About WCF Service Bus

Question

In my graduating project proposal, in which i will need to access so intranet externally from another intranet, he asked me to use the WCF Service bus (Windows Azure) , in fact i understand nothing about the WCF and my whole experience is in WPF & C# , so i would like to know

1. What's the service bus and when it's used ?
2. Can i establish an ordinary connection just to access the resources of another part of company ?
3. Is there any underlying required networking knowledge to understand the service bus ?
4. what benefits and advantages of the service bus ? why people are using it ?
5. Should i understand the WCF totally before i use it ? or i can directly jump and learn it ?

And please , any additional information about this stuff will be very useful for me , thanks alot :)

Answer 1

Azure Service Bus provides a lot of different capabilities, but the one you seem to be most interested in is relaying.

Please consider this excerpt:

The Service Bus Relay service enables you to build hybrid applications that run in both a Windows Azure datacenter and your own on-premises enterprise environment. The Service Bus relay facilitates this by enabling you to securely expose Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services that reside within a corporate enterprise network to the public cloud, without having to open up a firewall connection or requiring intrusive changes to a corporate network infrastructure.

The Service Bus relay allows you to host WCF services within your existing enterprise environment. You can then delegate listening for incoming sessions and requests to these WCF services to the Service Bus running within Windows Azure. This enables you to expose these services to application code running in Windows Azure, or to mobile workers or extranet partner environments. The Service Bus allows you to securely control who can access these services at a fine-grain level. It provides a powerful and secure way to expose application functionality and data from your existing enterprise solutions and take advantage of it from the cloud.

I think that excerpt answers your first and fourth questions.

To answer your second question, if by "ordinary connection" you mean a connection utilizing HTTP or TCP protocols, then yes.

To answer your other questions, yes, it is always helpful to understand--with at least some degree of depth--a technology you are utilizing, especially if you want to avoid common mistakes and maintain decent performance. While you do not need to use WCF to connect to an Azure Service Bus, if you are planning on using WCF in your project in conjunction with Azure Service Bus relaying, then naturally it would be of great benefit for you to understand that technology. I recommend you follow a MSDN "Getting Started" tutorial.