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Microsoft announced a price update for several Azure services. Many customers asked about the pricing policy of the new features in service bus (e.g. Queues and Topics). This announcement provide a clear answer. No more connection package. From now on a simple Time and Payload model. Reduced price for data transfers : $0.12 per GB for outbound data transfers for Zone 1 (Europe and North America) $0.19 per GB for outbound data transfers for Zone 2 (all other locations) Service Bus is free for a promotional...
I wanted to demonstrate how Windows Server AppFabric Monitoring works for WCF services, but when I called my services I did not see any recording of any WCF call. Why? It took me some time to find the problem. To make the story short. AppFabric monitoring relies on SQL Agent. WCF event are written to a database that is set when we configure AppFabric Hosting Service. This information is written to the "ApplicationServerMonitoringConnectionString" connection string in the root web...
I was working with a customer that wanted to use AppFabric Topics to push notifications to clients. as We all know anyone who wants to listen or send messages using service bus has to authenticate first. Traditionally authentication to the service bus was done by presenting a secret key before a connection was established.It is reasonable to put the secret key in a software package deployed on a server (Some can argue with that and say it is a security violation) but providing the key to numerous...
Recently the AppFabric team released real pub-sub capabilities with the new queues and topics features. Queues are simple. AppFabric provides a queue for durable messaging between senders and receivers. Topics are interesting because they allows to create different subscriptions so different clients can receive only the messages they need. To demonstrate how to use topics I created two helper classes: Senders and Receiver that will send and receive messages using AppFabric Topics. Sender /// <summary>...
In Claim based applications we use token to provide the application (Relying party) with details (a collection of claims) about the the authenticated identity. In ASP.net web sites and WCF SOAP services SAML tokens are used as a container for the claims. SAML is a standard that describe how token and claims are constructed and how they are cryptographically protected using digital signature and encryption. SAML tokens are powerful yet they are large. The size of the token is not a real issue in ASP...
One of the major missing parts in windows azure was the support for workflow. You could install a workflow on a web role but when multiple instances of the web role try to persist and load the same workflow instance an exception is thrown. Workflow was designed to run by a single host that persist its state to a single database. This concept does not fit to the cloud that uses multiple computing instances by design. Azure AppFabric provides the solution. A whole new host was developed especially...
As I wrote in my last post AppFabric is about to release a whole new exciting set of important capabilities. Windows azure AppFabric will be the new generation of middle-tier infrastructure. Well it is here. The CTP was released. This CTP release consists: (from the team blog) AppFabric Developer Tools - Enhancements to Visual Studio that enable to visually design and build end-to-end applications on the Windows Azure platform. AppFabric Application Manager – Powerful, yet easy way to host and manage...
Building, deploying and managing composite applications is a complex challenge. Such applications involve a large number of middleware infrastructures, each with its own configuration, management and development tools, runtime, and programming models. Developers as well as IT professionals have to put all the pieces together before the application can run. Windows Azure AppFabric provides the infrastructure and tools to unify these pieces so developers can build the application in a consistent way...
Cloud applications are distributed applications by design. There are many instances of roles located on different VMs and everything is load balanced. In Windows Azure there is no sticky load balancing so you can never know which role instance will serve your request. Such an environment introduces the challenge of state management. This is not a new challenge we know it from Asp.Net applications. Now in windows azure we find it everywhere – In web roles and worker roles. When you create a object...
Azure AppFabric labs was upgraded. No more old portal style… Now you can enjoy the new Silverlight portal look and feel. On the way all the namespaces from the last version were deleted. I hope you are not damaged… More improvements: Ability to choose from a set of available cache sizes and provision a cache of the chosen size Support for upgrading or downgrading between caches from the available sizes dynamically based on your requirements Added client side tracing and client request tracking capabilities...
Named Cache: In Windows Server AppFabric Caching Service it is possible to create named caches and provide different configuration characteristics to each cache. For example, one cache with rarely changing data could have a very long time-to-live configured for cached data while another cache containing more temporary data could have a much shorter time-to-live. Furthermore, it is possible to create regions on a single node in the cache cluster and associate searchable tags with cache entries. Neither...
Azure appfabric distributed cache is very important for managing state in distributed applications. (I will talk about it in details in my next post) but it has a little unpleasant surprise. It does not work side by side with Windows Server AppFabric ! If you previously installed Windows Server AppFabric, you must uninstall it before installing the AppFabric CTP SDK. These on-premise and cloud versions of AppFabric are not compatible at this time. When both are installed Windows Azure Appfabric SDK...
AppFabric Azure Access control service was released with very small set of features which were mainly targeted to REST web services. Now the ACS comes in a new version with a much larger set of features and capabilities. Integrates with Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) and tooling Out-of-the-box support for popular web identity providers including: Windows Live ID, Google, Yahoo, and Facebook Out-of-the-box support for Active Directory Federation Server v2.0 Support...
As you might have known The Windows Azure Access Control Services where completely changed in the RTM release. No more portal management. Rules are created using tools like ACM.exe which actually calls a set of web services. No more Federation Bindings. Tokens are acquired and validated manually. I found a very good introductory of the new access control service which I recommend to read. The new Azure AppFabric SDK provides few simple samples and a nice WPF tool for access rules management...
Two weeks ago I posted that the current download of Appfabric does not work with VS RTM, well the guys at Microsoft heard the feedback from the community and released a Windows Server AppFabric Beta 2 Refresh that works with VS RTM. Anyway On May 20th Windows Server AppFabric and BizTalk Server 2010 will be launched… The launch will be broadcasted at The Application Infrastructure Virtual Launch Event The program of the event can be found here . Manu