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I'm very happy to announce the October Feature Release, 2.5.14, for Neuron ESB 2.5. If you are using an earlier released build, you can download this latest release from here Neuron ESB 2.5.14 .
The product team is very excited about this release as it contains many new features which our customers will immediately benefit from. Some of the features included are:
Adapters
- ODBC Adapter - This adapter supports Publish, Subscribe, Query and Execute mode. It allows the use of both stored procedures and SQL statements. Also supports FOR XML clause when the Sql Client ODBC driver is selected. Supports schema generation as well as before and after statements when in Publish mode. Supports using dynamic connection strings to connect to the database. This can be set within a pipeline code step i.e. context.Data.SetProperty(“odbc”,”ConnectionString”,<somevalue>)
- SMTP Adapter - This adapter supports dynamic setting of SMTP properties, XSL transform for message bodies, attachments, InfoPath and delivery notifications.
Service Policies
Support has been added under the Availability tab of Service Policies for customization of the SOAP Fault returned to the calling client when Limited Availability of an Endpoint is enabled. This message can be customized to include either the service name, the service endpoint url or both i.e. “The Neuron end point, '{0}', configured with the following url, ‘{1}’, is not available.”
Messaging
New capabilities regarding how Neuron handles metadata has been added. For example, custom message properties can now be preserved on Request/Response calls. Also, an end to end TransactionId property has been introduced along with a ParentId property to facilitate more advanced and customized tracking and service monitoring scenarios.
Pipelines
- Msmq Pipeline Step - enhanced with PEEK capability
- Pipeline Execution Pipeline Step - this allowed users to call a pipeline within a pipeline, essentially creating composable processes. This step is capable of executing pipelines at runtime that exist in external/secondary ESB solution files, allowing for library of patterns to be centrally maintained, developed and reused.
- Audit Pipeline Step - now accepts an XPath value to determine what part of the message to store in the Neuron database.
Dynamic Connection Strings
Both the SQL and ODBC adapters have been enhanced with the ability for their connection strings to be set at runtime.
Performance Counters:
New WMI performance counters to capture error and throughput statistics from Neuron Endpoints, Neuron Topics and Neuron Parties. These can be used within 3rd party monitoring tools.
Resubmit Failed Messages:
The ability to edit and resubmit messages within the Message Viewer has been completely refactored. Users can now edit a single message and resubmit that message directly to a Party (running associated pipeline processes) or to an Adapter or Service Endpoint (circumventing those same associated pipeline processes).
Bulk edit and Resubmit of messages has also been added. Users may select multiple messages in either the Message History or Failed Message reports and choose to edit and then resubmit all of them at once directly to a Party or to an Adapter or Service Endpoint.
Besides new features, this release includes all the accumulated fixes since our previous 2.5.13 release in July 2011. Important fixes are included which positively affect the following:
- Msmq Topics
- Pipeline testing, configuration and runtime performance
- Service Policies
- Event Logging
The complete list of changes can be found in the Neuron Change Log located at the root of the Neuron ESB installation directory as well as on our support site.
To determine the current version you are working with ,see What version of Neuron are you running?
As an addendum to our shipped documentation, I'll be regularly posting information on how to use the new features, so continue to monitor our blog and forums.
Upgrade Instructions
Upgrading to this release is identical to the previous release and is fairly straight forward, requiring updating existing ESB Configuration files. You can read more about the update considerations on our forum.
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Neuron ESB Architectural Assessments
Remember, Architectural Reviews, pre and post production roll out assessments as well as advanced training are available through the Neuron ESB Product Team. Our goal is to ensure success. |
Stay tuned this channel! Once I finish the “What’s New” and “How to use it” documentation, I’ll post the download link and the docs.
Kind regards,
Marty Wasznicky
Neuron ESB
Neudesic, L.L.C.
Work: (949) 754-5223
Fax: (949) 754-6523
marty.wasznicky@neudesic.com | www.neudesic.com
Hello Everyone,
As many of you know we've been hard at work on the Neuron ESB feature release for July. Our goal is to send out a general announcement at the end of this week (July 29th) to let users know where to download it, and how to use some of the new features. The "how to use" part though may come over the weekend, as I think there is a lot to write about :).
I'm personally very excited about this release as it’s going to include many features I think a lot of our customers have wanted, and many features that will make developing and deploying Neuron solutions much easier to do. Besides new features, this release will include all the accumulated bug fixes from the past few months. Some of the features we’re including in this release are:
· Custom Pipeline Steps – Users will be able to create a reusable custom Pipeline Steps, register them, and use them within the Neuron ESB Pipeline Designer by simple drag and drop.
· MSMQ Pipeline Step – This will provide users the ability to send messages to a Queue within a pipeline. It will also support correlated receives from a Queue as well.
