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• SQL Azure: Notes on Building a Shard Technology

  - by Herve Roggero

  In Chapter 10 of the book on SQL Azure (http://www.apress.com/book/view/9781430229612) I am co-authoring, I am digging deeper in what it takes to write a Shard. It's actually a pretty cool exercise, and I wanted to share some thoughts on how I am designing the technology. A Shard is a technology that spreads the load of database requests over multiple databases, as transparently as possible. The type of shard I am building is called a Vertical Partition Shard  (VPS). A VPS is a mechanism by which the data is stored in one or more databases behind the scenes, but your code has no idea at design time which data is in which database. It's like having a mini cloud for records instead of services. Imagine you have three SQL Azure databases that have the same schema (DB1, DB2 and DB3), you would like to issue a SELECT * FROM Users on all three databases, concatenate the results into a single resultset, and order by last name. Imagine you want to ensure your code doesn't need to change if you add a new database to the shard (DB4). Now imagine that you want to make sure all three databases are queried at the same time, in a multi-threaded manner so your code doesn't have to wait for three database calls sequentially. Then, imagine you would like to obtain a breadcrumb (in the form of a new, virtual column) that gives you a hint as to which database a record came from, so that you could update it if needed. Now imagine all that is done through the standard SqlClient library... and you have the Shard I am currently building. Here are some lessons learned and techniques I am using with this shard: Parellel Processing: Querying databases in parallel is not too hard using the Task Parallel Library; all you need is to lock your resources when needed Deleting/Updating Data: That's not too bad either as long as you have a breadcrumb. However it becomes more difficult if you need to update a single record and you don't know in which database it is. Inserting Data: I am using a round-robin approach in which each new insert request is directed to the next database in the shard. Not sure how to deal with Bulk Loads just yet... Shard Databases:  I use a static collection of SqlConnection objects which needs to be loaded once; from there on all the Shard commands use this collection Extension Methods: In order to make it look like the Shard commands are part of the SqlClient class I use extension methods. For example I added ExecuteShardQuery and ExecuteShardNonQuery methods to SqlClient. Exceptions: Capturing exceptions in a multi-threaded code is interesting... but I kept it simple for now. I am using the ConcurrentQueue to store my exceptions. Database GUID: Every database in the shard is given a GUID, which is calculated based on the connection string's values. DataTable. The Shard methods return a DataTable object which can be bound to objects.  I will be sharing the code soon as an open-source project in CodePlex. Please stay tuned on twitter to know when it will be available (@hroggero). Or check www.bluesyntax.net for updates on the shard. Thanks!

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• Windows Azure Service Bus Scatter-Gather Implementation

