The most fundamental element in FABRIQ is a message handler and handlers are organized in pipelines to process messages. I explain the relationship here.

We have one regular session:

• Architecture Overview Session (ARC405) with Arvindra Sehmi and myself: Wed, Jun 30 12:00 - 13:15 Room: 9b

along with a Hands-On-Lab and a Chalk-Talk 

• Internals Chalk Talk (CHT019) with Arvindra Sehmi (I will try to make it there. Thursday is very busy): Thu, Jul 1 10:15 - 11:30 Room: U
• Hands-On Lab (ARC-IL01) with newtelligence's Achim Oellers and Jörg Freiberger: Tue-Thu throughout the day, Room: O

For the impatient, this post shows two config snippets.

Before I can get into explaining how the FABRIQ works and how to configure it, I need to explain a bit of the terminology we use:

• A network is the FABRIQ term that's rougly equivalent to an "application". A network consists of an arbitrary number of network-distributed nodes that are running inside the scope of the network. The network creates a common namespace for all of these nodes. Networks are configured using a single XML configuration document that is submitted (or routed via another network) to all hosts that shall host the network's nodes.
• A node is the FABRIQ term that is roughly equivalent to a "service" or "component". A node is the smallest addressable unit. Every node has a "relative node URI" that is composed of the network name and the node's own name into {network/node}. This relative node URI can be composed with absolute, transport dependent URIs such as http://server/vdir/network/node or msmq://machine/queuename/network/node. Within a network, the runtime is also capable of resolving logical addresses of the form fabriq://network/node and automatically map them to physical addresses. At runtime, a node accepts messages and dispatches them into one of one or more action pipelines. Each node may be guarded by a set of WS-Policy assertions, including Kerberos and X.509 cert authentication and authorization claims. A node may be hosted on a dedicated machine, one a well defined set of machines or on "any" machine within a cluster.
• An action pipeline is a pipeline that is associated with an action identifier and is roughly equivalent to a "method". An action identifier is a URI as per WS-Addressing's definition of wsa:Action and is mapped to SOAPAction: whenever we go through HTTP. A node must host at least one action pipeline with no limit on the number of action pipelines it can support. An action may declare a set of message schema-types that it understands and those message definitions may be used for validation inbound messages. An action has one or more outbound message routes that are matched against the result message action or destination. Multiple routes may match a message, which causes the message flow to fork. For each route exist one or multiple prioritized routing destinations. If multiple destinations have the same priority, the engine will balance calls across those, otherwise the engine will use the ones with lower priority as backup routes. At the end of each action pipeline is a sender port that sends resulting messages out to their destinations, which may be other FABRIQ nodes or any other external endpoint that understands the respective one-way message being sent.
• A pipeline is a composition of a sequence of handlers or nested pipelines. Pipelines can be nested in arbitrary depth. Pipelines are strictly unidirectional message processors that have no concept of a "response" on the same thread analogous to a return value (hence all actions are one-way only). A pipeline may or may not be based on a predefinable pipeline-type. Pipeline-types allow the definition of reusable pipelines that can be reused within the same network or (via import) in multiple networks.
• A handler refers to a software component (a CLR class) implementing a set of interfaces that allow it to be composed into and hosted in a pipeline. Handlers should be designed to perform only very primitive operations that can then be composed into pipelines to implement specific functionality. Built-in handlers include a content-based routing handler and an XSLT transformation handler. Custom handlers may contain any type of logic. A handler receives messages and may consume them, evaluate and annotate them and yield any number of resulting messages. The definition of a handler embeds an XML fragment that allows the handler to configure itself. The actual reference to the CLR class implementing the handler is defined in a handler-type.
• A handler-type associates a CLR class with a name that can be used to define handlers within a configuration file. It also allows the declaration of a code-base URL for the CLR class. This feature allows the installation of "virgin" FABRIQ runtimes in a cluster and have the runtimes auto-download all the required code for hosting a node from a central code store and therefore dramatically eases deployment and dynamic reconfiguration of a FABRIQ cluster.

In the next couple of postings I will map these terms to concrete config files.

The interesting bit about config is that FABRIQ's configuration mechanism uses the FABRIQ itself. FABRIQ has a predefined (extensible, configurable) network "fabriq" with a node "configuration" that currently defines a single action "configure". The pipeline for that action consists of a single handler (the FabriqConfigurationHandler) and that expects and accepts the configuration files I'll describe over the next days as the body of a message. With that, the configuration mechanism can be secured with policy, or can be embedded into a larger network that does preprocessing or even performs automatic assembly of configuration, or that automatically distributes configuration from a single point across a large cluster of machines.

To be continued ...

Achim and myself are currently in a series of very quick rev-cycles for the first public release of the Microsoft/newtelligence FABRIQ project that we did with and for Microsoft EMEA HQ and that was conceived, driven and brillantly managed by my architect colleague Arvindra Sehmi, who gave me the lead architect role for this project.