· Pipeline Execution Pipeline Step – Provides the ability to create composite pipelines by executing existing pipelines within a pipeline for easy reuse.
· Global Pipeline Cache – This will support the creation and initialization of any variable type that can be used across all instances of a pipeline executed by a Neuron Party
· Custom SOAP Header Support for the Service Pipeline Step
· Dynamic Transform Pipeline Step – Allows users to determine XSLT to run at runtime, rather than design time
· Dynamic Schema Pipeline Step – Allows users to determine Schema to validate against at runtime, rather than design time
· Environmental Variable support for Service/Client Connectors – This was the last step to make deployment truly easy for all customers. This deprecates the use of the Addresses tab located on Deployment Groups.
· Multi-threaded receive for MSMQ based topics – This provides performance enhancements.
· MSMQ Time to Live – The ability to set this property at the Topic level
· WSDL support for Client Connectors - Ability to associate an existing WSDL endpoint with Client connectors so developers can use “add service reference” or “add web reference” within Visual Studio by referencing the client connector configured urls
· Resubmit – the ability to resubmit a message directly from either the Audit or Failed Message reports. In the next feature release we’re going to try to introduce bulk resubmit as well as the ability to resubmit to a specific adapter or service endpoint.
· Reorder Pipelines – The ability to re order pipelines for a party within the UI so that users do not have to remove and then re-add.
· RFID Sync and Async enhancements – Refactored to increase performance by 10 fold, as well as remove need to modify configuration files and enhanced tracing
· Scatter Gather Sample – Updated the scatter gather sample and documentation (see attached) to use new Dynamic Transform Pipeline Steps
· Neuron Farm Enhancements – Numerous fixes were introduced to support Neuron Farm mode with TCP based topics
· Unique WMI Performance Counters– We no longer generate performance counter names using Guids. Now they are generated by appended the Party name with a number. So if only one instance of a Party is used, the Performance counter name will now be predictable.
Stay tuned this channel! Once I finish the “What’s New” and “How to use it” documentation, I’ll post the download link and the docs.
Kind regards,
Marty Wasznicky
Neuron ESB
Neudesic, L.L.C.
Work: (949) 754-5223
Fax: (949) 754-6523
marty.wasznicky@neudesic.com | www.neudesic.com
David Pallmann has posted a full set of Azure Storage examples up on CodePlex. Very, very cool - REST and .NET examples are delivered side-by-side. Read more on his blog.
If you’re working with Azure, you really should be checking out AppFabric labs to get early exposure to new features. There’s a new preview for potential new features in the Azure AppFabric Access Control Service (ACS), including new support for Google, Yahoo, and Facebook identity providers. I have a blog post coming, but for more info see Justin Smith’s posting.
I have an older touch-screen laptop with an early Windows Phone CTP installed. The control-panel uninstaller is broken - and won't uninstall unless you have the orginal media. Like I have media that I used to install something last week, let alone months ago. Anyway, I found a great blog post with a solution - just browse to the installation folder and manually uninstall by right-clicking vs_setup.exe. The linked blog post has more details.
A fundamental pattern in Eiffel is the principle of Command Query Separation (also known as CQS). The idea behind CQS is that you separate class operations into two categories:
- Commands that mutate state on an instance of the class
- Queries that expose information about the instance
Commands and queries are different; although a successful command will usually alter the state of the targeted object, a query has no side-effects.
Although it’s a bedrock feature in Eiffel, there is no reason why it can’t be used in many languages, such as C#, and queries can be expressed in C# with a read-only property, such as:
public class Account
{
/// <summary>
/// What is the current balance?
/// </summary>
/// <value>The balance.</value>
public decimal Balance { get; }
}
Note that a query is typically commented as a question (in my code, anyway). In those cases where an instance must be able to change state via the property you can declare the setter with more restrictive access:
public class Account
{
/// <summary>
/// What is the current balance?
/// </summary>
/// <value>The balance.</value>
public decimal Balance { get; private set; }
}
The advantage of CQS is that queries can be executed without side-effects – multiple queries can be executed without any concern for mutating the object state; and query results can be cached (at least between command invocations.) By providing a clear separation between the operations that do (and do not) impact object state, other advanced patterns such as Design by Contract are enabled.
There's an updated version of Azure App Fabric released yesterday - read more about it and get download details on Zane Adam's blog here. In addition to .NET 4.0 support, this release supports Silverlight development by enabling cross-domain calls (this also helps something called Flash, which seems to be a SL clone.) This was a feature initially rolled out to the community as part of the App Fabric Labs project - read more about App Fabric Labs here.
I’ll be in Redmond most of the week of 7/5 for some meetings at Microsoft about this and that. If you’re in the area drop me a line and we can get together to discuss Azure, ApFabric, or other distributed computing topics. I’ve also got The David Pallmann™ with me in case you need someone intelligent in addition to me.