Joe Freeman

This article is not for you if you are happy developing/testing with at most two machines, your developer machine and a machine under test.  It is not for you if you do all your product evaluation, training and test can only be done in Azure or some other cloud environment that doesn't support nested virtualizaiton. This is really about building your own virtual labs or data centers to simulate larger installations or to use as training environments.  Microsoft applications or machine clusters often include Active Directory, a database and some application servers. You can some times install all this on single machines.  Multiple machines make sense if you are working on clustering or wish to leverage portions of your setup for future projects. Microsoft often provides VHDs for some of their more complicated products that save you configuration time. These machines are often more interesting when integrated into to some type of application including AD databases or other too

Our team returns a HTML home page  when anyone makes a GET request at the root of our API or monitoring web endpoints.  This  service help page includes a combination of static and dynamic content. We struggled building decent looking pages until we started using the Mule Parse Template  component and groovy component that invokes the Mule Expression Language (MEL) processor against the markup. The example to the right shows how our  default  behavior in a our web choice router processes a web template. Sample Code You can find sample code in the Coda Hale exception metrics counter demo on GitHub Parse Template The Parse Template  component loads a file into the Mule payload. You can use this to return any raw file to the caller based on the request path. This lets you return html, css or js type files from iniside your application.  We will use this feature to load an HTML file into the payload that includes embedded MEL.  The sample program sets the Location  property