Looking for a simple "WCF+ACS+Windows Azure" walkthrough - azure

I just spent the last two hours trying to walk through Microsoft's "Web Services and Identity in Windows Azure Exercise 1: Using Windows Identity Foundation with a WCF Service in Windows Azure" which purports to show how to host a secured WCF service in Azure.
Unfortunately, the walkthrough is ridiculously complicated with a whopping 151 steps. I've tried to complete the first part of the walkthrough 3 separate times but without any luck. I'm pretty sure I'm following the instructions exactly as written but there's so much subtlety in there (certificate setup, configuration chaanges, etc.) that it's likely that I'm missing a critical detail. In either case 151 steps is clearly an order of magnitude too difficult for mere mortals to follow.
Anyway, any help in this rgard would be greatly appreciated....

Check out the BidNow sample. That is a lot less complicated. http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/BidNowSample
Also, check out the samples on http://acs.codeplex.com/

There's a pretty good article walking through this in the December 2010 MSDN Magazine - the fact that it's titled "Re-Introducing the Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service" says a lot. You have to "re-introduce" things that no one understood or used when you "introduced" it. :)

Related

Azure Premier Support

I am an azure customer and i have had very bad experiences with the support so far. The developer support ($25/month) does not help with server outages because they take 8 hours to respond.. and since everyone is in india or some foreign country, that means all i get is an email, so i respond and wait another 8 hours for a response.. theres really know way to get an issue resolved any faster than 2 days it seems.
So my question, what are your personal opinions/experiences of the azure premiere support ($300-$1000/month) vs developer support? Is premiere support American engineers or still from india? Are the engineers more knowledgabe or are they the same as developer support but faster response time? And opinions would be helpful (i have the link to Microsoft's website, i want real info from people who have used it, not sales talk :) )
#kwill stated:
Every time you open a support incident the first communication you
receive from the support engineer will include their normal working
hours along with instructions on how to get support from another
engineer in a time zone that more closely matches yours.
From personal experience I can tell you this:
While this may very well be true, however, the first communication with the support engineer is the tricky part. The last ticket we created, after almost a week we're still waiting on that first communication with a support engineer which had expected response: 4h ; This is with a Gold support account.
I used all service plans (Developer > Premium), not only Azure but also a few Microsoft products (e.g. SharePoint). First of all, I'm not going to criticize Microsoft service supports but most of the paid tickets I raised give me NOT good experience.
Note that Developer support plan aims to help basic troubleshooting. I'm unsure if you are given an experienced engineer (or you are lucky enough) but the first level is support escalation engineer. I have no idea with this role but per my experience, people with this role have no developer background. They have skills in system, network and IT background enough to kind of understand what you encounter, and may answer general questions. In the loop of email also has a few people to monitor the case.
Standard Plan is quite similar to Developer plan. The difference is the support time (24 x 7) because Microsoft engages people from different shifting time zone. The role is still Support Escalation Engineer.
Professional Direct is quite more professional and has experience with the specific Azure service you encounter. This person may come from Premier Field Engineer (PFE) team who understands the service and also have good troubleshooting skills. You are asked as deep as possible so they can drill down to see the root cause.
Premier Support is more to consulting, architecture and code review. If you encounter system or application error when working with Azure, I don't recommend you to pick this plan. Go with Professional Direct plan is enough. Premier Support also has (but rarely) PFE guys engaged. Role engaged mostly is Consultant and Architect (not Cloud Solutions Architect).
My experience (mostly):
I was shared many long articles (from Microsoft Docs for Azure) which even had obsolete information, missing guidance or unclear points without indicating which I should pay attention to. And you know articles from here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ have so many issues (e.g. wrong API version, wrong configuration, invalid class,invalid directive, poor documented SDK sample....)
Developer and Standard Plan would not give much value. Slow response and no consensus (someone handles case then off business hour. Another one takes over and asks what is encountered again). Such a loop resulted waste of time.
Professional Support gives best practices of DOING, or DESIGN, without actually understanding the scenario. Every design has a reason and decision consideration. It's not just giving a documentation then recommend to follow.
Premier Support: it is good but don't really expect something so high. Sometimes your customer asks you to open Premier Support ticket to JUST get confirmation of valid architecture design or coding pattern from Microsoft.
Again, I really love Microsoft and would like to make it better by giving positive feedback.
Kris, the Azure support team is a 24x7 global team with engineers in every region of the world, including the United States. The US based team is the largest team since that is the time of day when the majority of incidents are submitted. All of the support plan options, severities and response times, and email/phone options are available at http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/plans/.
Every time you open a support incident the first communication you receive from the support engineer will include their normal working hours along with instructions on how to get support from another engineer in a time zone that more closely matches yours.
If you ever feel that you are not getting extremely high quality support you can always ask to speak to that engineer's manager, at which time a manager and an escalation engineer will review the incident to make sure you are getting everything you need.

examples sites that are large and run on Azure?

