Nuno Filipe Godinho : Architecture

Clarification about WCF RIA Services

NunoGodinho — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 22:33:31 GMT

A lot as been said about “.NET RIA Services” now called “WCF RIA Services”, and much more about this name change, since many people doesn’t look at RIA Services like a real WCF Services with all their power, but that isn’t quite true since WCF RIA Services use the same bases as WCF but just make the work a little bit easier for us in terms of the “plumbing/low level development” part.

One of the Product Team members, in this case Saurabh Pant in his blog talked about this and why the change, and clarifies the WCF inside WCF RIA Services in this blog post. He also talks about the motivation of this alignment between the WCF and the RIA Services Team, and in this blogs post the .NET Connected Framework Team explain the entire ecosystem for WCF and in which WCF RIA Services is part of. Check the following picture to know more about this ecosystem that has technologies like:

WCF Core Services

The most commonly known WCF implementation

WCF WebHttp/AJAX Services

The RESTful WCF service implementation

WCF Data Services

The previously known ADO.NET Data Services are now also using WCF for all the communication

WCF Workflow Services

Workflows that are exposed and interact as WCF Services

WCF RIA Services

The previously know .NET RIA Services that now use the WCF communication capabilities in order to provide more power to the developer and at the same time, easier development and less “plumbing”

Hope this helps clarify a little better the WCF part of the WCF RIA Services and their place in the entire WCF ecosystem.

PDC09 – Day Three – Building Scalable and Reliable Applications with Windows Azure

NunoGodinho — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:22:41 GMT

Brad Calder – Director/Architect

Data Building Blocks

Types of Storage in Windows Azure

Volatile Storage

Local Storage
Caches (eg. AppFabricCache and MemCache)

Persistent Storage

Windows Azure Storage

Blobs

Provide interface for storing name files

Tables

structured storage.

Queues

reliable storage and delivery of messages

SQL Azure

Storage Account Performance at commercial Availability

Capacity

100TB

Throughput

Up to a few hundred megabytes

Partitioning of Data Objects

Load balancing is an internal concept of Windows Azure Storage

Allows the system to automatically scale out access to your data to meet its peek traffic demands

What matters to the application is the partitioning key used for objects

All objects with the same partition key are always grouped

Per Object/Partitioning Performance for Commercial Availability

Throughput

Single Queue and single table partition

Up to 500 transactions per second

Single Blob

small reads/writes up to 30 MB/s
large reads/writes up to 60 MB/s

Scaling Computation

Compute Service Model – What is describes?

The topology of your service

Types of roles and their binaries
How the roles are connected

Configuration of the service

How many instances of each role type
Application specific configuration settings
How many update domains you need

Best Practices

Due to application failures, upgrades or hardware failure

Use multiple instances

Queue Workflow Concepts

Windows Azure Queue Provides

Guarantee delivery

Worker dequeues Message and marks it as Invisible
Worker deletes Message when finished processing

Note: If worker role crashes, message becomes visible for another worker to process

A message may be processed more than once
Assume messages put into same queue can be processed in any order

Best Practice

Make work items idempotent

Scaling Queue Throughput

Batch Work Items into Blob

Group together many work items into a blob
Queue up pointer to the Blob for the message

Use Multiple Queues

Job Manager

Responsible form managing the execution of the Queues

Work Items

Continuation for Long Running Work Items

Want to continue on failover
High level approach

Bread work item into smaller and repeatable steps
Record progress

Lifecycle Management

In-place Rolling updates

Specify the number of upgrade domains in service model

Breaks your roles evenly over the number of domains

Rolling upgrade

Walk each upgrade domain one at a time
Upgrade just the roles in the current domain

Benefits

Minimizes availability loss

Only one domain of roles are restarted at a time

Allows local state to be uses across upgrades
Caches application upgrade issues early

Detect upgrade issues after first few domains

Versioning with Rolling Updates

Always assume you will have old and new running side by side in your service
Version Everything

Protocols, Schemas, Messages and everything else

Windows Azure Tables Schema change

Have a version property in each entity
Types of Schema changes

Adding a non-key property

Perform similar step update process
Update “IgnoreMissingProperties”

Removing a non-key property

Perform similar upgrade process
Update “IgnoreMissingProperties”

Changes in Partition Key or Row Key

Most uses schema change is adding a non-key property

PDC09 – Day Two – Developing Advanced Applications with Windows Azure

NunoGodinho — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:56:04 GMT

Steve Marx – Technology Strategist

Now we can have the ability to have more than a Web and a Work Role, since we have several different types of Roles.

Example:

IIS Role
SMTP Role
…

Now the there is the new Storage API that is currently being shipped with the SDK and not only a sample.

Some new features:

Inter-role communication
Non-Http endpoints
Role instance lifecycle
VM Sizes
Full-trust in the Cloud
Local Storage

Upgrading the local storage

How to model you application

Draw the boxes and arrows
Each box is a role

Which receive traffic from the internet
Which need IIS?

