Host a Workflow Service with Windows Server App Fabric

Hosting workflow services in App Fabric is similar to hosting under IIS/WAS. The only difference is the tools App Fabric provides for deploying, monitoring, and managing workflow services. This topic uses the workflow service created in the Creating a Long-running Workflow Service. That topic will walk you through creating a workflow service. This topic will explain how to host the workflow service using App Fabric. For more information about Windows Server App Fabric, see Windows Server App Fabric Documentation. Before completing the steps below make sure you have Windows Server App Fabric installed. To do this open up Internet Information Services (inetmgr.exe), click your server name in the Connections view, click Sites, and click Default Web Site. In the right-hand side of the screen you should see a section called App Fabric. If you don’t see this section (it will be on the top of the right-hand pane) you do not have App Fabric installed. For more information about installing Windows Server App Fabric seeInstalling Windows Server App Fabric.

Creating a Simple Workflow Service

1. Open Visual Studio 2012 and load the OrderProcessing solution you created in the Creating a Long-running Workflow Service topic.

2. Right click the OrderService project and select Properties and select the Web tab.

3. In the Start Action section of the property page select Specific Page and type Service1.xamlx in the edit box.

4. In the Servers section of the property page select Use Local IIS Web Server and type in the following URL: http://localhost/OrderService.

5. Click the Create Virtual Directory button. This will create a new virtual directory and set up the project to copy the needed files to the virtual directory when the project is built. Alternatively you could manually copy the .xamlx, the web.config, and any needed DLLs to the virtual directory.

Configuring a Workflow Service Hosted in Windows Server App Fabric

1. Open Internet Information Services Manager (inetmgr.exe).

2. Navigate to the OrderService virtual directory in the Connections pane.

3. Right click OrderService and select Manage WCF and WF Services, Configure…. The Configure WCF and WF for Application dialog box is displayed.

4. Select the General tab to display general information about the application as shown in the following screen shot.

   

5. Select the Monitoring tab. This shows various monitoring settings as shown in the following screen shot.

   

   For more information about configuring workflow service monitoring in App Fabric see Configuring monitoring with App Fabric.

6. Select the Workflow Persistence tab. This allows you to configure your application to use App Fabric’s default persistence provider as shown in the following screen shot.

   

   For more information about configuring workflow persistence in Windows Server App Fabric see Configuring Workflow Persistence in App Fabric.

7. Select the Workflow Host Management tab. This allows you to specify when idle workflow service instances should be unloaded and persisted as shown in the following screen shot.

   

   For more information about workflow host management configuration see Configuring Workflow Host Management in App Fabric.

8. Select the Auto-Start tab. This allows you to specify auto-start settings for the workflow services in the application as shown in the following screen shot.

   

   For more information about configuring Auto-Start see Configuring Auto-Start with App Fabric.

9. Select the Throttling tab. This allows you to configure throttling settings for the workflow service as shown in the following screen shot.

   

   For more information about configuring throttling see Configuring Throttling with App Fabric.

10. Select the Security tab. This allows you to configure security settings for the application as shown in the following screen shot.

    

    For more information about configuring security with Windows Server App Fabric see Configuring Security with App Fabric.

Using Windows Server App Fabric

1. Build the solution to copy the necessary files to the virtual directory.

2. Right click the OrderClient project and select Debug, Start New Instance to launch the client application.

3. The client will run and Visual Studio will display an Attach Security Warning dialog box, click the Don’t Attach button. This tells Visual Studio to not attach to the IIS process for debugging.

4. The client application will immediately call the Workflow service and then wait. The workflow service will go idle and be persisted. You can verify this by starting Internet Information Services (inetmgr.exe), navigating to the OrderService in the Connections pane and selecting it. Next, click the App Fabric Dashboard icon in the right-hand pane. Under Persisted WF Instances you will see there is one persisted workflow service instance as shown in the following screen shot.

   

   The WF Instance History lists information about the workflow service such as the number of workflow service activations, the number of workflow service instance completions, and the number of workflow instances with failures. Under Active or Idle instances a link will be displayed, clicking on the link will display more information about the idle workflow instances as shown in the following screen shot.

   

   For more information about Windows Server App Fabric features and how to use them see Windows Server App Fabric Hosting Features

Reference: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff729689(v=vs.110).aspx

Add Google Cloud Platform as Backend with Android Studio

Android Studio lets you easily add a cloud backend to your application, right from your IDE. A backend allows you to implement functionality such as backing up user data to the cloud, serving content to client apps, real-time interactions, sending push notifications through Google Cloud Messaging for Android (GCM), and more. Additionally, having your application’s backend hosted on Google App Engine means that you can focus on what the cloud application does, without having to worry about administration, reliability or scalability.

