Sam Gentile's Blog (if (DeveloperTask == Communication && OS == Windows)

My Dublin category has been totally empty since August 2008, when Dublin was announced at the SOA Conference. Well, today it finally became public in the form of Windows AppFabric. As my good friend,Brian Loesgen writes, "Today at PDC Bob Muglia, President Server and Tools Business, introduced the world to Windows AppFabric.  AppFabric is a new set of capabilities, bringing together the functionality of Dublin, as well as Velocity (a high-performance, distributed, highly-scalable in-memory cache), plus the Service Bus and Access Control Services that were formerly part of the .NET Services brand."

This makes total sense. By bringing in the capabilities formerly in code-name Dublin, AppFabric provides host capabilities for .NET 4.0 Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation services, with extended management through the IIS manager, plus the ability to do service monitoring. This is much needed functionality as V1 (V3.0) and V2 (3.5) of both WCF and WF didn't ship with much tooling - you had to roll out your own for hosting, monitoring, management and so forth. This caused hardship in adoption of these CSD technologies and left a big gaping hole, for Java platforms have had Application Servers for years that served as host for EJBs and such.

I have been playing quite a bit with Dublin (and the virtual labs) and happy to see it public so I can blog more about it. For now, as Brian says, "Beta 1 of AppFabric is available now. I’d encourage you all to go off and explore some of the exciting capabilities. Get it right now at http://msdn.microsoft.com/AppFabric."