Receive Traffic: Input Endpoints

Different ports on same domain
There’s always load balancing
Declared in ServiceDefinition.csdef
Handled by IIS

InputEndpoint

Defined the protocol, port and name of the endpoint that will opened in order to listen for the requests
Protocols supported

Http
Https
Tcp

RoleEnvironment is the class that allow us to communicate with the Windows Azure fabric, for example in order to know the Configurations

Aside about Email

Spammers will use Windows Azure then the IP ranges can get blacklisted

Best Practices: Use a relay service in order not to have your mails marked as SPAM

Send mail via a rely mail
Receive mail is fine

Searching

Lucene.NET

Popular search API
.NET port of original Java implementation

Index data

Bring index up to speed on startup
Continually update index

Serve searched (via WCF)

Asynchronous Work without a Queue

Queues deliver messages to one worker only
We need every worker to see the message

Solution

use Table instead

Build your own secondary index
Order references

Initialization of Roles

Now we have:

OnStart() – “busy” state, initialization
Run() – do work
OnStop() – traffic stops, graceful shutdown

Internal Endpoints

Declare endpoints in ServiceDefinition.csdef
API to find out what port to listen on RoleEnvironment in Order to know if the port or anything change about the endpoint since the last call

How to Get More RAM

RAMDiectory pouts everything in memory
Choose the VM Size:

Small
Medium
Large
Extra-Large

PDC09 – Day Two - Keynote

NunoGodinho — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:04:10 GMT

Steven Sinofsky

Developing Windows 7

Learning

Solving Problems + Innovation
“Engineering 7” Blog made a very interesting Dialog even without having any code of the product, just about the decisions that were being made
Ecosystem Readiness
Developer Pre-Beta, Beta, RC rhythm
Telemetry

Telemetry

Seed Feedback Button
Hardware and Device Diagnostics
Reliability Analysis Component (RAC)
Software Quality Monitor (SQM)
Windows Error Reporting (WER or “Watson”)

Developing Internet Explorer

Learning

Responsible Engineering
Trustworthy computing
Real-world Interoperability
Innovative Technologies

Updates

Standards Progress

ACID
HTML 5

Performance Improvements

Javascript

Ecosystem Innovations

IE 9 with 3 weeks of development is looking interesting in terms of performance and interoperability
Using Direct2D and DirectWrite to provide better graphics rendering and Hardware Acceleration without any change of the current sites

Windows 7 Call to Action

Integrate with Windows 7 Desktop
Develop 64-bit
Focus on fundamentals in your code
Build on new APIs in Windows 7
Watch more videos today on Channel 9 about Internet Explorer 9

Scott Guthrie – Developer Division

Silverlight 4

Focus

Media

Web and and Microphones

gives you access to the raw access to the input and so you can make the changes you want on that stream, like using PixelShader with it

Multicast streaming

IIS Smooth Streaming

Silverlight Media Framework available today on CodePlex

Output protection
Offline DRM support

Business Applications

Printing

Print Preview Dialogs
Printing Configurations
This is a Print API that you can change however you want and not only a screenshot of the screen

Rich Text
Clipboard access

Local and Central clipboard support

Right Click
Mouse Wheel
Implicit Styles
Drag and Drop
Drop Targets support
Bidi & RTL
HTML

Hosting HTML inside Silverlight application
We can interact with the HTML contents as being a brush

Commanding and MVVM
Data & Networking

Sharing Assemblies across SL and .NET 4.0
Data Binding Improvements
UDP Multicast support
REST Enhancements
WCF Improvements

Main one is TCP channel support

WCF RIA Services

All the capabilities of RIA Services and with all the capabilities of WCF
Works well with OAuth

Visual Studio 2010

WYSIWYG Design Surface
XAML Intellisense
WF and POCO Support

Additional Control
Beyond the Browser

Windowing API
Notification Popups
HTML support
Drop Target support
Opening the Sandbox

Trusted Application

Custom Windows Chrome
Local File System
Cross-file Network
Keyboard support in Full Screen Mode
COM object support in Windows

using dynamic keyword of C#

Access to Several devices form the client machine

Silverlight Performance

Twice as fast

uses JIT like the normal .NET Application

30% faster startup
New Profiling support

Google Chrome will support SL4 also

Schedule

Beta

All the features seen today
VS2010 Tools
Expression Tools

RC
Final Release

First half of Next Year (MIX’10 ????)

Kurt DelBene – Office and Sharepoint 2010

Microsoft Business Productivity Infrastructure

Unified Business Platform

Unified Communications
Business Intelligence
Enterprise Content Management
Collaboration
Enterprise Search

Office and Sharepoint Development Platforms

User Experience

Based in Services and in a Object Model that can be extended in order to create better User Experience

Application Services

Expose all the capabilities in the Applications as services to be consumed without loosing any of the features that we have access inside the solution

Content and Data Management
Interoperability with LOB integration

possibility to more easily integrate the external LOB applications inside the products

Tools and Deployment Flexibility

New Tools for Sharepoint Development
Debug capabilities are currently in the Tools

Now Debug really works. Awesome.

Interesting capability to import a Sharepoint solution to start the project
Possibility to deploy the solution in a sandboxed solution. Interesting in terms of security
Deployment

Simply upload the package generated by Visual Studio 2010 into the sharepoint – Real All-in-One working for deployment also. Now it looks really good for Sharepoint Development.

