After talking about Windows Azure Service Bus EAI EDI Labs or Windows Azure BizTalk Services over the 11 months all over around Europe I decided that my last session was last Wednesday, 16 January in BizTalk Summit 2013 in London and I will only return to this topic when a new release is published with new features.
So I decided to publish all my demos that I have been using in my sessions, but first, let but first let’s talk about how and what I have to do to start playing with these features.
Download Windows Azure Service Bus EAI & EDI – April 2012 Release
The first thing, of course, is to download the Windows Azure Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs SDK – April 2012, you can do this by accessing http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=235057.
Windows Azure Service Bus EAI & EDI Labs provides integration capabilities for the Windows Azure Platform to extend on-premises applications to the cloud, provides rich messaging endpoints to process and transform messages, and helps organizations integrate disparate applications, both on cloud and on-premises.
The resources available are organized in four resources:
- Windows Azure Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs SDK
- Install the Visual Studio project templates for creating an Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) project or an EDI Project (Artifacts).
- Provides the tools to develop and deploy EAI Bridges and Artifacts.
- Windows Azure Service Bus Connect
- Developer SDK: This is required to create an Enterprise Application Integration project that can include a Service Bus Connect component.
- Runtime and Tools: This is required to manage connectivity between the cloud applications and the on-premises LOB applications. Also, includes PowerShell cmdlets to manage the Service Bus Connect Runtime components.
- Samples
- This zip will provide a variety of samples that will help you begin to understand these new functionalities like Exploring Bridge Features, Exploring Transforms Features, Order Processing and EDI samples, Tools, and so on.
- Microsoft Edi XSD Templates
- Zip file that contains all EDI Schemas that you can use in your projects.
System Requirements
You must have the following components installed on the computer where you are installing Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs SDK:
- Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7 (Professional or Ultimate)
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 RTM or SP1(Premium, Professional, Ultimate), .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, .NET Framework 4 and Microsoft Visual C# .NET (minimum requirement)
- SQL Server 2008 and higher versions are supported, Windows Server AppFabric 1.0 or 1.1 (for Windows Server), IIS 7.0 or higher
Installing Windows Azure Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs
Before you begin to install this features you must make sure that no instances of Visual Studio are running when you run the setup! And if you have an earlier version of the SDK (December 2011 release) installed on the computer, you must remove it before starting the setup.
Install the Windows Azure Service Bus EAI & EDI – Developer SDK
Download the installer (WindowsAzureServiceBusEAI-EDILabsSDK.msi) suitable for your computer architecture (32-bit or 64-bit) and run it to start the installation wizard.
- On the Welcome page, read the information and click “Next”.
- Accept the license agreement, and then click “Next”.
- Check only the “Developer SDK” checkbox option and then click “Next”.
- Click “Install” to start the installation.
- Click “Finish”
The following components are installed as part of the Developer SDK:
- Windows Azure Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs (EAI): Installs the Visual Studio templates and plug-ins for creating EAI applications.
- Microsoft WCF LOB Adapter SDK 2010: Required by the Microsoft BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010.
- Microsoft BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010: Required if your EAI application sends messages to on-premise line-of-business (LOB) systems including SAP, SQL Server, Siebel, Oracle Database, or Oracle E-Business Suite.
Install the Windows Azure Service Bus EAI & EDI – Runtime and Tools
Download the installer (WindowsAzureServiceBusEAI-EDILabsSDK.msi) suitable for your computer architecture (32-bit or 64-bit) and run it to start the installation wizard.
- On the Welcome page, read the information and click “Next”.
- Accept the license agreement, and then click “Next”.
- Check only the “Runtime & Tools” checkbox option and then click “Next”.
- When “Runtime & Tools” is selected, a new installation wizard starts that installs Service Bus Connect Runtime
- Click “Next” on the Welcome screen.
- Accept the End-User License Agreement and click “Next”
- On the Choose Setup Type screen, select the installation type “Complete”
- Typical and Complete are the same option and install both Runtime and Management Tools.
- Using the Custom option, you need to specify which components you want to install.
- In the Management Service Application Pool screen, you need to define an identity that has sysadmin rights on the SQL Server and has Internet access and then click “Next”.
