Well folks I’ve been greeted with the news that Microsoft Windows Azure will be in 2 geo-replicated places here on Australian soil, coming ‘shortly’.

As an Azure MVP & from Breeze (a leading Microsoft Cloud Partner) perspective we invest heavily in cloud technologies.

What does this mean and why should I care? I hear you ask… good question and I asked the same.

As most of you know I have a passion for Integration, sticking all sorts of things together from small RFID devices, hand made hand-held devices, raspberry PIs through to high end ERP, Financials & many other types of systems. So before I get to the WHY aspect, let me briefly set the context.

There’s some great data coming out of Gartner a report which caught my eye - http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/news/2240173583/Gartner-Better-collaboration-for-new-era-of-application-integration came out with these:

• Integration Costs to rise by 33% by 2016, more than half of new system development costs will be spent on Integration
• By 2017, over two-thirds of all new integration flows will extend outside the enterprise firewall.

So Integration just took on a whole new face – successful integration is about using the right tools (in the toolbox) for the right task. Now we have a whole new drawer in our toolbox full of Azure goodies & widgets. This functionality is just too compelling to be ignored….

…and now that it’s on Australian soil I’d be thinking that just about every Data center service provider should be giving you cloud functionality.

Some quick cloud advantages:

• scale, provisioning and ease of use
  • Imagine being able to spin up a SharePoint site in the time it takes me to write this article.
    
  • Imagine being able to ask for an extra load balanced highly available Server/Service at the click of a button. Importantly – Imagine being able to give it back again at the end of the weekend/day/next hour.
    
    
• Not wait the typical 12 weeks for a new server to be provisioned, oh and dont mention filling out the right forms. Running an application on those machines and getting a firewall port opened….that’ll be another 2 weeks…and on it goes.
  
• The much beloved Enlightenment for many companies of achieving Single Sign-On – Imagine your customers being able to sign into your applications using their own Ids, Live Ids, + a bunch of other Ids without you needing to provision more services. You can house your identity accounts in Azure, locally or elsewhere – finally you don’t need a Quantum Analyst to setup Single Sign-on.
  
• My experiences in the last few weeks on client sites have been back in the world of old – classic encumbered infrastructure service providers wanting to claim everything, put the brakes on any new ideas and have meetings around such concepts of adding an extra 10gb disk space to existing servers. These guys should be ‘can do’ people – it’s all about choosing the right tool for the job.
  
• Microsoft have done a great job on the developer tooling front from the classic MS toolset through to Apple, PHP, Ruby, Phython etc. all being able to access, develop on, publish and deploy.
  
• We could even give a bunch of HDD drives to Olaf (our gun cyclist @ Breeze) to ride to the Azure Data Center and offload our data, while we wait for the NBN to never come to our area.
  
• There are some great options on the horizon coming down the track.
  

So let’s say we’re keen to explore – how hard/easy is it to get ‘my’ own environment & what does this mean.

The short answer is you get an Azure Footprint which could be running in a ‘Data Center’ in Sydney. Depending on what you’re playing with you could get:

- SQL Databases, Cloud Services, Scalable Mobile Device Services, Load balanced Websites/Services/Restful endpoints…and the list of ‘widgets’ goes on and on.

How do I interact with this environment:

Often the issue around alot of this is that because my beloved ‘servers’ are running somewhere else I’m concerned over how much control we get.

We enter into the Hybrid Integration space – where as you can imagine not *everything* is suited for the Cloud, there will be things you keep exactly as they are. So there will be many many scenarios where – we have something running locally as well as something running in Azure. Some options we have available are to make our servers ‘feel at home’:

• VPN connection – we can have several flavours of a VPN connection that connect our Azure Footprint to our local network. for e.g. local network is 10.10.x.x/16, Azure network 10.50.x.x/16. Full access to all the machines/services and other things you have running. CRON jobs, FTP, scripts, processes, linux boxes, samba shares, etc etc.. (I do realise the integration world is never as easy as we see it in the magazines)
  
• RDP Connections – standard level of service really from any Service provider.
  
• Remote PowerShell Access
  
• Azure Service Bus - Applications Level Web/WCF/Restful Services connectivity. An Application Service can run either locally or in the cloud and this feature allows your Service to be accessed through a consistent Endpoint within the cloud, but the calls are Relayed down to your Application Service. There’s a few different ways we can ‘relay’ but the public endpoint could house all the clients & their device requests, while your existing application infrastructure remains unchanged.
  
