14 DAY TRIAL // On June 30, 2009, Microsoft announced that it was ready to start accepting nominations for the Technology Adoption Program of its upcoming Distributed Application Server. Essentially, the company is opening up Codename Dublin to a specific customer segment interested in more than simply testing the new technologies cooking over in Redmond. In this regard, Kent Brown, a senior product manager in the .NET product marketing group for Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), noted that the TAP program for Codename Dublin would provide not only early access to the Distributed Application Server, but also a chance for participants to influence the requirements of the product, and even tailor the solution to their needs.
““Dublin” rounds out the existing application server capabilities in Windows by providing additional features to help organizations manage and run Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) services built using .NET 4,” Brown explained. “TAP participants help Microsoft reach its quality bar across product, documentation and support services and help validate features and use cases in real world environments. Customers receive direct support by Microsoft and are able to deploy pre-release builds into production if needed.”
Brown indicated that request for participation in the technology Adoption Program for codename Dublin could be submitted via Microsoft Connect. However, at the time of this article, the Connect page reserved for the Microsoft Codename "Dublin" Program, although live, wasn't offering customers an actual chance to sign up for testing.
“We are accepting nominations now and will continue to accept nominations until August when the program is scheduled to start or until capacity is exceeded. Because “Dublin” needs WCF and/or WF 4 services to manage, we want to accept organizations into the program as soon as possible so that work can commence on the service development side prior to “Dublin” availability for TAP customers in August/September,” Brown added.