  - by Alan Smith

  One of the more challenging enterprise integration patterns that developers may wish to implement is the Scatter-Gather pattern. In this article I will show the basic implementation of a scatter-gather pattern using the topic-subscription model of the windows azure service bus. I’ll be using the implementation in demos, and also as a lab in my training courses, and the pattern will also be included in the next release of my free e-book the “Windows Azure Service Bus Developer Guide”. The Scatter-Gather pattern answers the following scenario. How do you maintain the overall message flow when a message needs to be sent to multiple recipients, each of which may send a reply? Use a Scatter-Gather that broadcasts a message to multiple recipients and re-aggregates the responses back into a single message. The Enterprise Integration Patterns website provides a description of the Scatter-Gather pattern here.   The scatter-gather pattern uses a composite of the publish-subscribe channel pattern and the aggregator pattern. The publish-subscribe channel is used to broadcast messages to a number of receivers, and the aggregator is used to gather the response messages and aggregate them together to form a single message. Scatter-Gather Scenario The scenario for this scatter-gather implementation is an application that allows users to answer questions in a poll based voting scenario. A poll manager application will be used to broadcast questions to users, the users will use a voting application that will receive and display the questions and send the votes back to the poll manager. The poll manager application will receive the users’ votes and aggregate them together to display the results. The scenario should be able to scale to support a large number of users.   Scatter-Gather Implementation The diagram below shows the overall architecture for the scatter-gather implementation.       Messaging Entities Looking at the scatter-gather pattern diagram it can be seen that the topic-subscription architecture is well suited for broadcasting a message to a number of subscribers. The poll manager application can send the question messages to a topic, and each voting application can receive the question message on its own subscription. The static limit of 2,000 subscriptions per topic in the current release means that 2,000 voting applications can receive question messages and take part in voting. The vote messages can then be sent to the poll manager application using a queue. The voting applications will send their vote messages to the queue, and the poll manager will receive and process the vote messages. The questions topic and answer queue are created using the Windows Azure Developer Portal. Each instance of the voting application will create its own subscription in the questions topic when it starts, allowing the question messages to be broadcast to all subscribing voting applications. Data Contracts Two simple data contracts will be used to serialize the questions and votes as brokered messages. The code for these is shown below.   [DataContract] public class Question {     [DataMember]     public string QuestionText { get; set; } }     To keep the implementation of the voting functionality simple and focus on the pattern implementation, the users can only vote yes or no to the questions.   [DataContract] public class Vote {     [DataMember]     public string QuestionText { get; set; }       [DataMember]     public bool IsYes { get; set; } }     Poll Manager Application The poll manager application has been implemented as a simple WPF application; the user interface is shown below. A question can be entered in the text box, and sent to the topic by clicking the Add button. The topic and subscriptions used for broadcasting the messages are shown in a TreeView control. The questions that have been broadcast and the resulting votes are shown in a ListView control. When the application is started any existing subscriptions are cleared form the topic, clients are then created for the questions topic and votes queue, along with background workers for receiving and processing the vote messages, and updating the display of subscriptions.   public MainWindow() {     InitializeComponent();       // Create a new results list and data bind it.     Results = new ObservableCollection<Result>();     lsvResults.ItemsSource = Results;       // Create a token provider with the relevant credentials.     TokenProvider credentials =         TokenProvider.CreateSharedSecretTokenProvider         (AccountDetails.Name, AccountDetails.Key);       // Create a URI for the serivce bus.     Uri serviceBusUri = ServiceBusEnvironment.CreateServiceUri         ("sb", AccountDetails.Namespace, string.Empty);       // Clear out any old subscriptions.     NamespaceManager = new NamespaceManager(serviceBusUri, credentials);     IEnumerable<SubscriptionDescription> subs =         NamespaceManager.GetSubscriptions(AccountDetails.ScatterGatherTopic);     foreach (SubscriptionDescription sub in subs)     {         NamespaceManager.DeleteSubscription(sub.TopicPath, sub.Name);     }       // Create the MessagingFactory     MessagingFactory factory = MessagingFactory.Create(serviceBusUri, credentials);       // Create the topic and queue clients.     ScatterGatherTopicClient =         factory.CreateTopicClient(AccountDetails.ScatterGatherTopic);     ScatterGatherQueueClient =         factory.CreateQueueClient(AccountDetails.ScatterGatherQueue);       // Start the background worker threads.     VotesBackgroundWorker = new BackgroundWorker();     VotesBackgroundWorker.DoWork += new DoWorkEventHandler(ReceiveMessages);     VotesBackgroundWorker.RunWorkerAsync();       SubscriptionsBackgroundWorker = new BackgroundWorker();     SubscriptionsBackgroundWorker.DoWork += new DoWorkEventHandler(UpdateSubscriptions);     SubscriptionsBackgroundWorker.RunWorkerAsync(); }     When the poll manager user nters a question in the text box and clicks the Add button a question message is created and sent to the topic. This message will be broadcast to all the subscribing voting applications. An instance of the Result class is also created to keep track of the votes cast, this is then added to an observable collection named Results, which is data-bound to the ListView control.   private void btnAddQuestion_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) {     // Create a new result for recording votes.     Result result = new Result()     {         Question = txtQuestion.Text     };     Results.Add(result);       // Send the question to the topic     Question question = new Question()     {         QuestionText = result.Question     };     BrokeredMessage msg = new BrokeredMessage(question);     ScatterGatherTopicClient.Send(msg);       txtQuestion.Text = ""; }     The Results class is implemented as follows.   public class Result : INotifyPropertyChanged {     public string Question { get; set; }       private int m_YesVotes;     private int m_NoVotes;       public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged;       public int YesVotes     {         get { return m_YesVotes; }         set         {             m_YesVotes = value;             NotifyPropertyChanged("YesVotes");         }     }       public int NoVotes     {         get { return m_NoVotes; }         set         {             m_NoVotes = value;             NotifyPropertyChanged("NoVotes");         }     }       private void NotifyPropertyChanged(string prop)     {         if(PropertyChanged != null)         {             PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(prop));         }     } }     The INotifyPropertyChanged interface is implemented so that changes to the number of yes and no votes will be updated in the ListView control. Receiving the vote messages from the voting applications is done asynchronously, using a background worker thread.   // This runs on a background worker. private void ReceiveMessages(object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e) {     while (true)     {         // Receive a vote message from the queue         BrokeredMessage msg = ScatterGatherQueueClient.Receive();         if (msg != null)         {             // Deserialize the message.             