The Power of the Worker Role: Windows Azure + Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Better Together, Part Three

If you are using Windows Azure, then you have probably noticed huge amount of recent changes. We have a new portal which looks and functions very nicely, more IaaS, and a lot of extended capabilities. Scott Guthrie  published a summary article on his blog about new Azure 2.0 that is worth a look.

Let's than start with another part of Windows Azure that might be a very helpful for those of us working in Microsoft Dynamics world, the "Worker Role". (You can see our previous explorations on routing orders and brokered messaging also.)  It sounds very mysterious but it's actually simple and powerful at the same time. Worker roles are applications that are developed to run asynchronously and to work on long-running or perpetual tasks independent of user interaction or input.  I would definitely compare them to the older (before cloud era ) "Windows Service" . The beauty of the worker role comes also with interoperability - a worker role can host almost any type of application including Java-based, Apache Tomcat, .NET of course, even WCF web services.  

But enough theory let's present our...

Business Problem

Company XYZ is adding more and more customers and they need to perform more and more periodic jobs. Two of these jobs in particular are consuming a lot of resources. One is generation and transfer of invoices and the other is monitoring of their SLA's (Service Level Agreements).

Generation of invoices seems like a pretty simple job, but ...