[Reminder/Disclaimer: this is not a product, but rather a pretty elaborate "how-to" architecture example that comes with an implementation. Hence it's not a supported Microsoft or newtelligence "framework" or an attempt at some general, definitive guidance on how to write services. FABRIQ is an optimized architecture for fast, one-way, message processing within network-distributed nodes consisting of sequences of dynamically composed primitive processing steps. This isn't even trying to get anywhere near the guidance aspirations of Shadowfax, or let alone all the guidance we're getting from the Indigo team or even the parallel work I've been doing for MS by building Proseware.]

We've settled on build 1.0.4173 (yesterday) to be the TechEd version, but we still found a last minute issue where we weren't using WSE 2.0 correctly (not setting the SoapEnvelope.Context.Destination property for use with a bare WSE2 Pipeline in the presence of policy) and when I reassembled the distribution I didn't reset an option that I use for debugging on my machine and that caused installation hiccups over at Achim's machine. Achim commented the hour-long bug hunt with "Ah, you gotta love software!".

There will be hands-on labs at TechEd Europe led by Achim and Jörg that let you play with what we (very much including our friends at Microsoft Argentina and Microsoft EMEA) have built. And even if you don't have a proper use for a one-way queuing network architecture, it actually turned into a fun thing to play with. 

I'll be starting to explain aspects of the spec over the upcoming days and will explain how the architecture works, how you configure it and what its potential uses are. Already posted is some relevant information about the great idea of an XmlReader-based message design (which I designed inspired by the Indigo PDC build) and our use of lightweight transactions.

I am in the boot phase for the next software project right now (proprietary work) and I have identified very many good uses for the FABRIQ model in there already (hint).

Once all parties involved are giving their "thumbs up", we'll also make the source code drop and the binaries available to the public (you) and from there we're looking forward to your input (and contributions?).

I start to believe Mono is real. Check this out. The folks from the mono team apparently ported dasBlog to Mono's ASP.NET incarnation. My friend Martin Spedding gave me the "heads up". Thanks.

You read it here first. Kimberly Tripp blogs (rss). If you do anything with SQL Server: Subscribe!

Microsoft urgently needs to consolidate all the APIs that are required for provisioning services or sites. The amount of knowledge you need to have and the number APIs you need to use in order to lock down a Web service or Enterprise Services application programmatically at installation time in order to have it run under an isolated user account (with a choice of local or domain account) that has the precise rights to do what it needs to do (but nothing else) is absolutely insane. 

You need to set ACLs on the file system and the registry, you need to modify the local machine's security policy, you need to create accounts and add them to local groups, you must adhere to password policies with your auto-generated passwords, you need to conbfigure identities on Enterprise Services applications and IIS application pools, you need to set ACLs on Message Queues (if you use them), and you need to write WS-Policy documents to secure your WS front. Every single of these tasks uses a different API (and writing policies has none) and most of these jobs require explicit Win32 or COM interop. I have a complete wrapper for that functionality for my app now (which took way too long to write), but that really needs to be fixed on a platform level.

Two non technical comments in a day; very rare. And two "thank you" messages, too. But this one has to be:

Thank you, President Reagan. Sir, you will have my respect forever for winning the cold war and having more than just a leading role in the fall of Berlin Wall.

Tomorrow morning, 60 years ago, the French Normandy coast saw the biggest military operation in the history of mankind.

It was the start of the liberation of Europe.

My grandfather Friedrich Vasters (my "F.") fell later the same year in France doing his duty as a motor-bike courier for the Wehrmacht in France. He and many other German soldiers had to die because Europe had to be freed from the grip of the German Nazi government. Many allied soldiers and German soldiers and members of the French resistance lost their lives on the beaches and field of northern France that day and just because of that I think this is a day to celebrate today's Europe.

Thank you, Allied Soldiers.

It's inevitable, its security improvements are absolutely necessary and it might break your code. I would strongly suggest that you install a test box with XP SP2 now if you haven't already done so. I've had some interesting surprises today.

Autonomy means that a service is alive.

Here are my sub-tenets:

• It has its very own, independent view on data. That may or may not result in fully owning its own data store (I think it should, but that's all a matter of scale and use case), but it certainly shall never share its own view on a shared store with others. The service's public interface(s) provide(s) the only way to manipulate its view on data.
• It controls its own lifetime. It can do periodical tasks, spin its own threads and should not be forced to shut down because its hosting process model thinks it's idle for the sole reason that it hasn't seen inbound traffic for a while.
• It has its own identity and carries a security responsibility. It identifies itself with a service-unique principal against other services and through of its own authorization rules it takes the responsibility upon itself that no user gains illegitimate access to backend data or services. It identifies and takes responsibility for those that invoke it, but never assumes their identity.

The PEACE tenets for SO are a composite set. Autonomy is architecturally the most far reaching of the SO tenets and it is much more about the inside and fundamental behavior of a service than about its edge.