Azure Services Kit - Exercise 2 (IntroServiceBus)

I have recently been evaluating the Azure Services Kit and ran across an error that I figured I would post in case anyone is looking for a solution.

The error occurs in Exercise #2 when trying to initialize the Server project to listen for requests through the .Net Services Service Bus. I would imagine that this error applies more so to IIS and WCF than the actual Service Bus.

Error
System.ServiceModel.AddressAccessDeniedException was unhandled Message="HTTP could not register URL http://+:80/services/My-Solution-Name/EchoService/. Your process does not have access rights to this namespace (see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=70353 for details)." Source="System.ServiceModel" StackTrace: at System.ServiceModel.Channels.SharedHttpTransportManager.OnOpen() at System.ServiceModel.Channels.TransportManager.Open(TransportChannelListener channelListener) at System.ServiceModel.Channels.TransportManagerContainer.Open(SelectTransportManagersCallback selectTransportManagerCallback) at System.ServiceModel.Channels.TransportChannelListener.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout) at System.ServiceModel.Channels.HttpChannelListener.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout) at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout) at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ChannelDispatcher.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout) at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout) at System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostBase.OnOpen(TimeSpan timeout) at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open(TimeSpan timeout) at System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open() at Service.Program.Main() in D:\Development\AzureServicesKit\Labs\IntroServiceBus\Ex02-BindingsConnectionModesSample\begin\Service\Program.cs:line 34 at System.AppDomain._nExecuteAssembly(Assembly assembly, String[] args) at System.AppDomain.ExecuteAssembly(String assemblyFile, Evidence assemblySecurity, String[] args) at Microsoft.VisualStudio.HostingProcess.HostProc.RunUsersAssembly() at System.Threading.ThreadHelper.ThreadStart_Context(Object state) at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.Run(ExecutionContext executionContext, ContextCallback callback, Object state) at System.Threading.ThreadHelper.ThreadStart() InnerException: System.Net.HttpListenerException Message="Access is denied" Source="System" ErrorCode=5 NativeErrorCode=5 StackTrace: at System.Net.HttpListener.AddAll() at System.Net.HttpListener.Start() at System.ServiceModel.Channels.SharedHttpTransportManager.OnOpen() InnerException:

Solution
The solution itself can be found in the link that is provided ( http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=70353) ...I know what a bonus; an error message that actually points you in the right direction to a solution.

The description of the error is not all that useful, but does cover some scenarios:
Using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) over HTTP either requires the use of a host, such as Internet Information Services (IIS), or manual configuration of the HTTP settings through the HTTP Server API. This document describes manually configuring WCF when using HTTP and HTTPS.

In order to actually solve the problem, I ran this command on my Vista machine:

netsh http add urlacl url=http://+:80/services/My-Solution-Name/EchoService/ user=domain\user

Note:

• "My-Solution-Name" is where I inserted my Azure Solution name. You would enter yours in this place holder.
• If your machine is not part of a Domain, just use the local machine name instead of Domain

Now that I have some spare time, I plan on spending some more time with Azure and more specifically .Net Services. Hopefully, I will have some interesting posts regarding these technologies.

Canadian TechDays - Virtualization

I spent my day at the Microsoft Canada TechDays conference. There were no Connected Systems related sessions going on so I figured that I would sit in on a few sessions that I knew very little about; virtualization.

From what I got out of these sessions is that Microsoft has made some great progress in this area. No longer can virtualization only be used on servers with non-mission critical applications. In fact under the right scenarios; servers capable of running VMBus and "Designed for Windows" hardware there is suppose to be very little overhead involved in running a guest Virtual Machine on a Windows 2008 Host server.

(image credit)

With virtualization creeping to the top of many CIO's lists I wanted to learn more about the topic so that I can intelligently speak about the subject when it comes time to discussing virtualizing BizTalk servers.

A document that I am aware of but have not had a chance to read yet is the BizTalk 2006 R2 Hyper-V Guide written by Ewan Fairweather and Clint Huffman. After sitting in the sessions and learning about the capabilities of Hyper V and Windows 2008, reading this document has risen towards the top of my "to-do" list.

On a lighter side, I must give the Microsoft Marketing folks some credit when it comes to the swag that they handed out. While the 160 gb portable hard drive that they handed out at PDC was nice, it was no where near as creative as what they handed out today.



And for my American friends that black piece of clothing is called a "tuque" not a "hat". :-)

TechDays_CA

BizTalk Server 2009 - Public Beta now available

The bits are now available for download from Microsoft Connect.

What can you expect?

(from Microsoft Connect site)

BizTalk Server 2009 represents the next release in Microsoft’s long-term strategy to enable the connected enterprise. BizTalk Server 2009 enhances enterprise connectivity with broad industry support of WS* protocols, the edge via Microsoft BizTalk RFID, and business partners though EDI.
What’s new in BizTalk Server 2009?