Announcing the Office and Sharepoint 2010 Public Beta to download www.microsoft.com/2010

Office 2010
Sharepoint Server
Project Server 2010
Visio 2010
Mobile is also available today in the mobile marketplace

Sharepoint has a Silverlight WebPart out of the Box.
Sharepoint 2010 now has the Office Ribbon

Announcing Duet Enterprise for Microsoft Sharepoint and SAP

Consume and extend SAP from Microsoft Sharepoint 2010
Available on the Second-half of 2010

Announcing the Outlook Social Connector

Windows Live, Sharepoint Server, Linkedin
Has an Open SDK that can be used to develop new connectors for this connector

PDC09 – Day One – Code Visualization, UML and DSLs

NunoGodinho — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 01:31:12 GMT

Cameron Skinner – Product Manager in Visual Studio, responsible for the Architecture Tools in VS2010

Why?

Complexity remains a serious problem

Found everywhere

Code
Requirements
Organizational Politics
and so on…

VS2010 attacks these problems by increasing

Shared understanding between team members
the understanding of existing systems
the ability to gain and maintaining the control over it

Who?

Developers are trying

to understand existing code
focused on the “right fix”

Architects are trying

to understand the Domain and how it relates to implementation
get the solution for the existing projects

Product Capabilities

“Understand the Code”

Architecture Explorer
Sequence Diagram Generation
DGML Graphs and “Standard” Graphs

“Maintain Control”

Layer & Diagram & Custom MSBuild Tasks
Work Item Integration

“Understand the Domain”

UML 2.x Designers

All this capabilities are only in the Ultimate version of VS2010

“Understanding the Code”

In Visual Studio Options, “Mark the Show Misc Documents in Architecture Explorer”

Dependency Diagram

Very interesting Dependency Diagram that represent you application and all the interaction of the solution and you even can search who in your solution is using a specific assembly and what is being made with it.

If we use MEF, Unity or any other Dynamic connection this won’t be possible to see in the Dependency Diagram, since it currently represents only the static dependencies.

Think of Dependency Diagram as read-only, since if you make any change on it he won’t change any of the code of the solution associated.

The Dependency is a DSL that was generated for this version of VS2010.

We can select just the elements that we want to view in the Dependency Diagram and define which level of information we want to have, like:

Assemblies

Namespaces

Types

Methods

We can even filter by access modifiers:

public

private

protected

internal

protected internal

We can navigate to the code from the Dependency Diagram.

Doesn’t work on unmanaged C++, but is currently being done but no date for the release now.

We can interact with the Diagram and extend the DGML model but in a simple model

Possibility to define the level and the center of the dependency that you want to see

Butterfly mode enables the viewing of only the types that are just linking to your central defined element

We can generate the Dependency Diagram based on a Custom selected elements

Note: We can Calculate the Complexity by right-clicking on the Project and selecting the “Calculate Complexity” option of the Context Menu, but this isn’t currently available inside the Dependency Diagram.

Architecture Explorer

Capabilities to filter information about your solution

Ability to look at the Logical and Physical View of the Solution Projects and filtering what you want to filter in terms of inbound or outbound navigation, and this way we’ll have more information's about how our solution is working and how we can maintain it.

Sequence Diagram

Now you have the ability to define the depth of the diagram in terms of levels and them expand if you want more directly on the diagram

Designed to be collaborative and to persist the changes made on the Model, and it will identify the changes that were made on the diagram and associate that change to a new Work Item.

Works on all versions of .NET Framework

Doesn’t generate the code on by changing the Sequence Diagram, just identifies the changes that need to be done

“UML Diagrams”

There’s a new Modeling project in VS2010 that will have all the Diagrams
State Diagrams will be supported as well as all other diagrams from UML
UML Diagrams supported in this version of VS2010:

Use Cases
Class Diagram
Sequence Diagram
Activity Diagram
Component Diagram
Layer Diagram

Very interesting to define the architecture
Capability to validate the architecture by doing static code analysis in order to check all the dependencies and references between the several Layers, and defining the architectural problems as errors in the Error List.
We can get a visual information regarding the layers that are invalid due to the architectural validation
Just for static elements right now, but can be made by extending the pipeline of the Validation of the models

Very interesting Session and a great step for getting real architecture tools inside Visual Studio.

PDC09 – Day One – SQL Azure Present & Futures

NunoGodinho — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:37:57 GMT

Data Platform as a Service

In the future will have Reporting, Data Analytics

SQL Azure Database

Relational Database service

SQL Server technology foundation
Scalable
Symmetrical

SQL Azure Provisioning

Each account has zero or more servers

Azure wide provisioned in a common portal
Billing instrument

Each server has one or more databases

contains metadata about the databases
Unit of authentication and security
Unit of Geo-location
The server is a logical grouping of you DBs

Each database has standard SQL Object

Unit of consistency
Contains users, tables, views, indexes, and so on,

Global Availability

North Europe
Southeast Asia
North and South USA

Futures

Goal: Provide and end-to-end experience for enterprise departmental apps and Saas ISVs scenarios
Improved Tools

Today we have

VS, SSMS, ADO.NET, ADO.NET Data Service

Data Backups

Multiple replicas of all databases with automatic failover. System backups for additional protection
Use Database Clone to create a clone of the Database with every capabilities of the original one
During 1H 2010

