Steve Spencer's Blog

This article aims to talk about Windows Store Notifications and the Windows Azure Notifications Hub and it will attempt to collate the various articles in a single place to help you build notifications into your app.

In order for you to get an understanding of Windows notifications look at the following article

Introduction to Push Notifications - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh913756.aspx. this provides a good overview of how push notifications work. To summarise the important bits.

1. Your store app needs to register with the Windows Notification Service to retrieve a unique URI for your instance of the app. Ideally you do this each time the app starts.

2. If the URI has changed then you need to notify your service that there is a new URI. Note: This URI expires every 30 days so your app needs to notify your service that this has been changed.

3. Your service sends notifications to this unique URI

You may have noticed above that I mentioned “Your service”. This is a critical piece of the notification mechanism and there are a number of ways to build this service. If you are not comfortable building backend services or you want something up and running quickly then mobile services might be the way to go for you. Here’s a tutorial that gets you started with mobile services http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/mobile/tutorials/get-started/

If, like me, you already have a source of data and a service then you will probably want to wire in notifications into your existing service. depending upon how many devices you have using your app may dictate the method that you get the notifications onto the users device. there are a number of options:

1. Local updates
2. Push Notifications
3. Periodic Notifications

Local updates require the creation of a background task that Windows runs periodically that calls into your data service, retrieves the data to put on the tiles and sends out tile notifications using the Windows Store app SDK

Updating live tiles from a background task - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/jj991805.aspx. Provides a tutorial on building a background task for your Windows Store App. this tutorial is for timer tasks but it can easily be used for push notification tasks. The bits that are likely to change are the details of the run method, the task registration and the package manifest.

Two more important links that you will require when you are dealing with notifications:

Tile template catalogue http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh761491.aspx

Toast template catalogue http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh761494.aspx

These two catalogues are important as they provide you with details of the xml you need for each type of notifications

Push notifications are sent through the Windows Notification Service to your device.

You can send notifications to your device from your service by creating a notification and sending it to each of the devices registered to your service via the Windows Notification Service.

If you have a large number of devices running your app then you will probably want to use the Windows Azure Notification Hub. This is the simplest way to manage notifications to your application as the notification hub handles scaling, managing of the device registration and also iterating around each device to send the notifications out. The Notification hub will also allow you to send notifications to Windows Phone, Apple and Android devices. To get started with the notification hubs follow this tutorial:http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/services/notification-hubs/getting-started-windows-dotnet/

The nice feature of the notification hub is that is makes the code needed to send notifications simple.

NotificationHubClient hub = NotificationHubClient.CreateClientFromConnectionString("<your notification hub connection string>", "<your hub name>");

var toast = @"<toast><visual><binding template=""ToastText01""><text id=""1"">Hello from a .NET App!</text></binding></visual></toast>";

await hub.SendWindowsNativeNotificationAsync(toast);

Compare this to the code to send the notification without the hub:

byte[] contentInBytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(xml);

HttpWebRequest request = HttpWebRequest.Create(uri) asHttpWebRequest;

request.Method =

"POST";

request.Headers.Add(

"X-WNS-Type", notificationType);

request.ContentType = contentType;

request.Headers.Add(

"Authorization", String.Format("Bearer {0}", accessToken.AccessToken));

using (Stream requestStream = request.GetRequestStream())

requestStream.Write(contentInBytes, 0, contentInBytes.Length);

In addition you will need to retrieve the list of devices that are registered for push notifications and iterate around the list to send this to each device. You will also require a service that receives the registrations and stores them in a data store. You need to manage the scalability of these services. On the down side the notification hub is charged per message which means the more often you send notifications the greater the costs where as hosting a service is load based and the notifications will be sent out slower as the number of devices increases but this would generally be a lower cost. If you also take into account that you will need to send out notifications for each tile size and that will increase the activity count on the notification hub for each tile size (currently 3).