Simplify Interoperability

• Support for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 - take advantages of the latest developer tools.
• Support for Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 – full support of Hyper-V, and increased performance and scale.

Extend To The Edge

• EDI - enhanced out of the box support for the most commonly used EDI schema and trading partner management tools.
• Simplify development of mobile applications that expose relevant, real-time business information (RFID Mobile).

Enhance Productivity

• ALM – new support is provided for Team Foundation Server (TFS), allowing development teams to leverage the integrated source control, bug tracking, support for team development, Project Server integration and support for automating builds via MSBuild.
• Enhanced Developer Productivity – improved underlying project system enhances debugging support for artifacts, pipeline components and orchestrations, and enables support for unit testing.

Support

This beta is community supported. The TechNet forums will be the primary place for support - http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=1470&SiteID=17.

• This beta is for evaluation purposes only. It is not supported in a live operating environment.
• ESB Guidance 2.0 CTP is also now available at - http://msdn.microsoft.com/esb

Come back to this blog for more information regarding BizTalk Server 2009 - Public Beta

BizTalk Hosted Web Service - Error CS2001

The project that I am currently on has an Orchestration that is exposed as a Web Service. This is running on Windows 2003, so we have created an app pool and assigned the BizTalk Isolated Host Instance user to this app pool's identity.


We just migrated our app to a pre-prod environment and were having some troubles connecting the client application to the BizTalk exposed web service. There were no errors in the event viewer on the BizTalk server, but there was in the client application's event viewer.


Here is the error:
Problem while generating request for waiting records: Server was unable to process request. ---> Unable to generate a temporary class (result=1).
error CS2001: Source file 'C:\WINDOWS\TEMP\hgz0bwpr.0.cs' could not be found
error CS2008: No inputs specified


There are a fair amount of CS2001 and CS2008 errors documented on the web, but I figured I would add this one to highlight that the error occurs on the client machine, not the host server.


How did I fix it?
I provided the BizTalk Isolated Host Instance user with the following permissions on the C:\Windows\temp folder:

• Read & Execute


• List Folder Contents


• Read

Also note that this machine is internal to our network so if your machine is externally facing, you may want to further restrict some permissions.

PDC Day 4 - More time spent in the Cloud

On the 4th day of PDC I spent more time in the Cloud learning about some architectural scenarios that the Cloud is capable of supporting.

As part of the PDC Symposium series, I attended Gianpaolo Carraro's session called "Head in the Cloud, Feet on the Ground". The objective of this session was to further investigate the Architectural challenges and opportunities in the cloud.

I found this session to be really helpful as so much of the other sessions has been about the technical bits that makes the Cloud technology "cool". This session focused on decisions that an Architect or even CIO may face when thinking about what applications belong in the cloud and which applications may be better hosted on premise. On premise meaning locally in your organization.

He also attacked this subject from two perspectives:

1. Corporate IT perspective
2. ISV Perspective

Since I live in Corporate IT I will spend more time in this area.

On Premise
Applications that are hosted locally tend to have more control than those in the cloud. Think of this more in terms of a custom application versus an application that runs in the cloud like Salesforce. If you have a custom built application, then your organization controls the feature set and have more agility when making a change as less people are involved. A challenge with this approach is that you have very little economy of scale as only your organization can extract value out of this application.

Cloud Applications
Conversely, an application that runs in the cloud has an opportunity for great economy of scale. Since many customers may be paying for this application, the savings are returned to the customers as collectively they are paying for the software to be developed. The challenge with this approach is that a company may need to alter an internal business process to align with the way that the application has been designed.

Conclusion
The end result came down to determine which applications are core to your business and provide a competitive advantage. These are the types of applications that are ideal candidates to be built and hosted internally. The commodity applications like Mail Services or Timesheet applications that are required to run your business, but not necessarily make your business more competitive are candidates for cloud based applications.

Best of both worlds
What I find extremely compelling is the idea of building an on premise service, yet leverage the capabilities of the cloud to expose this service to the world. This alleviates you from being overwhelmed with challenges related to Firewalls, NATs and security. I find this of even of greater value when you introduce several B2B partner scenarios. You don't need to be concerned with each of your partner's connectivity requirements. You let the .Net Service bus deal with those complexities.

Co-location
Also worth mentioning is a middle ground called Co-location or Managed Servers. This type of scenario may be ideal for you to build a custom application, but have it hosted by a 3rd party where you are not responsible for the on-going maintenance of the server that is hosting your application. For instance you may be a small or up and coming company that just does not want to make a large up front investment in infrastructure, but want to build an application and have it hosted in an external environment. This allows you to reduce the amount of up-front Capital Expenditures.