Vote vote = msg.GetBody<Vote>();               // Update the results.             foreach (Result result in Results)             {                 if (result.Question.Equals(vote.QuestionText))                 {                     if (vote.IsYes)                     {                         result.YesVotes++;                     }                     else                     {                         result.NoVotes++;                     }                     break;                 }             }               // Mark the message as complete.             msg.Complete();         }       } }     When a vote message is received, the result that matches the vote question is updated with the vote from the user. The message is then marked as complete. A second background thread is used to update the display of subscriptions in the TreeView, with a dispatcher used to update the user interface. // This runs on a background worker. private void UpdateSubscriptions(object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e) {     while (true)     {         // Get a list of subscriptions.         IEnumerable<SubscriptionDescription> subscriptions =             NamespaceManager.GetSubscriptions(AccountDetails.ScatterGatherTopic);           // Update the user interface.         SimpleDelegate setQuestion = delegate()         {             trvSubscriptions.Items.Clear();             TreeViewItem topicItem = new TreeViewItem()             {                 Header = AccountDetails.ScatterGatherTopic             };               foreach (SubscriptionDescription subscription in subscriptions)             {                 TreeViewItem subscriptionItem = new TreeViewItem()                 {                     Header = subscription.Name                 };                 topicItem.Items.Add(subscriptionItem);             }             trvSubscriptions.Items.Add(topicItem);               topicItem.ExpandSubtree();         };         this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(DispatcherPriority.Send, setQuestion);           Thread.Sleep(3000);     } }       Voting Application The voting application is implemented as another WPF application. This one is more basic, and allows the user to vote “Yes” or “No” for the questions sent by the poll manager application. The user interface for that application is shown below. When an instance of the voting application is created it will create a subscription in the questions topic using a GUID as the subscription name. The application can then receive copies of every question message that is sent to the topic. Clients for the new subscription and the votes queue are created, along with a background worker to receive the question messages. The voting application is set to receiving mode, meaning it is ready to receive a question message from the subscription.   public MainWindow() {     InitializeComponent();       // Set the mode to receiving.     IsReceiving = true;       // Create a token provider with the relevant credentials.     TokenProvider credentials =         TokenProvider.CreateSharedSecretTokenProvider         (AccountDetails.Name, AccountDetails.Key);       // Create a URI for the serivce bus.     Uri serviceBusUri = ServiceBusEnvironment.CreateServiceUri         ("sb", AccountDetails.Namespace, string.Empty);       // Create the MessagingFactory     MessagingFactory factory = MessagingFactory.Create(serviceBusUri, credentials);       // Create a subcription for this instance     NamespaceManager mgr = new NamespaceManager(serviceBusUri, credentials);     string subscriptionName = Guid.NewGuid().ToString();     mgr.CreateSubscription(AccountDetails.ScatterGatherTopic, subscriptionName);       // Create the subscription and queue clients.     ScatterGatherSubscriptionClient = factory.CreateSubscriptionClient         (AccountDetails.ScatterGatherTopic, subscriptionName);     ScatterGatherQueueClient =         factory.CreateQueueClient(AccountDetails.ScatterGatherQueue);       // Start the background worker thread.     BackgroundWorker = new BackgroundWorker();     BackgroundWorker.DoWork += new DoWorkEventHandler(ReceiveMessages);     BackgroundWorker.RunWorkerAsync(); }     I took the inspiration for creating the subscriptions in the voting application from the chat application that uses topics and subscriptions blogged by Ovais Akhter here. The method that receives the question messages runs on a background thread. If the application is in receive mode, a question message will be received from the subscription, the question will be displayed in the user interface, the voting buttons enabled, and IsReceiving set to false to prevent more questing from being received before the current one is answered.   // This runs on a background worker. private void ReceiveMessages(object sender, DoWorkEventArgs e) {     while (true)     {         if (IsReceiving)         {             // Receive a question message from the topic.             BrokeredMessage msg = ScatterGatherSubscriptionClient.Receive();             if (msg != null)             {                 // Deserialize the message.                 Question question = msg.GetBody<Question>();                   // Update the user interface.                 SimpleDelegate setQuestion = delegate()                 {                     lblQuestion.Content = question.QuestionText;                     btnYes.IsEnabled = true;                     btnNo.IsEnabled = true;                 };                 this.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(DispatcherPriority.Send, setQuestion);                 IsReceiving = false;                   // Mark the message as complete.                 msg.Complete();             }         }         else         {             Thread.Sleep(1000);         }     } }     When the user clicks on the Yes or No button, the btnVote_Click method is called. This will create a new Vote data contract with the appropriate question and answer and send the message to the poll manager application using the votes queue. The user voting buttons are then disabled, the question text cleared, and the IsReceiving flag set to true to allow a new message to be received.   private void btnVote_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) {     // Create a new vote.     Vote vote = new Vote()     {         QuestionText = (string)lblQuestion.Content,         IsYes = ((sender as Button).Content as string).Equals("Yes")     };       // Send the vote message.     BrokeredMessage msg = new BrokeredMessage(vote);     ScatterGatherQueueClient.Send(msg);       // Update the user interface.     lblQuestion.Content = "";     btnYes.IsEnabled = false;     btnNo.IsEnabled = false;     IsReceiving = true; }     Testing the Application In order to test the application, an instance of the poll manager application is started; the user interface is shown below. As no instances of the voting application have been created there are no subscriptions present in the topic. When an instance of the voting application is created the subscription will be displayed in the poll manager. Now that a voting application is subscribing, a questing can be sent from the poll manager application. When the message is sent to the topic, the voting application will receive the message and display the question. The voter can then answer the question by clicking on the appropriate button. The results of the vote are updated in the poll manager application. When two more instances of the voting application are created, the poll manager will display the new subscriptions. More questions can then be broadcast to the voting applications. As the question messages are queued up in the subscription for each voting application, the users can answer the questions in their own time. The vote messages will be received by the poll manager application and aggregated to display the results. The screenshots of the applications part way through voting are shown below. The messages for each voting application are queued up in sequence on the voting application subscriptions, allowing the questions to be answered at different speeds by the voters.