• SQL Azure Data Sync – sync data between clouds & local from your databases. So for many clients, come 8pm each day, their local database has all the Orders for the day as per normal, without the usual provisioning headaches as the business responds to new market opportunities to support smart devices.
  
• We even get pretty graphs….
  
  • But wait there’s more…..
  • These details are typical performance monitor counters + diagnostic information. We can use Azure Admin tools to import these regularly and import them into our typical tools.
  • System Center does exactly this – so our ‘dashboard’ of machines will list our local machines as well as our cloud machines. Your IT guys have visibility into what’s going on.

We’ve been using Singapore DCs or West Coast US with pretty good performance times across the infrastructure. 

What does having a local Windows Azure Data Center mean to me:

• Medical Industry – we have several medical clients allowing us to innovate around Cloud technologies using HL7 transports. Faster time to market and higher degrees of re-use.
• Cloud Lab Manager – www.cloudlabmanager.com can run locally for all training providers. Breeze has created an award winning cloud based application that will certainly benefit from this piece of great news.
• Creating a cloud based application is now feasible (this particular one was due to the sensitive nature of information it carried)
• And lastly I can house my MineCraft server – well it’s my 10 yr old sons and half the school I reckon.

So for you…

Ask yourself the question – are you getting all these features from where you currently host/run your hardware?

Lack of infrastructure and provisioning challenges shouldn’t be holding back new ideas & business movement. iPads, smartphones, anywhere, any time access should be the norm, not like we’re putting another person on the moon.

It’s all about using the right tool for the job

Enjoy folks as it’s certainly exciting times for us Aussies ahead!!

Microsoft’s Announcement

While looking into purchasing MSDN licenses for a client here’s what I found:

For the US:

Now when you change the drop down from US to Australia we get these prices (given that $AUD 1 = (approx) $USD 1

So for e.g. take a MSDN – VS.NET Test.

Aussie Dollar = $3,460   US= $2,170 which equates to $AUD 1 = $USD 0.627

this is what happens when living in a 3rd world country…. - absolutely outrageous.

Hi folks, I came across a very handy little tip the other day that works with *any* set of Batch Commands that you want to run sequentially.

Now before you jump out and tell me “Mick, what are you doing?! Powershell is where it’s at!”….yes yes I know. I’ve half the guys at the office telling me that too.

So onto the goodness on this one:

The key is

<cmd> && <cmd>
or
<cmd> & <cmd>

Hold the Phone - we have an UPDATE (from a commenter upon whom I owe a beer)

----- Update ----

Using a single ampersand achieves a similar result but with a slight difference:

* single (&): run command 1 then command 2
* double (&&): run command 1, and if it returns success then run command 2

So in your example, if the print spooler is already stopped then "net stop" will fail and "net start" will not be run. If you use a single ampersand instead, then "net start" will still be run.

------ End of Update -----

e.g.

net stop “Print Spooler” && net start “Print Spooler”

While on SharePoint 2013 training we came across all the different ways of calling SharePoint and it’s data through JavaScript, JQuery and all the bits.

It was all looking good until we needed to update sharepoint – e.g. a list, a list item etc.

The MS Course notes say – “if you’re in SharePoint you can get the Form Digest from the main SharePoint Form….”

What about if you’re running outside of SharePoint (a Provider App – they now call it, or Cloud Hosted…depending on who wrote the help article)

The answer in the notes is… go and make an old fashion call to Sites.asmx SOAP WebService…. from client side javascript this is going to be a feat.

….

The Answer – make a REST call to get the ‘Context Info’ first, then you’ll have the form digest and you’re done.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fp142386(office.15).aspx#bk_synchronize (just at the top of this page)

To access this information, use the /contextinfo operator. For example:

http://server/web/doclib/forms/_api/contextinfo

To increase security against cross-site scripting attempts, the /contextinfo operator accepts only POST requests.

Great news – Jurgen Willis and his team have worked hard to bring Microsoft’s first V1.0 WF Workflow Hosting Manager.

It  runs both as part of Windows Server and within Azure VMs also. It also is used by the SharePoint team in 2013, so learn it once and you’ll get great mileage out of it.
(I’m yet to put it through serious paces)

Some links to help you out…

What is it?

WF Mgr 1.0 – Code Samples

The following main areas for WF improvements in .NET 4.5: (great MSDN magazine article)

1. Workflow Designer enhancements
2. C# expressions
3. Contract-first authoring of WCF Workflow Services
4. Workflow versioning
5. Dynamic update
6. Partial trust
7. Performance enhancements

Specifically for WorkflowManager there’s integration with:

1. Windows Azure Service Bus.

So all in all a major improvement and we’ve now got somewhere serious to host our WF Services. If you’ve ever gone through the process of creating your own WF host, you’ll appreciate it’s not a trivial task especially if you want some deeper functionality such as restartability and fault tolerance.

but…. if you want to kick off a quick WF to be part of an install script, evaluate an Excel spreadsheet and set results, then hosting within the app, spreadsheet is fine.

