Search Results

Search found 17293 results on 692 pages for 'wcf workflow services'.

Page 127/692 | < Previous Page | 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134  | Next Page >

• What web services are available for for currency conversions?

  - by Robin

  Yahoo's service doesn't seem to provide an API I can use. What web services are there for currency conversions?

  Read the article

• how to pass arguments to windows services in c#?

  - by eurekha_ananth

  I just want to know how to pass arguments to windows services . The problem is , i am developed a windows application and then called it from Onstart() method . Now , i want to call the particular function from another project . protected override void OnStart(string[] args) { Process.Start("C:\\Program Files\\macro.exe"); } I want to call a function inside the macro.exe project with arguments . Any suggestions

  Read the article

• C++ Library for implementing a web services api over legacy code?

  - by leeand00

  Does anyone know of any really good C++ Libraries for implementing a web services api over top of existing legacy code? I've got two portions that are in need of it: An old-school client/server api (No, not web based, that's the problem) An old cgi application that it integrates with the client and server. Let me know if you've had any luck in the past implementing something like this using the library.

  Read the article

• SQL Reporting Services 2005 - Date field based on a user entered date?

  - by Pierce

  Hi, I have a report in report services 2005 that has two date fields. The problem is that if users run this for a large section of time it uses too much resources on our server. It is possible to only allow the end user to enter the start date and then the end date be auto populated/derived from this field (for example they enter the 1st of a month and this automatically change the end date to the last of a month.)

  Read the article

• Stop SQL Server services from conveniently

  - by MedicineMan

  I have a general use laptop. I use it for games, development, and web surfing. I've just installed SQL Server 2008 with Analysis, Reporting, and Error reporting, as well as any of the other options on the installer. I also have a default instance of SQL server as well as a named instance. When I'm not doing development, I'd like to shut down these services conveniently. I'm thinking that a batch file would be good. What are the commands to shut these services down and release the associated memory and resources? It appears that: net stop MSSQLSERVER seems to stop the MSSQLSERVER instance. What about the other services?

  Read the article

• Most secure way of connecting an intranet to an external server

  - by Eitan

  I have an internal server that hosts an asp.net intranet application. I want to keep it completely and utterly secure and private however we need to expose some information through a WCF service to another server which hosts our external websites which CAN be accessed by the public. What is the best way to pass information between the two servers with regards to an IT setup, while keeping the intranet in house server completely secure and inaccessible? I've heard VPN was the way to go but I wanted to be sure this was the safest way. Another question what would be the most secure way of passing data in the WCF service?

  Read the article

• Recommended website performance monitoring services? [closed]

  - by Dennis G.

  I'm looking for a good performance monitoring service for websites. I know about some of the available general monitoring services that check for uptime and notify you about unavailable services. But I'm specifically looking for a service with an emphasis on performance. I.e., I would like to see reports with detailed performance statistics from multiple locations world-wide, with a break-down on how long it took to fetch the different website resources, including third-party scripts such as Google Analytics and so on (the report should contain similar details such as the FireBug Net tab). Are there any such services and if so, which one is the best?

  Read the article

• Installing Sql Server 2005 SP2 - Getting error on analysis services component

  - by Greg_the_Ant

  At first many of the components didn't install and I followed this workaround (fixing user/SID mappings in registry.) After that everything installed successfully except for analysis services. I am getting the exact same error message as before on analysis services. (Are there other users installed by sql server I'm not aware of perhaps?) Do you guys have any ideas? All of my searches seem to just point to that workaround above that I already did. Error message from log: Product : Analysis Services (MSSQLSERVER) Product Version (Previous): 1399 Product Version (Final) : Status : Failure Log File : C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Setup Bootstrap\LOG\Hotfix\OLAP9_Hotfix_KB921896_sqlrun_as.msp.log Error Number : 29528 Error Description : MSP Error: 29528 The setup has encountered an unexpected error while Setting Internal Properties. The error is: Fatal error during installation.

  Read the article

• Putting our OLTP and OLAP services on the same cluster

  - by Dynamo

  We're currently in a bit of a debate about what to do with our scattered SQL environment. We are setting up a cluster for our data warehouses for sure and are now in the process of deciding if our OLTP databases should go on the same one. The cluster will be active/active with database services running on one node and reporting and analytical services on the other node. From a technical standpoint I don't see an issue here. With the services being run on different nodes they shouldn't compete too heavily for resources. The only physical resource that may be an issue would be the shared disk space. Our environment is also quite small. Our biggest OLAP database at the moment is only about 40GB and our OLTP are all under 10GB. I see a potential political issue here as different groups are involved but I'm just strictly wondering if there would be any major technical issues that could arise from this setup.

