Microsoft has published my five part introduction to the basics of partitioning and layering a software application. While there is a great deal of discussion about it in the literature on intermediate and advanced topics on software development, I have never found a good introduction that discusses the essentials. So I wrote one.

You can find it on the Microsoft Ramp Up site.

Commodity hardware has gotten very cheap. Hence it often makes more economic sense to spread the load in the cloud over several cheap, commodity servers, rather than one large expensive server.

Microsoft's Azure data pricing makes this very clear. One Gigabyte of SQL Azure costs about $10 per month. Azure table storage costs $0.15 per GB per month.

The data transfer costs are the same for both. With Azure table storage you pay $0.01 for each 10,000 storage transactions.

To break even with the SQL Azure price you can get about 9,850,000 storage transactions per month. That is a lot of bandwidth!

Another way to look at the cost is to suppose you need only 2,600,000 storage transactions a month (1 a second assuming an equal time distribution over the day). That would cost you only $2.60. That means you could store almost 50 GB worth of data. To store 50 GB worth of data in SQL Azure would cost about $500 / month.

If you don't need the relational model, it is a lot cheaper to use table or blob storage.

One way to approach the different architectural implications is to look at the various vendor offering and see how they match to the various application types.

You can divide the cloud vendors into four categories, although one vendor might have offerings in more than one category:

Platform as a Service providers
Software as a Service providers
Application as a Service providers
Cloud Appliance Vendors

The Platform as a Service providers attempt to provide a cloud operating system for users to build an application on. An operating system serves two basic functions: it abstracts the underlying hardware and manages the platform resources for each process or user. Google App Engine, Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, and Force.com are examples of platform providers.

The most restrictive platform is the Google App Engine because you program to the Google API which makes it difficult to port to another platform. One the other hand, precisely because you program to a specific API, Google can scale your application and provide recovery for a failed application.

At the other extreme is Amazon. Amazon gives you a virtual machine which with you can program directly against the native OS installed on the virtual machine. This freedom comes with a price. Since the Amazon virtual machine has no knowledge about the application you are running, it cannot provide recovery or scaling for you. You are responsible for doing that. You can use third party software, but that is just a means of fulfilling your responsibility.

Microsoft tries to achieve a balance between these two approaches. By using .NET you have a greater degree of portability than the Google API. You could move your application to an Amazon VM or even your own servers. By using metadata to describe your application to the cloud fabric, the Azure infrastructure can provide recovery and scalability.

The first architectural dimension (ignoring for a moment the relative econonmics which will be explored in another post) then is how much responsibility you want to take for scaling and recovery vs. the degrees of programming freedom you want to have. Of course the choice between the Google API and Microsoft Azure might come down to the skill set of your developers, but in my opinion, for any significant application, the architectural implications of the platform choice should be the more important factor.

I just did an interview on .NET rocks about cloud computing.

We covered a whole bunch of topics including:
                     what is cloud computing
                     comparing the various offering of Google, Force.com, Amazon, and Microsoft
                     the social and economic environment required for cloud computing
                     the implications for transactional computing and the relational model
                     the importance of price and SLA for Microsoft whose offerring is different from Amazon and Google
                     the need for rich clients even in the world of cloud computing.

It's time for me to be interviewed on .NET Rocks again!

Carl and Richard will interview me about Cloud Computing. The interview will be published on June 30 at http://www.dotnetrocks.com/.

Based on my previous show (and related DNR TV segments) it will be a lot of fun to do and to listen to.

I have uploaded the slides and code for my talk on Windows Azure at the Microsoft MSDN day in Boston on January 22.

The talk was a combination of slides from several PDC talks with some of my own additions. I went through the fundamental architecture of the Azure cloud operating system and the basic elements of the Azure cloud services (i.e. Identity, Workflow, Live, SQL Data Services).

I did two demos. The first was a simple thumbnail generator. It illustrated a simple, scalable architecture using web roles and worker roles that used the primitive Azure operating system storage for blobs and queues.  It also demonstrated how you model and configure a cloud application. The second, using the SQL Data Services, demonstrated how to integrate a non-cloud application (on a desktop or server) with the cloud. The app used a variety of industry standard mechanisms (WS*, REST, HTTP Get) to create and query data.