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• Azure &ndash; Part 6 &ndash; Blob Storage Service

  - by Shaun

  When migrate your application onto the Azure one of the biggest concern would be the external files. In the original way we understood and ensure which machine and folder our application (website or web service) is located in. So that we can use the MapPath or some other methods to read and write the external files for example the images, text files or the xml files, etc. But things have been changed when we deploy them on Azure. Azure is not a server, or a single machine, it’s a set of virtual server machine running under the Azure OS. And even worse, your application might be moved between thses machines. So it’s impossible to read or write the external files on Azure. In order to resolve this issue the Windows Azure provides another storage serviec – Blob, for us. Different to the table service, the blob serivce is to be used to store text and binary data rather than the structured data. It provides two types of blobs: Block Blobs and Page Blobs. Block Blobs are optimized for streaming. They are comprised of blocks, each of which is identified by a block ID and each block can be a maximum of 4 MB in size. Page Blobs are are optimized for random read/write operations and provide the ability to write to a range of bytes in a blob. They are a collection of pages. The maximum size for a page blob is 1 TB.   In the managed library the Azure SDK allows us to communicate with the blobs through these classes CloudBlobClient, CloudBlobContainer, CloudBlockBlob and the CloudPageBlob. Similar with the table service managed library, the CloudBlobClient allows us to reach the blob service by passing our storage account information and also responsible for creating the blob container is not exist. Then from the CloudBlobContainer we can save or load the block blobs and page blobs into the CloudBlockBlob and the CloudPageBlob classes.   Let’s improve our exmaple in the previous posts – add a service method allows the user to upload the logo image. In the server side I created a method name UploadLogo with 2 parameters: email and image. Then I created the storage account from the config file. I also add the validation to ensure that the email passed in is valid. 1: var storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.FromConfigurationSetting("DataConnectionString"); 2: var accountContext = new DynamicDataContext<Account>(storageAccount); 3:  4: // validation 5: var accountNumber = accountContext.Load() 6: .Where(a => a.Email == email) 7: .ToList() 8: .Count; 9: if (accountNumber <= 0) 10: { 11: throw new ApplicationException(string.Format("Cannot find the account with the email {0}.", email)); 12: } Then there are three steps for saving the image into the blob service. First alike the table service I created the container with a unique name and create it if it’s not exist. 1: // create the blob container for account logos if not exist 2: CloudBlobClient blobStorage = storageAccount.CreateCloudBlobClient(); 3: CloudBlobContainer container = blobStorage.GetContainerReference("account-logo"); 4: container.CreateIfNotExist(); Then, since in this example I will just send the blob access URL back to the client so I need to open the read permission on that container. 1: // configure blob container for public access 2: BlobContainerPermissions permissions = container.GetPermissions(); 3: permissions.PublicAccess = BlobContainerPublicAccessType.Container; 4: container.SetPermissions(permissions); And at the end I combine the blob resource name from the input file name and Guid, and then save it to the block blob by using the UploadByteArray method. Finally I returned the URL of this blob back to the client side. 1: // save the blob into the blob service 2: string uniqueBlobName = string.Format("{0}_{1}.jpg", email, Guid.NewGuid().ToString()); 3: CloudBlockBlob blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(uniqueBlobName); 4: blob.UploadByteArray(image); 5:  6: return blob.Uri.ToString(); Let’s update a bit on the client side application and see the result. Here I just use my simple console application to let the user input the email and the file name of the image. If it’s OK it will show the URL of the blob on the server side so that we can see it through the web browser. Then we can see the logo I’ve just uploaded through the URL here. You may notice that the blob URL was based on the container name and the blob unique name. In the document of the Azure SDK there’s a page for the rule of naming them, but I think the simple rule would be – they must be valid as an URL address. So that you cannot name the container with dot or slash as it will break the ADO.Data Service routing rule. For exmaple if you named the blob container as Account.Logo then it will throw an exception says 400 Bad Request.   Summary In this short entity I covered the simple usage of the blob service to save the images onto Azure. Since the Azure platform does not support the file system we have to migrate our code for reading/writing files to the blob service before deploy it to Azure. In order to reducing this effort Microsoft provided a new approch named Drive, which allows us read and write the NTFS files just likes what we did before. It’s built up on the blob serivce but more properly for files accessing. I will discuss more about it in the next post.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• Windows Azure: Caching

  - by xamlnotes

  I was poking around today and found this great article on caching: http://www.cloudcomputingdevelopment.net/cache-management-with-windows-azure/ Caching is a great way to boost application performance and keep down overhead on a database or file system. Its also great when you have say 3 web roles as shown in this articles Figure 2 that can share the same cache. If one of the roles goes offline then the cache is still there and can be used. You can change out your asp.net caching to use this pretty easy. Its pretty cool. There’s a sample that’s mentioned in the article that shows how to use this. You can download the cache here.

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• Installing the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio March 2011 and SDK 1.4

  - by Enrique Lima

  Coming from the joys and new features the SDK 1.3 version gave us back in November/December, we are now again at the doors of another update, Version 1.4 To get it, go to the Windows Azure website, the click on the Develop Menu option.  Once there, Click on the Get Tools & SDK button. This will start the download to activate the Web Platform Installer, when you review the information on it, you get this. Click Install. And Accept the EULA. Installation starts at this point. And you are finished. More to come on the changes this addresses.