Continuous Backups

Configurable retention and lag period
Backups available for read operations
Local and regional options
During 2H 2010

Operational Models

SaaS

Provisioning APIs for ISVs
Template database support
Meta-data tracking
Additional billing scenarios

Scale-out support –Today

Databases and workloads partitioning is a classic

Better price/performance
Levels of throughput not possible with a single machine

What SQL Azure addresses

Highly available service on top of commodity hardware
Zero administration

There will be available several options and the 10GBs of space is not an issue

Customer Feedback

Add support for profiler, DMV’s
SQLCLR
and much more

Codename “Vidalia”

Sharing to trustworthy collaboration

Cloud is a grate place to connect
Empowers multiple parties
Businesses need control

Very interesting demos, need to see more about it.

PDC09 – Day One – Software + Services Identity Roadmap Update

NunoGodinho — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:01:55 GMT

Announcement: WIF – Windows Identity Foundation RTW

Extensions to .NET for claim-based identity
http://www.microsoft.com/wif

Interesting Changes

“Genera” Server is now called “Active Directory Federation Services 2.0” and comes as part of Windows Server 2008 and not separately.
“Genera” Framework is now called “Windows Identity Foundation” and is an extension for .NET
Windows CardSpace “Geneva” is now called “Windows CardSpace 2.0” and is the usage of WIF with CardSpace

Microsoft Dynamics CRM “5”

Identity Challenges

Custom Authentication
Grant Access to users at partner organizations
Mash up: single sign on across applications and across companies
Support browser, rich and mobile clients

Now using WIF and ADFS 2.0 in order to get the Challenges solved

Microsoft Sharepoint 2010

Identity Challenges

Identity Flow

Client
Web Server
App Server
Sharepoint Content
Back-End Web Services

Use Customer Identity Provider

Several Authentication Providers like

Integrated Authentication
ASP.NET Membership
Live ID
Custom Membership

Automatic & Secure identity delegation
Authorization over Application specific roles
“No-credential” access to WebService

Directions

Authorization - .NET ACS CTP

Claims-based, rules driven authorization for REST Web Services
Developed with Google and Yahoo

OAuth Web Resource Authorization Protocol (WRAP)
Simple Web Tokens (SWT)

Integrating with WIF and ADFS 2.0
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/dotnettservices

OpenID

Key part of the Identity Management System

50.000 destination sites
US Government sites to be OpenID enabled

Major portals are OpenID providers

Yahoo, Google

Challenges

Usability
Security
Client Software

‘M’ Model : System Identity

Allow more interesting queries in terms of security tracking

Very interesting topics and certainly to keep seeing more information about it.

Windows Azure TCO and ROI Calculator

NunoGodinho — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:30:51 GMT

One of the most asked questions about Windows Azure is what is the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) and the ROI (Return of Investment) that we have in order to decide if we are going or not into the cloud.

Based on this questions Windows Azure Team putted together a TCO and ROI Calculator that will help you make your decisions better, and also plan how much are you going to spend in Windows Azure and Windows Azure Service Platform in order to maintain your business going. This is very important because even when having things going into the cloud our management still need some predictability on the costs and also some numbers to support the decision of moving to the cloud.

Start predicting and planning your TCO and ROI using this calculator here.

Windows Azure November SDK and Tools release

NunoGodinho — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 20:37:32 GMT

There is already available the new November set of SDK and Tools for Windows Azure, that can be found here. Also you can see here more about the new .NET Services and also here on the Windows Azure Development Center for .NET Services. Read more in this post from the .NET Services Team.

There are some breaking changes in this version so check also this post from the team.

TechEd EMEA 2009 – Session “Deep Dive in Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0” – Part 1/4

NunoGodinho — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:39:23 GMT

Just last week was in Berlin, Germany the TechEd EMEA 2009 event and in that event had a session called “Deep Dive in Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0”. This was a level 300 session and not 400 as the name could make you think, but this way we could achieve more people in terms of breadth.

In order to provide all of those that were in the session with more information and some summary of what we’ve seen and also the Demo Scripts for all that was made during the presentation I’ve prepared a 4 part series of posts that will help them, and also those who weren’t able to attend it because the room was full or simply because they hadn’t the opportunity to get to the Event.

This 4 part series will be:

- Part 1: Changes from WF 4.0 Beta 1 to Beta 2

- Part 2: Flowchart

- Part 3 : Correlation

- Part 4: Migration from State Machine to Flowchart

So let’s start this part 1 with the Changes made from WF 4.0 Beta 1 to Beta 2, since the Beta 2 was release just 3 weeks ago this seemed to me a very interesting topic just to place ourselves in the same page.

So basically we can divide the changes into the following parts:

Activity Hierarchy

Beta 1

The base of the Workflows was always a WorkflowElement class, and everything would inherit from that class and so we would have different approaches for the several types of Workflows, like Flowchart and Sequential.

