TechEd Day 3 – AppFabric
Most of the sessions I attended today have covered the new technology of Windows Server AppFabric. As well as getting some in depth information on the existing technical details we’ve also been fortunate enough to get to view some of the brand new functionality (such as Caching) that was only revealed to the developer community 2 weeks ago at the PDC.
AppFabric is a long promised technology platform that provides a number of services:
- Caching
- Service Hosting (eg WF,WCF)
- Monitoring
- Service Bus
- Access Control
A view more details ….
Caching
This service could well be of use to us in scaling our ASP.net apps as it provides a viable alternative to ASPs current SessionState model.
Service Hosting
This is the bit that most excites me as it provides for the deployment, hosting and persistence of Workflows and WCF endpoints (ie running WF instances and WCF services).
All of the Hosting, Tracking, Monitoring and control panel functionality(plus more) I had to code by hand for the Rio project is covered by this.
Two years ago when we attended the PDC in LA this part of AppFabric was announced and was code named “Dublin”. So to finally see it delivered and demoed was great. (PDC 2008 : “Dublin”)
Monitoring
This “does exactly what it says on the tin”. It monitors the health of WF & WCF!
Service Bus
Connecting 2 disparate systems via a secure messaging paradigm (MSMQ … I think?). The systems don’t need to be on the same domain or even be .NET apps.
Access Control
Unbelievably this is nothing less than federation of a huge variety of the many different identities a user may have on the web : Passport, Facebook, GMail ….
So for example you can choose to federate an AD account with a Facebook account to authenticate a user. Sounds very dodgy to me !
I can’t see HSBC letting users sign on to our AD using Facebook credentials ! 😀
Of course all of this new technology is key to Azure and their Cloud ambitions. None the less AppFabric is still a “1st class citizen” (to quote Microsoft) in the Windows Server landscape.
All of this functionality is administered via an AppFabric Dashboard that is part of IIS7 or can be used in WAS.
This is pretty neat really because it means you can administer both your GUI tier and Business Layer in one place now.
Tuck, Kieran and Jon meanwhile have been emersing themselves in the black arts of SQL configuration and optimization. They also joined in with some of the “AppFabric fun” too.
Jon & I rounded off the day in an interesting session on the “Best Practices for Building High Performance Websites”. It was intriguing to see a demo of the forthcoming IE9 and to hear about all the optimisations they’ve built in , especially around the Java Runtime.
A most excellent day.