[Update: You can send out a single notification for all tile sizes rather than 3 separate notifications by adding a binding for each tile size in your xml see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh465439.aspx for more details]

It is possible to send custom notifications to your app which can be received directly in the app or by using a background task. These are called Raw notifications. In order to receive raw notifications in a background task your app needs to be configured to display on the start screen. However Raw Notifications can be received in your app whilst it is running when it is not configured to display on the start screen. A Raw Notification is a block of data up to 5KB in size and can be anything you want.

The following code will send a raw notifications using the notifications hub:

string rawNotification = prepareRAWPayload();

Notification notification = new Microsoft.ServiceBus.Notifications.WindowsNotification(rawNotification);

notification.Headers.Add(

"X-WNS-Cache-Policy", "cache");

notification.Headers.Add(

"X-WNS-Type", "wns/raw");

notification.ContentType =

"application/octet-stream";

var outcome = await hub.SendNotificationAsync(notification);

In order to receive Raw Notifications in your app you need to add an event to the channel you retrieve from the Windows Notification Service:

var channel = awaitPushNotificationChannelManager.CreatePushNotificationChannelForApplicationAsync();

channel.PushNotificationReceived += channel_PushNotificationReceived;

And then handle the notification received:

privatevoid channel_PushNotificationReceived(PushNotificationChannel sender, PushNotificationReceivedEventArgs args)

{

 

switch (args.NotificationType)

{

 

    casePushNotificationType.Raw:

 

        ReceiveNotification(args.RawNotification.Content);

 

    break;

}

}

Note: the content of the notification is the block of data that you sent out.

Sample background task for Raw Notifications is here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/jj709906.aspx

Guidelines for Raw Notifications can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh761463.aspx

Periodic notifications also require a service but the application periodically calls into a service to retrieve the tile notifications without needing to process the source data and then create the notifications locally. details about how to use periodic notifications can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/windows/apps/jj150587

In summary Windows Store application notifications can be send to the app in a variety of ways and the mechanism you choose will depend upon how quick and how many notifications are required. Push notifications allow notifications to be sent whenever they are ready to send. Periodic and Local updates are pull notifications and require a service to be available to pull the data from. All of these will require some sort of service and all have an associated costs. The notifications hub is a useful tool to assist with notifications and it can be useful to manage the device connections as well as sending out notifications to multiple device type. It does however come at a cost and you need to work out whether it is a cost effective mechanism for your solution.

After a good night in Hereford at the Smart Devs User Group and my presentation at DDDNorth

Here are the links from my presentation and some from questions asked:

Gadgeteer: http://www.netmf.com/gadgeteer/

Signal-R: http://www.asp.net/signalr/

Web API: http://www.asp.net/web-api

The Signal-R chat example can be found at: http://www.asp.net/signalr/overview/getting-started/tutorial-getting-started-with-signalr

Windows Azure Pricing Calculator : http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/?scenario=full

Signal-R Scaleout using Service bus, SQL Server or Redis: http://www.asp.net/signalr/overview/performance-and-scaling/scaleout-in-signalr

The Windows Azure Training Kit: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/other-resources/training-kit/

Gadgeteer Modules: http://proto-pic.co.uk/categories/development-boards/net.html

Fex Spider Starter Kit: http://proto-pic.co.uk/fez-spider-starter-kit/

In addition to these links I have more from my presentation at the DareDevs user group in Warrington

It is possible to drive a larger display from Gadgeteer using a VGA adapter. You use this the same way that the Display-T35 works using the SimpleGraphics interface for example.

VB eBook - Learn to Program with Visual Basic and Gadgeteer

Fez Cerberus Tinker Kit: https://www.ghielectronics.com/catalog/product/455 

I’ve just finished presenting my talk on “Successfully Adopting the Cloud: TfGM Case Study”and there were a couple of questions that I said I would clarify.

