14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has made available for download the second Beta development milestone of Windows Server AppFabric. Designed to allow developers to expand their applications into the Cloud, Windows Server AppFabric brings to the table a collection of integrated technologies aimed at companies that are currently leveraging Internet Information Services (IIS). With the application server, devs can build, scale and manage web and composite applications expanding on top of the already familiar IIS environment. Specifically, Windows Server AppFabric is designed for applications that have been put together leveraging Microsoft technologies including ASP.NET, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF).
“It provides out-of-the-box capabilities for you to easily build and manage composite applications, including: enhanced design and development tools in Visual Studio to build rich composite applications; management and monitoring of services and workflows via integration with IIS Manager and Windows PowerShell; distributed in-memory application cache to improve application performance,” Microsoft explained.
Windows Server AppFabric Beta 2 comes to replace the Beta 1 Build which was offered to developers in 2009. Beta 1 of Windows Server AppFabric went live at the Professional Developers Conference 2009, in Los Angeles, concomitantly with the Windows Azure platform AppFabric. As Microsoft announced at that time, AppFabric contains a range of products such as the hosting and caching technologies code-named “Dublin” and code-named “Velocity,” but also Windows Azure platform AppFabric Service Bus and AppFabric Access Control (formerly referred to as .NET Services).
In addition to offering a new development milestone of Windows Server AppFabric, the Redmond company has also made available for download codename "Dublin" and codename "Velocity" samples for the Beta 2 Build. Devs will be able to access Dublin Samples: Common Dublin Sample Application, Integrating Monitoring with SQL Reporting Services, Windows PowerShell Script to Configure Throttling on Multiple Computers, Scripted Configuration of Dublin, Querying the SQL Monitoring Database using Windows PowerShell, Synchronize All Computers in a Web Farm to a Model Computer. At the same time, the following Velocity samples are being offered: CacheApiSample, CacheVersusDiskPerformance and CacheSampleApp.
Windows Server AppFabric Beta 2 is available for download here.