Tag Archives: AppFabric

Packt Publishing is celebrating 1000 titles giving away free access to its library

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Birmingham-based publisher Packt Publishing (that published our Windows Server AppFabric cookbook recently) is about to publish its 1000th title. Packt books are renowned among developers for being uniquely practical and focused, but you’d be forgiven for not yet being in the know – Packt books cover highly specific tools and technologies which you might not expect to see a high quality book on.

During the event, we will be inviting anyone already registered to www.packtpub.com, or who registers before 30th September 2012, to download any one of our eBooks for free. Packt is also opening its online library for an entire week for free to members, offering customers an easy way to research their choice of free eBook.

Get your choice of eBook for free. Find out more here.

Get your choice of eBook for free. Find out more here.

Packt is certain that in its 1000 titles there is at least one book that everyone in IT will find useful right away, and are inviting anyone to choose and download any one of its eBooks for free over its celebration weekend of 28-30th Sep 2012. Packt is also opening its online library for a week for free to give customers an easy to way to research their choice of free eBook.

GET YOUR CHOICE OF FREE BOOK HERE

Packt supports many of the Open Source projects covered by its books through a project royalty donation, which has contributed over $400,000 to Open Source projects up to now. As part of the celebration Packt is allocating $30,000 to share between projects and authors as part of the weekend giveaway, allocated based on the number of copies of each title downloaded.

Dave Maclean, founder of Packt Publishing:

“At Packt we set out 8 years ago to bring practical, up to date and easy to use technical books to the specialist tools and technologies that had been largely overlooked by IT publishers. Today, I am really proud that with our authors and partners we have been able to make useful books available on over 1000 topics and make our contribution to the development community.”

Windows Server AppFabric Cookbook has been published.

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Earlier in March I shared with you that the book that I have been working on since last year is available for pre-order.

AppFabric Cookbook

Today, it gives me a great pleasure to share with you that “Windows Server AppFabric Cookbook” has been published and is en-route to the book shelves near you. Of course you can get an e-book  (PDF, epub, packtlib, mobi) version right away for your favourite reader (Kindle, Nook etc.). Once you purchase the book, the source code is available for download as well.

Some highlights from the book :-

Elevator Pitch:

This book has over 60 recipes that cover Caching, Hosting, Monitoring and Security aspects of Windows Server AppFabric. This book also delves deep in to additional capabilities added by Microsoft AppFabric 1.1 for Windows Server.

Overview:

  • Gain a solid understanding of the capabilities provided by Windows Server AppFabric with a pragmatic, hands-on, results-oriented approach with this book and eBook
  • Learn how to apply the WCF and WF skills you already have to make the most of what Windows Server AppFabric has to offer
  • Includes step-by-step recipes for developing highly scalable composite services that utilize the capabilities provided by Windows Server AppFabric including caching, hosting, monitoring and persistence

What will you learn from this book? 

  • Download, install, configure and get up and running with Windows Server AppFabric quickly
  • Learn how to take advantage of distributed caching for providing high performance and elastic scale on-premise today
  • Take advantage of the enhanced hosting capabilities that Windows Server AppFabric has to offer including Auto-Start and a greatly simplified configuration experience
  • Enable support for long-running composite applications that are resilient and fault-tolerant while maximizing computing resources
  • Gain insight into the health of your composite applications seamlessly, both proactively and when something goes wrong
  • Learn how to scale Windows Server AppFabric by leveraging farm deployments

 Want to know more?

Heard over to Rick’s blog and read more about the book.

In the end…

I have worked very hard on this book for over a year and I have been fortunate to have Rick Garibay co-author it with me. We sincerely hope that this will be a valuable addition to your libraries and you will learn quickly and effectively on how to utilize Windows Server AppFaric’s capabilities to build scalable, distributed and loosely coupled enterprise scale applications.

Feedback:

I will be really glad to hear your feedback. So please drop me a note at hammad[dot]rajjoub[at]gmail.com or a mention @hammadrajjoub.

 

Top Rated Speaker/Session at Singapore TechDays

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Guess what? My Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus was the top rated session at Singapore Tech Days. Clemens Vasters will be happy to know this, I am sure about it ;) .

Here is the link for the video, if you want to watch it.

How to Run Middleware in the Cloud? Story of Windows Azure AppFabric from SpiffyTV on Vimeo.

Windows Azure AppFabric–The Middleware for the Cloud– Slides + Code Demo

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Singapore TechDays was super awesome. From the keynotes to the breakouts, rooms were jam packed. Developers and IT Pros were super enthusiastic. We got good positive feedback from one and all. So all in all it was a great event. Now we have to top it up next time around.

