Particular Software Blog

What's new in NServiceBus 7.4

At Particular Software, we don’t believe in packaging all the cool new features into major versions that make it hard to upgrade. We prefer to deliver improvements incrementally in minor releases that are easy upgrades, deferring breaking changes until the next major release to clean things up before the next set of incremental improvements.

That means that when it comes to new goodies, minor releases are where it’s at, and this minor release is no exception.

NServiceBus 7.4 includes some great new enhancements that make mapping sagas easier and more powerful, enable multiple different strategies for message conventions, and subdivide a message flow into multiple conversations.

Support for Azure Functions

Microsoft Azure Functions provide a simple way to run your code in the Azure Cloud. They are easy to deploy, scale automatically, and provide many out-of-the-box ways to trigger your code. Rather than pay for an entire virtual machine, you only pay for compute while your code is being executed.

NServiceBus makes Azure Functions even better. You can use a simple but powerful API to consume and dispatch messages, add robust reliability features like delayed retries, an extensible message processing pipeline, and a suite of tools to help you monitor and maintain your message-driven system. We think they go together like milk and cookies.

Support for .NET Core 3.1 is here!

Supporting NServiceBus on .NET Core 3.1 has been a focus for us here at Particular in 2020. Well, the day is finally here. We’re happy to announce that with the latest version of NServiceBus, you can build and deploy your NServiceBus endpoints on .NET Core 3.1, taking advantage of great features like built-in hosting, logging, and dependency injection.

The end of the legacy Azure Service Bus transport

A while back, we introduced a brand new transport for use with Azure Service Bus. This transport was a necessary step in our Azure offering to allow users to target .NET Standard and .NET Core. It also used the new Microsoft.Azure.ServiceBus client rather than the older, deprecated client.

More importantly, it started the process of deprecating the now-legacy Azure Service Bus transport. At the time, we didn’t have details about how we would do that; now we do.

Usability enhancements in ServicePulse 1.25

One of the challenges in building a distributed software system is that with so many processes doing their own thing, it can be hard to get the bird’s-eye view of what’s going on. Is everything healthy? Is the performance ok? Is there anything going on that could cause a problem?

ServicePulse is our application for monitoring your entire distributed system. It’s where heartbeats tell you if endpoints are healthy or have failed. It’s where our monitoring tools tell you how many messages are in each queue, how long it’s taking to process those message, and if the system is able to keep up with the load or is falling behind. It’s also where you find out if messages have failed processing, see the error (without having to dig through log files), and get the system back on track once the error is fixed.

In this post we’ll tell you about some of the usability enhancements we’ve added in our new version, ServicePulse 1.25.

Getting NServiceBus ready for the cloud

More and more companies are realizing that it’s in their best interest to move to the cloud. As software consultants at Headspring, we’re often tasked with helping organizations migrate their highly complex legacy systems to modern cloud environments. For clients using NServiceBus to facilitate messaging, moving to the cloud without it seems untenable. So how do we prepare to take NServiceBus with us?

For complex software systems like the ones we’re used to working with, moving to the cloud often involves more than a simple “lift and shift.” NServiceBus proves to be just as valuable in a cloud environment, but various aspects of its configuration and integration into the system need to be modified in order to take full advantage.

One of our recent clients—a government agency—was already using NServiceBus and wanted to migrate their system to Azure. The steps we took to get NServiceBus ready to run in Azure may be helpful to you as you map your own cloud moves. I’ll walk you through exactly what we had to do differently in the cloud, explain the hybrid-cloud solution we built with NServiceBus for reporting, and demonstrate how we handled logging in the cloud, as well as our client’s need to run locally on occasion.

How the Swedish Transport Agency learned distributed systems in six months

Microsoft's new SQL client is here!

A few months back, Microsoft released a brand new SQL client library called Microsoft.Data.SqlClient on NuGet. Wait…didn’t we already have a stable SQL client library shipped as a part of .NET Framework? Why reinvent the wheel?

Let’s see why, which one you should choose, and how this affects our NServiceBus packages.

NServiceBus now supports Microsoft Extensions DependencyInjection

The history of dependency injection (DI) containers in .NET is almost as long as .NET itself. StructureMap and Castle Windsor were released in 2004, Spring.NET in 2005, and more after that, each with their own unique API, some more opinionated than others.

And yet each of these libraries fulfills a fairly simple task: a place to hold on to dependencies so that objects can get them when they need them.

With .NET Core, Microsoft has created a DI container abstraction that is quickly becoming a de facto standard: Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection.

NServiceBus now supports this same container abstraction via our new NServiceBus.Extensions.DependencyInjection package, which means you can use any container that conforms to the Microsoft abstraction with NServiceBus. This has a ton of advantages, but also means the time has come to retire our existing container adapters.

MSMQ is dead

We gather here today to mourn the passing of a dear friend. Microsoft Message Queuing, better known by its nickname MSMQ, passed away peacefully in its hometown of Redmond, Washington on October 14, 2019, at the age of 22. It was born in May 1997 and through 6.3 versions lived a very full life, bringing the promise of reliable messaging patterns to users all around the globe. It is preceded in death by Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation, and survived by Azure Queues and Azure Service Bus. It will be greatly missed.