When you create a backend using Android Studio, it generates a new App Engine application under the same project, and gives your Android application the necessary libraries and a sample activity to interact with that backend. Support for GCM is built-in, making it easy to sync data across multiple devices. Once you’ve generated the project, you can build and run your client and server code together, in a single environment, and even deploy your backend code right from Android Studio.

In this post we’ll focus on how to get started with the basic setup. From there it’s easy to extend the basic setup to meet your needs.

Preliminary setup
Before you get started, make sure you take care of these tasks first:

Download Android Studio if you haven’t done so already and set it up.
Make sure you have an application project set up in Android Studio. You can use any working app that you want to integrate with your backend, even a sample app.
If you’ll be running the app on an emulator, download the Google APIs Addon from the SDK Manager and run your app on that image.
Create a Google Cloud Platform project: In the Cloud Console, create a new project (or reuse an old one) and make note of the Project ID. Click on the words “Project ID” on the top left to toggle to the Project Number. Copy this as well.
Enable GCM and obtain API Key: In the Cloud Console, click on APIs and turn on the Google Cloud Messaging for Android API. Then, click on the “Register App” button on the top left, enter a name for the app, then select “Android” and “Accessing APIs via a web server”. In the resulting screen, expand the “Server Key” box and copy the API key.
1. Generate an App Engine project
In Android Studio, open an existing Android application that you want to modify, or create a new one. Select the Android app module under the Project node. Then click Tools > Google Cloud Endpoints > Create App Engine Backend.

In the wizard, enter the Project ID, Project Number, and API Key of your Cloud project.

This will create:

An App Engine project which contains the backend application source
An endpoints module with a RegisterActivity class, related resources, and client libraries for the Android app to communicate with the backend
The generated App Engine application (-AppEngine) is an Apache Maven-based project. The Maven pom.xml file takes care of downloading all the dependencies, including the App Engine SDK. This module also contains the following:

A Google Cloud Endpoint (DeviceInfoEndpoint.java, auto-generated from DeviceInfo.java) that your Android app will “register” itself through. Your backend will use that registration info to send a push notification to the device.
A sample endpoint, MessageEndpoint.java, to list previously sent GCM messages and send new ones.
A starter web frontend application (index.html in webapp directory) that will show all the devices that have registered with your service, and a form to send them a GCM notification.
The endpoints module (-endpoints) generated for you contains the classes and libraries needed by the Android application to interact with the backend:

A RegisterActivity.java class that, when invoked, will go through the GCM registration flow and also register itself with the recently created backend through DeviceInfoEndpoint.
Client libraries, so that the application can talk to the backend using an object rather than directly using raw REST calls.
XML files related to the newly created activity.
2. Add GCM registration to your app
In your Android application, you can call RegisterActivity whenever you want the registration to take place (for example, from within the onCreate() method of your main activity.

…
import android.content.Intent;
…

@Override
protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
…
Intent intent = new Intent(this, RegisterActivity.class);
startActivity(intent);
}
3. Deploy the sample backend server
When you’re ready to deploy an update to your ( the sample ) production backend in the cloud, you can do that easily from the IDE. Click on the “Maven Projects” button on the right edge of the IDE, under Plugins > App Engine, right-click and run the appengine:update goal.

As soon as the update is deployed, you can also access your endpoints through the APIs Explorer at http://.appspot.com/_ah/api/explorer.

For testing and debugging, you can also run your backend server locally without having to deploy your changes to the production backend. To run the backend locally, just set the value of LOCAL_ANDROID_RUN to true in CloudEndpointUtils.java in the App Engine module.

4. Build and run the Android app
Now build and run your Android app. If you called RegisterActivity from within your main activity, the device will register itself with the GCM service and the App Engine app you just deployed. If you are running the app on an emulator, note that GCM functionality requires the Google APIs Addon image, which you can download from the SDK Manager.

You can access your sample web console on any browser at http://.appspot.com. There, you will see that the app you just started has registered with the backend. Fill out the form and send a message to see GCM in action!

Extending the basic setup
It’s easy to expand your cloud services right in Android Studio. You can add new server-side code and through Android Studio instantly generate your own custom endpoints to access those services from your Android app.

