of being above to use the services for free (data transfer charges still apply), now is a perfect time to gain some experience of using the technologies, or even create a small proof-of-concept application in your organization.

You may like to check out my free e-book on the brokered messaging capabilities of the service bus “The Developer’s Guide to AppFabric”. It’s available here .

As “AppFabric” has been dropped from these branding of the service bus I’ll be re-branding the title of the book in the next release.

Details of the offer are here .

CTP of Azure Service Bus Integration Services

If, like me, you have been following the long and winding roadmap of BizTalk Server, and want to get an early insight into what “BizTalk vNext” will look like, now is your chance.

The first CTP of Microsoft’s cloud-based integration capabilities has been released and is available to use in the AppFabric Labs environment. As the technology is in developer-preview mode, it’s free to use, no credit card required!

Details of the CTP are here .

SWAG & SWENUG Security in the Cloud & Julfest

Alan Smith — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 08:27:07 GMT

Sweden Windows Azure Group (SWAG) and Sweden .NET User Group (SweNUG) will be hosting a “Security in the Cloud” and Christmas event this Thursday. Sergio Molaro and Robert Folkesson will be presenting on different aspects of cloud security, there will be good food, good drinks and prizes in a great location. If you are in Stockholm it’s free to register to attend here .

The Developer's Guide to App Fabric November 2011

Alan Smith — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 20:26:56 GMT

The November 2011 release expands on the Service Bus brokered messaging content to provide more details of the features. Deadlettering and message expiration are covered, along with message deferral, duplicate message detection, message correlation and sessions.

Get it here.

Deadlettering in Azure AppFabric Service Bus Brokered Messaging

Alan Smith — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 09:28:28 GMT

I’ve just published an article on deadlettering on “Deadlettering in Azure AppFabric Service Bus Brokered Messaging”. It looks at how deadlettering can be used to handle poison messages, and messages that do not meet business rules.

The article will be included in the next release of “The Developer’s Guide to AppFabric”, a free e-book on Azure AppFabric development. The latest edition of the e-book is available for download here.

Sweden Windows Azure Group (SWAG) meeting on Thursday 27th October in Stockholm, "Extending to the Cloud",

Alan Smith — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 07:23:28 GMT

I’ll be presenting a session on “Extending to the Cloud” at the Sweden Windows Azure User Group next week.

Extending to the Cloud

Extending to the cloud involves developing hybrid applications that leverage the capabilities of cloud based platforms. Many of the Windows Azure solutions developed today involve extending the capabilities of existing applications and infrastructure to leverage the capabilities of Azure.

These hybrid applications allow developers to combine the best of both worlds. Existing IT infrastructure can be utilized and the capabilities of cloud platforms used to extend the applications, providing enhanced functionality at minimal cost.

This demo centric session will highlight how the hosting, compute and storage capabilities in the Window Azure platform can be used to extend on premise applications to the cloud. The rendering of 3D animations and cloud based source control will be used as case studies.

Free registration is here.

Official release of “The Developer’s Guide to AppFabric"

Alan Smith — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 08:59:23 GMT

I’ve just published the official release version of “The Developer’s Guide to AppFabric”. After receiving some great feedback from people I’ve corrected some errors and typos. There’s no new content since the CTP, but I’m busy working on that and there will be a lot more coverage of brokered messaging in the November release. If you want notification of new releases, follow me on Twitter @alansmith.

You can download the October 2011 release here.

CTP Version of The Developers Guide to AppFabric

Alan Smith — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 09:15:10 GMT

I’ve just published a CTP version of “The Developers Guide to AppFabric”. Any feedback on the content would be great, and I will include it in the full release next week.

“The Developer’s Guide to AppFabric” is a free e-book for developers who are exploring and leveraging the capabilities of the Azure AppFabric platform.

The goal is to create a resource that will evolve and mature in parallel with the Azure AppFabric technologies. The use of an electronic format will allow sections to be added as new technologies are released and improved as the knowledge and experience of using the technologies grows within the developer community.

The CTP version, published on the 3^th October 2011, marks seven years to the day since the first version of “The Blogger’s Guide to BizTalk” was published.

The first section will provide an introduction to the brokered messaging capabilities available in the Azure AppFabric September 2011 release. The next section will go into a lot more depth and explore the brokered messaging feature set. Future sections will cover the Access Control Service, relayed messaging, and cache. Features like the application model and integration services will be covered as they emerge and are released.

The book will always be free to download and available in CHM and PDF format, as well as a web based browsable version. The planned release schedule for the remainder of 2011 is to update the guide with new content monthly, around the start of each month. Updates will be made available on the website and announced through my blog and twitter.

Developer’s Guide to AppFabric: devguide.cloudcasts.net

Twitter: @alansmith

The feedback form is here.

Two Great AppFabric Resources

Alan Smith — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 11:54:08 GMT

If you want to get up to speed on Azure AppFabric brokered messaging there are a couple of resources you should check out.

SB CTP Messaging User Guide

This is a 30 page word document put together by the AppFabric dev team. It’s a great read to get an introduction to Queues, Topics and Subscriptions. If you are working in the AppFabric Labs environment using the May or June CTP the code will work fine. There have been significant changes in the API in the September 2011 release, so don’t expect any of the code to compile in that release, but the theory section is still very much valid.

