The importance of staying current

One of my favorite aspects of Azure Service Bus, or most true cloud platforms, is the continuous delivery model that we as a product team use to constantly improve the service. We are capable of updating our service, while running, at any time. In fact we do it all the time and customers don't really see an impact because the way in which we do it. When people make a comment that something is 'like changing a tire driving down the highway' I have a little laugh because we change all the wheels, engine, and the drive-train.

The one part we can't change is the client that our customers use to communicate with our service. This is one reason many people like REST so much - there is no client. That said we still update our .NET client at a very regular basis. In fact twice just this month. The client package is located at https://www.nuget.org/packages/WindowsAzure.ServiceBus/.

This is where we would like customers to play a part in improving our platform and hence their solutions. Updating to the latest NuGet package is ALWAYS THE BEST PRACTICE for Azure Service Bus. Some of these updates are small - like this week's which removes sensitive information from exceptions involving connection strings (and has zero signature change or impact to your code) - others are more significant - like improvements we've introduced to improve service performance for every service in Service Bus. This means that if you use Relay, Queues & Topics (messaging), Event Hubs, or Notification Hubs you should update your NuGet packages AT LEAST quarterly or better still every time you compile or deploy. That's the power and beauty of NuGet – it makes this easy.

If you're worried about 'things break when I update' you should know that we follow the  Semantic Versioning 2.0.0 guidelines. This means unless we increment the major number nothing will break. For more information how NuGet facilitates this please see https://docs.nuget.org/Create/Versioning.

Even if you use the Azure SDK, you should still add Service Bus via a NuGet package and ALWAYS USE THE LATEST package. The Service Bus client is a sophisticated and powerful piece of software and like the service itself we are constantly improving it. If you were to have a support incident one of the first questions asked will be what client version you are using - and the first step towards resolution will be to update your client package.

Please - take the small amount of time to update your NuGet packages right now.

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 23, 2015
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• Anonymous
  May 23, 2015
  I've started using a great Azure ServiceBus library called Nimbus (github.com/.../135).  It still supports the on-premise ServiceBus installation that comes via the Web Platform Installer.  However that means they need to stay on an older version of the API. Do you have an opinion on how to best handle that scenario?

• Anonymous
  May 23, 2015
  i am owner of <a href="http://www.jobcall.in">jobs</a>

• Anonymous
  May 25, 2015
  On the topic of 'staying current', can we expect any news about Service Bus for Windows (which is still languishing on version 1.1)?

• Anonymous
  June 02, 2015
  Hi, did you changed certificate on Service Bus - Azure Event Hub? Since 12:30 today, our devices cannot connect to REST API due to the error with TLS handshake. Matej