Let’s go through installation:

Download from here

Workflow_Manager_BPA.msi = Best Practices Analyser.

WorfklowClient = Client APIs, install on machines that want to communicate to WF Manager.

WorkflowManager = the Server/Service Component.

WorkflowTools = VS2012 plugin tools – project types etc.

And we’ll grab the 4 or you can you the Web Platform Installer

The Workflow Client should install fine on it’s own (mine didn’t as I had to remove some of the beta bits that were previously installed).

Installing the Workflow Manager – create a farm, I went for a Custom Setting install below, just to show you the options.

As you scroll down on this page, you’ll notice a HTTP Port – check the check box to enable HTTP communications to the Workflow Manager.
This just makes it easier if we need to debug anything across the wire.

Select NEXT or the cool little Arrow->

On Prem Service Bus is rolled into this install now – accepting defaults.

Plugin your Service Accounts and passphrase (for Farm membership and an encryption seed).

Click Next –> to reveal….

As with the latest set of MS Products a cool cool feature is the ‘Get PowerShell Commands’ so you can see the script behind your UI choices (VMM manager, SCCM 2012 has all this right through). BTW – passwords don’t get exported in the script, you’ll need to add.

Script Sample:

# To be run in Workflow Manager PowerShell console that has both Workflow Manager and Service Bus installed.

# Create new SB Farm
$SBCertificateAutoGenerationKey = ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText  -Force  -String '***** Replace with Service Bus Certificate Auto-generation key ******' -Verbose;

New-SBFarm -SBFarmDBConnectionString 'Data Source=BTS2012DEV;Initial Catalog=SbManagementDB;Integrated Security=True;Encrypt=False' -InternalPortRangeStart 9000 -TcpPort 9354 -MessageBrokerPort 9356 -RunAsAccount 'administrator' -AdminGroup 'BUILTIN\Administrators' -GatewayDBConnectionString 'Data Source=BTS2012DEV;Initial Catalog=SbGatewayDatabase;Integrated Security=True;Encrypt=False' -CertificateAutoGenerationKey $SBCertificateAutoGenerationKey -MessageContainerDBConnectionString 'Data Source=BTS2012DEV;Initial Catalog=SBMessageContainer01;Integrated Security=True;Encrypt=False' -Verbose;

# To be run in Workflow Manager PowerShell console that has both Workflow Manager and Service Bus installed.

# Create new WF Farm
$WFCertAutoGenerationKey = ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText  -Force  -String '***** Replace with Workflow Manager Certificate Auto-generation key ******' -Verbose;

New-WFFarm -WFFarmDBConnectionString 'Data Source=BTS2012DEV;Initial Catalog=BreezeWFManagementDB;Integrated Security=True;Encrypt=False' -RunAsAccount 'administrator' -AdminGroup 'BUILTIN\Administrators' -HttpsPort 12290 -HttpPort 12291 -InstanceDBConnectionString 'Data Source=BTS2012DEV;Initial Catalog=WFInstanceManagementDB;Integrated Security=True;Encrypt=False' -ResourceDBConnectionString 'Data Source=BTS2012DEV;Initial Catalog=WFResourceManagementDB;Integrated Security=True;Encrypt=False' -CertificateAutoGenerationKey $WFCertAutoGenerationKey -Verbose;

# Add SB Host
$SBRunAsPassword = ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText  -Force  -String '***** Replace with RunAs Password for Service Bus ******' -Verbose;

Add-SBHost -SBFarmDBConnectionString 'Data Source=BTS2012DEV;Initial Catalog=SbManagementDB;Integrated Security=True;Encrypt=False' -RunAsPassword $SBRunAsPassword -EnableFirewallRules $true -CertificateAutoGenerationKey $SBCertificateAutoGenerationKey -Verbose;

Try
{
    # Create new SB Namespace
    New-SBNamespace -Name 'WorkflowDefaultNamespace' -AddressingScheme 'Path' -ManageUsers 'administrator','mickb' -Verbose;

    Start-Sleep -s 90
}
Catch [system.InvalidOperationException]
{
}

# Get SB Client Configuration
$SBClientConfiguration = Get-SBClientConfiguration -Namespaces 'WorkflowDefaultNamespace' -Verbose;

