After a quite while, I’d a chance to start looking into Windows Server AppFabric. This is one my long pending middler tier component from Windows/.NET combo.
What is AppFabric?
A set of components provide service hosting, in-memory caching, stateful services persistence and management services, management consoles and API to access these services. The following figure shows the major responsibilities of AppFabric components.
Hosting services extends WAS (Windows Process Activation Service) with some default configuration, workflow management and, administration tools. In-memory caching, previously code-named as Velocity, is a solution for scalable caching of enterprise/web applications. Its cluster architecture and provision to configure various caching options enable us to prepare feast for small to large crowd. Not know in detail about what makes different from WF 3.x and SQL Server combo, and state persistence service in AppFabric. Let us see in detail on future logs. To manage these aspects, AppFabric provides variety of management services which includes dashboard, service deployment, monitors and APIs.
Setup your AppFabric Environment
Windows Server AppFabric is actually designed for Windows 2008, but has development stage avatars for Windows Vista/7. AppFabric beta 1 targetedc .NET 4.0 beta 2 and AppFabric beta 2 is targeted .NET 4.0 RC. It will act as extension of IIS 7.0. The following figure shows the IIS MMC for this.
The Windows 7/2008 beta 1 can be downloaded at http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/A/E/0AEB3BC1-506E-4954-8AB1-4FA2EE75985C/AseSetup_x86_6.1.exe.
Beta 2 can be downloaded at http://download.microsoft.com/download/F/D/4/FD4F05A5-016B-40F8-A61F-1D38E202A32A/WindowsServerAppFabricSetup_x86_6.1.exe.
[...] to my previous introductory post about AppFabric, it is very fundamental knowing the architecture and components IIS 7.0 and WAS. So, this post. [...]