Introduction to Service Fabric – Part 4: Stateful Services

After getting familiar with the various techniques in Service Fabric to build scalable and realiable services, the next step is to talk about Stateful Services.

In a traditional webservice the service layer is stateless and the data is stored externally in some sort of database, like an SQL Server or CosmosDB. This inherently adds an extra bit of latency to the queries as they have to pass through the services and eventually get passed further down the pipe to the database. This means our service layer can be stateless and will be easily scalable but only as long as the database won’t start being a bottleneck.

Of course, as I mentioned in the previous articles, with the right partitioning strategy we can split the data access through partitions and build partitioned cache within the services to quickly process requests. But in case, you’re building a data-heavy system and the data access is still a bottleneck to the overall performance, you have an extra option to consider: Stateful Services.

Introduction to Rx

When I finished my university in 2013, I wrote my thesis about Rx and also released it as a free ebook available for anyone interested in learning about it. That book was written in Hungarian, it was based on Rx 2.x version and it was targeting Windows 8 WinRT app developers. Since then some things have changed in the library (moving to NuGet, changed namespaces, etc), WPF on .NET Core 3 (Preview) got released and I had the chance to rethink some parts of the book and most importantly translate it to English.

This book is not a hard core deep dive book, it’s an introduction for beginners who want some easy to understand "Hello World" level examples to understand the core concepts of Rx and see the various LINQ operators working alone and combined.

I host this book on GitHub with the source code of the examples and any tools I’ve been using to put this book together, and I absolutely welcome any suggestions or requests to expand this book with, or potentially even do a series of blog posts or another more in-depth book to talk about more advanced scenarios.

I hope you are going to enjoy it.

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Introduction to Service Fabric – Part 3: What you can do for Service Fabric?

In this article I will introduce some of the more advanced use-cases of Service Fabric. Following the previous article, the main focus is still going to be resource/load balancing and scaling, but this time using some of the more advanced techniques that "don’t come for free".

Introduction to Service Fabric – Part 2: What Service Fabric can do for you?

Service Fabric offers a wide range of tools to manage services and many of these can be used without touching an existing service, purely through manifest files. I believe walking through these is a good exercise because these are typically the kind of features people try to achieve for their own services, hosted on-premises or even in the cloud.

Introduction to Service Fabric – Part 1: From Console to Cloud

I’ve been studying Service Fabric for a while now in small steps and one thing I noticed about most of the introduction material is that they are usually following a “top-down” approach when introducing the features of Service Fabric instead of gradually building them up from the bottom.

So this blog series is going to be a slightly unusual attempt to introduce Service Fabric to developers with already existing experience of building – and more importantly – hosting web services. It’s going to start from the basics and gradually introduce many of Service Fabric’s capabilities in about 4 or 5 blog posts.

Continued: My rant about certain apps in the Windows Store

About a month ago I wrote an article about Spotify not publishing their apps properly (as a single entry) to the Store, but I found a bunch of new BAD EXAMPLES, and this time, they are coming straight from Microsoft.

What’s next for Cortana?

As for this holiday season, Microsoft is bringing Cortana to “traditional” Smart Speakers, so she can listen to us and answer questions from the middle of the room. This is nice, this kind of standalone device has its place on the market, it’s going to compete well against the similar products from Amazon, Google and Apple.

But I think Microsoft should be building on its unique strength, which is “having a PC on every desk”. Or an Xbox in plenty of living rooms. Microsoft could easily take on this market by utilising their strength of having a “brain” device somewhere in the house and then they can put cheap “edge devices” into every room.

Holiday Season Hype

Microsoft and its hardware partners announced quite a few interesting NEW stuff to come this year, that every tech-enthusiast should look forward to. I tried to keep up with the announcements and put together a small list of upcoming interesting things this fall.

Mobile is not THAT important

I’d like to start by acknowledging that Mobile is (and will be) important, it’s an essential device, like a PC, but with that said I also think it’s vastly overrated.

Smartphones are not the one-and-only future, and to reflect to the countless articles about Windows Mobile’s, and with that, Windows’ (and even Microsoft’s) death, I think Microsoft will be just fine and if anyone, it will be Apple and Google who will have to be careful.

The next step: UWP Drivers

With Windows 10, Microsoft finally arrived to the point where they can provide a so called Universal Windows Platform, a set of APIs that are available for developers on all kinds of Windows 10 based devices: PC, Mobile, Xbox One, HoloLens, Surface Hub and even IoT and Server. This is not much news, we’ve been talking about these apps for years now, but a less-known thing is that this platform is not just for apps but also for drivers.