14 DAY TRIAL // Cloud customers already leveraging the enhancements introduced recently with the May 2011 Windows Azure AppFabric Community Technology Preview, might also be interested in some details about the next refresh of the service. Microsoft plans to kick the Windows Azure AppFabric CTP up a notch again next month with a fresh update, which will contain, among others AppFabric Developer Tools and Application Manager, the Redmond company revealed.
The Windows Azure AppFabric CTP May release brought with it a range of improvements to the Service Bus.
At the same time, the next refresh to AppFabric will make it even easier for developers to not only build, but also deploy, monitor closely and manage their Cloud applications.
The work Microsoft is currently focusing on will allow devs to put together applications which will act as single logical entities thanks to AppFabric, despite being essentially multi-tier apps, stretched across the Cloud, business logic and databases.
As a part of the evolution of AppFabric, Cloud customers will also be able to leverage Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) services starting in June 2011.
Here is a list with the changes planned for Windows Azure AppFabric CTP June 2011:
“• AppFabric Developer Tools which are enhancements to Visual Studio that enable to visually design and build end-to-end applications on the Windows Azure platform.
• AppFabric Application Manager which are runtime capabilities that enable automatic deployment, management and monitoring of the end-to-end application, and is supported by visual monitoring and analytics from within the cloud management portal.
• Composition Model which are a set of .NET Framework extensions for composing applications on the Windows Azure platform. This builds on the familiar Azure Service Model concepts and adds new capabilities for describing and integrating the components of an application. The Composition Model gets created by the AppFabric Developer Tools and used by the AppFabric Application Manager,” Microsoft revealed.