A topic that I think BizTalk professional find appealing in Windows Azure is the Service Bus (part of Windows Azure AppFabric). Service Bus provides secure messaging and connectivity capabilities that enable building distributed and disconnected applications in the cloud, as well hybrid application across both on-premises and the cloud.
One of new features is topics and queues. Clemens Vasters did a talk on Windows Azure Service Bus Topics and Queues during Windows Build and an advanced one, which you find on his blog.
Tracing messages and Azure Service Bus monitoring across multiple Queues and Topic Subscriptions get powerful toolsets and actionable insights to troubleshoot messaging issues.
You can work with this new feature through Windows Azure AppFabric SDK V1.5 – September 2011. The version 1.5 SDK includes an updated Service Bus assembly that includes support for durable, or “brokered” messaging features, such as queues, topics, and subscriptions. These features require the .NET Framework version 4.0. (Note: If you have a dependency on the .NET Framework version 3.5, you should download or continue to use version 1.0 of the AppFabric SDK.)
If you have virtual machine available or laptop following requirements are applicable:
- Account Requirements Before running the samples in the SDK, you must have one or more service namespaces. To create a Windows Azure AppFabric service namespace, you have to register or login Windows Azure Platform Portal.
- Runtime Requirements The Windows Azure AppFabric SDK samples are available as Visual Studio 2010 solutions (C# and VB) and require Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 higher to run. The SDK is supported on Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, and Windows XP operating systems. For Windows Server AppFabric integration, IIS7.5 is required.
