Introduction In the first article of the series we discussed how to exchange messages with an orchestration via a two-way WCF Receive Location using the Duplex Message Exchange Pattern . This form of bi-directional communication is characterized by the ability of both the service and the client to send...

Introduction In the first article of the series we discussed how to exchange messages with an orchestration via a two-way WCF Receive Location using the Duplex Message Exchange Pattern . This form of bi-directional communication is characterized by the ability of both the service and the client to send...

This blog entry is a sequel to the October 30th Blog “ Securing WCF Services hosted in Windows Server AppFabric with Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) ” where we demonstrated how to use WIF to secure Services hosted in AppFabric. And in this blog post we extend the same scenario to demonstrate...

  The following is a good place to get started with how to go about collecting basic information for monitoring and/or troubleshooting an App Fabric (AF) cache setup (Host/Cluster and clients). It starts by pointing to some resources on the different available logging features and then, via a sample...

Even though this topic looks obvious, there have been some interesting customer scenarios centered around this topic. I am hoping that this blog helps for decision making. As a basic tenet, in most solutions, a distributed cache will be used along with a database to optimize the application performance...

A couple of weeks ago I was working with a customer who engaged me to assist with a "little" problem they had – under certain conditions, the system would lose messages coming from a MSMQ queue and designed to correlate to instances of a long-running WF service hosted in IIS/AppFabric. The Rule...

At this year’s SQL PASS summit , I had the opportunity to talk with customers about App Fabric Cache and in preparation for the event, I put a demo to show some of the characteristics of the available APIs. The following is an explanation on how to setup the demo, what to expect when running it...

Abstract (updated version) Technical and commercial forces are causing Enterprise Architects to evaluate moving established on-premises applications into the cloud – the Microsoft Windows Azure Platform. This blog post will demonstrate that there are established application architectural patterns that...

Introduction One of the important reasons to move an application to the cloud is scalability (outside of other benefits that the cloud provides). When the application is deployed to the cloud, it is critical to maintain performance - the system needs to handle the increase in load and importantly maintain...

Introduction Some time ago, I was asked by a customer whether or not BizTalk WCF Adapters support the Duplex Message Exchange Pattern. The latter is characterized by the ability of both the service and the client to send messages to each other independently either using one-way or request/reply messaging...

Doing a search online for WCF and Cache will eventually lead you to a number of links* demonstrating the use of an IOperationInvoker implementation to manage caching. With AppFabric Cache rapidly becoming a mainstream enterprise technology I felt this to be an ideal time to revisit this concept. I...

Recently, a particular deployment with cache servers on domain1 and cache clients (app servers or web servers) running on domain2 lead to some debugging challenges when the cache clients are unable to communicate with the servers. Whether it is your DEV servers accessing cache servers or a production...

"Yet another post on AppFabric Monitoring" I hear you saying. Indeed, and one that you may want to read, especially if you're using AppFabric mostly for management and monitoring of code-based WCF services. If you had already looked at, or even better – used the monitoring features of AppFabric...

  In the middle tier AppFabric (AF) Caching can be setup in High Availability (HA) mode which is the feature that improves resiliency in the case a cache server goes down and for the backed, when using SQL for your configuration database, the simplest answer is to use mirroring. You may use SQL...

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...

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...

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...

I’ve seen a lot of services routing solutions. Some used expensive hardware. Some were built on top of integration or ESB platforms and others were simply built from the ground up. Building from the ground up has always been the most flexible method with the obvious drawback that it was also...

There is tremendous interest in versioning .NET4 Workflows. This blog post provides guidance on common scenarios that can be supported. Background Workflow versioning is required by a change in a business process that causes a modifications in the implementation of a .NET4 Workflow Service and...

One of the great (and major) features of Windows Server AppFabric is the out-of-the-box experience for monitoring WCF and WF based services. Gone are the days when an exception half way through a workflow instance could either 1) never be discovered or 2) take hours of creative efforts and ad-hoc debugging...

Yesterday someone contacted me in regards to adding a secondary persistence store to their AppFabric installation – they were trying to configure the environment so that workflow service A persists its instances to Store A, while workflow service B persists to Store B. Simple enough, right? Well, I realized...

The goal of this blog is to dig deeper into cache client & server communication, provide more insights into a set of configuration knobs and conclude with some best practices recommendation. Introduction If you are reading this blog, chances are that you are reasonably deep into AppFabric Cache...

Windows Server AppFabric Monitoring works with Oracle (10g XE) database? Yes, indeed! AppFabric Monitoring Provider extensibility is proven out in this MSDN Code Gallery Release - http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/AFMonitoringOracleDB The release includes the Visual Studio 2010 solution that contains...

This is just a short note before heading into the weekend, to announce availability of the AppFabric Architecture and Deployment Topologies guide. In this guide we address common questions we have heard from customers during our CAT engagements related to designing an enterprise-level AppFabric environment...

W e have new premium content for AppFabric server. This sample and the document are just what customers need to start using AppFabric Server to manage a .NET4 WCF Workflow service. Customers have been asking about versioning and security , and those are two features of the sample. The sample is released...