  Read the article

• Windows Azure: Major Updates for Mobile Backend Development

  - by ScottGu

  This week we released some great updates to Windows Azure that make it significantly easier to develop mobile applications that use the cloud. These new capabilities include: Mobile Services: Custom API support Mobile Services: Git Source Control support Mobile Services: Node.js NPM Module support Mobile Services: A .NET API via NuGet Mobile Services and Web Sites: Free 20MB SQL Database Option for Mobile Services and Web Sites Mobile Notification Hubs: Android Broadcast Push Notification Support All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note: some are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Mobile Services: Custom APIs, Git Source Control, and NuGet Windows Azure Mobile Services provides the ability to easily stand up a mobile backend that can be used to support your Windows 8, Windows Phone, iOS, Android and HTML5 client applications.  Starting with the first preview we supported the ability to easily extend your data backend logic with server side scripting that executes as part of client-side CRUD operations against your cloud back data tables. With today’s update we are extending this support even further and introducing the ability for you to also create and expose Custom APIs from your Mobile Service backend, and easily publish them to your Mobile clients without having to associate them with a data table. This capability enables a whole set of new scenarios – including the ability to work with data sources other than SQL Databases (for example: Table Services or MongoDB), broker calls to 3rd party APIs, integrate with Windows Azure Queues or Service Bus, work with custom non-JSON payloads (e.g. Windows Periodic Notifications), route client requests to services back on-premises (e.g. with the new Windows Azure BizTalk Services), or simply implement functionality that doesn’t correspond to a database operation.  The custom APIs can be written in server-side JavaScript (using Node.js) and can use Node’s NPM packages.  We will also be adding support for custom APIs written using .NET in the future as well. Creating a Custom API Adding a custom API to an existing Mobile Service is super easy.  Using the Windows Azure Management Portal you can now simply click the new “API” tab with your Mobile Service, and then click the “Create a Custom API” button to create a new Custom API within it: Give the API whatever name you want to expose, and then choose the security permissions you’d like to apply to the HTTP methods you expose within it.  You can easily lock down the HTTP verbs to your Custom API to be available to anyone, only those who have a valid application key, only authenticated users, or administrators.  Mobile Services will then enforce these permissions without you having to write any code: When you click the ok button you’ll see the new API show up in the API list.  Selecting it will enable you to edit the default script that contains some placeholder functionality: Today’s release enables Custom APIs to be written using Node.js (we will support writing Custom APIs in .NET as well in a future release), and the Custom API programming model follows the Node.js convention for modules, which is to export functions to handle HTTP requests. The default script above exposes functionality for an HTTP POST request. To support a GET, simply change the export statement accordingly.  Below is an example of some code for reading and returning data from Windows Azure Table Storage using the Azure Node API: After saving the changes, you can now call this API from any Mobile Service client application (including Windows 8, Windows Phone, iOS, Android or HTML5 with CORS). Below is the code for how you could invoke the API asynchronously from a Windows Store application using .NET and the new InvokeApiAsync method, and data-bind the results to control within your XAML:     private async void RefreshTodoItems() {         var results = await App.MobileService.InvokeApiAsync<List<TodoItem>>("todos", HttpMethod.Get, parameters: null);         ListItems.ItemsSource = new ObservableCollection<TodoItem>(results);     }    Integrating authentication and authorization with Custom APIs is really easy with Mobile Services. Just like with data requests, custom API requests enjoy the same built-in authentication and authorization support of Mobile Services (including integration with Microsoft ID, Google, Facebook and Twitter authentication providers), and it also enables you to easily integrate your Custom API code with other Mobile Service capabilities like push notifications, logging, SQL, etc. Check out our new tutorials to learn more about to use new Custom API support, and starting adding them to your app today. Mobile Services: Git Source Control Support Today’s Mobile Services update also enables source control integration with Git.  The new source control support provides a Git repository as part your Mobile Service, and it includes all of your existing Mobile Service scripts and permissions. You can clone that git repository on your local machine, make changes to any of your scripts, and then easily deploy the mobile service to production using Git. This enables a really great developer workflow that works on any developer machine (Windows, Mac and Linux). To use the new support, navigate to the dashboard for your mobile service and select the Set up source control link: If this is your first time enabling Git within Windows Azure, you will be prompted to enter the credentials you want to use to access the repository: Once you configure this, you can switch to the configure tab of your Mobile Service and you will see a Git URL you can use to use your repository: You can use this URL to clone the repository locally from your favorite command line: > git clone https://scottgutodo.scm.azure-mobile.net/ScottGuToDo.git Below is the directory structure of the repository: As you can see, the repository contains a service folder with several subfolders. Custom API scripts and associated permissions appear under the api folder as .js and .json files respectively (the .json files persist a JSON representation of the security settings for your endpoints). Similarly, table scripts and table permissions appear as .js and .json files, but since table scripts are separate per CRUD operation, they follow the naming convention of <tablename>.<operationname>.js. Finally, scheduled job scripts appear in the scheduler folder, and the shared folder is provided as a convenient location for you to store code shared by multiple scripts and a few miscellaneous things such as the APNS feedback script. Lets modify the table script todos.js file so that we have slightly better error handling when an exception occurs when we query our Table service: todos.js tableService.queryEntities(query, function(error, todoItems){     if (error) {         console.error("Error querying table: " + error);         response.send(500);     } else {         response.send(200, todoItems);     }        }); Save these changes, and now back in the command line prompt commit the changes and push them to the Mobile Services: > git add . > git commit –m "better error handling in todos.js" > git push Once deployment of the changes is complete, they will take effect immediately, and you will also see the changes be reflected in the portal: With the new Source Control feature, we’re making it really easy for you to edit your mobile service locally and push changes in an atomic fashion without sacrificing ease of use in the Windows Azure Portal. Mobile Services: NPM Module Support The new Mobile Services source control support also allows you to add any Node.js module you need in the scripts beyond the fixed set provided by Mobile Services. For example, you can easily switch to use Mongo instead of Windows Azure table in our example above. Set up Mongo DB by either purchasing a MongoLab subscription (which provides MongoDB as a Service) via the Windows Azure Store or set it up yourself on a Virtual Machine (either Windows or Linux). Then go the service folder of your local git repository and run the following command: > npm install mongoose This will add the Mongoose module to your Mobile Service scripts.  