Beta 2

In this new version the key changes were:

WorkflowElement goes away, and is replaced with Activity. Activity is the root type for all units of execution within the world of WF. This means that we now look at workflows in a different perspective, that is that the types or workflows are just activities that can be composed and use in conjunction with one another, and this will make the real Workflow.
Addition of ActivityWithResult which is the base for the Expression activities
Addition of AsyncCodeActivity. We got a lot of feedback that people liked what we were doing integrating asynchronous programming within activities but that there was still a fair amount of work in order to hook those up. AsyncCodeActivity is some nice sugar that makes it pretty easy to write an activity that takes advantage APIs that surface a Begin/End pair using the asynchronous programming model.

Runtime and Hosting

CachedMetadata

improved for activity authors to write code within to validate the activity tree.
One stop shop for customizing behaviors that were previously spread through methods like:

OnGetArguments()
GetConstraints()
GetActivities()

ActivityAction

Introducing DelegateArguments to pass data into and out of an ActivityAction.
In Beta 1, this required using an object of type Variable<T> that was assigned to a property named Argument

Persistence and Durable Timer and Tracking

‘Under the Hood’ category, the team has made improvements to Persistance, Durable timer and tracking which should provide a better runtime experience for the WF4 developer.

Dynamic Update

Last on the runtime front, dynamic update was a feature that had made its debut in Beta 1, but was removed again between Beta 1 and Beta 2 - and will not be present in the RTM release

WorkflowInstance renamed

WorkflowInstance was renamed to WorkflowApplication based on Beta 1 feedback from users.

Activities

Correlation

ParametersContent

XPath can now be generated from ParametersContent

CorrelationInitializers

CorrCorrelationQuery and AdditionalCorrelations have been merged into a collection called CorrelationInitializers.

CorrelationScope

Reduced the need for CorrelationHandles all over the place by improving the CorrelationScope and having an implicit correlation handle.

Parameters support

Parameters activities

Removal of Parameters Activities and merging that into the Send and Receive activities.

Content

You can now use the Content property to support MessageContent (primarily for untyped Message or MessageContract ) and ParametersContent (which is for the more RPC style list of name value pairs).

Refactored Semantics on Error Handling Activities

Refactored the semantics around the error handling activities to behave similar to a “throw” in a C# catch block. The most visible aspect of this change is the addition of the Rethrow activity.

InvokePowershell

Lastly, the InvokePowershell activity is no longer shipped as part of the .NET Framework. Fear note, for it is not gone; it has been moved to the SDK samples, joining other quite useful activities.
One point worth to mention about the PowerShell activity in the SDK is that includes activity code + designer code

Added a TerminateWorkflow activity in Beta2 (it’s in the runtime category)

Interop Activity

Key Component in WF4

The Interop activity is a key component for WF4 workflows, Leverages Activities built in WF3
Interop Activity allows you to continue to leverage activities built in WF3.

Improvements

Validations and Transactions are handled within the Interop activity to more fully support WF3 activities

Whenever using the Interop activity, if you have persistence in the workflow/activities that is used in the interop, that the Persistence and Monitoring databases that will be used is the 4.0 version, since this way we leverage the use of both versions, and only need one to provide that capability.

Designer

Expand in place support

This makes it easy expand an activity within the canvas without having to drill into it. This also lets you collapse activities when you don’t want to see all of the detail

Imports designer

No more fully qualified type names within expressions

Text of flowchart lines for FlowDecision and FlowSwitch

This is a nice usability / readability fix for the Flowchart, making it easier to see which cases and conditions the lines leading from decision shapes are for.

The rehosting was made really powerful, and in the WCF and WF Samples from the SDK there’s a WorkflowSimulator that makes the ReHosting and also provide visual information about the running state of the workflow. This is really interesting in terms of providing the our customers the capability to define the Business easily.

All these information were based on the team blog that appears here http://blogs.msdn.com/endpoint/.

SaaS Architecture

NunoGodinho — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:30:35 GMT

When building Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions one of the things that is very important to consider is the Multi-Tenancy of the Database, and the different approaches that available in order to achieve the best option.

The option is always the same in every part of any solution, and this is from a Fixed Solution to a Fully Configurable Solution, and a SaaS solutions normally starts somewhere in the middle, that is when different customers can have different functionalities and even different UX. But a very important thing to acknowledge is the fact that in order to maintain this kind of differences we need a data model that needs to be Multi-Tenant, and so the next choice to make is the Multi-Tenancy approach that will be used, and it can be:

Separate Databases for each Customer
- Isolation, The most Isolation we can have, and the one we can be sure that no customer can access other customer’s data
- Customization, Each customer can have different data model without affecting other customers
- Performance, The fact that the data is isolated allows that the several customers have performances accessing that are dependent only on their amount of data, and not other customers data.
- Manageability, Whenever a customer has a problem with the data on the solution, or needs a migration, or backups are easier to achieve since they are isolated.
Same Database, Separate Schemas for each Customer
- Isolation, This is in the middle way since we have from one side the data isolated since we have different schemas for each customer, but all resides on the same database, simplifying the number of databases that reside on our server.
- Customization, Each customer can have different data models without affecting others
- Performance, The fact that the data resides on the same database as other customers, the amount of data from other customers can affect the performance of accessing the data, but of course this can be simplified by using Partitioning on the database.
- Manageability, Whenever a customer has a problem with the data on the solution or even a migration it’s still not so hard since we have different schemas for each customer, but for separate backups this is not that easy.
Same Database, Same Schema for each Customer
- Isolation, This is the less isolated solution for data since everything reside exactly on the same tables, and database, and then this will simplify the number of Databases and Database objects on the server.
- Customization, This makes that every customer have the same schema, and so customization is only possible using approaches like:
  - Having several Custom columns on the tables, like, Custom1, Custom2, and so on.
  - Having a table for customizable columns, like ColumnName, ColumnType, ColumnValue.
- Performance, The fact that the data is nor isolated makes that the amount of data from other customers affect the performance of accessing data, but of course this can also be achieved using Partitioning on the database based on the for instance in the TenantID.
- Manageability, This becomes harder since everyone's data is on the same tables and so the separation of the backups, as well as the manageability of the customers data becomes harder, but the possibility to run checks on customers data became easier since we always know at front the schema used for each customer.

