Comparing RPC With Messaging For Handling Spikes in Load. Part 4.

March 25, 2015

Part 4: Load testing the messaging integration style

In this four part series we have been looking at how different application integration styles handle spikes in load. In Part 1 we created and deployed a distributed system that used an RPC-based integration style. Our inventory application communicated with our purchasing application via a web service. In Part 2 we simulated a spike in load and caused the system fail. In Part 3 we updated the architecture from an RPC-based integration style to a messaging-based integration style. In this post, we are going to simulate the same spike in load and see how the messaging-based architecture copes.

Where are we now? We have updated our distributed system to use messaging as the communication mechanism between the applications. We have created an integration test that causes the inventory application to request stock replenishment from the purchasing application and we have created a load test that executes the integration test a thousand times and records the results. We have already tested our previous, RPC-based architecture and seen that it doesn’t hold up when there is more load than the hardware can handle. Read More…

Search Service Application stops working after adding a user to Administrators

March 13, 2015
sharepoint 2013 logoI came across an interesting bug while trying to add a user the Administrators of a Search Service Application in SharePoint 2013. When I tried adding the user, and clicking OK, and error is returned: “User does not have permission to perform this action” along with a correlation ID. Further investigation in the ULS logs revealed that the problem was SQL permission related: “The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object ‘proc_MSS_GetConfigurationProperty’, database ‘SPSearch’, schema ‘dbo’.” Additionally performing a search fails and logs the error: “There was an exception in the Database. Please retry your operation and if the problem presists, contact an administrator.” (The error message has a typo too).  Read More…

Webinar: AIS Azure Café – Azure and Messaging Patterns

March 11, 2015
Microsoft Azure

Please join AIS as presenter Kevin Aenmey discusses the Azure Service Bus as a messaging platform hosted in the cloud.  

Thursday, March 26, 2015 – 12:00 PM EST: REGISTER NOW

Azure Service Bus is a messaging platform hosted in the cloud. It provides different messaging capabilities that allow applications to communicate with each other whether those application are running in Azure or on-premises. The asynchronous messaging patterns enabled by Service Bus allows for convenient load leveling, load balancing and temporal decoupling. This talk will provide an introduction to asynchronous messaging with Azure Service Bus.  We will focus on what it is, why you would want to use it and a brief demonstration on a number of asynchronous messaging patterns implemented with Service Bus.

Register Today! 
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Searching CRM with SharePoint 2013 Enterprise

March 8, 2015
sharepoint 2013 logoIf you’ve ever had the need to add document management capabilities for your entities in CRM, you already know that CRM 2013 and CRM online rely on SharePoint for this functionality. This out of the box integration point is well documented and available for configuration in the CRM administrative interface. When set up, users can create, upload, view and delete documents in SharePoint locations that correspond to entity instances in CRM.

This post will discuss a different integration point – using search in SharePoint 2013 to expose CRM entity data. When setup properly, SharePoint 2013 can provide a robust, enterprise level search capability that can be tailored to your needs. Also, it seems to fill a current functionality gap in CRM that often requires a third party tool. Granted, you will need SharePoint 2013 Enterprise to realize this setup, but if this is available to you there should be no need to look anywhere else for search. Read More…

Interesting Features in ECMAScript 6

March 2, 2015
javasciptWhat is ECMAScript? ECMAScript is the standards name for the language many of us know as JavaScript. To envision the relationship between the two, think of ECMAScript as the language, and JavaScript as the dialect. There are other dialects – including JScript, ActionScript, etc. – that are still around. These days, developers commonly use the terms “ECMAScript” and “JavaScript” to mean the same thing – and more and more I see developers referring to implementing ECMA, ES, or ECMAScript.

Version six of the ECMAScript standard – code-named “Harmony” – will include some very interesting features that bring the experience of implementing complex apps on the client side closer to the experience server side developers know and love. Although some of these features have been previously available using a combination of patterns and third party plugins – ECMAScript 6 aims to make many commonly used features available natively.

I’ll walk through a few of my highlights below, but keep in mind version 6 is a large release that has been a long time coming (five years since the last version’s publication) and has a ton of functionality and improvements that will be well worth exploring. So the features sites below should not be seen as any more or less important that other ES6 features. Also, it’s worth noting that not all browsers will support every feature right away, but it appears as if the development teams behind the major browsers are very motivated to support as much of the standard they can – as quickly as possible. Read More…