Microsoft Service bus: Queue, Topic and Event Hub

Selecting between Queue, Topic and Event Hub:

Usage:

Queue:

The scenario for queue is almost clear. Each message will be receive only by 1 receiver.

Of course it is possible to have multiple senders and multiple receivers, but the key point is that each message will receive only to one of those receivers.

A simple example of using queues is POS (point of sale) systems. POS terminals produce some data with different load/times and the inventory management system has to process all of them. The inventory system and the Terminals are loosely coupled there might be different softwares in each terminal, but there is only 1 receiver on the other end.

Topic-subscription:

This type of queue will be used when a single message has to be received by multiple receivers. It is also possible to differentiate between receivers so a group of receivers will only receive special types of messages.

The same as queues, there can be multiple instances of sender/receivers (multiple receiver per subscription) is available, but when a receiver reads data from 1 subscription, the others cannot read it again from the same subscription.

A simple example for this scenario is logging/Search. You want to have an instance of your data to use in a logging (search) system, but there has to be no relation between your realtime system with the logging system rationally.

The second scenario is also possible when you want to divide your messages into different lines. Like when you want to create a priority queue, or when a set of producers produce data for different systems. 

A simple example for this would be when you create data in a way and process them in different manners. For instance if there is an ordering system registers orders for different companies, then each company only needs to know about its orders.

Event-Hub:

Event Hub is simply a big stream of data. In a way, Event hub is the answer for the same issues that we addressed in the Topics. There are multiple consumers for each message, but the big difference is that Event-hub has been implemented for maximizing the throughput.

Each Topic in event hub will multiple partitions (normally between 4 to 16) and 1 instance of the client will read from each partition. If any of the clients goes down or there are less clients that the partitions, clients will compete against each other to access to more partitions.

A simple scenario for this solution is logging players actions in a popular game. 

How they Access data

Queue:

There is only 1 line of messages. Clients wait for a message and when a new message received, only one of them will process it.

Topic-subscription:

There is only multiple lines of subscriptions. Clients of a subscription wait for data and the same scenario as queues happens here. It is important to note that there is no relation between data in different subscriptions.

Event-Hub:

Clients are responsible for the data that they read. Meaning that it is possible for different clients to read a message multiple time. Messages would not remove from system until a reasonable time (some days), or depending on size of data. 

Each client will ask the hub for data after special message (check point) so it is very possible to see some messages has been read multiple time when a client restarts.

There is a concept of Consumer Groups which is almost the same as subscription in the topic base service bus.

How to manage failure

Topic-subscription:

There is 2 ways of receiving a message:

1- PeekLock (default)

Data will be read by the client and it will be locked for some time. When the client finished its work, it simply tells to the broker that and the broker will remove the item from queue.

If an error happens in the process client can abandon the message, therefore another client would read the same message later on in case that the error was temporary.

Also, if the client crashes in the middle of the process, the lock will be time outed and the message will be readable for another client.

2-ReceiveAndDelete

The broker doesn't care about the probable errors. It simply say the message will be read 1 times max!

Event-Hub:

Messages will be in the hub for a long time, so we can be sure that data will be read by clients at least 1 time. 

Each client will set a check point after a portion of time (or any rule that the clients decides) and if it restarts, it will continue reading from that checkpoint again. So the client has to take care of duplicates it self.

Installation Environment

Queue and Topic-subscription are available on both Microsoft Azure (cloud) and on premise but Event-Hub is only available on the Azure.

Read More

Azure Event Hubs overview

Create applications that use Service Bus queues

Azure Event Hubs vs Azure Messaging

Event Processor Host Best Practices

* Pictures for this post have been copied from here and here

Creating an email template engine - Part 1

Introduction

Sending emails is always one of the jobs that most customers want. Sometimes they want to send a welcome letter or some notifications or even a newsletter for the customers and so they ask for a module that they can use. Writing a method for sending emails takes less than 10 seconds these days (
SmtpClient.Send :) ) but creating a good content that can be flexible enough for the client to use and at the same time not much complex that make them suffer is a bit tricky. So In this post I will show you how to do it in a simple way.

