I've recently been playing with the Azure Event Hub. This is basically a way of transmitting large amounts* of data between systems. In a later post, I may try and test these limits by designing some kind of game based on this.

As a quick disclaimer, it's worth bearing in mind that I am playing with this technology, and so much of the content of this post can be found in the links at the bottom of this post — you won't find anything original here, just a record of my findings. You may find more (and more accurate) information in those.

The first step, as with many Azure services, is to create a namespace:

For a healthy amount of data transference, you'll pay around £10 per month.

Finally, we'll create event hub within the namespace:

When you create the event hub, it asks how many partitions you need. This basically splits the message delivery, and it's clever enough to work out that if you have 3 partitions and two listeners you should have two slots, and one listener needs only one slot:

We'll need an access policy so that we have permission to listen:

We'll need to create two applications: a producer and a consumer.

Let's start with a producer. Create a new console app and add this NuGet library.

Here's the code:

class Program {
 private static EventHubClient eventHubClient;
 private
 const string EhConnectionString = "Endpoint=sb://pcm-testeventhub.servicebus.windows.net/;SharedAccessKeyName=Publisher;SharedAccessKey=key;EntityPath=pcm-eventhub1";
 private
 const string EhEntityPath = "pcm-eventhub1";

 public static async Task Main(string[] args) {
  EventHubsConnectionStringBuilder connectionStringBuilder = new EventHubsConnectionStringBuilder(EhConnectionString) {
   EntityPath = EhEntityPath
  };

  eventHubClient = EventHubClient.CreateFromConnectionString(connectionStringBuilder.ToString());

  while (true) {
   Console.Write("Please enter message to send: ");
   string message = Console.ReadLine();
   if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(message)) break;

   await eventHubClient.SendAsync(new EventData(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(message)));
  }

  await eventHubClient.CloseAsync();

  Console.WriteLine("Press ENTER to exit.");
  Console.ReadLine();
 }
}

Consumer

Next we'll create a consumer, so the first thing we'll need is to grant permissions for listening:

We'll create a second new console application with this same library and the processor library, too.

class Program {
 private
 const string EhConnectionString = "Endpoint=sb://pcm-testeventhub.servicebus.windows.net/;SharedAccessKeyName=Listener;SharedAccessKey=key;EntityPath=pcm-eventhub1";
 private
 const string EhEntityPath = "pcm-eventhub1";
 private
 const string StorageContainerName = "eventhub";
 private
 const string StorageAccountName = "pcmeventhubstorage";
 private
 const string StorageAccountKey = "key";

 private static readonly string StorageConnectionString = string.Format("DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName={0};AccountKey={1}", StorageAccountName, StorageAccountKey);

 static async Task Main(string[] args) {
  Console.WriteLine("Registering EventProcessor...");

  var eventProcessorHost = new EventProcessorHost(
   EhEntityPath,
   PartitionReceiver.DefaultConsumerGroupName,
   EhConnectionString,
   StorageConnectionString,
   StorageContainerName);

  // Registers the Event Processor Host and starts receiving messages
  await eventProcessorHost.RegisterEventProcessorAsync < EventsProcessor > ();

  Console.WriteLine("Receiving. Press ENTER to stop worker.");
  Console.ReadLine();

  // Disposes of the Event Processor Host
  await eventProcessorHost.UnregisterEventProcessorAsync();
 }
}

class EventsProcessor: IEventProcessor {
 public Task CloseAsync(PartitionContext context, CloseReason reason) {
  Console.WriteLine($ "Processor Shutting Down. Partition '{context.PartitionId}', Reason: '{reason}'.");
  return Task.CompletedTask;
 }

 public Task OpenAsync(PartitionContext context) {
  Console.WriteLine($ "SimpleEventProcessor initialized. Partition: '{context.PartitionId}'");
  return Task.CompletedTask;
 }

 public Task ProcessErrorAsync(PartitionContext context, Exception error) {
  Console.WriteLine($ "Error on Partition: {context.PartitionId}, Error: {error.Message}");
  return Task.CompletedTask;
 }

 public Task ProcessEventsAsync(PartitionContext context, IEnumerable < EventData > messages) {
  foreach(var eventData in messages) {
   var data = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(eventData.Body.Array, eventData.Body.Offset, eventData.Body.Count);
   Console.WriteLine($ "Message received. Partition: '{context.PartitionId}', Data: '{data}'");
  }

  return context.CheckpointAsync();
 }
}

As you can see, we can now transmit data through the Event Hub into client applications:

Footnotes

*Large, in terms of frequency, rather than volume — for example, transmitting a small message twice a second, rather than uploading a petabyte of data.