Reference:http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2013/06/adding-backend-to-your-app-in-android.html

Start a first project for cloud application in visual studio

If you dont have Windows Azure Tools installed

1. Open Visual Studio 2010

2. On the File Menu, Click new, and then click Project. This opens the New Project dialog

3. In the New Project dialog under Installed Templates, expand the Visual C# node

4. In project type click Cloud. A project that says Enable Windows Azure Tools appears

5. In Name type for example EnableTools and click OK

6. A project with a web page will appear. Click the Download Windows Azure Tools button. Close Visual Studio. Download and installed them.

Once you have Windows Azure Toolsl installed

1. Open Visual Studio 2010

2. On the File Menu, Click new, and then click Project. This opens the New Project dialog

3. In the New Project dialog under Installed Templates, expand the Visual C# node

4. In project type click Cloud. A project that says Windows Azure Cloud Service appears

5. In Name Type for example Phonebook and click ok. The New Cloud Service Project is shown

If you are developing a Silverlight application with some services select the WCF Service Web Role. Rename it to something appropriate. In this example will be Phonebook.Web and Press OK

Your solution explorer will look like this:

Now you can developing your application. We already have an Silverlight application (that was migrated from VB6 to Silverlight) and some existing Silverlight Class libraries and Server Class Libraries (Class Libraries compiled with the full 4.0 Framework that will be used in the Server Project Phonebook.Web).

To add your Silverlight app. Right Click your server project (Phonebook.Web), then Properties and in Properties go to Silverlight Application and add Phonebook_Silverlight

When everything compiles Go to the Visual Studio Menu Bar, then Debug and then Start Without Debugging. That starts the local development environment on your computer.

You can now start testing and finish development of your application.

There is something you myst notice. Everytime you start the Cloud Service, the Azure test environment starts. By default it will start in http:\\localhost:81 but there was a previous Development Fabric it will start in http:\\localhost:81. This is important for Silverlight applications because you must configure your service end point to a particular port. Make sure that your ServiceReferences.ClientConfig file is in sync with the port that your DevelopmentFabric is using

Notes for Azure development:  Sometimes during development it might happen that you get more than one instance of the Development Fabric. This will affect your silverlight apps that rely on WFC services because each new instance starts on a new port. You can use the CSRun tool to stop all instances. If you have installed the Windows® Azure™ SDK to the default location, the CSRun tool can be found at C:\Program Files\Windows Azure SDK\v1.0\bin\csrun.exe.Then run C:\Program Files\Windows Azure SDK\v1.2\bin\csrun.exe /devfabric:shutdown

Publishing your Application

1. Navigate to Azure : https://windows.azure.com/Cloud/Provisioning/Default.aspx

2. On the page that says My Projects. When you are starting you will only see one project line. Click on it

3. Click on New Service

4. Click on Hosted Services

5. In the Create Service page, specify the service properties. In this example we will use Phonebook.Web for service label and a short description and press next.

6. Now your hosted service needs a public url. You must check availability. In this example we will use phonebook. Hosted Affinity tries to group your services and storages in the same area. We have a SQL Azure database that is hosted in North Central US, so we will create a new AffinityGroup and call it PhonebookGroup. Press Create

7. After Creation your Service is ready, and you can start the deployment.

8. In Visual Studio 2010 Right click your Cloud Service. And Select Publish…

9. The Publish Cloud Service Dialog appears. From the Credentials drop down list select <Add>

10. From the Create or select an existing certificate select <Create>.
10.1 In our example we will enter a FriendlyName for the new certificate of PhoneBook.

10.2 Click the “Copy the full path” link in the dialog. Then Open your browser and navigate tohttps://windows.azure.com/cloud/provisioning/ and click on your project

10.3 Now click on account.And in the Account page click on Manage My API Certificates

10.4 Click the Choose file and paste the full path you had copied before and then click upload

the installed certificate will be shown below.

10.5 Now navigate to AppFabric by clicking AppFabric on the left hand side. This will show your subscription ID. Select it and copy it. You have to pasted on the dialog box in Visual Studio on the textbox that says above it “Copy the subscription ID”

and name those Credentials PhonebookAccount and press  OK

11 You need a storage account. If you have not created one. Then you have to follow these steps:

11.1 Open your browser and navigate to https://windows.azure.com/cloud/provisioning/ and click on your project.

11.2 Now click on New Service

11.3 Now click on Storage Account

11.4 The Create Service Page is show. Enter a Service label and Description and Click Next

11.5 Select a name for the public URL, check its availability. And select Affinity.And press Create

12. Press OK on the Publish Cloud Service Dialog

13. Visual studio will upload your application to the cloud

While your application is in staging the only problem might be that the published URL changed and that might be conflictive for your ServiceReferences.ClientConfig.

Once your application is on Staging you can switch it to Production and your are ready for business.