Dividing the content

If you ask a client what content will you have in your emails, they will probably say everything is possible but they usually want to have the same design on most of their emails. It is a way to show that all of those emails are from the same company. Also, the one who writes the email content usually doesn't have any knowledge about the design, and you don't want to let him mess up with the CSS.
So in short you have these contents inside your email engine:
1- A HTML/CSS design form
2- Some placeholders for special data like customer name, Date, etc.
3- Some content that changes by the editor

Using MVC engine

Usually whenever we talk about HTML/CSS design, we think of how we do it using MVC, because as web developers that is what we do. By using MVC, we always separate our business from the view. Right? We never write anything inside the view so if the customer doesn't like the look of his pages, or if there was a change in theme or etc. it could be possible without us doing anything. And let me add that doing the front-end usually needs a good eye to see what is pretty and I myself don't have it :)
So, why not using MVC engine to create our email body? It is only a simple HTML page noting more.

Replacing the placeholders 

String processing is very easy in all programming languages, you just need to define strings that no one will use in a text. Something simple like having names with double hash in both sides like ##SomeName## will probably do the task. You can also use the simple string.Replace method but for the sake of both speed and flexibility I choose to work with RegEx library most of the time.

Implementing the code

Rendering the MVC view to string:

There is a very good post by Rick Strahl . He basically wrote a class to help him do some of the stuff easily:

public class ViewRenderer
{

protected ControllerContext Context { get; set; }

public ViewRenderer(ControllerContext controllerContext = null)
{
if (controllerContext == null)
{
if (HttpContext.Current != null)
controllerContext = CreateController().ControllerContext;
else
throw new InvalidOperationException(
"ViewRenderer must run in the context of an ASP.NET " +
"Application and requires HttpContext.Current to be present.");
}
Context = controllerContext;
}

public string RenderView(string viewPath, object model)
{
return RenderViewToStringInternal(viewPath, model, false);
}

public string RenderPartialView(string viewPath, object model)
{
return RenderViewToStringInternal(viewPath, model, true);
}

public static string RenderView(string viewPath, object model,
ControllerContext controllerContext)
{
ViewRenderer renderer = new ViewRenderer(controllerContext);
return renderer.RenderView(viewPath, model);
}

public static string RenderPartialView(string viewPath, object model,
ControllerContext controllerContext)
{
ViewRenderer renderer = new ViewRenderer(controllerContext);
return renderer.RenderPartialView(viewPath, model);
}

protected string RenderViewToStringInternal(string viewPath, object model,
bool partial = false)
{
ViewEngineResult viewEngineResult = null;
if (partial)
viewEngineResult = ViewEngines.Engines.FindPartialView(Context, viewPath);
else
viewEngineResult = ViewEngines.Engines.FindView(Context, viewPath, null);

if (viewEngineResult == null)
throw new FileNotFoundException("View did not find!");

var view = viewEngineResult.View;
Context.Controller.ViewData.Model = model;
string result = null;
using (var sw = new StringWriter())
{
var ctx = new ViewContext(Context, view,
Context.Controller.ViewData,
Context.Controller.TempData,
sw);
view.Render(ctx, sw);
result = sw.ToString();
}

return result;
}

public static T CreateController(RouteData routeData = null)
where T : Controller, new()
{
T controller = new T();


HttpContextBase wrapper = null;
if (HttpContext.Current != null)
wrapper = new HttpContextWrapper(System.Web.HttpContext.Current);

if (routeData == null)
routeData = new RouteData();

if (!routeData.Values.ContainsKey("controller") && !routeData.Values.ContainsKey("Controller"))
routeData.Values.Add("controller", controller.GetType().Name
.ToLower()
.Replace("controller", ""));

controller.ControllerContext = new ControllerContext(wrapper, routeData, controller);
return controller;
}
}

This class works very good giving you the opportunity to render your Razor view to HTML string.

Creating the viewModel
To work with MVC, you need to have a model to pass to the view and then in the view the designer knows what he has to create a good view.

