Windows Azure and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Better Together, Part Two: Routing Orders to Many Partners

After a long break it's time for the next part of this series on connecting Dynamics CRM with Windows Azure. In the last article I presented the "brokered" messaging pattern.  Now I'd like to show you a somewhat more advanced messaging pattern; but let's start with the business problem.

Business Problem

Our favourite company XYZ is still using Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, but now they have acquired another company that has Dynamics CRM 2011 on-premise.  They also have more business partners who can fulfil their orders.  XYZ wants still leverage Windows Azure as it's already been proven for providing secure and reliable cross-boundary communication.

The situation looks a bit more complex - we have at least 2 Dynamics CRM systems that are "publishing" orders and we have few business partners who are waiting for orders. That situation should drive us to use a very common and powerful messaging pattern called publish/subscribe. 

A bit of theory: Publisher/subscribe is a pattern whereby senders of messages do not send anything directly to specific receivers, but instead they publish message and subscribers express interest in those  message and only receive messages that are of interest, without knowledge of the exact publishers. The diagram bellow shows how we can implement the pub/sub pattern using Windows Azure component:

In the previous example we had queues and each message was consumed by a single consumer.  Now we can have one-to-many communication. Messages are sent to a topic and delivered to one or ...