I will be speaking at VSLive! San Francisco on February 25 on "Advanced Topics in Windows Workflow Foundation".

The conference will be at the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero from February 23-27. Workshops are offered on Feb 23 and 27. The conference sessions are on Feb 24, 25 and 26. If you register with promo code NS9F20 you will receive a $500 discount off the price. The event web site is vslive.com/2009/sf.

There is some great content that covers ALM and Development Tools, .NET, Data Management, Infrastructure, Rich Clients, Distributed Systems, and Web Development. I hope to see you there.

At the PDC Microsoft announced its answer to Amazon and Google's cloud computing services.

This answer has two parts: the Azure platform and hosted applications.  Unfortunately people confuse these two aspects of cloud computing although they do have some features in common.

The idea behind Azure is to have a hosted operating systems platform.  Companies and individuals will be able to build applications that run on infrastructure inside one of Microsoft's data centers.  Hosted services are applications that companies and individuals will use instead of running them on their own computers.

For example,  a  company wants to build a document approval system. It can outsource the infrastructure on which it runs by building the application on top of a cloud computing platform such as Azure.  My web site and blog do not run on my own servers, I use a hosting company. That is an example of using a hosted application.

As people get more sophisticated about cloud computing we will see these two types as endpoints on a continuum. Right now as you start to think about cloud computing and where it makes sense,  it is easier to treat these as distinct approaches.

The economics of outsourcing your computing infrastructure and certain applications is compelling as Nicholas Carr has argued. 

Companies will be able to vary capacity as needed. They can focus scarce economic resources on building the software the  organization needs, as opposed to the specialized skills needed to run computing infrastructure.  Many small and mid-sized companies already using hosting companies to run their applications. The next logical step is for hosting on an operating system in the cloud.

Salesforce.com has already proven the viability of hosted CRM applications.  If I am a small business and I need Microsoft Exchange,  I have several choices. I can hire somebody who knows how to run an Exchange server. I can take one my already overburdened computer people and hope they can become expert enough on Exchange to run it without problems. Or I can outsource to a company that knows about Exchange,  the appropriate patches, security issues, and how to get it to scale. The choice seems pretty clear to most businesses.

We are at the beginning of the cloud computing wave, and there are many legitimate concerns. What about service outages as Amazon and Salesforce.com have had that prevent us from accessing our critical applications and data? What about privacy issues? I have discussed the cloud privacy issue in a podcast .  People are concerned about the ownership of information in the cloud.

All these are legitimate concerns. But we have faced these issues before. Think of the electric power industry. We produce and consume all kinds of products and services using electric power. Electric power is reliable enough that nobody produces their own power any more. Even survivalists still get their usual power from the grid.

This did not happen over night. Their were bitter arguments over the AC and DC standards for electric power transmission. Thomas Edison (the champion of DC power) built an alternating current electric chair for executing prisoners  to demonstrate the "horrors" of Nikola Tesla's approach. There were bitter financial struggles between competing companies. Read Thomas Parke Hughes' classic work "Networks of power: Electrification in Western society 1880-1930". Yet in the end we have reliable electric power.

Large scale computing utilities could provide computation much more efficiently than individual business. Compare the energy and pollution efficiency of large scale electric utilities with individual automobiles.

 Large companies with the ability to hire and retain infrastructure professionals might decide to build rather than outsource. Some companies may decide to do their own hosting for their own individual reasons.

You probably already have information in the cloud if you have ever used Amazon.com. You have already given plenty of information to banks, credit card companies, and other companies you have dealt with. This information surely already resides on a computer somewhere. Life is full of trust decisions that you make without realizing it.

Very few people grow their own food, sew their own clothes, build their own houses, or (even in these tenuous financial times)  keep their money in their mattresses any more. We have learnt to trust in an economic system to provide these things. This too did not happen overnight.

I personally believe that Internet connectivity will never be 100% reliable, but how much reliability will be needed depends on the mission criticality of an application. That is why there will always be a role for rich clients and synchronization services.

