Azure Functions or WebJobs? Where to run my background processes on Azure?

14th of September, 2016 / / 14 Comments

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Introduction

Azure WebJobs have been a quite popular way of running background processes on Azure. They have been around since early 2014. When they were released, they were a true PaaS alternative to Cloud Services Worker Roles bringing many benefits like the WebJobs SDK, easy configuration of scalability and availability, a dashboard, and more recently all the advantages of Azure Resource Manager and a very flexible continuous delivery model. My colleague Namit previously compared WebJobs to Worker Roles.… [Keep reading] “Azure Functions or WebJobs? Where to run my background processes on Azure?”

Interacting with Azure Web Apps Virtual File System using PowerShell and the Kudu API

30th of August, 2016 / / 11 Comments

Introduction

Azure Web Apps or App Services are quite flexible regarding deployment. You can deploy via FTP, OneDrive or Dropbox, different cloud-based source controls like VSTS, GitHub, or BitBucket, your on-premise Git, multiples IDEs including Visual Studio, Eclipse and Xcode, and using MSBuild via Web Deploy or FTP/FTPs. And this list is very likely to keep expanding.

However, there might be some scenarios where you just need to update some reference files and don’t need to build or update the whole solution.… [Keep reading] “Interacting with Azure Web Apps Virtual File System using PowerShell and the Kudu API”

Monitoring Azure WebJobs Health with Application Insights

11th of August, 2016 / / 11 Comments

Introduction

Azure WebJobs have been available for quite some time and have become very popular for running background tasks with programs or scripts. WebJobs are deployed as part of Azure App Services (Web Apps), which include their companion site Kudu. Kudu provides a lot of features, including a REST API, which provides operations for source code management (SCM), virtual file system, deployments, accessing logs, and for WebJob management as well. The Kudu WebJobs API provides different operations including listing WebJobs, uploading a WebJob, or triggering it.… [Keep reading] “Monitoring Azure WebJobs Health with Application Insights”

When to use an Azure App Service Environment?

5th of April, 2016 / / 44 Comments

Introduction

An Azure App Service Environment (ASE) is a premium Azure App Service hosting environment which is dedicated, fully isolated, and highly scalable. It clearly brings advanced features for hosting Azure App Services which might be required in different enterprise scenarios. But being this a premium service, it comes with a premium price tag. Due to its cost, a proper business case and justification are to be prepared before architecting a solution based on this interesting PaaS offering on Azure.… [Keep reading] “When to use an Azure App Service Environment?”

Implementing a WCF Client with Certificate-Based Mutual Authentication without using Windows Certificate Store

23rd of November, 2015 / / 9 Comments

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) provides a relatively simple way to implement Certificate-Based Mutual Authentication on distributed clients and services. Additionally, it supports interoperability as it is based on WS-Security and X.509 certificate standards. This blog post briefly summarises mutual authentication and covers the steps to implement it with an IIS hosted WCF service.

Even though WCF’s out-of-the-box functionality removes much of the complexity of Certificate-Based Mutual Authentication in many scenarios, there are cases in which this is not what we need.… [Keep reading] “Implementing a WCF Client with Certificate-Based Mutual Authentication without using Windows Certificate Store”

Connecting to MS SQL Server with MuleSoft

9th of October, 2015 / / 14 Comments

MuleSoft provides an extensive list of connectors which come in handy when implementing integration solutions. In many integration scenarios, we need to connect directly to a database to get or update data. MuleSoft provides a database connector which allows JDBC connectivity with relational databases to execute SQL operations such as Select, Insert, Update, Delete, and Stored Procedures.

However, the database connector only provides out-of-the-box connectivity with Oracle, MySQL, and Derby databases. To connect to Microsoft SQL Server, additional steps are to be followed.… [Keep reading] “Connecting to MS SQL Server with MuleSoft”

Better Documenting your BizTalk Solutions

18th of March, 2015 / / 19 Comments

The BizTalk Documenter has been available for many years on Codeplex for different BizTalk versions, starting with 2004 all the way to 2013 R2. The Documenter for 2004, 2006, 2006 R2 and 2009 can be found here. Some years later, a version for BizTalk 2010 was created. Last year, MBrimble and Dijkgraaf created a newer version which also supports BizTalk 2013 and 2013 R2. They did a great job; all improvements and fixes are listed here.… [Keep reading] “Better Documenting your BizTalk Solutions”