After that you can use and reference the Mongoose module in your custom API scripts to access your Mongo database: var mongoose = require('mongoose'); var schema = mongoose.Schema({ text: String, completed: Boolean });   exports.get = function (request, response) {     mongoose.connect('<your Mongo connection string> ');     TodoItemModel = mongoose.model('todoitem', schema);     TodoItemModel.find(function (err, items) {         if (err) {             console.log('error:' + err);             return response.send(500);         }         response.send(200, items);     }); }; Don’t forget to push your changes to your mobile service once you are done > git add . > git commit –m "Switched to use Mongo Labs" > git push Now our Mobile Service app is using Mongo DB! Note, with today’s update usage of custom Node.js modules is limited to Custom API scripts only. We will enable it in all scripts (including data and custom CRON tasks) shortly. New Mobile Services NuGet package, including .NET 4.5 support A few months ago we announced a new pre-release version of the Mobile Services client SDK based on portable class libraries (PCL). Today, we are excited to announce that this new library is now a stable .NET client SDK for mobile services and is no longer a pre-release package. Today’s update includes full support for Windows Store, Windows Phone 7.x, and .NET 4.5, which allows developers to use Mobile Services from ASP.NET or WPF applications. You can install and use this package today via NuGet. Mobile Services and Web Sites: Free 20MB Database for Mobile Services and Web Sites Starting today, every customer of Windows Azure gets one Free 20MB database to use for 12 months free (for both dev/test and production) with Web Sites and Mobile Services. When creating a Mobile Service or a Web Site, simply chose the new “Create a new Free 20MB database” option to take advantage of it: You can use this free SQL Database together with the 10 free Web Sites and 10 free Mobile Services you get with your Windows Azure subscription, or from any other Windows Azure VM or Cloud Service. Notification Hubs: Android Broadcast Push Notification Support Earlier this year, we introduced a new capability in Windows Azure for sending broadcast push notifications at high scale: Notification Hubs. In the initial preview of Notification Hubs you could use this support with both iOS and Windows devices.  Today we’re excited to announce new Notification Hubs support for sending push notifications to Android devices as well. Push notifications are a vital component of mobile applications.  They are critical not only in consumer apps, where they are used to increase app engagement and usage, but also in enterprise apps where up-to-date information increases employee responsiveness to business events.  You can use Notification Hubs to send push notifications to devices from any type of app (a Mobile Service, Web Site, Cloud Service or Virtual Machine). Notification Hubs provide you with the following capabilities: Cross-platform Push Notifications Support. Notification Hubs provide a common API to send push notifications to iOS, Android, or Windows Store at once.  Your app can send notifications in platform specific formats or in a platform-independent way.  Efficient Multicast. Notification Hubs are optimized to enable push notification broadcast to thousands or millions of devices with low latency.  Your server back-end can fire one message into a Notification Hub, and millions of push notifications can automatically be delivered to your users.  Devices and apps can specify a number of per-user tags when registering with a Notification Hub. These tags do not need to be pre-provisioned or disposed, and provide a very easy way to send filtered notifications to an infinite number of users/devices with a single API call.   Extreme Scale. Notification Hubs enable you to reach millions of devices without you having to re-architect or shard your application.  The pub/sub routing mechanism allows you to broadcast notifications in a super-efficient way.  This makes it incredibly easy to route and deliver notification messages to millions of users without having to build your own routing infrastructure. Usable from any Backend App. Notification Hubs can be easily integrated into any back-end server app, whether it is a Mobile Service, a Web Site, a Cloud Service or an IAAS VM. It is easy to configure Notification Hubs to send push notifications to Android. Create a new Notification Hub within the Windows Azure Management Portal (New->App Services->Service Bus->Notification Hub): Then register for Google Cloud Messaging using https://code.google.com/apis/console and obtain your API key, then simply paste that key on the Configure tab of your Notification Hub management page under the Google Cloud Messaging Settings: Then just add code to the OnCreate method of your Android app’s MainActivity class to register the device with Notification Hubs: gcm = GoogleCloudMessaging.getInstance(this); String connectionString = "<your listen access connection string>"; hub = new NotificationHub("<your notification hub name>", connectionString, this); String regid = gcm.register(SENDER_ID); hub.register(regid, "myTag"); Now you can broadcast notification from your .NET backend (or Node, Java, or PHP) to any Windows Store, Android, or iOS device registered for “myTag” tag via a single API call (you can literally broadcast messages to millions of clients you have registered with just one API call): var hubClient = NotificationHubClient.CreateClientFromConnectionString(                   “<your connection string with full access>”,                   "<your notification hub name>"); hubClient.SendGcmNativeNotification("{ 'data' : {'msg' : 'Hello from Windows Azure!' } }", "myTag”); Notification Hubs provide an extremely scalable, cross-platform, push notification infrastructure that enables you to efficiently route push notification messages to millions of mobile users and devices.  It will make enabling your push notification logic significantly simpler and more scalable, and allow you to build even better apps with it. Learn more about Notification Hubs here on MSDN . Summary The above features are now live and available to start using immediately (note: some of the services are still in preview).  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using them today.  Visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