I'm looking for examples that show Azure scales up well. Does anyone know of any large, high-volume sites that run on Azure?
This type of question seems out of scope. That said, try looking at some Windows Azure case studies. This is where you're likely to find information on deployment details. Typically, deployment details aren't revealed to the general public, and those of us who do know about such deployments are usually bound by NDA's.

Windows Azure learning resources for individual developers.

I'm a single developer working on an idea I'd like to deploy to windows azure, however my main issue is I couldn't find any good learning resources for individual developers working alone. Does anyone have any recommendations? I've got the azure platform training kit, but from what I can tell, it's intended more for teams of developers learning at the same time.
As the prior owner, I can tell you that the platform training kit was targeting to anyone looking to learn about the platform - not just teams. If I was trying to get up to speed, I would sit down and start on the hands on labs, but I am biased towards the kit.
Cory keeps an updated list of 'Essential Windows Azure Resources' I would take a look at as well, there are some good items in it.
Take a look at the book "Azure in Action"
I found the Cloud cover show at channel 9 very helpful in my learning. Try it

Is Azure mature enough for actual production usage yet?

I toyed around with Azure in January this year and though it looked great in theory, I wasn't even able to deploy a simple dummy application due to various bugs I encountered.
I'd like to have another look, however I don't want to spend another two days in vain. If you have recently tried Azure, I would be interested to hear about your experiences.
Thanks,
Adrian
Yes, Xbox Live, Microsoft's BPOS suite, Live Messenger, and more all run on Azure.
If it can run Xbox Live, it can run your production app.
I'm using Azure for production stuff, and I've found it reliable, but pretty hard work. Hard work because:
The reference documentation is minimalist. Many functions are covered by a one sentence explanation and no examples.
While being much better than nothing, not everything that works on the development fabric will work on production.
When things go wrong (especially when a role keeps recycling) it can be hard to work out what the problem is, although remote desktop can help a lot.
Windows Azure works for us and allows to deploy rather complex business solutions with rather impressive auto-scaling capabilities.
We have already migrated all of the major projects towards Azure so far.
If still in doubt, take a look at 50+ case studies here.
Visual Studio 2010 added a BUNCH of functionality towards Azure development. I think it is enough to move Azure up to snuff for production apps.
However, if you don't have Studio 2010, I would wait till you can get it.
Another example that I like (I was personally involved a teeny weeny bit so I'm biased :) ). All Twitter/Facebook results on Bing.com are piped through an engine that runs on Windows Azure. It consumes multiple realtime feeds and surfaces them on Bing. You can do the math on the scale since it is crunching on all of Twitter's data and has been doing so for months

Are there any WCF Configuration Tools out there that will make the job easier

Are there any tools that go beyond requiring deep and intimate knowledge of every configuration option and nuance and will just setup an application with a minimum of inputs. Something like a wizard that produces the XML configuration based on those simple inputs. I don't care about security I just need the service to work. Ideally the tool would be able to setup IIS6 as well or at least with a given set of options it would produce a list of steps I needed to complete in IIS.
The Microsoft Service Configuration Editor is no better than direct editing of the XMl. I did find a web site that has the right idea but it wasn't able to solve my simple installation. (http://www.noemax.com/support/wcf_binding_configuration_wizard.html).
Is there anything out there that puts some convention into play over this mountain of configuration?
WCF configuration can look very daunting at first, indeed! I like that configuration wizard you linked to - why wasn't it good enough for you?
I don't know of any tool right now, that would solve your problem and help you figure out the proper configuration - it really boils down to learning the ropes and getting to know the ins and outs of it, I'm afraid.
Basically, what I've learned is : don't even start to imagine all the things you could do - try to focus on what you should do (and what you need).
Really, it boils down to about five scenarios as outlined in the excellent book "Programming WCF" by Juval Lowy:
intranet apps (use the NetTcp binding, Windows security)
internet apps (use the wsHttp binding if ever possible, username/pwd or certificates for security)
business-to-business apps (use whatever binding makes sense, secure by certificates)
queue message delivery (MSMQ)
no-security apps (legacy ASMX support, interop with "dumb" webservice clients)
Basically, pick the one you need, and from there, you're pretty much set as to what to do and how to do it. I would definitely recommend checking out Juval's book - excellent excellent resource!
So the question is: which category does your app fit in? Based on that, you can pretty much determine all that's needed from there.
Also, I watched two screencasts that really helped me get over the heaps of configuration options in WCF, and focus on what's really important:
Extreme WCF with Miguel Castro
Demystifying WCF with Keith Elder
Both gave me a good feel for what configuration is really needed - and what is just fluff.
Hope that helps some!
Marc

Resources