Programming WCF Services, 3rd Edition

Programming the Service Bus

The service bus supports a WCF-friendly programming model by offering a set of dedicated bindings and behaviors. By and large, except for a few slight twists to the programming model, working with the relay service is no different from any other WCF service.

The service bus supports the core WCF features of reliable messaging, Message security and Transport security. Presently, it does not support propagation of transactions from the client to the service across the relay service.

The service bus features are available in the Microsoft.ServiceBus.dll assembly, mostly under the Microsoft.ServiceBus namespace.

Note

The service bus requires a separate download of the Windows Azure SDK, and will work on machines running .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0.

Relay Service Address

After opening an account with the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus, you need to use the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus administration website to create a service namespace (see Figure 11-3) and to select a connection payment plan.

Figure 11-3. Creating a service namespace

Note

It may be obvious, yet it is best to state that the service bus use is not free and, at the time of this writing, users (both clients and services) pay based on the maximum number of active concurrent connections per unit of time they maintain against the service bus.

A service namespace is the equivalent of a machine or domain ...