Hosting companies will have to be large to have the financial stability to handle law suits and survive for the long term. We will have to develop the institutional and legal infrastructure to handle what happens to data and applications when a hosting company fails. We learned how to do this with bank failures and  we will learn how to do this with hosting companies.

This could easily take 50 years with many false starts. People tend to overestimate what will happen in 5 years, and underestimate what will happen in 10-15 years.

Azure, the color Microsoft picked for the name of its platform, is the color of a bright, cloudless day.  Interesting metaphor for a cloud computing platform. Is the future of clouds clear?

To further simplify the example, let us assume that the we want to use the certificate to encrypt a message from the client to the service. It is easy to apply what we discuss here to other scenarios.

 

As we discussed in the previous post, we need to generate two certificates, the root certificate that represents the Certificate Authority, and the certificate that represents the identity of the client or service. We will also create a Certificate Revocation List (CRL).

 

We will use a tool called makeCert to generate our certificates. Makecert, which ships with the .NET platform,  allows you to build an X509 certificate that can be used for development and testing. It does three things:

1. Generates a public and private key

2. It associates the key pair with a name

3. It binds the name with the public key.

 

Many of the published examples use makecert to both create and install the certificate. We will do the installation in a separate step because this approach is closer to the use of real certificates.  Separating the certificates also allows the certificates to be installed on many machines instead of just one. This makes distributing certificates to developer machines much easier.

 

First we will create the Root Certificate with the following command:

 

makecert -sv RootCATest.pvk -r -n "CN=RootCATest" RootCATest.cer

 

-n specifies the name for the root certificate authority. The convention is to prefix the name with "CN=" where CN stands for "Common Name"

-r indicates that the certificate will be a root certificate because it is self-signed.

-sv specifies the file that contains the private key. The private key will be used for signing certificates issued by this certificate authority. Makecert will ask you for a password to protect the private key in the file.

 

The file RootCATest.cer will just have the public key. It is in the  Canonical Encoding Rules (CER) format. This is the file that will be installed on machines as the root of the trust chain.

 

Next we will create a certificate revocation list.

 

makecert -crl -n "CN=RootCATest" -r -sv RootCATest.pvk RootCATest.crl

 

-crl indicates we are creating a revocation list

-n is the name of the root certificate authority

-r indicates that this is the CRL for the root certificate, it is self-signed

-sv indicates the file that contains the private key

 

RootCATest.crl is the name of the CRL file.

 

At this point we could install the root certificate, but we will wait until we finish with the certificate we will use in our scenario.  Here we need two files. We will need a CER file for the client machine so that we can install the public key associated with the service. Then we will create a PKCS12  format file that will be used to install the public and private key in the service.

 

The initial step is :

 

makecert -ic RootCATest.cer -iv RootCATest.pvk -n "CN=TempCert" -sv  TempCert.pvk -pe -sky exchange TempCert.cer

 

-n specifies the name for the certificate

-sv specifies the file for the certificate. This must be unique for each certificate created. If you try to reuse a name, you will get an error message .

-iv specifies the name of the container file for the private key of the root certificate created in the first step.

-ic specifies the name of the root certificate file created in the first step

-sky specifies what kind of key we are creating. Using the exchange option enables the certificate to be used for signing and encrypting the message.

-pe specifies that the private key is exportable and is included with the certificate. For message security is this required because you need the corresponding private key. 

 

The name of the CER file for the certificate is specified at the end of the command.

 

Now we need to create the PKCS12 file. We will use a the Software Publisher Certificate Test Tool to create a Software Publisher's Certificate. You use this format to create the PKCS12 file using the pvkimprt tool.

 

cert2spc TempCert.cer TempCert.spc

pvkimprt -pfx TempCert.spc TempCert.pvk

 

We now have four files:

 

RootCATest.cer

RootCATest.crl

TempCert.cer

TempCert.pvk

 

The next step is to install these on the appropriate machines. I could not get certmgr to work properly to do an automated install.  The Winhttpcertcfg tool works for PKCS12 format files, but not CER format files. We will use the MMC snap-in for this.

 

 

Run the mmc snapin tool (type mmc in the Run menu). First we will open the Certificates snap-in.  Choose: Add/Remove Snap-In.