  Read the article

• Git Workflow With Capistrano

  - by jerhinesmith

  I'm trying to get my head around a good git workflow using capistrano. I've found a few good articles, but I'm either not grasping completely what they're suggesting (likely) or they're somewhat lacking. Here's kind of what I had in mind so far, but I get caught up when to merge back into the master branch (i.e. before moving to stage? after?) and trying to hook it into capistrano for deployments: Make sure you’re up to date with all the changes made on the remote master branch by other developers git checkout master git pull Create a new branch that pertains to the particular bug you're trying to fix git checkout -b bug-fix-branch Make your changes git status git add . git commit -m "Friendly message about the commit" So, this is usually where I get stuck. At this point, I have a master branch that is healthy and a new bug-fix-branch that contains my (untested -- other than unit tests) changes. If I want to push my changes to stage (through cap staging deploy), do I have to merge my changes back into the master branch (I'd prefer not to since it seems like master should be kept free of untested code)? Do I even deploy from master (or should I be tagging a release first and then modifying my production.rb file to deploy from that tag)? git-deployment seems to address some of these workflow issues, but I can't seem to find out how on earth it actually hooks into cap staging deploy and cap production deploy. Thoughts? I assume there's a likely canonical way to do this, but I either can't find it or I'm too new to git to recognize that I have found it. Help!

  Read the article

• Calling services from the Orchestrating layer in SOA?

  - by Martin Lee

  The Service Oriented Architecture Principles site says that Service Composition is an important thing in SOA. But Service Loose Coupling is important as well. Does that mean that the "Orchestrating layer" should be the only one that is allowed to make calls to services in the system? As I understand SOA, the "Orchestrating layer" 'glues' all the services together into one software application. I tried to depict that on Fig.A and Fig.B. The difference between the two is that on Fig.A the application is composed of services and all the logic is done in the "Orchestrating layer" (all calls to services are done from the "Orchestrating layer" only). On Fig.B the application is composed from services, but one service calls another service. Does the architecture on Fig.B violate the "Service Loose Coupling" principle of SOA? Can a service call another service in SOA? And more generally, can the architecture on Fig.A be considered superior to the one on Fig.B in terms of service loose coupling, abstraction, reusability, autonomy, etc.? My guess is that the A architecture is much more universal, but it can add some unnecessary data transfers between the "Orchestrating layer" and all the called services.

  Read the article

• Understanding the workflow of the messages in a generic server implementation in Erlang

  - by Chiron

  The following code is from "Programming Erlang, 2nd Edition". It is an example of how to implement a generic server in Erlang. -module(server1). -export([start/2, rpc/2]). start(Name, Mod) -> register(Name, spawn(fun() -> loop(Name, Mod, Mod:init()) end)). rpc(Name, Request) -> Name ! {self(), Request}, receive {Name, Response} -> Response end. loop(Name, Mod, State) -> receive {From, Request} -> {Response, State1} = Mod:handle(Request, State), From ! {Name, Response}, loop(Name, Mod, State1) end. -module(name_server). -export([init/0, add/2, find/1, handle/2]). -import(server1, [rpc/2]). %% client routines add(Name, Place) -> rpc(name_server, {add, Name, Place}). find(Name) -> rpc(name_server, {find, Name}). %% callback routines init() -> dict:new(). handle({add, Name, Place}, Dict) -> {ok, dict:store(Name, Place, Dict)}; handle({find, Name}, Dict) -> {dict:find(Name, Dict), Dict}. server1:start(name_server, name_server). name_server:add(joe, "at home"). name_server:find(joe). I tried so hard to understand the workflow of the messages. Would you please help me to understand the workflow of this server implementation during the executing of the functions: server1:start, name_server:add and name_server:find?