- The Service Bus Connect application pool in IIS will be created under this identity.
- On the Configure Store Database page, enter the SQL Server name that will be used to store the Service Bus Connect management service configuration information and then click “Next”.
- The Service Bus Connect setup creates a database with minimal objects to store information about the LOB Targets configured within the runtime environment. You can either use an existing SQL Server instance or set up a new one.
- On Configuration Store Master Key screen, you must define the master key password. This master key encrypts the database used by Service Bus Connect. Click “Next”
- On the Management ServiceBus Connect Setup screen, you need to enter the certificate bindings to be used by the Service Bus Connect website and then click “Next”:
- Use SSL to secure the management service: Check this to encrypt the HTTP requests with SSL.
- Use an existing SSL certificate: Select this option to select an existing certificate from the Certificates personal store. The certificate should be from a trusted certificate authority. Use this option with “production” data.
- Create a new self-signed certificate: Select this option to create a self-signed certificate. This option is to test SSL functionality of the Runtime.
- Port: Enter the port number to be used by the Service Bus Connect website. By default, this should be port 8080. Confirm this port is opened in your firewall.
- Click “Install”
- And when the installation completes, click “Finish”.
The following components are installed as part of Runtime & Tools:
- Windows Azure Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs (EAI): Installs the Visual Studio templates and plug-ins for creating EAI applications.
- Microsoft WCF LOB Adapter SDK 2010: Required by the Microsoft BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010.
- Microsoft BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010: Required if your EAI application sends messages to on-premise line-of-business (LOB) systems including SAP, SQL Server, Siebel, Oracle Database, or Oracle E-Business Suite.
- Runtime Service: Runs on-premise to manage the communication between the on-premises LOB systems and the EAI application running on the Service Bus.
- PowerShell: Extensions to manage the Service Bus Connect Runtime component.
The Service Bus Connect feature allows an application in the cloud to communicate with a Line-of-Business (LOB) system on-premise, in your network, behind your firewall. Using the LOB adapters in the BizTalk Adapter Pack (BAP), a Service Bus Connect application can execute LOB operations to the following on-premise LOB systems:
- Microsoft SQL Server
- Oracle Database
- Oracle E-Business Suite
- SAP
- Siebel eBusiness Applications
But in order to take advantage of this functionalities, we need to configure the ServiceBus Connect Servers in order to create and use the LOB Targets.
Configure the ServiceBus Connect Servers – Add your Management URL
The ServiceBus Connect Server Management URL is a path to the ManagementService.svc WCF service hosted in IIS.
- Create an Enterprise Application Integration project in Visual Studio.
- In Server Explorer, right-click ServiceBus Connect Servers and click Add Server.
- This prompts for the ServiceBus Connect Server Management URL.
- Click OK
With the Management URL configured we are able to create LOB in ServiceBus Connect Servers in Visual Studio.
Create a Windows Azure CTP Service Namespace
After we installed the Developer SDK and Runtime and Tools in our environment, we need to create a new service namespace in the Windows Azure CTP subscription (You can create one or more service namespaces within your Windows Azure CTP subscription)
To create a new service namespace:
- Open an Internet browser and visit the Windows Azure CTP Management Portal.
- Log on to the Windows Azure CTP Management Portal using your Windows Live ID.
- Once you signed, on the lower left-hand side of this page, click “AppFabric”.
- To create a new service namespace, expand Services in the tree on the left-hand side, click Service Bus
- if you get an error window, ignore it, click ”Close”
- On the toolbar of the page, under Service Namespace category at the top of the page, click “New”
- If you do not have an existing subscription, one will be created for you and a default name will be assigned.
- In the Create a new Service Namespace box, type a name for your new service namespace. Note that each service namespace must be globally unique so that it can be identified by the service. Verify that the namespace you specified is available.
You might have to wait several minutes as the system provisions resources for your account. Once the Namespace is activated, you will able to expand the namespace and see that it is active.
We are now able to create and deploy Enterprise Application Integration project in the cloud. In the next couple of daysI will publish the source code of my demos.
Also, get insights on improving Azure Service Bus monitoring and messaging issues.
Nice article. I really hope that they soon will realease a updated version of this Azure feature. It would be a great addition to the things they already have on Azure½