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Showing posts from 2013

Starting you Azure project

Is this your project approach? Azure Project X == Azure Subscription X Azure Project X Budget == Azure Billing Alert on Azure subscription X Azure Project X Monitoring == setup (SCOM) Azure monitoring Azure Project DEV == prepared to support the application after Go-Live? Azure Subscriptions http://blog.kloud.com.au/2013/07/30/good-practices-for-manag… Azure Billing http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/dn47977… Azure SCOM http://blogs.technet.com/b/dcaro/archive/2012/05/03/how-to-monitor-your-windows-azure-application-with-system-center-2012-part-2.aspx Regards, Sander

The Enterprise Continuum – separation of concerns

There are so many options, and ways of developing a solution that I would like to share some of the guidelines we are developing internally. At this moment, I will do this on the blog you are reading, focusing on the solution architectures. In parallel I’m working for my company on the enterprise architectural guidelines, and I’m trying to follow TOGAF principles to lay down the architecture. I’m hoping to be able to define the architecture context, general architecture, and relate it to the solution architecture. In the perfect world, with all the time to do this….this should result in Architectural concepts, which will be posted on: http://theenterprisecontinuum.blogspot.nl/ focused from the top-down approach of setting architectural requirements such as ‘every project must leverage a monitoring capability’, and this blog: http://snefs.blogspot.com where I will post the solution for this concept. The first post (which is basically the same as this): http://theenterprisecontinuu

Azure Service Bus – Error handling strategy

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At this moment there are several ways to build exciting new applications. In several projects, we are using a hybrid/cloud architecture, specifically Windows Azure. In my upcoming posts I would like to share some of the guidelines we are developing internally, in this case specifically a way of handling errors in Azure queues/topic-subscriptions. A lot of the Azure (integration) Architectures (and even between web-worker roles) will likely use some elements of the Azure Service Bus, or Azure Queues. Going through the different architectures is not part of this post, so I will suffice with a slide from the Service Bus Deep Dive presentation; Within our company Caesar , several internal systems have been created and where possible purchased. One of them, CRM4.0 was outdated, or not suited for all our requirements (among them Accessibility online). We decided to migrate our CRM system to the Cloud, using Dynamics CRM. As not all systems are migrate and we are in the process of analyzi

Architecture - ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010:2011

After following the IASA Architecture Core course, I like to continue with my personal learning and improvement, and focus on my architectural skills, among others. This year, by following a course on the Theory of Constraints , which is a really interesting theory which will help analyze the core issue behind a problem, and have followed the MetaPlan training which allows for a structured goal oriented brainstorm. For next year, I enrolled in a training on TOGAF. In my preparation for this, I stumbled upon the Open2Study website, where you can follow a lot of courses for free. I enrolled this weekend into the EntrArch course, which includes TOGAF. In one of the additional resources, it referred to a lot of very useful articles. So after diving into a lot of them, for learning more about architectural styles, frameworks and more. I can recommend the following; TOGAF A Comparison of the Top Four Enterprise-Architecture Methodologies Survey of Architecture Frameworks     Cheers,

BizTalk User Group NL 28-11-2013

On 28-11-2013 the BizTalk User Group ( LinkedIn group BTUG NL ) meeting took place in Amsterdam, which was organized by Estreme . The purpose of the BizTalk User Group is to have regular meetings with members in the community on the topic of integration. Since Azure provides more and more integration capabilities, by means of the Azure Service Bus, and the Go-Live of Windows Azure BizTalk Services (WABS), the meetings are diverse and very interesting. As Azure is very broad, the BTUG focuses on the following elements of the Microsoft Integration stack: On Premise (WCF/SSIS/BizTalk/Windows Server Service Bus etc) Cloud - Windows Azure (Windows Azure BizTalk Services / Service Bus etc). Announcements An upcoming event in January is the BizTalk Saturday, focused on Windows Azure BizTalk Services Next year, a BTUG Beach event is organized, an informal community event The next upcoming meeting will be held in March Feedback BizTalk Summit - Steef - Jan Wiggers Steef - Jan Wiggers pr

‘ETW2.0’ - High performance tracing using EntLib SLAB

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Are you writing an application that has high performance requirements, are you wondering how Azure Diagnostics works, do you want to write your own logging framework….this might help you out. Not so long ago, the Application Server Group ISV Partner Advisory Team posted an excellent article on how to instrument specifically BizTalk applications, by leveraging the ETW infrastructure. This allowed for significant high performance tracing and was measured against other frameworks as you can see in the diagram below; In the latest EntLib releases, this has been included in the Semantic Logging Application Block (SLAB) . What’s really interesting is that there are 2 patterns which you can implement: 1. In Process, where the Host which performs the log data is written to the ETW Infrastructure and the Listener is subscribed to the ETW data 2. Out of Process, where the Listener can be a Service outside of your application (most suitable for OnPremise usage)   EventSource With

Service bus management – here's a way

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UPDATE : this post contains a lot of additional great suggestions http://blogs.msdn.com/b/thecolorofazure/archive/2014/05/13/azure-implementation-guidelines.aspx   How to create a consistent DTAP environment, which standards to adhere to, what naming conventions to apply, how to document these….all questions….the answers….a little cloudy. In this post I show how I use the tool Service Bus Explorer to my advantage for some of these questions. ·          Goal: create a consistent environment for DTAP ·          Challenges 1.        Naming conventions on Windows Azure (sb / queues / topics etc) 2.        Isolation of environment and thus billing 3.        Repeatable steps / Configurable using a tool / xml configuration   #1: Naming conventions Are they out there for Azure? This is a future subject for a WindowsAzure live chat session. ·          My #1 rule: make sure that the naming convention you think of are consistent ·          An example convention: <Cu

Exposing an REST Endpoint (POST) which processes Xml

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For my project I needed to expose an Endpoint, which accepts an HTTP Post with Xml as input/output. As I like to start small I’ve tried to start with a small test project. In this project, I wanted to learn how to expose an endpoint, how to set everything up and what options are there. This, because there are a lot of resources on all sort of specific issues, but the ones I faced were scattered in several blogposts. So for my project I developed a WCF Service, which was created using a WCF Webrole so that I can also publish it in Azure. ·          Create a new WCF Webrole o    Create a new Cloud service o    Create a new web role o    Which should result in a similar structure ·          Configure the endpoint to use WCF-WebHTTP and allow a help page At this point, you have a WCF Service, which is not yet exposed a WCF-WebHTTP endpoint. We can do this by: o    simply changing the Web.Config   o    Add a method which accepts Xml and decorate it with the ‘WebInvoke’ attri