Create a EmailTemplateBase so you can use it for different views depending on what you need to do and put your base stuff inside that. something like:

public class EmailTemplateBase
{
 public string Markup { get; set; }
public string BodyTextMarkup { get; set; }
}

Then you can inherit from it to have your special view or just use it as your view model.
Creating the Controller
Since we are using the .Net MVC, it is not possible to generate stuff without using a controller. So just create a simple controller:

public class mycontroller
{
public ActionResult Index(EmailTemplateBase model)
{
 return View(model);
}
}

Creating the view
It is the simple Razor MVC view and the viewmodel is the one that you've already created so I won't bother writing that :)

Replacing the name value tokens

I myself prefer to have this method in a helper class with extension methods so I can use it like text.ReplaceTokens(collection) but you can use it as a simple method without extentions.

public static string ReplaceTokens(this string text, NameValueCollection nameValueCollection)
{
foreach (var key in nameValueCollection.AllKeys)
{
 var replacementText = nameValueCollection[key] ?? "";
 text = Regex.Replace(text, key, replacementText, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
}
return text;
}

Creating the Email Body
To create the email body, you need to get the body markup from the DB where you put bodytext that you already took from the editor. also you need to have a list of namevalues that you want to replace somewhere. The namevalue collection has to have everything that is possible for the editor to use, but it has to be ok for him not using some or all of them.

public string CreateEmail(string bodyMarkupText, NameValueCollection tokenCollection)
{
 var url = "~/views/myPage/Index.cshtml";
 var model = new ReceiptViewModel()
 {
  BodyTextMarkup = bodyMarkupText
 };
 var bodyText = ViewRenderer.RenderView(url, model, null);

 return bodyText.ReplaceTokens(tokenCollection);
}

Now you just need to put the string as the email body and send the email to the user :)
Easy right?
Have fun :)

EPiServer for beginers, where is version history

Version history is one of the basic features of any CMS and of course EPiServer has complete support over all of your pages and commerce data.
You might say that everyone knows that EPiServer has this feature, but to be honest I didn't expect to find it inside the gadgets pane the first time, so I thought why not mentioning it for beginners :)


So to see the version history follow these steps:
1-  In the editors page find the settings button on top right of your pane.

2- click on add gadgets

3- select "versions" gadget from the list

Version history is available for you. You can see who has done changes to the selected page and if the latest changes has been published or not :)

Umbraco: Adding Gibe Link Picker to Macro parameters

Gabe link picker is one of the coolest add-ons  available for Umbraco 7. By installing it, you will have the option to select a link from inside your Umbraco project, or write the URL your self for an external link/mailto. You can read more about downloading/ using it from here.

However, one might want to use the link picker as macro parameter. To do so,go to your solution-> app_plugins>GabeLinkPicker>package.manifest

and then add isParameterEditor: true to the property editor. It should look like this:

Now if you open a macro type(or create one) and go to parameters tab, link picker will be one of your options as the parameter type.

umbracoRedirect The great hidden Property

I had a scenario that I wanted to redirect a page to another one in my Umbraco solution. I needed my page to be in my structure, but I didn't want it to show anything and I didn't want its url to be shown on the address bar. Then my friend Niels Damkjær showed me a good hidden feature in Umbraco.

There is no need to write code or do something hard. You just need to create a new field in your document type with alias umbracoRedirect and the editor has to be Content Picker. Thats all you need to do :) Something like this:

Then in your page you can select the tab for redirecting which is very cool. 

There is also a post in our Umbraco in here but you don't need to do it with those steps.

* After adding the field for the first time, it did not work for me, but when I restart my webserver it started to work fine.

* It uses the http 302 header to tel the browser to redirect to another page which is the temporary redirect command. 