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• Visual Studio 2010 & Windows Azure Launch

  If youre involved in any capacity with software development, or want to understand more about cloud computing, this is a half-day event not to be missed. Come along to the official New Zealand launch of Visual Studio 2010 and Windows Azure. Weve lined up two international experts, Sam Guckenheimer and David Chappell to deliver our two keynote sessions. Plus, to mark the occasion, were producing a very cool retro t-shirt for all attendees,...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Windows Azure RoleEntryPoint Method Call Order

  - by kaleidoscope

  Worker Role Call Order: WaWorkerHost process is started. Worker Role assembly is loaded and surfed for a class that derives from RoleEntryPoint.  This class is instantiated. RoleEntryPoint.OnStart() is called. RoleEntryPoint.Run() is called.  If the RoleEntryPoint.Run() method exits, the RoleEntryPoint.OnStop() method is called . WaWorkerHost process is stopped. The role will recycle and startup again. Web Role Call Order: WaWebHost process is started. Hostable Web Core is activated. Web role assembly is loaded and RoleEntryPoint.OnStart() is called. Global.Application_Start() is called. The web application runs Global.Application_End() is called. RoleEntryPoint.OnStop() is called. Hostable Web Core is deactivated. WaWebHost process is stopped. For Further Reference: http://blogs.msdn.com/jnak/archive/2010/02/11/windows-azure-roleentrypoint-method-call-order.aspx   Tinu, O

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• Dev Connections Azure Tutorial

  I am more than a little tardy with this blog post but the link for the tutorial code can be found here: http://www.dasblonde.net/downloads/windowsazureessentialslaunch042010.zip If you had already downloaded the code from the link specified in my tutorial slides, that link (and this one) are both updated with some new stuff. If you attended my similar tutorial in Norway, there are updates to the scripts here that you might be interested in. I created some PowerShell scripts to delete all Windows Azure...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Microsoft Sync. Framework with Azure on iOS

  - by Richard Jones

  A bit of a revelation this evening. I discovered something obvious, but missing from my understanding of the brilliant iOS example that ships with the Sync. Framework 4.0CTP It seems that on the server side if a record is edited, correctly only the fields that are modified gets sent down to your device (in my case an iPad). I was previously just blindly assuming that I'd get all fields down. I modified my Xcode population code (based on iOS sample) as follows: + (void)populateQCItems: (id)dict withMetadata:(id)metadata withContext:(NSManagedObjectContext*) context { QCItems *item = (QCItems *)[Utils populateOfflineEntity:dict withMetadata:metadata withContext:context]; if (item != nil) // modify new or existing live item { if ([dict valueForKey:@"Identifier"]) // new bit item.Identifier = [dict valueForKey:@"Identifier"]; if ([dict valueForKey:@"InspectionTypeID"]) // new bit item.InspectionTypeID = [dict valueForKey:@"InspectionTypeID"]; [item logEntity]; } } I hope this helps someone else; as I learnt this the hard way. Technorati Tags: Xcode, iOS, Azure, Sync Framework, Cloud

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• Dev Connections Azure Tutorial

  I am more than a little tardy with this blog post but the link for the tutorial code can be found here: http://www.dasblonde.net/downloads/windowsazureessentialslaunch042010.zip If you had already downloaded the code from the link specified in my tutorial slides, that link (and this one) are both updated with some new stuff. If you attended my similar tutorial in Norway, there are updates to the scripts here that you might be interested in. I created some PowerShell scripts to delete all Windows Azure...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Microsoft Azure Diagnostics Part 1: Introduction

  Having a well thought-out plan for diagnostic data is important for on-premises applications, but it is arguably more important for distributed, highly scalable cloud applications. Michael Collier has provided a clear introduction to Microsoft Azure Diagnostics, including the Diagnostics Agent and how to extract the data. 24% of devs don’t use database source control – make sure you aren’t one of themVersion control is standard for application code, but databases haven’t caught up. So what steps can you take to put your SQL databases under version control? Why should you start doing it? Read more to find out…

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• Reading and conditionally updating N rows, where N > 100,000 for DNA Sequence processing

  - by makerofthings7

  I have a proof of concept application that uses Azure tables to associate DNA sequences to "something". Table 1 is the master table. It uniquely lists every DNA sequence. The PK is a load balanced hash of the RK. The RK is the unique encoded value of the DNA sequence. Additional tables are created per subject. Each subject has a list of N DNA sequences that have one reference in the Master table, where N is 100,000. It is possible for many tables to reference the same DNA sequence, but in this case only one entry will be present in the Master table. My Azure dilemma: I need to lock the reference in the Master table as I work with the data. I need to handle timeouts, and prevent other threads from overwriting my data as one C# thread is working with the information. Other threads need to realise that this is locked, and move onto other unlocked records and do the work. Ideally I'd like to get some progress report of how my computation is going, and have the option to cancel the process (and unwind the locks). Question What is the best approach for this? I'm looking at these code snippets for inspiration: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jimoneil/archive/2010/10/05/azure-home-part-7-asynchronous-table-storage-pagination.aspx http://stackoverflow.com/q/4535740/328397