  Read the article

• Managed Service Architectures Part I

  - by barryoreilly

  Instead of thinking about service oriented architecture, a concept that is continually defined, redefined, abused and mistreated, perhaps it is time to drop the acronym and consider what we actually need to get the job done.   ‘Pure’ SOA involves the modeling of an organisation’s processes, the so called ‘Top Down’ approach, followed by the implementation of these processes as services.     Another approach, more commonly seen in the wild, is the bottom up approach. This usually involves services that simply start popping up in the organization, and SOA in this case is often just an attempt to rein in these services. Such projects, although described as SOA projects for a variety of reasons, have clearly little relation to process driven architecture. Much has been written about these two approaches, with many deciding that a hybrid of both methods is needed to succeed with SOA.   These hybrid methods are a sensible compromise, but one gets the feeling that there is too much focus on ‘Succeeding with SOA’. Organisations who focus too much on bottom up development, or who waste too much time and money on top down approaches that don’t produce results, are often recommended to attempt an ‘agile’(Erl) or ‘middle-out’ (Microsoft) approach in order to succeed with SOA.  The problem with recommending this approach is that, in most cases, succeeding with SOA isn’t the aim of the project. If a project is started with the simple aim of ‘Succeeding with SOA’ then the reasons for the projects existence probably need to be questioned.   There are a number of things we can be sure of: ·         An organisation will have a number of disparate IT systems ·         Some of these systems will have redundant data and functionality ·         Integration will give considerable ROI ·         Integration will already be under way. ·         Services will already exist in the organisation ·         These services will be inconsistent in their implementation and in their governance   So there are three goals here: 1.       Alignment between the business and IT 2.     Integration of disparate systems 3.     Management of services.   2 and 3 are going to happen,  in fact they must happen if any degree of return is expected from the IT department. Ignoring 1 is considered a typical mistake in SOA implementations, as it ignores the business implications. However, the business implication of this approach is the money saved in more efficient IT processes. 2 and 3 are ongoing, and they will continue happening, even if a large project to produce a SOA metamodel is started. The result will then be an unstructured cackle of services, and a metamodel that is already going out of date. So we get stuck in and rebuild our services so that they match the metamodel, with the far reaching consequences that this will have on all our LOB systems are current. Lets imagine that this actually works ( how often do we rip and replace working software because it doesn't fit a certain pattern? Never -that's the point of integration), we will now be working with a metamodel that is out of date, and most likely incomplete if the organisation is large.      Accepting that an object can have more than one model over time, with perhaps more than one model being  at any given time will help us realise the limitations of the top down model. It is entirely normal , and perhaps necessary, for an organisation to be able to view an entity from different perspectives.   So, instead of trying to constantly force these goals in a straight line, why not let them happen in parallel, and manage the changes in each layer.     If  company A has chosen to model their business processes and create a business architecture, there will be a reason behind this. Often the aim is to make the business more flexible and able to cope with change, through alignment between the business and the IT department.   If company B’s IT department recognizes the problem of wild services springing up everywhere, and decides to do something about it, by designing a platform and processes for the introduction of services, is this not a valid approach?   With the hybrid approach, it is recommended that company A begin deploying services as quickly as possible. Based on models that are clearly incomplete, and which will therefore change rapidly and often in the near future. Natural business evolution will also mean that the models can be guaranteed to change in the not so near future. To ‘Succeed with SOA’ Company B needs to go back to the drawing board and start modeling processes and objects. So, in effect, we are telling business analysts to start developing code based on a model they are unsure of, and telling programmers to ignore the obvious and growing problems in their IT department and start drawing lines and boxes.     Could the problem be that there are two different problem domains? And the whole concept of SOA as it being described by clever salespeople today creates an example of oft dreaded ‘tight coupling’ between these two domains?   Could it be that we have taken two large problem areas, and bundled the solution together in order to create a magic bullet? And then convinced ourselves that the bullet actually exists?   Company A wants to have a closer relationship between the business and its IT department, in order to become a more flexible organization. Company B wants to decrease the maintenance costs of its IT infrastructure. If both companies focus on succeeding with SOA, then they aren’t focusing on their actual goals.   If Company A starts building services from incomplete models, without a gameplan, they will end up in the same situation as company B, with wild services. If company B focuses on modeling, they could easily end up with the same problems as company A.   Now we have two companies, who a short while ago had one problem each, that now have two problems each. This has happened because of a focus on ‘Succeeding with SOA’, rather than solving the problem at hand.   This is not to suggest that the two problem domains are unrelated, a strategy that encompasses both will obviously be good for the organization. But only if the organization realizes this and can develop such a strategy. This strategy cannot be bought in a box.       Anyone who has worked with SOA for a while will be used to analyzing the solutions to a problem and judging the solution’s level of coupling. If we have two applications that each perform separate functions, but need to communicate with each other, we create a integration layer between them, perhaps with a service, but we do all we can to reduce the dependency between the two systems. Using the same approach, we can separate the modeling (business architecture) and the service hosting (technical architecture).     The business architecture describes the processes and business objects in the business domain.   The technical architecture describes the hosting and management and implementation of services.   The glue that binds these together, the integration layer in our analogy, is the service contract, where the operations map the processes to their technical implementation, and the messages map business concepts to software objects in the implementation.   If we reduce the coupling between these layers, we should be able to allow developers to develop services, and business analysts to develop models, without the changes rippling through from one side to the other.   This would allow company A to carry on modeling, and company B to develop a service platform, each achieving their intended goal, without necessarily creating the problems seen in pure top down or bottom up approaches. Company B could then at a later date map their service infrastructure to a unified model, and company A could carry on modeling, insulating deployed services from changes in the ongoing modeling.   How do we do this?  The concept of service virtualization has been around for a while, and is instantly realizable in Microsoft’s Managed Services Engine. Here we can create a layer of virtual services, which represent the business analyst’s view, presenting uniform contracts to the outside world. These services can then transform and route messages to the actual service implementations. I like to think of the virtual services with their beautifully modeled interfaces as ‘SOA services’, and the implementations as simple integration ‘adapter’ services providing an interface to a technical implementation. The Managed Services Engine also provides policy based control over services, regardless of where they are deployed, simplifying handling of security, logging, exception handling etc.   This solves a big problem. The pressure to deliver services quickly is always there in projects. It is very important to quickly show value when implementing service architectures. There is also pressure to deliver quality, and you can’t easily do both at the same time. This approach allows quick delivery with quality increasing over time, allowing modeling and service development to occur in parallel and independent of each other. The link between business modeling and service implementation is not one that is obvious to many organizations, and requires a certain maturity to realize and drive forward. It is also completely possible that a company can benefit from one without the other, even if this approach is frowned upon today, there are many companies doing so and seeing ROI.   Of course there are disadvantages to this. The biggest one being the transformations necessary between the virtual interfaces and the service implementations. Bad choices in developing the services in the service implementation could mean that it is impossible to map the modeled processes to the implementation with redevelopment of the service. In many cases the architect will not have a choice here anyway, as proprietary systems are often delivered with predeveloped services. The alternative is to wait until the model is finished and then build the service according the model. However, if that approach worked we wouldn’t be having this discussion! And even when it does work, natural business evolution will mean that the two concepts (model and implementation) will immediately start to drift away from each other, so coupling them tightly together so that they are forever bound to the model that only applies at the time of the modeling work will not really achieve a great deal. Architecture is all about trade offs, and here a choice has to be made. The choice is between something will initially be of low quality but will work, or something that may well be impossible to achieve in most situations.         In conclusion, top-down is a natural approach for business analysts, and bottom-up  is a natural approach for developers. Instead of trying to force something on both that neither want, and which has not shown itself to be successful,  why not let them get on with their jobs, and let an enterprise architect coordinate the processes?