1. What are the limits for the numbers of subscriptions per service bus topic. the answer is 2000. further details can be found at:http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ee732538.aspx

2. what are the differences between Windows Azure SQL database and SQL Server 2012. The following pages provide the details:

Supported T-SQL: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee336270.aspx

Partially supported T-SQL: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee336267.aspx

Unsupported T-SQL: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee336253.aspx

Guidelines and Limitations: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff394102.aspx

3. Accessing the TfGM open data site requires you to register as a developer at: http://developer.tfgm.com

Thanks to everyone who attended I hope you found it useful.

Whilst working on a project in which we we using the Topics on Windows Azure Service Bus, we noticed that our subscription queues (when viewed from the Windows Azure Management portal) didn’t seem to be empty even though our subscription queue processing code was working correctly. On closer inspection we found that our subscription queue was empty and the numbers in the management portal against the subscription were messages that had automatically faulted and had been moved into the Dead Letter queue.

The deadletter queue is a separate queue that allows messages that fail to be processed to be stored and analysed. The address of the deadletter queue is slightly different from your subscription queue and is the form:

YourTopic/Subscriptions/YourSubscription/ $DeadLetterQueue

for a subscription and

YourQueue/$DeadLetterQueue for a queue

Luckily you don’t have to remember this as there are helpful methods to retrieve the address for you:

SubscriptionClient.FormatDeadLetterPath(subscriptionClient.TopicPath, messagesSubscription.Name);

To create a subscription to the deadletter queue you need to append /$DeadLetterQueue to the subscription name when you create the subscription client

Once you have this address you can connect to the dead letter queue in the same way you would connect to the subscription queue. Once a deadletter brokered message is received the properties of the message should contain error information highlighting why it has failed. The message should also contain the message body from the original message. By default the subscription will move a faulty message to the dead letter queue after 10 attempts to deliver. You can also move the message yourself and put in sensible data in the properties if it fails to be processed by calling the DeadLetter method on the BrokeredMessage. The DeadLetter method allows you to pass in your own data to explain why the message has failed.

The DeadLetter can be deleted in the same was as a normal message by calling the Complete() method on the received dead letter message

Here is an example of retrieving a dead lettered message from a subscription queue

var baseAddress = Properties.Settings.Default.ServiceBusNamespace;
var issuerName = Properties.Settings.Default.ServiceBusUser;
var issuerKey = Properties.Settings.Default.ServiceBusKey;

Uri namespaceAddress = ServiceBusEnvironment.CreateServiceUri("sb", baseAddress, string.Empty);

this.namespaceManager = new NamespaceManager(namespaceAddress, 
                           TokenProvider.CreateSharedSecretTokenProvider(issuerName, issuerKey));
this.messagingFactory = MessagingFactory.Create(namespaceAddress, 
                           TokenProvider.CreateSharedSecretTokenProvider(issuerName, issuerKey));
var topic = this.namespaceManager.GetTopic(Properties.Settings.Default.TopicName);
if (topic != null)
{

    if (!namespaceManager.SubscriptionExists(topic.Path, 
                                  Properties.Settings.Default.SubscriptionName))
    {
        messagesSubscription = this.namespaceManager.CreateSubscription(topic.Path, 
                                            Properties.Settings.Default.SubscriptionName);
    }
    else
    {
        messagesSubscription = namespaceManager.GetSubscription(topic.Path, 
                                            Properties.Settings.Default.SubscriptionName);
    }
}
if (messagesSubscription != null)
{
    SubscriptionClient subscriptionClient = this.messagingFactory.CreateSubscriptionClient(
                                            messagesSubscription.TopicPath,
                                            messagesSubscription.Name, ReceiveMode.PeekLock);

   // Get the Dead Letter queue path for this subscription
    var dlQueueName = SubscriptionClient.FormatDeadLetterPath(subscriptionClient.TopicPath,
                                             messagesSubscription.Name);

   // Create a subscription client to the deadletter queue
    SubscriptionClient deadletterSubscriptionClient = messagingFactory.CreateSubscriptionClient(
                                           subscriptionClient.TopicPath, 
                                            messagesSubscription.Name + "/$DeadLetterQueue");