# Add WF Host
$WFRunAsPassword = ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText  -Force  -String '***** Replace with RunAs Password for Workflow Manager ******' -Verbose;

Add-WFHost -WFFarmDBConnectionString 'Data Source=BTS2012DEV;Initial Catalog=BreezeWFManagementDB;Integrated Security=True;Encrypt=False' -RunAsPassword $WFRunAsPassword -EnableFirewallRules $true -SBClientConfiguration $SBClientConfiguration -EnableHttpPort  -CertificateAutoGenerationKey $WFCertAutoGenerationKey -Verbose;

Upon completion you should see a new IIS Site…. with the ‘management ports’ of in my case HTTPS

Let’s Play

Go and grab the samples and have a play – make sure you run the samples as the user you’ve nominated as ‘Admin’ during the setup – for now.

I recently ran into an interesting one while building some InfoPath forms for SP2010/2013 forms services.

I wanted to return some Rich Text (XHTML) fields back from a WCF WebService call.

I was at the point as a developer, where I couldn’t even say ‘Works on my machine…’.

The problem was – no matter what I tried, I would always have *plain text* and no ‘richness’ of the Rich Text. Didn’t work for me.

So I have:

1) a basic WCF Web service – running on my dev environment.

2) an InfoPath Form that makes the call and displays the results.

The WCF Service:

This is the field that I eventually want to return as RichText to InfoPath.

Here’s the Service Method code (which basically goes into a file and returns back a list of clauses) – just focus on the CONTENT = …GetXHTMLRichText(…)

InfoPath and Returning a RichTextField
2 things need to happen for this to work.

1. When InfoPath adds the WCF Service to the form, it needs to ‘detect’ the field correctly when it build the underlying schema.



You need (nb – ‘Content’ is my field name):
<xs:element minOccurs="0" name="Content" nillable="true">
                <xs:complexType mixed='true'>
                    <xs:sequence>
                        <xs:any minOccurs="0" processContents="lax" maxOccurs="unbounded" namespace="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"></xs:any>
                    </xs:sequence>
                </xs:complexType>

</xs:element>

Note the namespace on the ANY element above – this is the winner to tell InfoPath that this is a richtext field.

2. When returning data via this field (in my case the ‘Content’ field), it needs to be in a certain shape, as in:
<Content xmlns=http://yournamespace>
    <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Rich text here</div>
</Content>

Your rich text content needs to be ‘wrapped’ for InfoPath to play nicely with it.

This was the purpose of my GetXMLRichText method as

The gotcha:

When I pointed InfoPath at my webservice and added a service reference I was getting back a SimpleType for the field and not a ComplexType/Rich Text field.

The WCF Service WSDL was ‘almost there’ but not close enough:


The Content field described in a ComplexType which is almost there, but not quite.

It’s missing the <xs:complexType mixed=’true’>…<xs:any namespace=’http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml’ …/>. The rest were good.

The fix:

Cutting a long story short, the simplest way forward here was to simply edit the form components that InfoPath had built and correct the schema. Then reuse the form.

The form looks like this:

From the File->Publish->Export Source Files you can get to the source and edit the correct schema (XSD) file.

Close the form down in InfoPath (or you may even need to close InfoPath) to edit the Schema.

You may need to hunt through a few of them to find the right one. My file was GetKCCTerms12.xsd

Modify, save and close that file.

Right click on manifest.xsf –> Design to launch InfoPath and then select Save As to work with it as *.XSN form (*.xsn files are just CABs with all these files inside)

The final result as viewed from an InfoPath form – notice the bolding sent through.

Enjoy,

Mick.

With Hyper-V now available on Win8 it's more important than ever.

VOTE here: https://connect.microsoft.com/WindowsServerFeedback/feedback/details/390443/hyper-v-needs-usb-support

The more votes...the more importance this issue has.

Let's get it in there.

p.s. I'm aware of the 'workarounds' after having to plug 183 usb devices into a virtual environment. Hours I'll never get back

Easy but effective

<script type='text/javascript'>
var msg = "your big title goes here…";
msg = " ..... " + msg;pos = 0;
function scrollTitle() {
document.title = msg.substring(pos, msg.length) + msg.substring(0, pos); pos++;
if (pos > msg.length) pos = 0
window.setTimeout("scrollTitle()",300);
}
scrollTitle();
</script>

Recently there’s been an update to the ‘on-premise’ AppFabric for Windows Server.

Grab the update here - http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=27115 (runs on win7, 2008, 2008R2)

What’s new

I’m in the process of updating my components, but the majority of updates seems to be around caching and performance.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh351389.aspx

Hi folks, welcome to Monday…so I thought.

