Announced today at PDC. Initially made up of a Service Bus, the Workflow Service, and the Access Control Service. What are they? Why would I use them?
I've looked at it a little. There's a few posts that convey a lot of meaning, I feel. This new wave of technologies really does look as 'big as NT' as is being reported in some circles.
In it's simplest form, map the current Microsoft server services for such solutions and imagine them hosted on Microsoft's data centres. So we have
Biztalk service bus / services->
.Net Service Bus
Windows Workflow -> Workflow
Services
SQL Server -> SQL Services
Active Directory Service -> Access
Control Service
(NOTE: these are approximations to illustrate rather than direct mappings)
Now initially it's not that your current Biztalk wired code can move into the cloud directly, but service contracts are being made avialable to run your own code against Sql, say, running on Microsoft kit. (remember we're talking to the cloud so all APIs will naturally be exposed via web services).
So software is finally moving to a subscription model perhaps - whilst pricing is not available, it's being promoted as a Pay-As-You-Go scheme.
Official links:
- MSDN - Windows Azure
- VS 2008 Tools (includes project templates)
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/John-Shewchuk-and-Dennis-Pilarinos-Inside-NET-Services/
Related
i'm about to decide on technology choices for an agent based application used in the transportaion systems domain.
basically there will be a central system hosting the backend, and multiple agents located across town (installed on desktops) that communicate with devices/kiosks collecting data and then transmitting them back to the central server. the central server could also be hosted on the cloud.
following are important
securing the data and communications between the device and the agent
and the agent and central server.
agents should be easily installable with little or no configuration.
near 100% uptime and availability
Does WCF fit the bill here?
if so what binding types should i go for? netTCP or wsHttp with SSL/HTTPS?
WCF is definitely a fit choice for this kind of scenario. For your bindings, the actual question is what technology you are going to use. Do you want to make the agents run in a non .NET environment like Java, then you should chose for wsHttpBinding. This binding communicates through SOAP and is very interoperable.
If you chose to use .NET agents, you might as well use netTcpBinding because they use the same WCF frameworks. It also supports binary encoding. If you really need to make a choice, take a look at the MSDN Documentation.
For your agents you could use a simple console application that runs in the background as a Windows service. WIX can help you with that (install an application as windows service), but thats all I know. WIX can also help you with basic installing and configure everything for you but it has a high learning curve so you might need to invest time in it.
I have a question about whether cloud vendors have an inter-operable mechanism. For example, I am developing a WCF service and hosting in Azure successfully. After a pro-long time using Azure, can I use the same code for deploying it in AWS? Will it be possible? Does the API of both matches the same for deploying? If not, what are all the extra care needed for hosting the same service when switching over other Cloud Vendors like Salesforce.com, OpenStack, etc.,
In general, you can't just take what you develop for one Cloud platform and put it on another: they have different functionality sets and expose different APIs. However, the more low-level you make your code, the more likely it is that you'll find another vendor with a very similar API, since virtualizing infrastructure is simpler (and closer to standardized) than virtualizing a CMS application.
If you're using just IaaS, you can probably port fairly rapidly but you have to do more work to make your application. If you're using PaaS (or SaaS!) then you're more locked-in but you get more support for developing rapidly: it's that support platform which is both the value-add and the lock-in, and you won't get one without the other.
If you're using an Azure web role for hosting your WCF service then from deployment point of view you will not have many problems with AWS. You'll simply use facilities offered by AWS SDK for .NET (aka Publish to AWS CloudFormation). For sure you'll have to change the logging part if you've used Azure Diagnostic and alla Azure services with related AWS services. We did this multiple times in the last year and it works.
For worker role it's not so simple because in Azure they are easily deployed like web role, but in AWS you haven't direct deployment from Visual Studio so you have to do some manual work using Windows Services or something else
we are currently on windows server 2008 R2, IIS 7.5 and we are going to open some of our data via WCF services.
To do that, we are planing to host our services on IIS but I heard that it is not a good idea for WCF services.
The problem with the WAS is that it is general purpose hosting engine. it's actually unaware that it's actually hosting a WCF service or a website (as far as I know)
I heard that we can install an extension to the WAS called the Windows Server AppFabric.
does anybody have any experience on
AppFabric?
should my app have to use so called
'Service Bus' to use AppFabric?
should I go ahead and definitely
install it?
at most basic level, how and where
can I install it? does it require
any licence?
Thanks in advance.
I don't think IIS us a bad idea - many developers use IIS to host their WCF services. IMHO you'd only use what you need, so if all you need is a hosting framework, then IIS is a very good option for WCF services. It is (almost) unaware that it's hosting a WCF service, but that in the majority of the cases isn't an issue.
Windows Server AppFabric as it's currently released provides three capabilities: a distributed caching system (so if you need to scale out your service you can use this cache to share state among the nodes); a packaging / deployment interface (in which you can package a project and deploy it a little easier in IIS); and a management / monitoring interface (where you can monitor the instances of WCF and Workflow services which are running in your machine).