 

 

Then Add the Certficate Snap-In.

 

 

 

When you add the snap-in, choose local computer account for the computer you want to install the certificate (usually the local one).




We want to install the root certificate on both the client and service machines  in the Trusted Root Certificate Store. 

 

 

 

Select that store, right mouse click and install both the RootCATest.cer and RootCATest.crl files.  On the client side you want to install only the public key in the TempCert.cer file.  On the service side only you want to install the PKCS12 format file (TempCert.pvk) which has the private key for the certificate. Install that in the Personal store. For private key installation you will have to provide the password for the PKCS12 file.

 

On the service side, we need to give the identity of the running process (NETWORK SERVICE) the rights to read the private key. We use two tools FindPrivateKey and cacls to do this. Run the following command:

 

for /F "delims=" %%i in ('FindPrivateKey.exe My LocalMachine -n "CN=TempITNCert" -a') do (cacls.exe "%%i" /E /G "NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE":R)

 

Remember to delete these certificates when you are finished with them.

Working with X509 certificates can be very frustrating for WCF developers.

This is the first of two posts. In this post I will explain just enough of the background for X509 certificates so that I can explain in the next post how to create and use certificates during .NET development with WCF.   The second post is here.

I do not know any good books for a developer that explains how to use certificates. Even the excellent books on WCF just give you the certificates you need to get the sample code to work. They do not really explain to you why you are installing different certificates into different stores, or how to generate the certificates you need to get your software to work. Very often the examples run on one machine with the client and service sharing the same store. This is not a realistic scenario.

Obviously I cannot explain all about certificates in one blog post. I just wish to share some knowledge. Hopefully it will spare you some grief.

Here is the problem I want to solve.

Suppose you have a set of web services that is accessed by either an ASP.NET or rich client. The service requires the client application to use an X509 certificate to access the service. This could be to encrypt the data, to identify the client, to sign the data to avoid repudiation, or for a number of other reasons. How do you install the certificates on the client and service machines?

Certificate technology is based on asymmetric encryption. 

In the encryption scenario, the client would use the public key of the service to encrypt the traffic.  The service would use its private key to decrypt the message.  In the identification scenario the service would use the public key of the client to identify a message signed with the client's private key.

One of the key issues is how you can be sure that the public key is associated with a given identity. Perhaps somebody substituted their key for the one you should be using.  Perhaps somebody is hijacking calls to the service, or you made a mistake in the address of the service.  A classic example of these types of vulnerabilities  is the "man in the middle attack".  Another key issue is that the private key cannot be read or modified by unauthorized parties.

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is the name for a technology that uses a certificate authority (CA) to bind the public key to an identity. This identity is unique to the certificate authority. X509 is a standard for implementing a PKI.  An X509 certificate represents an association between an identity and a public key.

An X509 certificate is issued by a given Certificate Authority to represent its guarantee that a public key is associated with a particular identity. Depending on how much you trust the CA, and the amount of identity verification the CA did, would determine how much trust you have in the certificate. For example VeriSign issues different types of certificates depending on how much verification was done. Sometimes organizations will be their own certificate authorities and issues certificates because they want the maximum amount of control.

This relationship between a CA and its issued certificates is represented in the "chain of trust". Each X509 certificate is signed with the private key of the CA. In order to verify the chain of trust you need the CA's public key.  If you are your own CA authority you can distribute the X509 certificate representing this "root certificate".  Some browsers and operating systems install root certificates as part of their setup. So the manufacturer of the browser or operating system is part of the chain of trust.

The X509 standard also includes a certificate revocation list (CRL) which is a mechanism for checking whether a certificate has been revoked by the CA.  The standard does not specify how often this checking is done. By default, Internet Explorer and Firefox do not check for certificate revocation. Certificates also contain an expiration date.

Another approach to trust is called "peer to peer" trust, or "web of trust".  Given the difficulties of peer trust it is not practical for most Internet applications. It can, however, make development scenarios simpler. Your development environment, however,  should mimic your deployment environment.  Hence I do not recommend using peer to peer trust unless that is practical for your deployed solution.

