AppFabric
Microsoft have announced two new Azure AppFabric CTPs.
May 2011 CTP will include Service bus enhancements including
- A more comprehensive pub/sub messaging
- Integration with the Access Control Service V2
- Queues based upon a new messaging infrastructure backed by a replicated, durable store.
See here for more details.
June 2011 CTP will include tooling to help with building, deploying and managing Windows Azure Applications including:
- AppFabric Developer Tools
- AppFabric Application Manager
- Composition Model
See here for more details
SQL Azure
The SQL May 2011 update contains the following:
- SQL Azure Management REST API – a web API for managing SQL Azure servers.
- Multiple servers per subscription – create multiple SQL Azure servers per subscription.
- JDBC Driver – updated database driver for Java applications to access SQL Server and SQL Azure.
- DAC Framework 1.1 – making it easier to deploy databases and in-place upgrades on SQL Azure.
See here for more details
When deploying an Access Control Service enabled web application from my development environment to Windows Azure I got the following error:
“Unable to find assembly ‘Microsoft.IdentityModel, Version=3.5.0.0. . .”
This had worked well when running in the development fabric on my machine so it was strange that it failed when deployed to Windows Azure. The reason why this file cannot be found is because on my machine it is installed in the GAC and it is not in the GAC when deployed in Azure. There is a simple way to fix this and it is by configuring a Start-up task in your ServiceDefinition.csdef file to install the Microsoft.IdentityModel assembly in the GAC. When a new instance is created within Windows Azure the start up task will be run to allow things to be installed into the virtual machine prior to running your application.
Steve Marx has written an introduction to Start-up tasks as well as a Tips, Tricks and Gotchas list.
This post explains how to create a Start-up task to add an assembly to the GAC.
I’ve been developing a web application that adds rules to the access control service when a user registers with my website. This was working well using the ACS in AppFabricLabs. When I ported across to ACS V2 in the live environment I kept getting an exception thrown whenever I tried to retrieve information via the management service api.
The exception details are
The remote server returned an error: (400) Bad Request.
Status = protocol error
After investigation by looking at the latest ACS code samples on MSDN I noticed that the protocol has actually changed in the Common assembly ManagementServiceHelper.cs class. Comparing the code and copying the changes across to mine fixed the problems.
I also noticed that today that AppfabricLabs was updated last night and now uses the same protocol as V2 Live so you will need to make these changes anyway.