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• Git-based storage and publishing, infrastructure advice

  - by Joel Martinez

  I wanted to get some advice on moving a system to "the cloud" ... specifically, I'm looking to move into some of Windows Azure's managed services, as right now I'm managing a VM. Basically, the system operates on some data stored in a github git repository. I'll describe the current architecture: Current system (all hosted on a single server): GitHub - configured with a webhook pointing at ... ASP.NET MVC application - to accept the webhook from git. It pushes a message onto ... Azure service bus Queue - which is drained by ... Windows Service - pulls the message from the queue and ... Fetches the latest data from the git repository (using GitLib2Sharp) onto the local disk and finally ... Operates on the data in git to produce a static HTML website hosted/served by IIS. The system works really well, actually ... but I would like to get out of the business of managing the VM, and move to using some combination of Azure web and worker roles. But because the system relies so heavily on the git repository on the local filesystem, I'm finding it difficult to figure out how to architect in the cloud. I know you can get file system access, so in theory I could just fetch the repository if there's nothing on disk ... but the performance/responsiveness of the system sort of depends on the repository being available and only having to fetch diffs, which is relatively quick. As opposed to periodically having to fetch the entire (somewhat large) git repository if the web or worker role was recycled, or something. So I would love some advice on how you would architect such a system :) Ultimately, the only real requirement is to be able to serve HTML content that's been produced from the contents of a git repository (in a relatively responsive manner, from a publishing perspective) ... please feel free to ask any clarifying questions if there's something I omitted. Thanks!

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• StarterSTS 1.5

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  I have the 1.5 version of StarterSTS sitting here for quite some time now. But I was always reluctant to release it. Some of the reasons are: too many new features for a single (small) version change. to many features that are optional, like bridged authentication and thus make the code very complex. the way I implemented Azure integration adds a dependency on the Azure SDK, even for “on-premise” installations. I don’t like that. the fact I am using some WebForms bits and some WCF bits, the URL structure got messy. WebForms also don’t help a lot in testability All of the above reasons together plus the fact that I am the only architect, developer and tester on this project made me come to the conclusion that I will cancel this release. But wait… StarterSTS 1.5 is fully functional. We use both the on-premise and Azure versions internally “in production”. Cancelling means I will release the latest source code on Codeplex – but will not mark it as a “recommended release”. I also won’t produce updated screen casts and docs. Bu the setup is very similar to earlier versions. Feel free to use and customize 1.5 and give me feedback. On the good news front, I am working on a new version – welcome thinktecture IdentityServer. This version is based on MVC3 and the routing architecture, removed a lot of the clutter, has a SQL CE4 based configuration system, is more extensible – and in overall just cleaner. I will be able to upload CTPs very soon.

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• howto distinguish composition and self-typing use-cases

  - by ayvango

  Scala has two instruments for expressing object composition: original self-type concept and well known trivial composition. I'm curios what situations I should use which in. There are obvious differences in their applicability. Self-type requires you to use traits. Object composition allows you to change extensions on run-time with var declaration. Leaving technical details behind I can figure two indicators to help with classification of use cases. If some object used as combinator for a complex structure such as tree or just have several similar typed parts (1 car to 4 wheels relation) than it should use composition. There is extreme opposite use case. Lets assume one trait become too big to clearly observe it and it got split. It is quite natural that you should use self-types for this case. That rules are not absolute. You may do extra work to convert code between this techniques. e.g. you may replace 4 wheels composition with self-typing over Product4. You may use Cake[T <: MyType] {part : MyType} instead of Cake { this : MyType => } for cake pattern dependencies. But both cases seem counterintuitive and give you extra work. There are plenty of boundary use cases although. One-to-one relations is very hard to decide with. Is there any simple rule to decide what kind of technique is preferable? self-type makes you classes abstract, composition makes your code verbose. self-type gives your problems with blending namespaces and also gives you extra typing for free (you got not just a cocktail of two elements but gasoline-motor oil cocktail known as a petrol bomb). How can I choose between them? What hints are there? Update: Let us discuss the following example: Adapter pattern. What benefits it has with both selt-typing and composition approaches?

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• NHibernate mapping with two special cases

  - by brainimus

  I am using NHibernate to map a class to a database table. The Part table has an ID column (primary key) and a ParentPart column (along with a few others). class Part { public virtual long ID{ get; set; } public virtual Part ParentPart { get; set; } } The ParentPart is normally another valid part in the part table but I have two special cases. I have a case where the ParentPart column can be 0 (zero) and another case where it can be -1. Neither of these cases currently represent another valid Part object. I was thinking I could make 2 subclasses of Part (ZeroPart and NegativeOnePart) that would never persist. I want the zero and -1 values to be entered in the column but not persist the entire ZeroPart or NegativeOnePart objects. I am unsure how to map this (I'm using hbm files) or if this even the correct approach. How can I map this so that normal valid parts are persisted but I can also handle the special cases? As an aside: My current hbm file has the Part.ID's unsaved value as zero but I think I can just change this in the mapping to something different and default it in the class.

