Particular Software Blog

Latest articles

• NServiceBus now supports Microsoft Extensions DependencyInjection

  Written by Sean Feldman and David Boike on March 12, 2020

  

  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.

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• MSMQ is dead

  Written by David Boike on January 28, 2020

  

  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.

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• Fallacy #5: Topology doesn't change

  Written by David Boike on December 10, 2019

  

  It’s easy for something that started out simply to become much more complicated as time wears on. I once had a client who started out with a very noncomplex server infrastructure. The hosting provider had given them ownership of an internal IP subnet, and so they started out with two load-balanced public web servers: X.X.X.100 and X.X.X.101 (Public100 and Public101 for short). They also had a third public web server, Public102, to host an FTP server and a couple random utility applications.

  And then, despite the best laid plans, the slow creep of chaos eventually took over.

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• Infrastructure soup

  Written by David Boike on November 12, 2019

  

  When it starts to get colder outside I start to think about soup. I love soup, especially chili. But I don’t want any of that watery gunk that’s just tomato soup with a few lonely beans floating in there somewhere. No sir! I want it thick and chunky. Load it up with ground meat, beans, onions, tomatoes, cheese, green peppers, jalepeños, pineapple–it’s all good!

  Just like with chili, we sometimes see code that feels kind of “thick and chunky.” It’s got validation, logging, exception handling, database communication, business logic, and so much more. But unlike chili, the result does not taste good.

  We see this kind of bloated, muddled code all over the place, regardless of what language or framework is being used, and NServiceBus is no exception. Here’s an example where someone has stuffed an NServiceBus message handler full to the breaking point:

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• The new MongoDB support for NServiceBus

  Written by Kyle Baley on October 15, 2019

  

  If you’re using (or considering) MongoDB with NServiceBus, we’ve got good news: we’ve just released our official MongoDB persister. This replaces the previous community-created (but now abandoned) MongoDB persistence options and is now a fully supported part of the Particular Service Platform.

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• Fixing malformed messages with ServicePulse

  Written by Particular Team on October 8, 2019

  

  Did you ever look at a failed message in ServicePulse and think “I wish I could just edit this quickly and dump it back in the queue”? Yes, you should follow best practices and investigate the root cause and make sure the error doesn’t come back, but the real world moves faster than that and sometimes you just need to get &#@%! done and figure it out later.

  Now you can. Using ServicePulse 1.21.0+ and ServiceControl 4.1.0+, you can edit the headers and body of a failed message and quickly get back on track.

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• Multi-tenancy support in SQL Persistence

  Written by Hadi Eskandari on September 17, 2019

  

  Multi-tenant systems are a popular way to use the same codebase to provide services to different customers while minimizing the effect they have on each other. In a distributed message-based system you need to partition customer information and segregate messages from different customers as well. Additionally, you have to make sure different system components are tenant-aware.

  In NServiceBus SQL Persistence 4.6, we have added new features that make it a bit easier to create multi-tenant systems. Let’s see how it all works.

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• Fallacy #4: The network is secure

  Written by David Boike on August 20, 2019

  

  There are a myriad of security-obsessed organizations scattered throughout the world that take security concerns to the verge of paranoia.

  In one such organization I’ve heard of, there existed two separate networks. Everyone had two computers without external disk drives of any kind. Inserting a USB drive would not work, and trying to use one would instantly alert the sysadmins that a workstation was compromised. To get data from a different network, you needed to browse in a separate room, as workstations did not have access to the Internet.

  Once you found the data you needed, you could download it to a floppy disk and then hand the floppy over to a sysop. The sysop would copy the contents to a mirror folder, which would analyze the contents with every virus scanner imaginable before mirroring them to the development network. But that sync only occurred once per hour.

  Paranoid? Maybe. If you’re just selling widgets on a website, then probably. But if your organization is working on defense contracts or controls critical infrastructure like electrical grids, perhaps the paranoia is justified.

  The only truly secure computer is one that is disconnected from any and all networks, turned off, buried in the ground, and encased in concrete. But that computer isn’t terribly useful.

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• What does idempotent mean in software systems?

  Written by David Boike on July 30, 2019

  

  You’ll often come across the term idempotent in software, especially when you design distributed, message-based systems for the cloud. It seems like a concept that is easy to grasp at first but it’s important to know the intricacies of idempotence if you want your systems to be scalable and reliable.

  Learn more about the challenges of implementing idempotent solutions: See Udi Dahan's presentation on Advanced API and Integration Problems and Patterns.

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• Fallacy #3: Bandwidth is infinite

  Written by David Boike on June 4, 2019

  

  Everyone who is old enough to remember the sound of connecting to the Internet with a dial-up modem or of AOL announcing that “You’ve got mail” is acutely aware that there is an upper limit to how fast something can be downloaded, and it never seems to be as fast as we would like it.

  The availability of bandwidth increases at a staggering rate, but we’re never happy. We now live in an age when it’s possible to stream high definition TV, and yet we are not satisfied. We become annoyed when we run a speed test on our broadband provider only to find that, on a good day, we are getting maybe half of the rated download speed we are paying for, and the upload speed is likely much worse. We amaze ourselves by our ability to have a real-time video conversation with someone on the other side of the world, but then react with extreme frustration when the connection quality starts to dip and we must ask “are you there?” to a face that has frozen.

  Today, we have DSL and cable modems; tomorrow, fiber may be widespread. But although bandwidth keeps growing, the amount of data and our need for it grows faster. We’ll never be satisfied.

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