This week, we completed a small PoC for brabant court , a customer that is building a Windows Azure application that integrates with Intuit’s Data Services (IDS). A couple words on mabbled from brabant court. Mabbled is a Windows Azure app (ASP.NET MVC 3, EF Code First, SQL Azure, AppFabric ACS|Caching...

Tailspin Surveys is a multitenant, SaaS solution, targeting many different customers. Some of these customers might be “enterprise” with “Big-IT” and are likely to demand advanced integration capabilities for identity (e.g. identity federation). Others, potentially smaller, are likely to not require...

These series of posts dealt with various aspects of dealing with failures while saving information on Windows Azure Storage: Windows Azure Guidance - Additional notes on failure recovery on Windows Azure Windows Azure Guidance – Failure recovery and data consistency – Part II Windows Azure Guidance ...

Fabio asked me on twitter “why there’re no dequeue , peek and enqueue on Windows Azure Queues?”   One of the most common patterns for interactions with queues is this:     You get the message from the queue. This is not a “dequeue”, even though it looks like one. It is more a “peek &...

In the previous post , my question was about a small change in the code that would yield a big improvement. The answer is:   What changed? No try / catch We reversed the order of writes : first we write the details, then we write the “header” or “master” record for the expense. If the last SaveChanges...

I had some great answers on my previous post question, like Simone ’s. Some where closer than others, but in general you got it right, Thanks! The recovery strategy depicted there assumes that all failures are external . That is, writing to a table fails, for example, and you have a chance to run the...

We are almost content complete for our first Windows Azure Architecture Guide (the most probable name for our book). Available for download today: New updated samples, including all file processing and background tasks (lot’s of small nuggets in there, such as use of multiple tasks in a single Worker...

Last week Scott walked me through his current design for the “Integration Service” in our sample. Here’s some preview of this early thinking. As a reminder, our fictitious scenario has a process that runs every once in a while and generates flat files for some other system to process: it simply scans...

Question for you: if your application has 2 “background” task to perform, do you implement this as 2 distinct workers? or as 1 worker with 2 responsibilities? Option 1 is straight forward. Option 2 requires more work, but … does it make sense? It turns out that it does make sense. In some cases it makes...

One frequent question we get is around “process guidance”. Also known by the more modern and fancy acronym “ALM”: A pplication L ifecycle M anagement, which replaced the old SDLC term, which in turn (and only if you are old enough like me) meant something completely different , but I digress…. Application...

This new release focuses primarily on replacing the data tier with Azure Table Storage. To make things more interesting, we changed the data model in a-Expense so it now requires two different related entities: the expense report “header” (or master) and the details (or line items) associated with it...

Available for download here , you’ll find the first step in taking a-Expense to Windows Azure. Highlights of this release are: Use of SQL Azure as the backend store for application entities (e.g. expense reports) Uses Azure storage for user profile information (the “Reimbursement method” user preference...

A big motivation for considering hosting on Windows Azure is cost. Each month, Microsoft will send Adatum a bill for the Windows Azure resources used. This is a very fast feedback loop on how they are using the infrastructure. Did I say that money is a great motivator yet? (another favorite phrase :...

First build of our samples is now available on CodePlex . This initial version is the “before the cloud” baseline application, so you won’t find anything related to Windows Azure here. This week we will take this simple baseline and start moving it to the cloud. Goals for this next iteration are to:...

In this post, we’ll examine the application Adatum is considering migrating to the cloud as a proof point for their assumptions. Adatum’s a-Expense a-Expense is one application in Adatum’s finance support systems that helps them submit, track and process business expenses. Everyone in Adatum is required...

Here’s the “fiction non-fiction” (I love that term :-)) that will become the backdrop for our initial scenario. Adatum Business overview Adatum is a 5000 employee manufacturing company with a large portfolio of applications. Their criticality ranges from “peripheral” to “mission critical”, with lots...

Yesterday, we uploaded a new release of the Guide and the samples. You can download the content from here . (Note: if you downloaded them yesterday, you might want to check again. We mistakenly uploaded the samples with no docs. It is fixed now). You’ll find: Updated introduction & WebSSO chapters...

Now that we presented the scenario & the requirements , let’s take a look at the solution. What is conceptual solution we propose? Fabrikam Shipping in the pre-Claims era: This diagram shows Fabrikam Shipping today if used by Adatum (no claims, no federation): You will see the usual suspects for...

First things first : thanks everybody who wrote me about the first scenario article . I got quite some e-mail on it with great suggestions to improve, but in general it seems it resonates well with. Disclaimer: this post and the next ones are early drafts to share with you the direction we are taking...

Disclaimer: this post and the next ones are early drafts to share with you the direction we are taking. They might (and I hope they will) change quite a bit in the actual Guide! We might end up not covering one of these scenarios in the book. These posts represent my ideas and not those of my employer...

Windows Azure’s primitives are very simple, but as in many other things, the power comes from the combination of these simpler primitives to create more complex things. Look around and see how many things can be assembled from a little more than 100 “simple” elements . In Windows Azure,  there are...

In the previous article , we explored the challenges of building services for an enterprise, illustrating those through a dialogue between VeryBigCorp CIO and a team from SuperCloudySoftware . VBC requirements can be summarized as: Identity integration (including Single Sign On and management...

Now that we have introduced our characters, we will start this story describing the acquisition process of IssueTracker in VeryBigCorp . IssueTracker was first used in VBC by a very limited number of people. Someone in some business unit somehow learnt about it and thought it would be a good tool...

I will start this series by introducing the main characters of our scenario. First, we have VeryBigCorp . VBC is a large corporation, with multiple branches and subsidiaries, thousands of employees, etc. VBC is the typical organization with a rather complex business environment: multiple business...

For the last couple of months, we’ve been working on scenarios that involve consuming cloud services and applications from "Big Enterprise" . The focus being the technical obstacles for adopting cloud services. Big Enterprise is the moniker we use to describe an organization with rather heavy investments...