Beginners guide to Umbraco 7: A guide for developers Part 1

Introduction

Some months ago, I've started to work with Umbraco. First I've tried to understand how it works and what do I need to know in order to implement good code with Umbraco, but actually it took more time than I've imagined.
The reason is Umbraco is very flexible which makes it easy to work for content managers, front-enders, and us (C# developers, back-enders, full-stack developers). You can easily implement lots of stuff inside Umbraco without needing any IDE and there is no need to implement a controller, service or anything. So if you are using it to implement a simple website that doesn't need that much code implementation or software structure, there is no need to read my post :)

As a developer why do I need Umbraco (or any CMS)?
If you want to develop some code on Umbraco, you probably have some user specific scenarios that you need to implement in your code and at the same time, you want to give some flexibility to the editors to use your structure and their creativity to make good content. For instance, recently I needed to create a rule engine in a project. It took me only a couple of hours to implement 4 different rule type, setting the consumers up and adding them to my pages. only 2 hours from A to Z :)

Where to start?
There are some videos in http://umbraco.tv/. Start from there and learn the structure of Umbraco and how it works. It is  Then come back and continue this post :)
You will learn:
*What is Umbraco's back office
*How to create content types
*How to create templates
*How to create content like pages
*How to set up surface controller ( a controller with access to Umbraco Stuff)
*How to set up a service

You will not learn:
*What is going on in Umbraco
*The project structures for different kind of projects
*Relating different stuff
*Working with Strongly Typed items! Yeap,

Beginners stuff in short
Installing
Creaete a new visual studio empty asp.net solution. Then go to  nuget package manager and add UmbracoCms.

This will add the Umbraco files. Now click F5 to run the project and then continue the wizard to create your stuff inside your DB. for the matter of your test project, you can go on with the DB file and when you want to publish your solution on test/production environment, you can easily set up the SQL server to use the DB like any other ASP.net project.

Umbraco Back office: 
The place that you can go and change stuff, create content type, create content and everything that is possible through a CMS.
You can go to your back office by adding an Umbraco to your sites url:
www.yoursitename.com/umbraco

Creating Content Type:
It is obvious from its name :). It is basically your model/class definition. There are 2 different types of content types,:

1- With  template: meaning that you want to show them to people like your pages.
2- Without template: when you don't want to show anything for that single item. like your settings, etc.

You can create content types by going to settings> content types and create your type. Just click on ... in front of the content types and select what you want.

Then add your fields to your type.  and click save.
For instance, let say that you want create a page to read my data from my text box in back office and write it to my start page. I will create a document type, and will call it something like "Test Doc Type".

Pay attention that Umbraco will change the alias of everything by removing the spaces and lower-casing the start character for the name.
Click on add property and then fill its name, then select the type of the box that you want to show to your user in back office (not the viewer!).  for instance you can select a rich text editor.

This will let the user to put some text with good rich text tools (tiny MCE to be more specific). you can select options and then save the form.

Editing the view 
Open your templates and find the template with the same name. (if you cannot see it, right click on the templates and click on reload).

This is your Razor View. You can do what ever you want in this view. You even don't need Visual studio to create/edit templates.

You have different option to working with views. One of them is working with "dynamic" data type in C#. Write this code inside your view and you will be fine:

@using Umbraco.Web 
@using Umbraco.Web.Mvc
@inherits UmbracoTemplatePage
@{
    Layout = null;
}

    < h1 >@(CurrentPage.YourFieldName != null ? CurrentPage.YourFieldName: "")< / h1 >

Easy right?
There is also one other way which is working with properties:

@using Umbraco.Web 
@using Umbraco.Web.Mvc
@inherits UmbracoViewPage
@{
    Layout = null;
}

   < h1 > @(Model.HasValue("YourFieldName") ? Model.GetPropertyValue("YourFieldName") : "")</ h1 >

Both codes work fine. and since there is no compilation, there is nothing that important to differentiate.
In later posts, I will show you how to work with strongly typed models inside Visual Studio (view/controller/services) but for now, set up your first page this way so you can see a sample page in Umbraco.

For additional data, you can take a look at this post by Dave Woestenborghs:
http://24days.in/umbraco/2015/strongly-typed-vs-dynamic-content-access/

Adding page to your site
Go to your content tab right click on "content" and click create to create a new page. Select your type and click create. Now give your page a title, and fill your field, then click save.
Now go to your base address to see your page.
Congratulations,  you've just created your first Umbraco site.