I did a session on Windows Azure AppFabric where I talked about how we can use AppFabric as a platform for middleware services. Since I was running the Platform track, I had the honor to introduce myself :) . I think overall the talk went well, I had 4 code demoes to share and I covered Caching and Service Bus for the most  part. All the code in demoes was based on SDK samples that come with Windows Azure AppFabric v 1.5 and can be downloaded (along with the SDK) here: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=27421

Slides are available here.  https://skydrive.live.com/view.aspx?cid=29B42AB82635B61D&resid=29B42AB82635B61D%216431

You can also view them via Slide Share:

Middleware in the cloud platform-v2

To learn more about AppFabric Service Bus please view the following sessions from Clemens Vasters.

I did some changes to the code (mostly configuration related) so that the demo does not prompt for namespace, issuer and token when connecting to the Azure AppFabric. Should you wish, you can download the code samples from here http://bit.ly/ohR1hO.

Speaking at Microsoft Singapore’s TechDays 2011

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If you are in Singapore and consider yourself a Developer or an IT Pro then this is the must attend event. We are covering number of topics from the Cloud Computing to the HTML5 and lots and lots in between. For a detailed agenda take a look here.

Amongst much more illustrious speakers you can find me here. If Cloud Computing is of interest to you and you want to know about some common messaging patterns for Middleware integration then I will definitely recommend you to attend my session.

How to Run Middleware in the Cloud? Story of Windows Azure AppFabric

Hammad Rajjoub, Architect Evangelist, Microsoft Singapore
IT Pro – Level 200

Don’t worry about the “IT-Pro” audience. This session is definitely aimed at Developers and Architects. Level will range between 200-300 depending on the folks we have in our conference room.

Also, i will be more than happy to discuss your integration scenarios offline as well.

Windows Server AppFabric v1.1 CTP–Now Available for download

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Windows Server AppFabric V1.1 CTP was recently released for download at MSDN. This is first major upgrade of Windows Server AppFabric, which is a set of integrated technologies that makes it easier to build, scale and manage Web and Composite Applications that run on IIS. This is something which is very close to my heart for obvious reasons.

For more details on Windows Server AppFabric read this.

Please note that it is recommended to have a clean install of this update.

Following are some of the key highlights of what’s changed in v1.1 of Windows Server AppFabric.

Read-Through/Write-Behind

This allows a backend provider to be used on the cache servers to assist with retrieving and storing data to a backend, such as a database. Read-through enables the cache to "read-through" to a backend in the context of a Get request. Write-behind enables updates to cached data to be saved asynchronously to the backend. For more information, see Creating a Read-Through / Write-Behind Provider (Windows Server AppFabric v1.1).

Graceful Shutdown

This is useful for moving data from a single cache hosts to rest of the servers in the cache cluster before shutting down the cache host for maintenance. This helps to prevent unexpected loss of cached data in a running cache cluster. This can be accomplished with the Graceful parameter of the Stop-CacheHost Windows PowerShell command.

Domain Accounts

In addition to running the AppFabric Caching Service with the NETWORK SERVICE account, you can now run the service as a domain account. For more information, see Change the Caching Service Account (Windows Server AppFabric Caching v1.1).

New ASP.NET Session State and Output Caching Provider

New ASP.NET session state and output caching providers are available. The new session state provider has support for the lazy-loading of individual session state items using Windows Server AppFabric v1.1 CTP Caching as a backing store. This makes sites that have a mix of small and large session state data more efficient, because pages that don’t need large session state items won’t incur the cost of sending this data over the network. For more information, see Using the ASP.NET 4 Caching Providers for Windows Server AppFabric v1.1 CTP.

Compression

You can now enable compression for cache clients. For more information, see Application Configuration Settings (Windows Server AppFabric Caching v1.1).

Multiple Cache Client Application Configuration Sections

A new dataCacheClients section is available that allows you to specify multiple named dataCacheClient sections in an application configuration file. You can then programmatically specify which group of cache client settings to use at runtime. For more information, see Application Configuration Settings (Windows Server AppFabric Caching v1.1).

Service Composition: Connecting On-Premise and Cloud Services

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I am invited to speak at IASA (International Association of Software Architecture) Singapore’s chapter evening on 10th of Feb 2011.
I will be talking about Service Composition using Windows Azure and Windows Server AppFabric, covering composition scenarios and capabilities on Microsoft platform using Windows Server AppFabric on-premise and Windows Azure AppFabric in the cloud.

I will be sharing the slides with you after the session.

For more details and back ground information on Windows Azure AppFabric and Windows Server AppFabric please visit:-

App fabric hybrid computing

Another presentation on Windows Server AppFabric

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I was invited to present Windows Server AppFabric at .Net Center Of Excellence (in Bank Of America) yesterday. The event was attended by 120+ developers and architects. I presented on Windows Server AppFabric where we talked about the architecture of Windows Server AppFabric and took a peek under the hood. Talked about how the hosting, management and caching works. Followed it with demoes on AppFabric Caching for Windows Server 2008.