Best Practices for Leveraging Windows Azure Service Bus Brokered Messaging API

This is a 10 page blog post from the Windows Azure CAT team that provides some great tips for developers who have some familiarity with brokered messaging. The level is pretty advanced, and it’s impressive to see how much experience the CAT team has accumulated on brokered messaging. All the code here is on the September 2011 release. It’s a must-read if you plan to develop anything using service bus brokered messaging.

Windows Azure Storage Session at Sweden Windows Azure Group (SWAG) in Stockholm Next Week

Alan Smith — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 14:05:08 GMT

Windows Azure Storage med Björn Eriksen.

Thursday, September 29, 2011 from 5:30 PM to 9:00 PM

Windows Azure Storage är en tjänst i Windows Azure som rör olika typer av lagring. Blobs, Queues, Tables och är begrepp som många garanterat känner till, och säkert har en uppfattning om hur de ska bete sig, men finns det mer än det som syns på ytan? Utvecklare är vana att jobba med filsystem, databaser och köhanterare så varför skapa en ny modell? Skalbarhet och pålitlighet är det korta svaret!

Register here.

Join Sweden Windows Azure Group (SWAG) here.

Another AppFabric Walkthrough - Introducing Topics and Subscriptions

Alan Smith — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 22:12:03 GMT

I’ve added a third walkthrough to the AppFabric Walkthrough series.

“The following walkthrough will show how topics and subscriptions can be used to implement a simple publish-subscribe messaging channel. The next walkthrough will build on this sample and explore the use of filters on subscriptions.”

Introducing Topics and Subscriptions

The other two walkthroughs are here.

Simple Brokered Messaging

Creating a Simple Queue Management Tool

At present there are no charges for using the new brokered messaging capabilities in AppFabric, so I have been taking advantage of this to explore the new functionality. This free offer will not last forever, so now is a great time to take a look at the new capabilities.

AppFabric Walkthrough: Creating a Simple Queue Management Tool

Alan Smith — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 07:54:36 GMT

I’ve added a second AppFabric Walkthrough based on the Azure AppFabric Service Bus September 2011 release. The second one looks at using the NamespaceManager class to create, list, get and delete queues in an AppFabric service bus namespace using a simple C# console application. Feel free to expand on this scenario to create more sophisticated management consoles.

As with the first walkthrough there have been a lot of changes in the classes used to interact with the service bus, so don’t expect this code to work against the May or June CTP releases.

The two walkthroughs are here.

AppFabric Walkthrough: Simple Brokered Messaging

AppFabric Walkthrough: Creating a Simple Queue Management Tool

AppFabric Walkthrough: Simple Brokered Messaging

Alan Smith — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 21:40:37 GMT

I’ve published a basic walkthrough of using the new brokered messaging capabilities in the Azure AppFabric service bus September 2011 release. If you have not used queues in AppFabric before this will get you started with a basic application that you can build upon. If you have used queues in the May or June CTP releases then this walkthrough will be useful to highlight the changes in the management portal and service bus API. (Quite a lot has changed, for the better, but I have a lot of rework to update all my demos and samples.)

The walkthrough is here.

Windows Azure AppFabric SDK V1.5 September 2011 – Brokered Messaging is Live!

Alan Smith — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 00:25:34 GMT

The Azure AppFabric Service Bus Brokered Messaging functionality has shipped to production, and is available in Azure data centers across the world. This means that we now have point-to-point queuing and publish-subscribe messaging available in the cloud in the form of Queues, Topics and Subscriptions. Be aware that there are substantial changes in the classes in the Microsoft.ServiceBus.Messaging namespace, which means I will have to re-record webcasts and repost blog posts.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time looking into the functionality of the new messaging capabilities and am very impressed with what I have seen in the CTP. IT’s great to see this make it to production.

If you want to download the SDK, it’shere. For an overview of the capabilities using the CTP bits I have some webcasts here.

If you have an AppFabric account you can log into the Service Bus section of your portal. There is some basic management functionality in the portal that allows you to create and delete queues, topics and subscriptions.

Queues can be created with various options for timeouts, queue size and options for duplicate detection, dead-lettering and sessions.

In the current release queues, topics and subscriptions are immutable, so once created it’s not possible to modify the properties. If you do need to change anything on a queue you will have to either delete and re-create the queue, or create a new queue with a different name.

As for the messaging API changes, after a quick glance I like the changes that have been made between the CTP and release versions, even though I’ve got to re-code all my demos for the release bits. Be aware that some of the sample documentation and code comments have not been updated to reflect the changes (I noticed this in the DeferredMessages sample) , so trust the code not the docs.

AppFabric Access Control Service Webcast - Using Social Identity Providers

Alan Smith — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 05:24:21 GMT

I’ve started to take a look at the Azure AppFabric Access Control Service (ACS), and have started an ACS sectionon Cloud Casts. The first webcast looks at using social identity providers to provide authentication for websites. I’m going to focus on ACS for a bit and wait for the AppFabric messaging capabilities to be released before returning to them and looking in more detail. I have a few webcasts on AppFabric messaging here.