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• Windows Azure Evolution &ndash; Deploy Web Sites (WAWS Part 3)

  - by Shaun

  This is the sixth post of my Windows Azure Evolution series. After talked a bit about the new caching preview feature in the previous one, let’s back to the Windows Azure Web Sites (WAWS).   Git and GitHub Integration In the third post I introduced the overview functionality of WAWS and demonstrated how to create a WordPress blog through the build-in application gallery. And in the fourth post I covered how to use the TFS service preview to deploy an ASP.NET MVC application to the web site through the TFS integration. WAWS also have the Git integration. I’m not going to talk very detailed about the Git and GitHub integration since there are a bunch of information on the internet you can refer to. To enable the Git just go to the web site item in the developer portal and click the “Set up Git publishing”. After specified the username and password the windows azure platform will establish the Git integration and provide some basic guide. As you can see, you can download the Git binaries, commit the files and then push to the remote repository. Regarding the GitHub, since it’s built on top of Git it should work. Maarten Balliauw have a wonderful post about how to integrate GitHub to Windows Azure Web Site you can find here.   WebMatrix 2 RC WebMatrix is a lightweight web application development tool provided by Microsoft. It utilizes WebDeploy or FTP to deploy the web application to the server. And in WebMatrix 2.0 RC it added the feature to work with Windows Azure. First of all we need to download the latest WebMatrix 2 through the Web Platform Installer 4.0. Just open the WebPI and search “WebMatrix”, or go to its home page download its web installer. Once we have WebMatrix 2, we need to download the publish file of our WAWS. Let’s go to the developer portal and open the web site we want to deploy and download the publish file from the link on the right hand side. This file contains the necessary information of publishing the web site through WebDeploy and FTP, which can be used in WebMatrix, Visual Studio, etc.. Once we have the publish file we can open the WebMatrix, click the Open Site, Remote Site. Then it will bring up a dialog where we can input the information of the remote site. Since we have our publish file already, we can click the “Import publish settings” and select the publish file, then we can see the site information will be populated automatically. Click OK, the WebMatrix will connect to the remote site, which is the WAWS we had deployed already, retrieve the folders and files information. We can open files in WebMatrix and modify. But since WebMatrix is a lightweight web application tool, we cannot update the backend C# code. So in this case, we will modify the frontend home page only. After saved our modification, WebMatrix will compare the files between in local and remote and then it will only upload the modified files to Windows Azure through the connection information in the publish file. Since it only update the files which were changed, this minimized the bandwidth and deployment duration. After few seconds we back to the website and the modification had been applied.   Visual Studio and WebDeploy The publish file we had downloaded can be used not only in WebMatrix but also Visual Studio. As we know in Visual Studio we can publish a web application by clicking the “Publish” item from the project context menu in the solution explorer, and we can specify the WebDeploy, FTP or File System for the publish target. Now we can use the WAWS publish file to let Visual Studio publish the web application to WAWS. Let’s create a new ASP.NET MVC Web Application in Visual Studio 2010 and then click the “Publish” in solution explorer. Once we have the Windows Azure SDK 1.7 installed, it will update the web application publish dialog. So now we can import the publish information from the publish file. Select WebDeploy as the publish method. We can select FTP as well, which is supported by Windows Azure and the FTP information was in the same publish file. In the last step the publish wizard can check the files which will be uploaded to the remote site before the actually publishing. This gives us a chance to review and amend the files. Same as the WebMatrix, Visual Studio will compare the files between local and WAWS and determined which had been changed and need to be published. Finally Visual Studio will publish the web application to windows azure through WebDeploy protocol. Once it finished we can browse our website.   FTP Deployment The publish file we downloaded contains the connection information to our web site via both WebDeploy and FTP. When using WebMatrix and Visual Studio we can select WebDeploy or FTP. WebDeploy method can be used very easily from WebMatrix and Visual Studio, with the file compare feature. But the FTP gives more flexibility. We can use any FTP client to upload files to windows azure regardless which client and OS we are using. Open the publish file in any text editor, we can find the connection information very easily. As you can see the publish file is actually a XML file with WebDeploy and FTP information in plain text attributes. And once we have the FTP URL, username and password, when can connect to the site and upload and download files. For example I opened FileZilla and connected to my WAWS through FTP. Then I can download files I am interested in and modify them on my local disk. Then upload back to windows azure through FileZilla. Then I can see the new page.   Summary In this simple and quick post I introduced vary approaches to deploy our web application to Windows Azure Web Site. It supports TFS integration which I mentioned previously. It also supports Git and GitHub, WebDeploy and FTP as well.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• Qu'est-ce que Windows Azure ? La réponse en 4 minutes dans une vidéo de Microsoft, qui lance une offre promotionnelle sur sa plate-forme

  Une mise à jour de la plate-forme Windows Azure permet de faciliter la migration et l'administration Mise à jour du 15/12/10 de Hinault Romaric Microsoft vient de faire une mise à jour de sa plate-forme Cloud Windows Azure. La firme de Redmond vient de livrer quelques une des nouvelles fonctionnalités de la plate-forme Windows Azure qu'elle avait annoncé lors de la conférence PDC 2010(Professional Developer Conference) de septembre dernier. La récente mise à jour permet de doter Windows Azure de nouvelles fonctionnalités facilitant la migration et l'amélioration de l'administration de la plate-fo...