There are various protocols for transmitting certificates.  We will be interested in two of them.

The Canonical Encoding Rules (CER) protocol will be used to digitally transmit the public key of a given identity. The PKCS12 protocol will be used to transmit the public and private keys. The private key will be password protected.

The next post will describe the mechanisms for creating and installing certificates in a .NET development environment.

"this is a well-known problem with code files that have desigable classes in them - the class that is to be designed has to be the first class in the file.  If you do the same thing in windows forms you get the following error: the class Form1 can be designed, but is not the first class in the file. Visual Studio requires that designers use the first class in the file. Move the class code so that it is the first class in the file and try loading the designer again."

It turns out I had changed a struct that was defined first in my file to a class. I moved that class to the end of the file and "mirabile dictu" everything worked.

So if this is a well known problem, why can't we get an error message just like in the Windows Forms case?

While it was clearly my mistake, Microsoft has a share of the blame here. Clearly this requirement makes it easier to build the workflow designer. It would have been just as easy to check if this class was not defined first, and issue an error message.

The Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) ships with a Policy Activity that allows you to execute a set of rules against your workflow. This activity contains a design time rules editor that allows you to create a set of rules. At run time, the Policy Activity runs these rules using the WF Rules engine.

Among other features, the rules engine allows you to prioritize rules and to set a chaining policy to govern rules evaluation.  The rules engine uses a set of Code DOM expressions to represent the rules. These rules can be run against any managed object, not just a workflow. Hence, the mechanisms of the rules engine have nothing to do with workflow. You can actually instantiate and use this rules engine without having to embed it inside of a workflow. You can use this rules engine to build rules-driven .NET applications.

I gave a talk at the last Las Vegas VSLive! that demonstrates how to do this. The first sample in the talk uses a workflow to demonstrate the power of the rules engine. The second and third samples use a very simple example to demonstrate how to use the engine outside of a workflow.

Two problems have to be solved.  You have to create a set of Code DOM expressions for the rules. You have to host the engine and supply it the rules and the object to run the rules against.

While the details are in the slides and the examples, here is the gist of the solution.

To use the rules engine at runtime, you pull the workflow rules out of some storage mechanism. The first sample uses a file. A WorkflowMarkupSerializer instance deserializes the stored rules to an instance of the RuleSet class.  A RuleValidation instance validates the rules against the type of the business object against which you will run the rules against. The Execute method on the RuleExecution class is used to invoke the rules engine and run the rules.

How do you create the rules? Ideally you would use some domain language, or domain based application, that would generate the rules as Code DOM expressions. If you were masochistic enough, you could create those expressions by hand.

As an alternative, the second sample hosts the Workflow rules editor dialog (RuleSetDialog class) to let you create the rules. Unfortunately, like the workflow designer, this is a programmer's tool, not a business analyst's tool. A WorkflowMarkupSerializer instance is used to serialize the rules to the appropriate storage.

I would be interested in hearing about how people use this engine to build rules driven applications.

My series of four digitial articles have been published by Addison-Wesley. You can get the links to purchase them and the associated source code from my web site .

I have tried to explain, in practical terms, what you need to know to actually build real world software using Windows Workflow. There is a tiny amount of theory to explain the underpinnings. The vast majority of the explanation uses code examples to illustrate all the key points. The last shortcut in the series has two extended examples that illustrate how to build custom activities.

Here are good instructions on how to install RC1 for the .NET Framework 3.0: http://blogs.msdn.com/pandrew/archive/2006/09/07/745701.aspx . People, including myself, have been having problems getting the Workflow Extensions for Visual Studio 2005 installed. I moved the installer file (Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows Workflow Foundation RC5(EN).exe) to a different directory from the other installation files. The workflow extensions then installed just fine.

I have updated the workflow examples on my site to the most recent Workflow version.

I would like to thank all those who helped me achieve an Microsoft MVP award for Visual Developer - Solutions Architect.

Here is my final dnrTV session: http://dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showID=24. It covers advanced topics in Windows Workflow Foundation such as synchronization, transactions, and compensation.