A very interesting document regarding this subject is this one that is part of the MSDN site, and that is called “Multi-Tenant Data Architectures”. Another interesting reading about this subject is this article from Scott Mitchell in the 4GuysFromRolla community site about “Querying a Multi-Tenant Data Architecture”.

In order to know more about SaaS architecture and solutions I’ll suggest the following articles:

Architecture Strategies for Catching the Long Tail, that explains the purpose of SaaS and why it’s interesting for customers and service providers.
Software as a Service (SaaS): An Enterprise Perspective, gives an insight of the need and advantages that SaaS can bring to Enterprises.

Hopes this can help you get started or even with your choices in terms of Multi-tenancy of Data.

New Features in Visual Studio 2010

NunoGodinho — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 19:20:52 GMT

Visual Studio 2010 is approaching rapidly from the launch and with it a new set of features will also appear.

One that I think is very important is the Architectural Tools that come with this new version, and elements like:

Dependency Graph
- Filters using Direct Graph Markup Language (DGML) on top of the generated graph.
- Views as:
  - Dependency Matrix
  - Forced Direct Layout
  - Top to Bottom Layout

Sequence Diagrams
- Available on the Code Editor

Unified Modeling Language (UML)
- Usage of UML to define the project

Use Cases (UC)
- Creation of Use Cases
- Integration with TFS, since we can select an element in the use case and build, link or View the associated Work Items.

Layer Designer and Layer Validation
- Possibility do build the Architecture of the solution and associate some validation elements that will always be enforced during the development process.

To know more about this subject read this S.Somasegar post.

Another very important features are the Debugging and Profiling.

Debugging
- Built in Debugger for MPI programs. Now with the new VS2010 we can select a cluster head node, how many cores you want, and hit F5 to debug your MPI program.
- SOA Debugging
  - Up until now, debugging Cluster SOA was limited to basic WCF/.Net style debugging with no cluster integration.
  - In Visual Studio 2010, an add-in for Cluster SOA enables the SOA Settings tab, allowing you to choose a head node, debug nodes and services, deploy runtime libraries and clean up automatically.

Profiling
- VS Profiler can offer insight into performance issues
- Shows a comparison report across multiple runs or builds so you can easily see the effect of your changes.

To know more about this subject read this S. Somasegar post.

Complex Event Processing (CEP) from Microsoft

NunoGodinho — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 19:15:59 GMT

Recently in a GASP (Grupo de Arquitectura de Software Português) we had a presentation regarding the need and the usage of CEP in solutions and the implementation presented was NESPER – Esper Complex Event Processing for .NET that is an Open-Source software available under GNU General Public License (GPL) v2. From what I saw there it’s very interesting and also not that difficult to use, but I always thought that it was strange that Microsoft was doing nothing regarding this subject that is so important in Event-Driven Architectures (EDA) or even called Advanced SOA.

Our wait is reaching an end, because Microsoft is already working on this and even already has a CTP version that can be downloaded here and that is called Microsoft® SQL Server® StreamInsight CTP2.

But what is Microsoft® SQL Server® StreamInsight CTP2?

“Microsoft® SQL Server® StreamInsight is a platform for the continuous and incremental processing of unending sequences of events (event streams) from multiple sources with near-zero latency. These requirements, shared by vertical markets such as manufacturing, oil and gas, utilities, financial services, health care, web analytics, and IT and data center monitoring, make traditional store and query techniques impractical for timely and relevant processing of data.
StreamInsight allows software developers to create innovative solutions in the domain of Complex Event Processing that satisfy these needs. It allows to monitor, mine, and develop insights from continuous unbounded data streams and correlate constantly changing events with rich payloads in near real time. Industry specific solution developers (ISVs) and developers of custom applications have the opportunity to innovate on and utilize proven, flexible, and familiar Microsoft technology and rely on existing development skills when using the StreamInsight platform.
Some of the key feature areas are:

Derive meaningful and relevant information from data/events streams through complex patterns. These patterns can be defined using a declarative query paradigm based on well-defined streaming semantics with LINQ as query language.

For the development of applications, adapters, and analytics, the user can rely on well-established and powerful development frameworks and tools such as .NET, LINQ, and Microsoft Visual Studio.