    // Get the dead letter message
    BrokeredMessage dl = deadletterSubscriptionClient.Receive(new TimeSpan(0, 0, 300));

   // get the properties
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    sb.AppendLine(string.Format("Enqueue Time {0}", dl.EnqueuedTimeUtc));
    foreach (var props in dl.Properties)
    {
        sb.AppendLine(string.Format("{0}:{1}", props.Key, props.Value));
    }
    dl.Complete();
}

Black Marble are participating in the Microsoft MVP Cloud OS Community Week. During the week commencing 9th September there will be daily events held at Cardinal Place, Victoria, London. Richard and I along with other MVPs will be participating in the event on Friday 13th Sept which is titled “Enables Modern Business Applications”. The sessions will include developing services for modern apps, case studies, ALM and much more. Further details and registration can be found at: http://mvpcloudosweek-eorg.eventbrite.co.uk/.

Registration for this specific day can be found at: http://enablemodernapps-es2.eventbrite.co.uk/?rank=1

Scott Guthrie made an announcement on his blog about changes to the way Windows Azure is priced

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2013/06/03/windows-azure-announcing-major-improvements-for-dev-test-in-the-cloud.aspx

The main two changes that will affect most people are

1. Per minute Billing
2. No charge for turned off VMs

Prior to this announcement you would be charge for Windows Azure usage in hour blocks of time which meant that if you used 5 minutes of compute time or 55 minutes of compute time you were charged for the full hour, similarly if you used 1 hour 5 minutes you were charged for 2 hours. This change now means that you will be charged for 5 minutes, 55 minutes and 1 hour 5 minutes, matching your actual usage, This doesn’t affect you if you have a fixed usage but for those who take advantage of the easy scalability of Windows Azure this could have a significant impact on your costs.

By far the biggest cost saving is the ability to turn off a VM and not be charged for its usage. Prior to this change you would need to undeploy the solution in order to not be charged and just turning it off would still incur charges, This allows for systems that are in staging, dev/test scenarios, training systems etc to be left deployed and configured but turned off without being charged. Saving both time and money. I have a number of customers where this change alone should half their monthly bills as they have systems running that are not needed all the time but can not be undeployed because of the time taken to deploy and configure them. The ability to turn off VMs will provide both customers and developers with flexibility whilst reducing costs. Always a good thing.

I’ve had a number of people ask me about adding a custom domain to a Windows Azure Website and it is a straight forward task providing you have access to edit your DNS records. the first thing to note is that custom domains can’t be configured on the Free instances but on Share and Reserved you get an option to configure the domain.

Clicking this option brings up the next screen

when you enter the domain name you want to use. You need to fill this in otherwise you will not redirect to your site.

You now need to configure you DNS. I set an CName record up for “www” which I pointed to my website. You need to make sure that the website you configure in your DNS and the domain name you configure in the website match up.

When I change the website back to the free instance I then get 404 errors

If you have been wondering why you would use Windows Azure Queues that are part of the Storage Service or the queues that are part of the service bus then the following MSDN article will give you full details.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh767287(VS.103).aspx

Recent changes in pricing make the choice even harder. There are two specific areas I like that makes the service bus queue a better offering than the storage queues:

1. Long connection timeout
2. Topics

The long connection timeout means that I don't have to keep polling the service bus queue for messages. I can make a connection for say 20 minutes and then when a message is added to the queue my application immediately returns the data, which you then process and then reconnect to the queue to get the next message. After 20 minutes without a message the connection closes in the same way it does when a message is received except that the message is null. You then just reconnect again for another 20 minute. The makes your application a more event driven application rather than a polling application and it should be more responsive. You can make multiple connections to the queue this way and load balance in the same way as you would when polling queues.

The following code shows how you can connect with a long poll.