I was interviewed by Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell on .NET Rocks: http://dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showID=183 . Yes we talked about Workflow and SOA. But we touched on other topics such as the failure of technology to really make foreign language learning any better.

Here is part three of the Workflow Webcast series: http://dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showID=23

Here is the second talk on Workflow Foundation on Carl Franklin's dnrTV:

http://dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showID=22

Here is the first of four talks on Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation that are appearing on Carl Franklin's dnrTV. This one was broadcast on June 2. Each of the following ones should appear in subsequent weeks.

http://dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showID=2 1

Microsoft's Indigo platform will unify all the divergent transport technologies (ASMX, WSE, COM+, MSMQ, Remoting) that are in use today. For building a service on the .NET platform this is the technology you will use.

What technology should you use today?

The ASMX platform's programming model is the same as Indigo's. Attributes, indicating what technologies (security, reliability, etc.) you want the infrastructure to use are applied to methods. Hence, a converter will be provided to convert ASMX code to Indigo code.

Does this mean ASMX should be the technology of choice? I would argue that WSE is the better technology to use. WSE's programming model is not that of Indigo. Classes and inheritance are used to interact with the WSE infrastructure. WSE will interoperate with Indigo. Nonetheless, the conceptual model of WSE is identical to that of Indigo.

ASMX is tied to the HTTP transport and its request / response protocol. It encourages programmers to think of a service call as a remote procedure call with programming types, not as an interoperable, versioned XML document message validated by XML Schema.

Service developers need to think of request / response as one of several possible message exchange patterns (MEP). The most fundamental MEP, the one all MEPs are built from, as the WS-Addressing spec makes clear, is the one-way asynchronous message. Business services tend to be asynchronous; you apply for a loan and you do not hear back for days.

Service messages can go through intermediaries before reaching the ultimate recipient. Each message segment may go over transports other than HTTP.

WSE's transport classes allow you to build services that use different MEPs over various transports. The SOAP envelope classes make it easy to build the SOAP message body as XML, or serialized XML objects. You learn to think in terms of XML documents and messages, not execution environment dependent types.

Using this conceptual model your services will last longer, and be easier to evolve in a business environment. That will be of more use to your business than using a technology that has a better upgrade path, but will have to be rewritten sooner because it is poorly designed and implemented.

When the speakers on the .NET track of the Syscon Edge 2004 conference got together, Carl Franklin and I were talking about why people think that C# is the "official language" for .NET. I told him that even though most of my consulting is in C#, I think that attitude is wrong. I believe it is important to elaborate why I feel this way.

People who feel that VB.NET is an inferior language to C#, or that somehow C# is a "better language", or the "official language" for accessing the .NET Framework Class Library are just plain wrong. My personal opinion is that I prefer C# to VB.NET because I like the compact syntax among other things, but that is a personal judgement.

People who talk that way about VB.NET are confusing three issues.

First suitability to access the Framework Class Library (FCL). Every example in my book "Application Development Using C# and .NET" has been translated into VB.NET and works exactly the same way. I have used the same courseware for both C# training and VB.NET training with the only difference that the examples were in the different languages. From the point of view of the FCL, everything C# can do, VB.NET can do as well.

Second issue: suitability to a given task. Equality before the FCL, or the Common Language Runtime is not everything. Perl.NET can do things that C# cannot. Does that make Perl.NET a better language than C#? No. It just makes it a better choice in some cases. If you need to use unsafe mode, you need C#. You cannot overload operators in VB.NET. You might find VB.NET's late binding feature more convenient than using the reflection API in C#. You might like background compilation in VB.NET. It is is possible, that for certain features the IL that C# generates is more efficient than the IL that VB.NET does. I do not know if this is true, but even if it is, it probably does not matter for most applications. After all, in some performance situations managed C++ is better than C#. For people interested in the differences between the languages look at O'Reilly's C# and VB.NET Conversion pocket reference.

FInally: de gustibus non disputandum est, there are matters of personal preference. I like C#'s compactness. I think it has certain advantages, but that is a matter of taste. Taste is important even in technical matters, but do not confuse taste with other factors, or mistake taste for intuition.

I wish VB.NET programmers a long and productive life. VB.NET programmers should not feel inferior.