  Read the article

• Dynamic swappable Data Access Layer

  - by Andy

  I'm writing a data driven WPF client. The client will typically pull data from a WCF service, which queries a SQL db, but I'd like the option to pull the data directly from SQL or other arbitrary data sources. I've come up with this design and would like to hear your opinion on whether it is the best design. First, we have some data object we'd like to extract from SQL. // The Data Object with a single property public class Customer { private string m_Name = string.Empty; public string Name { get { return m_Name; } set { m_Name = value;} } } Then I plan on using an interface which all data access layers should implement. Suppose one could also use an abstract class. Thoughts? // The interface with a single method interface ICustomerFacade { List<Customer> GetAll(); } One can create a SQL implementation. // Sql Implementation public class SqlCustomrFacade : ICustomerFacade { public List<Customer> GetAll() { // Query SQL db and return something useful // ... return new List<Customer>(); } } We can also create a WCF implementation. The problem with WCF is is that it doesn't use the same data object. It creates its own local version, so we would have to copy the details over somehow. I suppose one could use reflection to copy the values of similar fields across. Thoughts? // Wcf Implementation public class WcfCustomrFacade : ICustomerFacade { public List<Customer> GetAll() { // Get date from the Wcf Service (not defined here) List<WcfService.Customer> wcfCustomers = wcfService.GetAllCustomers(); // The list we're going to return List<Customer> customers = new List<Customer>(); // This is horrible foreach(WcfService.Customer wcfCustomer in wcfCustomers) { Customer customer = new Customer(); customer.Name = wcfCustomer.Name; customers.Add(customer); } return customers; } } I also plan on using a factory to decide which facade to use. // Factory pattern public class FacadeFactory() { public static ICustomerFacade CreateCustomerFacade() { // Determine the facade to use if (ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["DAL"] == "Sql") return new SqlCustomrFacade(); else return new WcfCustomrFacade(); } } This is how the DAL would typically be used. // Test application public class MyApp { public static void Main() { ICustomerFacade cf = FacadeFactory.CreateCustomerFacade(); cf.GetAll(); } } I appreciate your thoughts and time.

  Read the article

• Choosing the right .NET architecture. WCF? WPF/Forms, ASP.NET (MVC)?

  - by Tommy Jakobsen

  I’m in the situation that I have to design and implement a rather big system from the bottom. I’m having some (a lot actually) questions about the architecture that I would like your comments and thoughts on. I don’t hope that I’ve written too much here, but I wanted to give you all an idea of what the system is. Quick info about the applications, read if you want: I can’t share much detail about the project, but basically it’s a system where we offer our customer a service to manage their users. We have a hotline where the users call and our hotline uses an (windows) application (intranet) to manage the user’s data, etc. The customer also has a web application where they can see reports, information about their business and users, and the ability to modify their data. Modifying data is not just user data like address and so, but also information about the products/services the user has, which can be complicated. The applications will be built on Microsoft .NET Framework 4, with a MS SQL Server 2008 database. There will be a few applications that have to access this database, such as: Intranet application (used by us and our hotline) Customer web application type 1 Customer web application type 2 Customer web application type n different applications) … Now my big problem is what .NET parts I should use for such a system. For the “backend” I’ve considered using Windows Communication Foundation: Would WCF be a good choice? The intranet application will be an application that has to edit lots of records in the database. It has to be easy to navigate using the keyboard (fast to work with). Has a feature such as “find customer, find that, lookup this, choose this and update that”. What would be the best choice to develop this application in? Would it be WPF or good old Windows Forms? I don’t need all of the fancy graphics features in WPF, like 3D, but the application has to look nice (maybe something like the new Visual Studio/Office tools). And the same question goes for the web pages. They have much the same work to do, but not as many features as the intranet application, and not the same amount of data (much less). That is my questions for now. I’m hoping to get a discussion going that will open my eyes to some of these technologies, helping me decide architecture to go with. I would like to say thanks in advance, and let you all know that any thoughts will be much appreciated.

  Read the article

• What to keep in mind when creating your own custom web services API?