The platform integrates with various data sources and sinks through input and output adapters. The framework to build domain-specific adapters utilizes a .NET API to make adoption of the platform easy. Independence between adapters and queries facilitates seamless integration of real-time and historical analysis.

The platform architecture supports a variety of deployment options, from scenarios with a low-footprint embedded option to high-end server deployments.

A rich set of manageability features such as a management interface, a diagnostic interface and a debugging tool are provided as part of the platform. “ (from the Microsoft site)

To know more about the licensing terms of this new product, check here.

From what I’ve checked there are some interesting comments regarding this subject like this Richard Seroter’s post in the “Low Latency Data and Event Processing with Microsoft SQL Server “ part of that post.

Another comment about this is from Charles Young in this post.

I’ll investigate a little bit more and I’ll give more information’s afterwards.

Update .NET RIA Services

NunoGodinho — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:55:25 GMT

Recently I posted about .NET RIA Services that is a framework that is associated with Silverlight and will make the development of business applications easier.

So here a some more links in order to understand .NET RIA Services better.

Have a nice reading about .NET RIA Services

Windows Azure SDK July update

NunoGodinho — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 15:03:16 GMT

Windows Azure has a new SDK release that is now available. A very interesting new feature is the possibility of having several Roles per deployment, unlike what happened in earlier releases where we would only be able to have one Web Role and also a one Worker Role. Another interesting feature is now we have the possibility to chose between a normal ASP.NET Web Forms application and a ASP.NET MVC application as the Web Role.

Download the Visual Studio Tools here.

Download the Windows Azure SDK here.

More on Windows Azure Commercial Availability

NunoGodinho — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:14:51 GMT

Microsoft announced on 14th July the commercial availability of Windows Azure as I posted previously and now there are more information’s about the the same subject so I decided to write again on the subject.

Important elements to retain:

“During Community Technology Preview (CTP), services included in Windows Azure will be available without charge - subject to certain limits:

Total compute usage: 2000 VM hours

Cloud storage capacity: 50GB

Total storage bandwidth: 20GB/day“

How Consumption is Measured:

How Consumption is Measured?
- Windows Azure
  - SLA
    - “(…)we guarantee that when you deploy two or more role instances in different fault and upgrade domains your Internet facing roles will have external connectivity at least 99.95% of the time (…)”
  - Compute time, measured in machine hours
  - Storage, measured in GB
  - Bandwidth requirements (transmissions to and from the Azure datacenter), measured in GB
  - Transactions
- SQL Data Services
  - SLA
    - “(…) will maintain a “Monthly Availability” of 99.9% during a calendar month. “Monthly Availability Percentage” for a specific customer database is the ratio of the time the database was available to customer to the total time in a month. Time is measured in 5-minute intervals in a 30-day monthly cycle. (…)”
  - Web Edition Relational Database includes:
    - Up to 1 GB of T-SQL based relational database
    - Self-managed DB, auto high availability and backup
    - Auto Scale with pay-as-you grow
    - Best suited for Web application, Departmental custom apps.
  - Business Edition DB includes:
    - Up to 10 GB of T-SQL based relational database
    - Self-managed DB, auto high availability and backup
    - Auto Scale, Pay-as- you grow
    - Additional features in the future like auto-partition, CLR, fanouts etc.
    - Best suited for ISVs packaged LOB apps, Department custom apps
- NET Services
  - “(…)Uptime percentage commitments and SLA credits for .NET Services are equivalent to those specified above in the Windows Azure SLA. Due to inherent differences between the technologies, underlying SLA definitions and terms differ for .NET Services. Using the Service Bus module of .NET Services, customers will have connectivity between a customer’s service endpoint and our Internet gateway(…)”
  - Messages are charged to the customer in discrete blocks of 100,000 (“100k”) for each monthly billing period, meaning that
  - A customer who consumed 95,000 messages would be billed for 1x100k messages (plus the bandwidth used to send messages in or out).
  - A customer who uses 150,000 messages in a billing period would be charged for 2x100k messages (plus the bandwidth used to send messages in or out).
  - A customer who uses 20 million messages in a billing period would be charged

More information can be be found on the Windows Azure site.

Windows Azure Commercial Availability and Business Model announced

NunoGodinho — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 21:40:45 GMT

Just today in the WPC 2009 Microsoft announced the Commercial Availability and Business Model that will be used in Windows Azure and Windows Azure Service Platform, and so a brief info about the amounts involved.

Windows Azure
- Compute – 0.12 $ per hour
- Storage – 0.15 $ per GB by month stored
- Storage Transactions – 0.01 $ per 10K

SQL Data Services
- Web Edition – up to 1 GB relational Database – 9.99 $ per month
- Business Edition – up to 10 GB relational Database – 99.99 $ per month

.NET Services (includes Service Bus, Access Control)
- Messages – 0.15 $ per 100K message operations

Bandwidth across all three services will be charged:
- 0.10$ for inbound communications
- 0.15$ for outbound communications

Guarantee Availability:

at least 99,95 % for external connectivity
at least 99,9% for storage

Availability at launch will be Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, India, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, and the United States.

In the March 2010 timeframe we expect commercial availability to expand to Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, South Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, Puerto Rico, Romania, Singapore, and Taiwan.

More information's here.