 1: NamespaceManager namespaceManager;

 2: MessagingFactory messagingFactory;

 3: Uri namespaceAddress = ServiceBusEnvironment.CreateServiceUri("sb", "yournamespace", string.Empty);

 4:  

 5: namespaceManager = new NamespaceManager(namespaceAddress, TokenProvider.CreateSharedSecretTokenProvider("yourIssuerName", "yourIssuerKey"));

 6: messagingFactory = MessagingFactory.Create(namespaceAddress, TokenProvider.CreateSharedSecretTokenProvider("yourIssuerName", "yourIssuerKey"));

 7:  

 8: WaitTimeInMinutes = 20;

 9:  

 10: // check to see if the queue exists. If not then create it

 11: if (!namespaceManager.QueueExists(queueName))

 12: {

 13:     namespaceManager.CreateQueue(queueName);

 14: }

 15:  

 16: QueueClient queueClient = messagingFactory.CreateQueueClient(queueName, ReceiveMode.PeekLock);

 17:  

 18: queueClient.BeginReceive(new TimeSpan(0, WaitTimeInMinutes, 0), this.ReceiveCompleted, messageCount);

When a message is received or the 20 minute timeout expires then the ReceiveCompleted delegate is called and a check is made to see if the message is not null before processing it.Once processed another long poll connecting is made and the process repeats. The beauty of this method is that you don’t have to manage timers or separate threads manage the queue.

Topics are private queues that are subscribed to by consumers and each private queue will receive a copy of the messages put into the original queue and are all manages individually. Topics can also apply filters to the message so that they only receive messages that they are interested in.

Further details of Service bus topics and queues

http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/how-to-guides/service-bus-topics/

The Windows Azure Training Kit June 2012 release is out now with the following features:

• 12 new hands-on labs for Windows Azure Virtual Machines
• 11 new hands-on labs for Windows Azure Web Sites
• 2 new hands-on labs demonstrating Windows Azure with Windows 8 Metro-style applications
• Several new hands-on labs for Node.js and PHP using Mac OS X
• Updated content for the latest Windows Azure SDKs, tools, and new Windows Azure Management Portal
• New and updated presentations designed to support individual sessions to a full 3 day training workshops

This is a follow on post from my introduction to Windows Azure Websites and shows you how you can synchronise your website in TFS with Windows Azure.

One of the biggest problems with the way you deploy applications to  Windows Azure is that minor changes (e.g .markup, content and styling) require a redeploy to publish the changes. Windows Azure Websites solves this problem by allowing you to synchronise your website with Team Foundation Server or GIT.

In this post I will show you how easy it is to manage your websites in version controlled environment using Team Foundation Service. Team Foundation Service is a cloud hosted version of Team Foundation Server.

This works by creating a continuous integration build with your source code that will automatically deploy your website after successful build each time code is checked in.

This is configured as follows:

Click the “+” button at the bottom of your portal screen and select Website –> Quick Create

Enter the url details and click Create Web Site

An Empty site has now been created.

This site now needs to be link to your Team Foundation Service. Click on the website in the dash board and then select “Setup TFS Publishing”. you will also note that you can use a GIT repository as well as TFS.

Enter your TFS url (or create a new one), then click Authorize Now.

this connects through to your TFS service and setup the CI build that will deploy your application to the cloud.

The TFS site will now be displayed asking you to authorize the connection

You now need to pick the website you want to deploy. If you haven’t create a site yet then you need to go to ~Visual Studio, create your site and check it in to TFS.

You have now linked your web site in TFS to the Azure Website. This will take a few moments to synchronise.

Your website has not been deployed yet. You need to make a change and then check the changes in

upon check-in the build is started

When the build is complete the new website is deployed

You can also revert back to older versions of the web site by clicking the desired version and then clicking redeploy:

This will start the redeploy of the older version:

A new build is kicked off using the same changeset details as the original deployment. Once the build is complete the  web site is reverted back. this whole cycle only took a few minutes so it is a lot faster than the redeploy mechanism you had previously.

TFS and Windows Azure provide a good mechanism for version controlling your website. Adding application life cycle management to any software development activity is a good thing.