Cloud Computing with the Windows® Azure™ Platform

Chapter 10. Interconnecting Services with the .NET Service Bus

Chapter 9 introduced you to the .NET Service Bus (SB) in the context of the .NET Access Control Service (ACS). This chapter concentrates on using the SB and its various messaging patterns for traversing firewalls and Network Address Translation (NAT) devices while interconnecting Windows Azure and other applications via the Internet.

Note

The .NET Service Bus was formerly known as the Internet Service Bus when it was in Biz Talk Services' beta testing stage. Biz Talk Services was part of the Biz Talk Labs (http://labs.biztalk.net) incubation project and was renamed as the .NET Service Bus in 2008.

SB enhances the industry-standard Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) pattern by integrating enterprise applications with a bidirectional messaging fabric or bus designed specifically for service integration over the Internet (see Figure 10-1).

SB provides the following features or services:

• Federated identity and access control with .NET Access Control Services (ACS), Windows CardSpace and, optionally, the Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) and Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS)^[1]

• Consistent service and endpoint naming to simplify relaying or routing of messages

• Service registry to simplify discovery by NAT clients behind firewalls and other users

• A common messaging fabric, which offers multiple communication options, including publish/subscribe (pub/sub) or send/listen features

• Messaging with RESTful HTTP Request/Response, SOAP, ...