  - by John Conde

  I have created a website which allows users to sign up for, and use, an online service. To help promote the website we will be have resellers who will be offering their own branded services through us. The initial plan is to allow resellers to place registration, login, and lost password forms on their own website and use an API created by us to handle these requests. I have begun outlining how I expect the API to work (and starting documenting it as well) and I want to make sure I get it right, or as close to right, as I can from the beginning as I know once you have declared a public API you want to avoid changing that API at all costs. So far I have decided: To have the user pass their account credentials with each request To require SSL for all requests What else should I be keeping in mind?

  Read the article

• Best practice when working with web services that return objects?

  - by Raj

  Hello, I'm currently working with web services that return objects such as a list of files e.g. File array. I wanted to know whether its best practice to bind this type of object directly to my front end code for example a repeater/listview or whether to first parse it into my own list of "file class" e.g. customFiles[] If the web service changes then it will break my front end code, however if I create my own CustomFile class, then i would only need to change my code in one place to fix the issue, but it just seems like a lot of extra work to create the same classes from a web service, i wanted to know what is the best practice for this type of work. thanks Raj.

  Read the article

• Security for web services only used from a Silverlight application?

  - by Lasse V. Karlsen

  I have googled a bit for how I should handle security in a web service application when the application is basically the data repository for a Silverlight application, but have gotten inconclusive results. The Silverlight application is not supposed to have its own user authentication, since it will be reachable only through a web application that the user have already authenticated to get into. As such, I was thinking I could simply add a parameter to the SL application that is a cookie-type value, with a certain lifetime, linked to the user in the database. The SL application would then have to pass this value alongside other parameters to the web services. Since the web service is hopefully going to be a generic web service endpoint, few methods, adding an extra parameter at this level will not be a problem. But, am I supposed to roll this system on my own? It sounds to me as this isn't exactly new features that nobody has considered before, so what are my options?

  Read the article

• Are self-described / auto-descriptive services loosely or tightly coupled in a SOA architecture ?

  - by snowflake

  I consider a self-described / auto-descriptive service as a good thing in a SOA architecture, since (almost) everything you know to call the service is present in the service contract (such a WSDL). Sample of a non self-described service for me is Facebook Query Language (FQL http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/FQL), or any web service exchanging XML flow in a one String parameter for then parsing XML and performing treatments. Last ones seem further more technically decoupled, since technically you can switch implementations without technical impact on the caller, handling compatibility between implementations/versions at a business level. On the other side, having no strong interface (diluted into the service and its version), make the service tightly coupled to the existing implementation (more difficulty to interchange the service and to ensure perfect compatibility). This question is related to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2503071/how-to-implement-loose-coupling-with-a-soa-architecture So, are self-described / auto-descriptive services loosely or tightly coupled in a SOA architecture ? What are the impacts regarding ESBs ? Any pointer will be appreciated.

  Read the article

• Can a SQL Server 2008 database support both a REST and SOAP web services within two different endpoints?

  - by PaulDecember

  Say you have a SQL Server 2008 database. You build a SOAP web service. You then deploy or publish this using Visual Studio 2010 in one website. Now, using the same database, you build a REST web service, in a different solution. You deploy this on another website. Can you consume the endpoints and/or .svc file of both the SOAP and REST web services, though they reference the same SQL Server 2008 database? I don't see why not, but before I go down this path and spend days I'd like to make sure. Also if there's a performance hit to the database if it is running both SOAP and REST at the same time--again, I don't see why it would matter, but I must make sure. Thanks.

  Read the article

• I spy a Live Framework portal

  - by jamiet

  Those that have followed my blogs for a while may know that I have a slightly banal interest in Windows Live and, more specifically, the Live Services developer platform'; if that doesn’t sound interesting to you then stop reading now. My interest mainly stems from the Live Mesh technology that was announced a couple of years ago and the data synchronisation platform API that underpins it; that platform is called the Live Framework or LiveFX for short. At the Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC) 2008 Microsoft made LiveFX available to the public as a Tech Preview and I spent some time learning to use it and also built a few test apps on it too. In August 2009 an announcement came that that tech preview was getting shut down: "At the Professional Developer Conference 2008, we gave the developer community access to the technical preview of the Live Framework. The Live Framework is core to our vision of providing you with a consistent programming interface. Now we are working to integrate existing services, controls and the Live Framework into the next release of Windows Live. Your feedback continues to help us build the best possible offerings for Windows Live users, for you and for your customers. " Since then news on LiveFX has disappeared save for a throwaway session at PDC09 and I was hoping that news was going to appear at this week’s MIX conference but nothing was forthcoming. Instead though today I stumbled upon an unannounced portal for future LiveFX applications on Microsoft’s Azure portal at http://live.azure.com. Check it out: I consider this to be very good news. This Azure portal was built after the LiveFX tech preview was decommissioned so seeing Live Services existing so prominently alongside Microsoft’s other cloud efforts like Windows Azure and SQL Azure vindicates my early investment in the platform and gives me hope that we’re going to see something get released very very soon. I believe that the potential uses for this platform are extremely compelling and I’m looking forward to trying some out in the near future. I am also expecting LiveFX to have a heavy dependency on the OData protocol that I talked about yesterday in my post OData.org updated - gives clues about future sql azure enhancements so you can tell where my interest in that stems from. In case you’re wondering the projects that you see listed above (Basic List Sample, JT-proj etc…) are projects that I built on the old Tech Preview platform so clearly that stuff has not gone for good which is also good news; not just because it means I’ll have access to the code I wrote before but I also assume it means that LiveFX won’t have changed much since its tech preview incarnation. I know there are other LiveFX buffs out there and hopefully this news reaches some of them. If you are one of them the please put a comment below and let me know your thoughts! @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

