Particular Software Blog

Latest articles

• Optimizations to scatter-gather sagas

  Written by Jan Ove Skogheim on October 7, 2020

  

  Over the last several months we’ve been noticing that some of our customers were having trouble with the performance of some of their sagas. Invariably, the sagas that were at fault were examples of the scatter-gather pattern, and the ultimate culprit was contention at the storage level due to the optimistic concurrency strategy that was being used.

  This is a fairly common pattern for sagas to implement, and we didn’t want our customers to have to change how they model their business process to get around a performance problem, so we decided to fix it.

  In this article, I’ll explain what the scatter-gather pattern is, how a pure optimistic concurrency strategy created a problem, and what we’ve done to fix it for you.

  Read more →

• Enhancements in NServiceBus Hosting

  Written by Daniel Marbach, Hadi Eskandari, and Andreas Öhlund on September 15, 2020

  

  The .NET Generic Host has become the de facto method of hosting applications built on .NET Core. To support the generic host, we released the NServiceBus.Extensions.Hosting package to make it simple to host NServiceBus within a .NET Core process or ASP.NET Core web application using the .UseNServiceBus(…) extension method.

  While a massive improvement for easily hosting NServiceBus in a .NET Core process, a few rough edges remained. For version 1.1, we aimed to make it easier than ever.

  Read more →

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  1. In the article on the ASP.NET Core Web Host, Microsoft states "This article covers the Web Host, which remains available only for backward compatibility. The Generic Host is recommended for all app types."

  2. Microsoft's Dependency Injection recommendations state "Avoid using the service locator pattern. For example, don't invoke GetService to obtain a service instance when you can use DI instead."Also, see Mark Seemann's post Service Locator is an Anti-Pattern.

  3. Such as GitHub Actions, Octopus Deploy, TeamCity, and dozens of others…

  4. Kubernetes, Service Fabric, Docker Compose, etc.

• What's new in NServiceBus 7.4

  Written by Hadi Eskandari and Mike Minutillo on September 1, 2020

  

  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.

  Read more →

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  1. Message conventions determine what classes in an assembly are considered messages.

• Support for Azure Functions

  Written by Sean Feldman and Bob Langley on August 19, 2020

  

  Update: NServiceBus hosting with Azure Functions for Azure Service Bus is now 1.0. In addition to full production support, that means API stability and backporting of bugfixes. See our release announcement here.

  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.

  Read more →

• Support for .NET Core 3.1 is here!

  Written by Hadi Eskandari, Mike Minutillo, and Laila Bougria on July 14, 2020

  

  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.

  Read more →

• The end of the legacy Azure Service Bus transport

  Written by Kyle Baley on June 30, 2020

  

  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.

  Read more →

• Usability enhancements in ServicePulse 1.25

  Written by David Boike on June 16, 2020

  

  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.

  Read more →

• Getting NServiceBus ready for the cloud

  Written by Anne Epstein on June 2, 2020

  

  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.

  Read more →

• How the Swedish Transport Agency learned distributed systems in six months

  Written by Kyle Baley on April 28, 2020

  

  For better or for worse, online education has become the most common (and in many cases, the only) way to learn these days. Schools and universities have had to adapt to a remote environment while companies such as Pluralsight have stepped up and offered online courses for free or at a discount. In-person training and conferences have been postponed, cancelled, or transitioned to the virtual world. We’ve certainly been affected by this shift at Particular with the cancellation of our… Read more →

• Microsoft's new SQL client is here!

  Written by Hadi Eskandari and Mike Minutillo on March 24, 2020

  

  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.

  Read more →