Service Bus Topic - Different ways to create and manage it

In the last post, we saw how easily we can integrate Service Bus Topic with WCF. Today topic is simple. There are times when we need to create topics and subscriptions that are valid for one day or two. Not only this, this task can sometimes be done by various persons of applications. Let’s see what our options are.
Of course the most powerful tool is the code. From code we can create topics, subscriptions and configure them in any way we want. When we create a topic we can set the default TTL value of messages that will be send to the topic, but we will not be able to set a property that specify the TTL of the topic (delete after 2 days for example). But, beside this we can set others values like the maximum size of the topic, enable or disable the batch operations and if the message duplication detection is activated. Similar configurations can be made to a subscription using SubscriptionDescription.

TopicDescription topicDescription = new TopicDescription()
{
 RequiresDuplicateDetection = true;
}

In this moment we cannot specify from configuration file (or any kind of XML) a new topic or a new subscription or to reconfigure one of them. If we need something like this we can very easily create a small application for this purpose.
The last way to create topics and subscriptions is from Windows Azure portal. This can be created from the portal using only the mouse. All the main properties can be configures from here. We need to go the Service Bus tab. In this tab we will have buttons than give us the ability to create topics and subscriptions. The only limitation is on subscriptions, we cannot create filters and actions for them. Because of this a subscription created from the portal will receive all the messages.

Another way to create them (that I don’t enjoy) is by HTTP requests. Yes, using simple HTTP request we can create and manage Service Bus. The assembly that we use from the code to create a topic is only a wrapper over HTTP requests. Because the topic is quite complex, please find more information about this in the following link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh780752.aspx
We saw that we can create and manager topics in various ways. Because all the commands can be executed over HTTP/HTTPS we can create any configuration tool (and also use Service Bus) from any language and platform. This can be great when we want to integrate it in a big and old system that is written in Perl or from COBOL (that use a library like Libcurl).