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• Microsoft sort un plug-in "Windows Azure pour Eclipse" pour faciliter le déploiement d'applications Java sur son Cloud

  Microsoft sort un plug-in Windows Azure pour Eclipse Pour faciliter le déploiement d'applications Java sur son Cloud Les développeurs Java peuvent désormais utiliser l'environnement de développement Eclipse pour le paquetage et le déploiement des applications Java sur la plate-forme Cloud de Microsoft Windows Azure. Microsoft vient de dévoiler la version CTP (Community Technology Preview) du plugin « Windows Azure for Eclipse ». Ce plugin offre aux utilisateurs une interface graphique pour la configuration et l'accès distant aux applications afin d'assurer leurs maintenances, des fonctions pour la validation du schéma et de l'auto-complétion pour les fichiers de configuration Azure...

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• Azure : Mobiles Services et Web Sites entrent en production, l'infrastructure stocke 8,5 trillions d'objets et gère 900 000 transactions par seconde

  Windows Azure : Mobiles Services et Web Sites entrent en production L'infrastructure stocke 8,5 trillions d'objets et gère 900 000 transactions par secondeDisponible en Preview depuis août 2012, Windows Azure Mobiles Services est passé en disponibilité générale (GA) avec Windows Azure Web Sites. Une étape qui marque l'entrée de ces services en phase de production. Pour rappel, Windows Azure Mobile Services est une plateforme Backend as a service (BaaS), qui fournit une solution clef en main dans le Cloud, permettant d'accélérer le développement d'applications connectées côté client.

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• Microsoft dévoile la Preview de Windows Azure Mobile Services, qui fournit un Backend pour les applications mobiles et Windows 8

  Microsoft dévoile la Preview de Windows Azure Mobile Services qui fournit un Backend pour les applications mobiles et Windows 8 La plateforme d'hébergement Cloud Windows Azure vient de s'enrichir d'un nouveau service. Microsoft vient d'annoncer l'ouverture de la Preview de Windows Azure Mobile Services pour les développeurs d'applications mobiles et Windows 8. Windows Azure Mobile Services est une plateforme Backend as a services, qui fournit une solution clef en main dans le Cloud, permettant d'accélérer le développement d'applications connectées côté client. Le service rationalise le processus de développement en permettant d'exploiter le Cloud pour des scénario...

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• Does Windows Azure support the Application Warm-Up module or something similar?

  - by Corey O'Brien

  We have a Web Role that we are hosting in Windows Azure that uses an old ASMX based Web Reference to contact an external system. The Web Reference proxy code is big enough that instantiating it the first time has a significant cost. We'd like to be able to have this run when the Web Role starts instead of on the first request. I know IIS 7.5 has an Application Warm-Up module that would allow us to achieve this, but I'm having trouble figuring out if something similar exists with hosting on Windows Azure. Thanks, Corey

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• Linq to SQL Azure genrating Error "Specified cast is not valid."

  - by Rabbi

  B"H I have an application that has been working for months using Linq to SQL connecting to a SQLExpress. I tried migrating it to SQL Azure. I copied the structure and data using the Sync Framework. I viewed the data in SQL Azure using SSMS 2008 R2 and it seams to be exactly what I have in my Sql Server. However when I try to use Linq to SQL against it I get an error "Specified cast is not valid." I seams to be happening any time I get child records. i.e. whenever I fill (the first time I access) an entity set. It seams to be happening after the data returns and when Linq tries to put it into the objects. remember, the application is working perfectly against sqlexpress, even when accessed across the internet or vpn.

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• Does anyone have a backup strategy for SQL Azure databases?

  - by Pete

  I'm using SQL Azure on a project and it works great. The problem is that the usual backup features do not exist. I have exported the database a couple of times using SQLAzureMW ( http://sqlazuremw.codeplex.com/ ) but this tool is now choking trying to download the database data with bcp. In any case, it's not as nice a solution as SQL Server backups. Is anyone aware of a commercial or open source tool, or other technique, for making reliable backups of SQL Azure databases? This is really a showstopper.

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• Linq to SQL Azure generating Error "Specified cast is not valid."

  - by Rabbi

  B"H I have an application that has been working for months using Linq to SQL connecting to a SQLExpress. I tried migrating it to SQL Azure. I copied the structure and data using the Sync Framework. I viewed the data in SQL Azure using SSMS 2008 R2 and it seams to be exactly what I have in my Sql Server. However when I try to use Linq to SQL against it I get an error "Specified cast is not valid." I seams to be happening any time I get child records. i.e. whenever I fill (the first time I access) an entity set. It seams to be happening after the data returns and when Linq tries to put it into the objects. Remember, the application is working perfectly against sqlexpress, even when accessed across the internet or vpn.

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