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This is the 4th episode in the "Getting Started with Service Bus" series and today I'm discussing the first steps with Queues, some of the key functionality, and how to send to and receive from a queue.  

Today I woke up thinking that talking about Identity and Access Control and how your strategy around that affects you (web-) app's architecture without going too deeply into the security lingo that usually comes with it. Here's the 40 minute result. I start with HTTP's "native" authentication model RFC 2617 and how that's universally bad, with both Basic and Digest authentication having issues Digest being, ironically worse for the overall security strategy. Then I dive into why models that use tokens (or cookies) are better in terms of security and scalability and explore a range of variations amongst those.

In this 3rd episode of the "Getting Started with Service Bus" series, and for a while the last one that doesn't focus on the developer API, I'm looking at Paolo Salvatori's Service Bus Explorer. Paolo works as one of our experts in the globally distributed Windows Azure Customer Advisory Team and has been building this tool based on what he and the customers needed in terms of extra tooling in the project context. The tool has been a great source of inspiration for the Visual Studio tooling that I explained in the last Getting Started episode and Paolo keeps adding new features with a new version coming out soon. Here I'm discussing Paolo's August 2012 release that coincided with the Service Bus 1.0 for Windows Server release and works for Service and Server. Aside from being a useful tool for what it does, it's also a good code sample for how to interact with the Service Bus management API, so you might browse through the code even if you've already made the first steps with Service Bus.

Today I'm sharing an ad-hoc, single-take whiteboard discussion on "push" and "pull" communication patterns. There's a lot of talk in the industry on push (see push notifications) and pulling/polling (long polling vs. web sockets and messaging), so I'm dissecting that space a bit and explore push vs. pull and various pattern nuances from UDP upwards. 

In this second part of the "Getting Started with Service Bus" series, I explain how to get at the SDK, give a brief tour of the Visual Studio tooling installed by the SDK, tell you how to use NuGet to add references to the Service Bus assembly, and give a brief overview of the NamespaceManager class, which provides programmatic access to Service Bus namespaces and allows creating, updating and deleting entities like Queues, Topics, and Subscriptions. 

With this post (entry? segment?) I'm going to start a series of screen casts for folks who are new to Service Bus or haven't yet had the time to use any or some of it features. In this first post I'll take you on a 15 minute tour through the new portal sections for Service Bus.  If you're a Service Bus veteran you will likely be familiar with the features of the new portal and may want to use the 15 minutes to make your solutions awesomer (sic!), but if you are just getting started, this will help you creating a new namespace and creating the first set of resources like Queues and Topics. I'm also going to show you how to get to the ACS portal where you can manage (also see Securing Service Bus with ACS) access control protection for the resources of a Service Bus namespace.

In this video I'm spilling the beans on some of the internal structures we set up for Service Bus for you to consider and potentially adapt as your building out your own global services on Windows Azure - Environments are deployment zones for separate purposes and Scale Units are sets of resources and that are bundles together in configuration and form independent units of deployment and management whose size is informed by the required scale.

Welcome to my new video blog here on Channel 9!