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.

Event Hub Namespace

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, if you have 3 partitions and two listeners that one should have two slots, and one, one slot:

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

New Console Apps

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

References

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/event-hubs/event-hubs-dotnet-standard-getstarted-send

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/event-hubs/event-hubs-dotnet-standard-getstarted-receive-eph