Answers to your questions:
Yes, some people have experience with it :)
No, the application doesn't have to use it. You'd only use the ServiceBus if you need its functionality (relay)
Only if you need it. If you don't need caching or the monitoring capabilities, for example, then I'd say you don't need it. I've found in the past that the least number of components I have in my system, the less likely it is to break.
Go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/ee695849.aspx. And AFAIK you don't need any license, but you can check on the download page to see if it has more information.
There is no real common reason why not to host a service in IIS/WAS.
If you want to absolutely, totally 100% make sure that your service is continuously running some process, such as a continuous loop or polling monitor, and if any interruption no matter how brief is a major issue, then you'd want to look at alternative hosts.
Win Server AppFabric is most useful for WF Service hosting and caching. Note however that Win Server AppFabric + Win Server Service Bus 1.0 represents the first steps in convergence between the Azure platform and the Windows Server private platform.... In other words, whichever of the two ways you choose, that's what is going to be earning your bread and butter in 5 years time.
I’m developing a .NET/C# application software for an instrument which has a built-in PC (Core 2 CPU/2.66GZ/4GB RAM) and will have access to the Internet from behind the facility IT firewall. The software is made up of two parts: a rich client desktop app for UI and device control and a web app (silverlight) for providing remote maintenance such as device configuration and calibration via internet using browser. This device web site will be hosted using IIS locally on the instrument. My questions are:
What is the risk of running an IIS hosted web site on a device?
What does it take to make it secure so that data and operation of the instrument is immune to potential hackers.
Is it a better design to provide web services (or WCF services) as the interface for remote maintenance? In this case, I’ll create a rich client service utility program that can consume the web services over Internet for remote maintenance purpose.
Wow, thats an interesting project!
Personally I would take a different approach and have the device/instrument pull the maintenance info from a centralized server instead of hosting the service that performs it.
Do you really want to worry about the maintenance of updates & patches on that device.
but Ill try to answer like you didn't have any choice.
1) the risks are the same as any website. you have to deal with authentication, in your case I would have allowed IP ranges.. etc.
2) Nothing is immune. But just google WCF security for a start.
3) Yes that is a better approach if the services are hosted outside the "instrument"
good luck, sounds like a fun one.
See the WCF Developer Center for much information on WCF.
One feature of WCF is that it's possible to host a WCF service in almost any kind of program. In particular, you could host a secure WCF service on your device - without needing to run IIS or any other web server at all.
I am in the process of integrating our custom web app with QuickBooks Enterprise 9. My thought is that I could use QuickBooks as my "database" of sorts. When a person creates an invoice, the invoice is actually stored only in QuickBooks. When a person views a list of invoices, they are actually viewing a list of QuickBooks invoices. I want to make sure the data is stored in only one location.
I realize that I could use the QB Web Connector, but the problem with that is I wouldn't have control over when the requests to QB actually get processed (That job is up to the Web Connector).
So I have my web UI to act as the QuickBooks "face," but I don't have any good way to get to and from the QuickBooks file located on an internal server. What I was thinking was that I could create a WCF web service and install it on the QuickBooks server. The web service could then be my integration point. My custom web app could then consume the web service and, viola, I have access to my QuickBooks files.
My question is this: Can a WCF app connect and run QuickBooks? If not, could i create a Windows service to act as my point of integration? If so, can my custom web app "consume" a windows service?
I'll start by warning you that QuickBooks probably isn't your best choice for a reliable back-end database accessible from a remote website. In fact... it's probably a really, really bad choice.
You should have your own application database, and then if you need to also exchange data with QuickBooks, do that outside of the normal lifecycle of your app, as a separate sync process.
QuickBooks generally isn't reliable enough for always-online type of applications due to a number of reasons:
Flaky SDK connections
Updates and single-user mode will
lock you out of accessing QuickBooks
Difficulty in establishing SDK connections from non-GUI processes (Windows Services and IIS processes)
With that said...
Yes, you could create a WCF web service, host it on the QuickBooks machine, and make your WCF web service relay messages to/from QuickBooks.
Yes, you could also create a Windows Service that does the same sort of thing.
Do NOT implement it as a Windows service, and do NOT implement it within IIS - instead implement it as a GUI app that runs alongside QuickBooks.
If you try to implement things as a Windows service or within IIS, the QuickBooks SDK requires you have a GUI available (it users a GUI COM message pump for events dispatching or something like that...) to process requests, so you'll probably need to use something like QBXMLRP2e.exe to straddle the process boundary between QuickBooks and your non-GUI Windows service/IIS. My experience has been that it's a gigantic pain in the butt, and requires mucking with DCOM permissions as well.
I have an example and some documentation on my QuickBooks integration wiki.
The IDN Forums are a good place to ask questions.
My recommendation to you would be to either:
Use the Web Connector and QuickBooks
and give up hope of keeping all of your data in one place. Cache the data in a real database, and update it by querying QuickBooks periodically. I'm almost done building a solution to do exactly this right now, and it works fantastic.
OR
Use a different account system. NetSuite is pretty nice. I'm not sure what else is out there, but if I were you I'd look for something SQL-based or with a strong SOAP/REST API.