Windows Azure Services Platform Changes

NunoGodinho — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:52:43 GMT

.NET Services July 2009 CTP Release

An one more CTP of Windows Azure was made available and this one has some interesting points like Windows 7 RC Support, easier setup, but of course the large amount of changes is in terms of connecting heterogeneous environments, in terms of:

Connect Applications and users
Interoperability by Default, very important since it supports now even more standards than before
Federation of Data, Messages, Identity and Access, that makes solutions more easier to interoperate between each other.

Of course this changes occur in the spectrum of the .NET Services Bus and Access Control, since the Workflow Services is now offline in order to incorporate more customer feedback.

Check more information here.

SQL Data Services

Now we can look at SQL Data Services as a real Database, and now give support for TSQL in SQL Data Services, of course in this release we only have a subset of TSQL, but this is a good way to go.

Of course there are differences between SQL Server on-Premise and SQL Data Services and some of they are:

“(…)

SDS is a multi-tenant system

The hardware resources are owned, hosted and maintained by Microsoft

SDS is a service

(…)”

So what’s in?

DDL
- FUNCTION
- INDEX
- PROCEDURE
- ROLE
- SCHEMA
- STATISTICS
- SYNONIM
- TABLE
- TRIGGER
- VIEW

DML
- SELECT/INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE functionality
- DML triggers
- JOINs
- Transactions
- A large number of built-in functions (aggregates, math, date and time, ranking, etc.)

Manageability
- Query tuning via SET SHOWPLAN and SET STATISTICS
- Index tuning via create and drop index
- Statistic management via UPDATE STATISTICS
- Information schema views and system catalog views (e.g., sys.databases)
- Local HA is automatically provided as part of the service.
- Upcoming version of SSMS and VS tools will work against SDS

Ok very nice v1 of SQL Data Services, check more in this post from the SQL Data Services Team.

Notes from the Windows Azure by David Chappell in ArCast.TV

NunoGodinho — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:18:44 GMT

I was viewing this ArCast.TV chapter about Windows Azure by David Chappell and I found that it would be interesting for me and for other people to get some notes about this, and so this post was created due to it.

We see in Cloud Computing two types of elements:

SaaS – Software as a Service

Examples:

SalesForce.Com
Microsoft

CRM Online (competitor of SalesForce.com)
Exchange Online
Sharepoint Online
and so on.

PaaS - Platform as a Service or Cloud Platforms

Competition in this space

Amazon (1st company in this space)

EC2 – we get Virtual Machines

Provide Virtual Machines in the Cloud that can be Windows or Linux, and after that those are your VM’s that you have to manage. Very different approach from Windows Azure.

Microsoft

Windows Azure - We give the Applications and the Virtual Machines are managed for us, without we ever need to manage a specific Virtual Machine

Components:

Windows Azure – Think of it as a Windows in the Cloud, of course this is not the same thing but is a nice way to make the analogy to it
Windows Azure Service Platform

.NET Services

Service Bus
Workflow Services
Access Control

SQL Data Services
Live Services

Google

AppEngine – Not like EC2 but more like Windows Azure

We give a Java or Phyton application and the will be place on VMs like the Windows Azure, but this is completely transparent for user
All about Supporting Web Applications
Not possible to have a Batch Service like in Azure
Only 10 seconds available to process Responses, or else the AppEngine will shutdown the Request

What’s the best? EC2, Windows Azure or AppEngine?

It depends on the application your building and the way you’ll build it because the approaches are different and so it’s important to get the most correct Technology to your problem.

ISV’s Strategy

In case of a Windows ISV then is normal to think about Windows Azure in order to address the SaaS space.

Enterprise Strategy

Often enterprises look at the cloud only as a way to save money, and move the current apps unchanged into the cloud, but that is not the purpose of Windows Azure since now this is not possible, but of course there will be attractive to move existing applications into the cloud.
Of course all depends on the applications, because it’s possible if we have a Web Application with a SQL Server Database, because in this case we can move the Web Application to the Windows Azure and the SQL Server Database into the SQL Data Services.

What this makes?

Application more manageable
More Scalable
More Extensible
and so on.

Get Started using Windows Azure in www.azure.com.

Windows Azure Service Platform – Worflow Services Changes

NunoGodinho — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:51:00 GMT

The team announced that several importance changes in the Workflow Services way of work and also that it will be taken offline for a while in order to proceed with all the changes.

Changes like the possibility of working in the Cloud Workflow Services the same way as in the .NET Framework 4.0:

“(…) An area of consistent discussion is the Microsoft .NET Workflow Service delivered via .NET Services, and how it relates to the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) in the .NET Framework. One of the comments that we’ve consistently heard about the .NET Workflow Service is that you want the Workflow Service to be built on .NET Framework 4‘s workflow engine. This is currently not the case, since we are prior to the release date of .NET Framework 4.

As the direct result of user feedback, we will hold off further releases of the Workflow Service until after .NET Framework 4 ships. Since there will be important changes to the Workflow Service before it goes to full production, we are planning to take down the existing Workflow Service as part of service improvements in the month of July. This means any solutions that currently rely on the Workflow Service will have to be modified on or before July 1 in order to continue functioning smoothly. (…)

More information’s here.