Here I was registering a message inspector which should take 5 mins tops.

Find the right config, make sure the .NET full assembly name is cool and away we go.

I wanted to use this guy from my custom WCF Adapter within BizTalk – so I needed my new message inspector to be seen by BizTalk.

So I used:

<add name="wcfMsgPropPromoter" type="Breeze.WCF.Extensions.BreezeMessagePromoteBehaviour,Breeze.WCF.Extensions,Version=1.0.0.0,Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=c2c8c7e827e9dd6a"/>

and added this guy to the <behaviorExtensions> element in the Machine.Config for .NET 4.0 x64/.NET 4.0 (& .NET 2.0 for good measure)

As if a scene from SpongeBob,… 3 hours later….

I had triple check GACs, caches, full assembly names etc…Scotty popped his head around and said “Oh yeah I had this one ages ago you need to use this…”

<add name="wcfMsgPropPromoter" type="Breeze.WCF.Extensions.BreezeMessagePromoteBehaviour, Breeze.WCF.Extensions, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=c2c8c7e827e9dd6a"/>

Can you spot the difference?

SPACES!!!!

Interestingly enough – this work is part of a .NET plugin I wrote for IIS 7.5 and to register the plugin you use “Breeze.WCF.Extensions.BreezeMessagePromoteBehaviour,Breeze.WCF.Extensions,Version=1.0.0.0,Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=c2c8c7e827e9dd6a"

NO SPACES!

My head hurts for a Monday…

Hopefully you reclaim the hours I’ve lost here.

Mick.

Hi folks, we’ve set a cracking pace into 2012 and are in need of an additional team member.

If you love technology, we love technology and I’d love to hear from you to be part of my team.

You will be stimulated, constantly thinking and challenged – azure, integration, biztlak, sql, windows phone 7 and many other technology areas you’ll be exposed to. Integration is all about the glue we use to achieve the result.

If you’re keen for a chat check out the blurb - http://www.breeze.net/about/jobs.aspx

Cheers,

Mick.

Hi folks, as you may/may not have been aware these are the core corner stone technologies of the MS Integration Stack.

The teams have been busily plugging away and coming up with the new versions – 4.5 corresponding to .NET 4.5 framework.

Here’s some links that describe what’s new from MS Santa & his elves:

1. What's New in Windows Communication Foundation 4.5

1. New Items I found of note are:

• New Service Transport Default values – keep an eye on these.
• Improvements from VS.NET 2011 – validation , better intellisence support.
• Streaming improved – true async (yay!)
• WebSocket support – through NetHttp(s)Binding
• Single WSDL file generation with ‘?singleWSDL’ (which is pretty handy)
• Self hosted + II hosted allow you to get to ServiceHost from code for dynamic configuration.
• Binary Encoder supports compression!! – this is generally gzip compression.
• My personal favourite – UDP support
  

1. New Items of note are:

• New Activites – NoPersistScope (possible previously but we needed to write code)
• WF Designer improvements – several here, but the ‘Outline view’ looks to be easier to work with.
• C# Expressions – where’s the F# ones ??
• Designer Annotations – add your own comments to keep control of the jungle that is built.
• WF Versioning – use WorkflowIdentity & DefinitionIdentity to define the version. WorkflowServiceHost supports multiple versions of the same WF. All pretty cool.
• WF Designers can still be rehosted – I’ve used that many a place.
• Contract First Development – ticks the boxes.
  

1. Will have to check out perf in this new land on these rules.
   

Async CTP – while this didn’t make the ‘whats new’ list, it certainly does deserve a mention here.
Over the last year I’ve built some pretty serious F# projects, and F# has the async support through and through the language. After over coming the challenge of learning it, the Async functionality is absolutely brilliant!!! F# does a great job in being able to turn a non-async chunk of code/method/class into an async one with by using the keyword async and a !. It’s straight forward from that aspect.

It’s great to see the C# & VB.NETs being able to use the same fundamentals (albeit not as slick IMO ). – see a previous POST - http://blogs.breezetraining.com.au/mickb/2011/04/26/EasierAsyncProgrammingComingToCVBSoon.aspx

As developers we sit here and say – what do I need this for? My code runs fine as it….and yes for the most part of what we do on our machine it does. This technology really comes into it’s own when you want consistent throughput from a solution with 1 person or 10000 concurrent people using it. That’s the difference.

To use it:

1. Get VSNET 2011 (as it requires a new compiler)
2. Use ASYNC CTP (refresh3) with VSNET2010 SP1