Using the Windows Azure Service Bus with SharePoint (part 1) - Create a Service Bus Namespace

Integrating with SharePoint by Using Windows Azure AppFabric

There are several ways of remotely interacting with Microsoft SharePoint—two of which are being discussed with increasing frequency in developer circles. One way is to use Microsoft Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG) and forms-based authentication to interact remotely with a SharePoint site. There is some trickery here with the security handshake with this solution.

You can use the Windows Azure AppFabric service bus to connect services deployed to Windows Azure (or the cloud in general) so that they can access and interact with SharePoint. Interacting with SharePoint can mean reading and writing list data, updating site information, or creating new sites or content types in SharePoint (or literally anything you can do with the SharePoint APIs). One way to do this is by creating an application that executes code against SharePoint; for example, a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service that resides and executes on the same server (or a connected edge server) where SharePoint resides. You access this WCF service code in a secure way by communicating with the service endpoint directly. This lets you provide a bridge between a cloud-deployed service and this on-premises application that connects you to SharePoint.

As an example of this, Figure 1 shows a remote application accessing a WCF service that is deployed to Windows Azure. This service then accesses a locally deployed service (deployed on the SharePoint server) which interacts with the SharePoint site via the AppFabric service bus. The remote application could include any number of client applications, such as Windows Forms applications, Microsoft Silverlight applications, PHP or Java applications, or Windows Phone 7 (or other phone or device) applications.

Figure 1. High-level view of architecture showing the use of the AppFabric service bus to access SharePoint.

You’ll build an application within this architecture. You’ll do it in steps rather than all at once, because Windows Azure AppFabric can be more complex than its Windows Azure counterparts. The steps you’ll follow will create a Windows Phone 7 application that will access SharePoint on-premises list data via the AppFabric service bus. These steps are:

1. Create a service namespace in Windows Azure AppFabric. This is a unique namespace that you’ll use to connect your two service endpoints. You’ll use the generic security features of the namespace (token and shared secret) to secure the connection. 

2. Create an on-premises service that can be called from a remote, cloud-based service. This service executes code against the SharePoint site. You’ll also create a second on-premises service to initially test the connection.

3. Create a remote, cloud-deployed WCF service that uses the AppFabric service bus to interact with SharePoint.

4. Finally, you’ll create two remote client applications. One is a Windows Forms test application that resides on the same server. The other is a Windows Phone 7 application, which resides on a separate client machine and represents a truly remote application.

Create a Service Bus Namespace

1. Open your browser and navigate to https://windows.azure.com/Default.aspx.

   On the left side of the Windows Azure portal, you’ll see several options you can choose.
   

2. Click Service Bus, Access Control & Caching as shown in the following graphic.

   

3. This displays the Windows Azure AppFabric page, which you can use to create a new namespace. To do this, click the Service Bus option (underneath AppFabric) as per the following figure, and then click New Namespace.

   

4. This Invokes a new dialog box in which you can provide a name for your service (such as servicebusexample), a region, and then the number of connection packs (Connection Pack Size), as shown in the following graphic. Click Create Namespace to create the service bus namespace.

   

   You now have a new service namespace that you can use to connect your WCF service endpoints. As shown in the following graphic, after you create the new namespace you’ll see your key name, management key, and service bus endpoints in the main Windows Azure portal. You can also click the View button to see the hidden token and key—which is the information you’ll use to connect your service endpoints.

You can move on to something slightly trickier: connecting two service endpoints together using the AppFabric service bus. With the service bus namespace in place, you have the core connection piece that bridges your service endpoints, so in the next exercise, you’ll create two services that communicate with one another via your newly created service namespace—that is, the AppFabric service bus.