Introduction

Service Bus Connect is organized in two big modules:

• Developer SDK
  • Windows Azure Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs (EAI): Previously installed,wich means that installing the Azure Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs we can install the whole bundle needed to star working.
  • Microsoft WCF LOB Adapter SDK 2010: Its a requirement to use the Microsoft BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010.
  • Microsoft BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010: Needed if our app will send messages to LOB on-premises systems like SAP, SQL Server, Oracle e Siebel.
• Runtime & Tools
  • Windows Azure Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs (EAI): Previously installed,wich means that installing the Azure Service Bus EAI and EDI Labs we can install the whole bundle needed to star working.
  • Microsoft WCF LOB Adapter SDK 2010: Its a requirement to use the Microsoft BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010.
  • Microsoft BizTalk Adapter Pack 2010: Needed if our app will send messages to LOB on-premises systems like SAP, SQL Server, Oracle e Siebel.
  • Runtime Service: Runs on-premise to manage all comunications between local LOB systems and the EAI apps running in Service Bus.
  • PowerShell: Extensions to manage Service Bus Connect Runtime components.

As we can check some components are common in Developer SDK and Runtime&Tools, this is because in a normal business environment we assume that is going to exist a machine to develop the applications and another to have them running.

System requirements

• Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7 (Professional or +)
• .NET Framework 4 or superior.
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.
• Microsoft Visual C# .NET
• SQL Server
• LOB Server client libraries (To establish the comunications with the LOB target that we want. Net framework 4 install de SQL Server library automatically.
• Windows Server AppFabric 1.0 ou 1.1
• AppFabric needs:
  • Installing the KB980423 hotfix for windows in order to fix some AppFabric and IIS bugs. This must be done after the installation of appfabric
  • Uninstall any previous appfabric version
  • IIS 7.0 or superior
    • After installing go to : “Turn windows features on or off” (use windows search text box to do it faster) and activate:
      • IIS Metabase and IIS 6 configuration compatibility
      • Windows Authentication
  • Insure the following:
    • We are local network administrators
    • We have permission to create SQL server databases using dbo schema.
    • We have administration roles in IIS manager

Install Service Bus Developer SDK

•     Inicialize the process (.exe file)
•     Accept the user licence terms

• Select only the Developer SDK option

• Click install

• Finished

Install Service Bus Runtime Environment

• Inicialize installation (.exe file)
• Accept user licence terms

• Select only runtime & tools

• Service Bus Connec installation is inicialized

• Select installation type (Recommend Complete)

• Define the SQL Server  sysadmin credentials just as they are defined in Management Service Application Pool of IIS 7.0+

• Define a path to the SQL Server instance that the Service Bus is going to. It will be something like: <ServerName>\<InstanceName>

• Define a master key that will be used to encript the SQL Server database in use by the Service  (Random value - with significance)

• Select the security certificate to use in Service Bus connections.

Selecting the “Use SSL to secure the management servce” checkbox is in order to allow service bus to encript hhtp requests with SSL. Must be selected. We can use an existing certificate in IIS personal storage. I advise you to use this option in production data, while for testing we should create a new one. In this last option we just need to provide a certificate name. By default the connection port is 8080, we must check if the firewall has this port opened.

• Click install

• Service bus is installed

• Select finish and its done.

With this last step the process is finished and now we are ready to use Visual Studio to create our Service Bus EAI and EDI projects.

Creating a Visual Studio Project  

To create a new project you just need to: 

• Start Visual Studio

• Go to File->New-> Project

• In New Project, expand the C# option, go to Service Bus and select the option that best fits your demands, EDI project or EAI.

• Thats its.

The EAI environment to work on Visual Studio project is very similar to BizTalk 2010 however some functionalities wont be available in windows azure eai and edi labs, functionalities like generating a schema instance or validating a schema, so usefull in BizTalk to test our maps.

My suggestion is that if you have it, use BizTalk in paralell with your eai and edi project and with this have all functionalities by your side, this because testing bridges deployed in the azure cloud can be quite complicated because errors returned by the debug console are insuficient. To insure that errors are not in our chemas or maps we shoul use biztalk server.

This lack of funcionalities is because Azure EAI and EDI labs is still in a development stage, so i hope, this april version is must better than the first release so lets hope some other release brings us the full package.

Thanks,
Rui Pedro Machado

I was recruited by Sandro Pereira!