Back in May 2009, I had a lengthy chat with Ewan Fairweather who was a technical reviewer on my first book. We talked about the host of products that Microsoft had either released or planned to release, and how it seemed increasingly difficult for an architect to keep up with such a constant stream of new offerings. It's one thing to read a press release or a whitepaper and get the marketing spin on a product, but it's something else to truly grasp their ideal use cases and challenges. Ewan and I agreed that it would be a useful exercise to try to craft around a dozen enterprise IT use cases and evaluate which Microsoft product is truly the best fit for each scenario. Thus, a book idea was born.
To make an educated choice on which product should form the foundation of your solution architecture, you need to have an accurate picture of the strengths and weaknesses of the product, as well as see it in action. In this book, we will give you a solid overview of the core technologies in the Microsoft application platform, evaluate a range of business problems, and use a consistent decision-making process to choose the right technology to implement a solution and actually build the solution using the ideal product.
I started down a path of creating a fancy flowchart which, based on a distinct set of choices, could direct you to a proper Microsoft application platform technology. However, decisions about the core technology of a solution cannot be driven from a single fork of a flowchart. How do you realistically eliminate a product from consideration by asking a single question such as "is batch processing needed?" Decision point? There are a myriad of additional factors to consider prior to eliminating BizTalk Server or embracing SQL Server Integration Services for batch processing, for instance. Instead of a single, rigid decision matrix or single flowchart, we chose to create a decision framework that takes into account the essential areas of interest when comparing a product against the needs of your project.
In the first part of the book, we do a short dive into the core technologies demonstrated in the book. These "primers" provide a background about WCF/WF, Windows Server AppFabric, BizTalk Server, SQL Server, and the Windows Azure platform. Each primer will tell you a bit about what a product is for and how to use it. You should then have enough working knowledge to thoroughly digest the rest of the book.
The rest of the chapters follow a specific structure. Each chapter starts with the description of a fictional, but realistic, customer use case. We then offer some background on the customer and find out about the problem they wish to solve. Following the use case, you will find an evaluation of the type of pattern that best fits the customer's requirements. We then consider and evaluate multiple solutions against our decision framework. After the best choice is made, the remainder of the chapter describes the actual construction of a solution.
I have put together a great team of authors that bring a diverse set of experiences with the Microsoft platform stack. We started our effort with extensive discussions about common problems we come across on projects and which topics might be of most interest to our readers. We ended this first phase of evaluation with dozens of pattern candidates, and through prioritization, bartering, and a little pleading, we finally narrowed it down to the thirteen you find here. There are clearly many many more "common" problems that we all encounter each day, but we hoped to identify ones where the product choices weren't always clear.
The biggest challenge with a book like this is balancing the inherent bias that we technologists have towards products that we are most familiar with. It is apt then, that this is the same problem that architects and developers regularly have on their own projects. For example, if you are a SQL Server specialist, then most problems look like they can be solved with a SQL Server-based solution. Much like good project teams where multiple viewpoints can help create the appropriate solution architecture, our authors constantly challenged each other to ensure that expertise in one area did not cloud our judgment in another.
Chapter 1, Solution Decision Framework, outlines where to locate solution requirements and how to consistently evaluate key dimensions of a solution prior to selecting an underlying technology.
Chapter 2, Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow 4.0 Primer, provides a background about WCF/WF technologies and typical scenarios to use WCF and Windows Workflow.
Chapter 3, Windows Server AppFabric Primer, explains the capabilities of Windows Server AppFabric and its components.
Chapter 4, BizTalk Server Primer, describes what BizTalk Server is, when to use it, and how to build a simple solution.
Chapter 5, SQL Server and Data Integration Tools Primer, contains a broad overview of the SQL Server products that address data integration and data management.
Chapter 6, Windows Azure Platform Primer, has an introduction into Microsoft cloud technologies including Windows Azure, SQL Azure and Windows Azure Platform AppFabric.
Chapter 7, Simple Workflow, covers a use case that involves aggregating data from multiple sources and presenting a unified response.
Chapter 8, Content-Based Routing, looks at how to effectively transmit data to multiple systems that perform similar functions.
Chapter 9, Publish-Subscribe, addresses a scenario where a message must be reliably sent to multiple endpoints.
Chapter 10, Repair/Resubmit with Human Workflow, builds a process for easy human interaction with failed messages inside a system.
Chapter 11, Remote Message Broadcasting, demonstrates a scenario where traditional polling solution is augmented to support real-time updates.
Chapter 12, Debatching Bulk Data, explains how to take giant sets of data and insert them into databases for analysis.
Chapter 13, Complex Event Processing, addresses website click stream analysis and creating actionable business events.
Chapter 14, Cross-Organizational Supply Chain, demonstrates how to build a supply chain solution to integrate systems in a purchase order scenario.
Chapter 15, Multiple Master Synchronization, covers methods for arriving at a single version of truth from multiple, often conflicting master data sources.
Chapter 16, Rapid Flexible Scalability, looks at creating temporary environments that can be easily created and contracted as needed.
Chapter 17, Low Latency Request-Reply, contains a retail scenario where high performing query services are established.
Chapter 18, Handling Large Session and Reference Data, discusses usage of distributed caching to scale large workloads in web applications.
Chapter 19, Website Load Burst and Failover, looks at leveraging the Windows Azure platform's elastic resources and high service level for building a low cost solution.
Chapter 20, Wrap Up, is a brief summary of the key points addressed in the book.
The following software products are used in this book:
BizTalk Server 2010 and ESB Toolkit 2.1
.NET Framework 4.0 (which includes Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation)
SQL Server 2008 R2
StreamInsight 1.0
Windows Server AppFabric
Windows Azure Platform
Visual Studio 2010
This book is for the busy architect, developer, or manager who needs to advance their knowledge of the Microsoft application platform space. If you last evaluated the Microsoft platform offerings in 2009, then you are woefully out-of-date. Don't worry, it happens to the best of us. I'd like to hope that flipping through this book will increase your confidence when trying to figure out a consistent way to choose which Microsoft product to use.
If you are a developer looking to transfer your skills into architecture, then this book can help you take a big-picture approach to pattern detection in use cases and apply a broad range of evaluation criteria to product selection. Alternately, you may just want to get a short primer on the latest Microsoft technology.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "Data is stored in the custom region June6_UserReviews of the ReviewsCache".
A block of code is set as follows:
SyncOrchestrator orchestrator = new SyncOrchestrator(); orchestrator.LocalProvider = source; orchestrator.RemoteProvider = destination; orchestrator.Direction = SyncDirectionOrder.UploadAndDownload; //bidirectional sync orchestrator.Synchronize();
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
SEND ON CONVERSATION @RecvReqDlgHandle MESSAGE TYPE [//SOAbook/SampleQueue/ReplyMessage] (@ReplyMsg); END CONVERSATION @RecvReqDlgHandle; END SELECT @ReplyMsg AS SentReplyMsg; COMMIT TRANSACTION; GO
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Right-click on the BizTalk project and select Properties".
Note
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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