Question

Currently I have one Windows Azure Cloud Service Project (Service1) that will put messages into a storage queue (to be pulled by another cloud service), and then later pull messages out of a different storage queue. Based on the messages received by this service, an object may be added to a SQL Azure Database. So Far I have adding to the Queue working, and I have created a service library that contains the Entity DataModel for the SQL Database which so far only has one table, tblCustomers. This Project has a web role to display the customers coming in, and a worker role to send customers to another service for proccesing. I serialize a customer Object into xml using XMLSerializer, and send that xml message to the Queue. Serialization code:

//Serialize Lead to XML
            StringBuilder sbLead = new StringBuilder();
            var serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(Lead));
            using (var writer = XmlWriter.Create(sbLead))
            {
                serializer.Serialize(writer, objLead);
            } 
            String xml = sbLead.ToString();

            //Create and send message
            var message = new CloudQueueMessage(xml);
            clarityQueue.AddMessage(message);

Customer Entity Object Definition:

public partial class Customer
    {
        public int ID { get; set; }
        public string FirstName { get; set; }
        public string MiddleName { get; set; }
        public string LastName { get; set; }
        public string AddressLine1 { get; set; }
        public string AddressLine2 { get; set; }
        public string ZipCode { get; set; }
        public string EmailAddress { get; set; }
        public string HomePhone { get; set; }
        public string CellPhone { get; set; }
        public string SSN { get; set; }
        public string DateOfBirth { get; set; }
        public string IDState { get; set; }
        public string IDNum { get; set; }
        public string Status { get; set; }
        public Nullable<System.DateTime> DateCreated { get; set; }
        public Nullable<System.DateTime> DateApproved { get; set; }
    }

Now I need to pull that message out of the Queue with a different service (Service2) and deserialize it. The problem is, that as of right now Service2 has no idea how to deserialize the Lead, because it does not know how a lead is structured. I understand that I could add the service library DLL from Service1 into service 2, and my problem would be solved, but then i have to copy over a DLL everytime the Entity Framework changes, which will probably be quite often. I think that having a seperate entity model in both projects is bad practice, but I also don’t feel like a WCF service library is appropriate because i would need the Cloud service, and the WCF service both running, and at that point I might as well make the whole project a WCF service. And thats not the goal.

My Question is, what is the best practice for using entity objects in multiple different solutions (Service1 and Service2 must be in separate solutions)? I feel like this is a somewhat common problem, but after going through the Azure Training kit, and searching online for hours, i havent come up with anything.

EDIT:
To Clear things up, All I am looking for is a way to Send an Entity Object from one azure cloud service to another Using Storage Queues. That is Send A customer Object From Service1, to a StorageQueue, and then Retrieve that same Customer Object From that StorageQueue using Service 2. The Services are in two separate solutions. I need to know how to define Customer (which is an object represented by a table in a database) in both Service1 and Service2

Answer 1

One approach is to have a seperate project that would contain the Entity classes, plus other stuff (like repositories, enums, constants, … etc)

For example, if your project is called “MyService”, you would have 3 projects: MyService, MyService.FrontEnd, MyService.Worker. The database entities code would live in MyService and the two other projects would include that project as a reference (do not browse to the bin folder and add the .dll as a reference. Visual studio allows you to reference other projects within the same solution, that way you don’t have to copy the dll or run into out of sync issues where the build order is incorrect)

That’s the approach that I’ve been using on multiple cloud projects for few years now.