  Read the article

• PASS Summit 2012: keynote and Mobile BI announcements #sqlpass

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  Today at PASS Summit 2012 there have been several announcements during the keynote. Moreover, other news have not been highlighted in the keynote but are equally if not more important for the BI community. Let’s start from the big news in the keynote (other details on SQL Server Blog): Hekaton: this is the codename for in-memory OLTP technology that will appear (I suppose) in the next release of the SQL Server relational engine. The improvement in performance and scalability is impressive and it enables new scenarios. I’m curious to see whether it can be used also to improve ETL performance and how it differs from using SSD technology. Updates on Columnstore: In the next major release of SQL Server the columnstore indexes will be updatable and it will be possible to create a clustered index with Columnstore index. This is really a great news for near real-time reporting needs! Polybase: in 2013 it will debut SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW), which will include the Polybase technology. By using Polybase a single T-SQL query will run queries across relational data and Hadoop data. A single query language for both. Sounds really interesting for using BigData in a more integrated way with existing relational databases. And, of course, to load a data warehouse using BigData, which is the ultimate goal that we all BI Pro have, right? SQL Server 2012 SP1: the Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2012 is available now and it enable the use of PowerPivot for SharePoint and Power View on a SharePoint 2013 installation with Excel 2013. Power View works with Multidimensional cube: the long-awaited feature of being able to use PowerPivot with Multidimensional cubes has been shown by Amir Netz in an amazing demonstration during the keynote. The interesting thing is that the data model behind was based on a many-to-many relationship (something that is not fully supported by Power View with Tabular models). Another interesting aspect is that it is Analysis Services 2012 that supports DAX queries run on a Multidimensional model, enabling the use of any future tool generating DAX queries on top of a Multidimensional model. There are still no info about availability by now, but this is *not* included in SQL Server 2012 SP1. So what about Mobile BI? Well, even if not announced during the keynote, there is a dedicated session on this topic and there are very important news in this area: iOS, Android and Microsoft mobile platforms: the commitment is to get data exploration and visualization capabilities working within June 2013. This should impact at least Power View and SharePoint/Excel Services. This is the type of UI experience we are all waiting for, in order to satisfy the requests coming from users and customers. The important news here is that native applications will be available for both iOS and Windows 8 so it seems that Android will be supported initially only through the web. Unfortunately we haven’t seen any demo, so it’s not clear what will be the offline navigation experience (and whether there will be one). But at least we know that Microsoft is working on native applications in this area. I’m not too surprised that HTML5 is not the magic bullet for all the platforms. The next PASS Business Analytics conference in 2013 seems a good place to see this in action, even if I hope we don’t have to wait other six months before seeing some demo of native BI applications on mobile platforms! Viewing Reporting Services reports on iPad is supported starting with SQL Server 2012 SP1, which has been released today. This is another good reason to install SP1 on SQL Server 2012. If you are at PASS Summit 2012, come and join me, Alberto Ferrari and Chris Webb at our book signing event tomorrow, Thursday 8 2012, at the bookstore between 12:00pm and 12:30pm, or follow one of our sessions!

  Read the article

• .NET WF4: Should it be in the middle of everything?

  - by stimpy77

  I am aware that WF4 (Windows Workflow 4.0, part of .NET 4.0) is a significant rework and redesign of WF3, where much of what made WF3 a poor technology choice has been cleaned up in WF4. For example, as far as I can tell, WF4 (Windows Workflow 4.0) activities are more or less testable with [TestMethod] and mocking. This among other things, like improved performance, has grabbed my attention about the technology again, whereas I had previously pooh-poohed WF3. I'm working on a new architecture for essentially an n-tier collaborative application (not enterprise-class, just a smallish project with potential to grow significantly) where I'm already trying to discipline myself to use IoC and, to some extent, TDD, and I'm wondering, in general terms, whether it is wiser to just hand-code workflow logic or if I should delve into learning and integrating WF4 so that WF becomes literally the controller of the entire application, i.e. the practical C in "MVC" (not ASP.NET MVC but rather the pattern). So should workflow activities in WF4 be the primary controller for a highly expandable/growable web-based collaborative application? Or am I asking entirely the wrong question? This is a vague question, I'm sure, so abstract answers are as welcome as specific ones.

  Read the article

• Unity to dispose of object

  - by Johan Levin

  Is there a way to make Unit dispose property-injected objects as part of the Teardown? The background is that I am working on an application that uses ASP.NET MVC 2, Unity and WCF. We have written our own MVC controller factory that uses unity to instantiate the controller and WCF proxies are injected using the [Dependency] attribute on public properties of the controller. At the end of the page life cycle the ReleaseController method of the controller factory is called and we call IUnityContainer.Teardown(theMvcController). At that point the controller is disposed as expected but I also need to dispose the injected wcf-proxies. (Actually I need to call Close and/or Abort on them and not Dispose but that is a later problem.) I could of course override the controllers' Dispose methods and clean up the proxies there, but I don't want the controllers to have to know about the lifecycles of the injected interfaces or even that they refer to WCF proxies. If I need to write code myself for this - what would be the best extension point? I'd appreciate any pointer.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134  | Next Page >