Looking Ahead
While some of this discussion is nothing earth shattering or ground breaking, I am curious to see how monitoring will evolve with these cloud based scenarios. For instance, currently with our on-premise applications we run Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) and System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) to provide us with some visibility into the health of our applications. If in the future we decide that we want to host a WF workflow in the cloud, what type of tooling will be available to inform us of any issues that may be occurring? This is a scenario that Microsoft is definitely aware of so I will be keeping an eye open on what type of tooling will be available.

PDC Day 2 - Windows 7

The big news on Day 2 at PDC was the first public sneak peak of Windows 7. Overall, I was pretty impressed with what I saw.

The first thing that stuck out at me is that Microsoft has dedicated a lot of effort to improve the usability of the operating system. Below is a list of features that I feel will greatly improve the usability of the Operating System.

Jump Lists
A feature called a "jump lists" is viewable in your task bar area. You know when you have 8 windows of IE or Word open and they stack up on top of each other? Well a jump list will provide some better visibility into what each of those windows contains.

Libraries
Do you have several folders where you store most of your content? For instance you may have some files you keep on a network drive, external drive or local drive. Do you hate having to search each of them independently(or having to search the entire drive)? The concept of the Library is to have the ability to aggregate your content. So if you need to do a search within your library, it will automatically search each of your work spaces that are configured in your library.

Homegroup
Homegroup is designed to make networking, and more specifically home networking, easier. The idea is that when you introduce a new computer to your home network, it shouldn't be difficult. The feature is also "smart" enough to seamlessly allow you to connect your work laptop to the network and take advantage of all of the file, network and printing capabilities without exposing sensitive data on your laptop to the remaining devices in your home network.

Pushing Content to a device
Are you in your home office but want to play some content on another machine? This feature will allow you to "Play media "xyz" on machine abc".

System Tray Notifications
Annoyed by those pop-ups that appear in you system tray? A new management tool exists that allows you more freedom to display the notifications that you want to display and suppress the ones that you do not want displayed.

Themes
Improved abilities to customize your Windows Themes. Also the ability to import/export themes to allow for sharing.

External Memory devices
Windows 7 supports Memory Stick - bit locker protection out of the box to ensure that if your memory stick gets into the hands of someone else that your data is encrypted.

VHD Support
New capabilities exist that allow you to create a VHD from Disk manager and also the ability to boot a Windows 7 vhd(directly) while maintaining state between reboots.

Dual Monitor Support
Ever RDP (remote desktop) into a PC/Server that has dual monitors? New capabilities exist that allow you to RDP into those machines and actually use both monitors.

User Account Control (UAC)
Tired of the "nag" messages that Vista gives you when you actually try to do something? A new UAC Slide control easily allows you to set the level of "nag" (or security) that you want applied.

Increased Touch Support
More monitor touch support is provided "out of the box" including the ability to use flicks inside of Internet Explorer. (Monitor must actually have touch capabilities).

Customized Shutdown
Have users that "accidentally" shut down machines when they should be logging off? New shutdown capabilities exist that allow you to customize the shutdown menu.

Other Features
Been waiting for the update to Paint or Wordpad? Wait no longer, as some improvements have been included in this release including Open XML support in Wordpad.

Windows 7 Principles
The goal of the Windows 7 team is to deliver an OS that:

• Has a decreased Memory (RAM) footprint
• Reduces the amount of Disk IO
• Does not require excessive Battery power (think laptops)

while

• Improving Speed(Faster boot/Device readiness)
• Responsiveness (start menu, task bar)
• Scale (Windows 7 supports up to 256 processors)
  

This release looks extremely promising, however don't expect it any time soon. The message that was given was "it will be ready when it is ready". This isn't such a bad thing as Microsoft is trying to deliver a solid product.

I encourage you to take a further look by viewing the actual web cast here.

PDC Day 3

The highlights for me on Day 3 include the .NET Services: Connectivity, Messaging, Events, and Discovery with the Service Bus and Dublin": Hosting and Managing Workflows and Services in Windows Application Server" sessions.

This blog post will provide a summary of both of these sessions and any additional 'tid-bits' that stuck out for me.

.NET Services: Connectivity, Messaging, Events, and Discovery with the Service Bus
Clemons Vasters presented the .Net Services session and did he ever do a good job. Not only is he extremely technically gifted, but he also has good presentation skills(this reminds me that I need to fill out a review for this session).

What are .Net Services
.Net Services is the successor of what was formerly called "BizTalk Services" and is one of the core components of the Azure platform. I would describe .Net Services as providing the abilities to host .Net Applications in the cloud (off-premise) and provide the ability to traverse firewalls by using Relay Bindings in messaging scenarios. For instance, if you have an on premise service that you would like to expose to the world but don't want to deal with some of the challenges that firewalls and security bring.

