Batch Dispatch #0

Happy holidays to all of you readers out there! Lately, several of our staff members have been active in the community, sharing valuable insights into building distributed systems. We thought we’d take this opportunity to share some of those resources, as well as other fun stuff, with you. With a bit of async/await, Azure Service Bus, AngularJS, code-driven visualizations, and even a throwback to the Commodore 64, there’s something in here for everyone. We hope you enjoy!

🔗Context Matters

Using async and await can make asynchronous code easier to write because it hides some of the details. But Tim Bussmann points out that, sometimes, knowing where your application is running can make the difference between functional code and a race condition.

🔗Progress bars aren’t all liars

Creating progress bars for web applications can be troublesome. Using a bit of AngularJS and NServiceBus, Colin Higgins shows us how to create them so that they are responsive and accurate.

🔗Bend Message Deduplication on Azure Service Bus to Your Will

Detecting duplicates when sending messages to Azure Service Bus is as important as it is non-trivial. But Sean Feldman has your back. He describes how you can leverage Azure’s built-in deduplication capabilities to make sure your messages aren’t processed more than once.

🔗Getting the most from Azure Service Bus

Thanksgiving might be over, but shopping season is still upon us. Daniel Marbach has a series of posts on how to maximize your throughput on Azure Service Bus to make sure you never miss a sale:

• Don’t spoil your Thanksgiving sales with naive Azure Service Bus client code
• Let’s save our Thanksgiving sales with Azure Service Bus
• Latency to Azure Service Bus matters
• Defer message completion on Azure Service Bus
• Let’s try batch completion of messages on Azure Service Bus
• Another attempt to batch complete with Azure Service Bus
• Improved batch completion loop for Azure Service Bus

🔗Video: A picture is worth 1000 lines of code

In his presentation at NDC Australia, Mike Minutillo shows a variety of tools and techniques that can be used to visualize software systems, from the macro scale all the way down to the nitty gritty details. In it he shows off C4 diagramming with Structurizr, as well as a method we’ve developed at Particular Software for visualizing all of the relationships between messages and handlers in your NServiceBus system.

🔗Slack looks great running on a Commodore 64

Since we use Slack for our internal communications, when we saw that Jeff Harris wrote a Slack client (of sorts) for the Commodore 64, we thought it was damn cool—though still not as entertaining as Impossible Mission.

— The team in Particular