Relational Database Design:Simple rules for creating primary key

Introduction

Some years ago, I had some discussions with one of my friends about using defining the primary key. In the old days, as a software developer you had to implement your database first so most people though about how does the database works and how they can implement their solution in a suitable way.
In these days, developers use ORMs most of the time which is very good, but at the same time, they start to ignore how their code will implement inside the DB. So it is important to consider how your data will be translated by ORM and what will you have inside your DB afterwards.


Some Rules 
Well I think most people these rules, but there is no harm in mentioning them.

Primary keys should never change

Your RDBMS, uses keys to manage tables, sort them, find them and make relation between them and the most important key obviously is the primary key. If you ever try to change the value of the primary key, it will affect other related tables.

You cannot use a natural key or a key form other system

It is possible for natural keys to change, so you are obviously violation the first rule. You might say, oh someones ID will not change. But it is possible for the government the change the system of producing the ids then you have to change a lot of stuff.

They cannot have any formula

It is also a violation of rule 1, since you may need to change the formula in the feature.

The uniqueness has to be easy to maintain

Your RDBMS will prevent you from putting a duplicate inside your primary key, so if you are generating your key with a method that can create duplicates, you will have lots of problems that you cannot fix easily.

Use short but suitable key type

All RDBMS' use B+ threes as they index structure. They need to put your keys inside a table and fetch them so if you use a big key, your RDBMS can put less items inside a page and therefore, it has to access the disc more times  which is the bottle neck of every business application.

In SQL Server, number of index rows in each page can be calculated using this formula:
Index_Rows_Per_Page = 8096 / (Index_Row_Size + 2)

Which and size of each row equals:

Index_Row_Size = Fixed_Key_Size + Variable_Key_Size + Index_Null_Bitmap + 1 (for row header overhead of an index row) + 6 (for the child page ID pointer)

Considering the above, size of index row for int is
int (4 bytes): 4+3+1+6=14
Which means you can put 506 rows inside a page


What are choises

Considering the above, I will start with the worst one!

Never use (n)char or (n)varchar!

If you are using (n)char or (n)varchar for your key, I am almost sure that you are violating of all rules above, since no one will store a string key generated by his system :)
You will also need to worry about upper and lower case and the size of the key is also obviously big!

For a varchar(50) you have: (2+1+50)+3+6+1 = 63
Which means you have only 124 keys inside a page which is awful

Even for a varchar(20) you have: (2+1+20)+3+6+1 = 33
Which means you have only 231 keys inside a page which is still awful

And also, when you are creating your key, you will be vulnerable to concurrent requests. Like when 2 threads ask for a new key inside your application 

Less than 1% of the times use GUID

GUIDs are good data structure that can help you make sure that your key is unique. But at the same time, they are very big and they cannot be stored as a cluster index because there is no order in generating them.
The good fact about them is that they are easy to move because there would be no conflict. Also, some times, you have to create the key inside a code, then it is of course better to use a GUID to reduce the chance of generating the same key, but I would say, try avoiding them as you can.
For a GUID you have: (2+1+16)+3+6+1 = 29

Which means you have only 261 keys inside a page which is still bad


99% percent of the times use int with identity 

Int with the option of identity will help you to keep everything simple. It is very small and will take not much space. Use it with identity so you can make sure that the code will not generate a duplicate because of concurrent process. And it can also contain more than 2 billion different keys which is enough for most business systems.

Don't use small int or tiny int
Tiny int and small int are too small but their size doesn't have that much effect in comparison with integer.

For smallint (2 bytes): 2+3+1+6=12
which means you can put 578 rows inside a page which is 14% improvement but it can contain only 32,000 different values which is not that much

For tiny int(1 bytes): 1+3+1+6=11
which means you can put 622 rows inside a page which seems to be 7% improvement but since it can contain only 256 values :| you cannot use the other 366! :) 

Less than 1% of the times use Bigint
Ok! In very special projects, you might have a table that can contain more than 2 Billion rows! Like you are working for Amazon :) Then use bigint which I don't think happens for most developers in their professional life time :)

References:
Please find the formula for calculating size of rows, etc here in MSDN
And for size of variables for to this page also in MSDN