Dealing with firewalls is becoming a bigger and greater challenge as they are extremely pervasive. Also the use of NAT (Network Address Translation) devices makes it difficult to connect with publicly exposed services. This is the result of the IPV4 address supply being pretty much exhausted.

Service Bus Capabilities
.Net Services provide Service Bus capabilities in the cloud. What this essentially means is that you are able to are able to place a message on the wire and let the Service Bus look after directing that message to the appropriate subscriber. Subscriptions are handled by the Service Bus Naming System and are URI based.

Message Confidentiality
Transport security, in the form of SSL, is used for all connections. Microsoft has no need to look at the payload of your messages and claims that they do not. They welcome, and to an extent, encourage you to use Message level encryption if you have concerns as to whether or not your data is safe. A question that I repeatedly heard was, what type of audience do you expect to use these services as certain agencies would "never" trust Microsoft with their data. For instance, could the level of privacy that Microsoft is offering be sufficient enough to meet the criteria of Governments or Health Care organizations? Since .Net Services is still in CTP mode, I never did hear a real definitive answer to the question, but it is definitely something that is on Microsoft's radar.

Bindings
A very cool demo and discussion about the NetTCPRelayBindingHybrid was included in this presentation. The goal of this binding is to try to establish a direct peer to peer connection between the service consumer and service provider. You may be asking: how is this accomplished? At a (very) high level, A Relay connection is established that includes some NAT Probing. Microsoft will use the data that is obtained during this NAT Probing to form an educated guess on what NAT settings need to be used in order to establish a direct connection between the parties. If a direct connection can be established then the message payload will be sent directly to the destination system. If a direct connection cannot be established, then the Relay connection will be used to send data to the destination system via the .Net Service bus. Since .Net Services will use a "Pay as you go approach" the data, that is sent over the Relay connection, would be subject to the "cost" model.


Dublin": Hosting and Managing Workflows and Services in Windows Application Server"

This was my first real good look at the technology since the SDR sessions that were held at the MVP Global Summit in April. While I cannot discuss what I saw in April, I am able to say that the Dublin team has been doing some good work and has made progress.

When will Dublin be available
No public date was given other than "shortly" after Visual Studio 10 is released. This means we are probably looking at 1.5 - 2 years from now.

It just works
A slogan that is being used by the Connected Systems team. The idea behind this slogan is that in the past developers have had to either implement some features themselves or tweak their WCF/WF application in order to get it to work the way they want it to. In Dublin, more tooling and visibility into your WCF/WF applications is provided. The goal is that you design/build/test your application and after that ..."it just works".

Feature list (non-exhaustive)

• Management Capabilities through IIS Manager snap in tool
• Management APIs in the form of PowerShell command-lets
• Hosting (Durable Time Service/Discovery Service)
• Persistence (Scale-out and Reliability)
• Monitoring(WCF and WF Tracking)
• Messaging (Forwarding Service)
• System Center Integration
• Modeling Deployment via Quadrant

Management
The Management experience had some of the "look and feel" that you would find in BizTalk. The difference being is that there is not a new or separate tool. Additional functionality is "plugged" into IIS Manager. The rationale behind this decision was that Microsoft did not want to introduce a new tool that would also introduce another learning curve. By using IIS Manager, they could leverage an existing tool which should allow people to get up to speed quicker since they may already be familiar with the tool.

Model Deployment
They showed a cool demo where they were able to Model a workflow in the new Quadrant tool. They were then able to deploy the Model to the runtime. This demonstrated the vast integration between the technologies and perhaps gave us a real world glimpse into how we will develop and deploy software in the future.

Looking Ahead
There were a few things that I believe require some additional investigation. I do realize that Dublin is currently a CTP so it may just be a matter of having more time to include some of these features.

• More details in IIS Manager surrounding instances. Having just a dialog box pop up indicating the amount of successful or failed instances is not quite enough information.
• No Workflow Debug/Replay capabilities. What I am looking for here is a similar experience to the Orchestration Debugger that essentially allows you to replay a suspended (or successful) instance.
• Provide a GUI for the forwarding service configuration. While Powershell is a great tool and I can see it being very useful, something like inputting an XPath statement into a GUI would be my preferred method. While I encourage scriptable deployments, making a change to this could be done on the fly and I may not always want to switch into a command based session to make a change like this
• Unless I misunderstood, you have to deploy the installation 'package' on each node in your Dublin "group". There was no way to "push" the application to all nodes in a "group". While this is probably achievable via Powershell, it would be nice to have more visibility into other servers that may be running the same application.

So all in all , I have listed some pretty minor enhancements . Overall, I think the Dublin team has done some great work with the technology and remember that it is still early.