News

Microsoft Debuts AppFabric for Composite App Development

• By Michael Desmond
• 11/19/2009

Bob Muglia, president of Microsoft's Server and Tools Business, introduced AppFabric during Tuesday's opening keynote at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles.

Muglia touted AppFabric as a foundational component of Microsoft's Windows Server and Windows Azure strategy. AppFabric comprises a number of already existing technologies bound together in an abstraction layer that will help establish a common set of target services for applications running either on-premise on Windows Server or in the cloud on Windows Azure.

The beta of AppFabric for Windows Server 2008 R2 was announced during the keynote, while a community technology preview (CTP) version for Windows Azure is promised some time in 2010.

Burley Kawasaki, director of Microsoft's Connected System Division, described AppFabric as a logical next step in .NET abstraction.

"We really see AppFabric as being the next layer that we add to move up the stack, so we can provide a developer with truly symmetrical sets of services -- application-level services that you can take advantage of regardless of whether you are targeting on-premise or cloud platforms," Kawasaki said. "This is an additional level of abstraction that is built into the system model, just like SQL, as an example, uses T-SQL as a common model, whether or not you are on the cloud."

Kawasaki said that AppFabric will help fix a problem facing Microsoft developers: ".NET is a consistent model today, but when you do File/New to write an app for Azure, your whole application looks a little different than it would if you were just writing an app on-premise."

The goal of AppFabric, Kawasaki said, is to present a uniform developer experience and service interface for both on-premise and cloud apps.

"They should be fairly identical in terms of capabilities. That should be the goal, so you as a developer do not have to learn different skills. It will be as symmetrical as possible," Kawasaki said. "There will always be things you have to know about the deployment environment you are running on, but if we do our job right again, the AppFabric is taking the lower-level dependencies in mind."

AppFabric incorporates a host of technologies already familiar to .NET developers, including the Velocity distributed caching engine, the Dublin app-server extensions focused on Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), as well as management enabled via PowerShell scripting and Internet Information Server (IIS) integration.

Kawasaki singled out Silverlight 4, the upcoming version of Microsoft's rich Internet application (RIA) platform announced on Wednesday by Scott Guthrie, vice president of Microsoft's Developer Division, as a platform poised to take advantage of AppFabric.

"A big push in Silverlight 4 is building on top of the WCF service model and the RIA services," Kawasaki said. "One of the benefits you get from that is because AppFabric just manages WCF as a service, suddenly your Silverlight 4 back-end now can be more scalable and reliable when using AppFabric as that scale-out middle tier. I think that's one of those things that we'll start talking about more now that the Silverlight 4 announcement was made. Increasingly, there are a very broad set of services that people are really excited about. People want to build Silverlight 4 apps and scale that and now there is a solution for that."

Kawasaki urged developers to jump on the AppFabric for Windows Server beta. "My advice to developers would be to start using Beta 1 for on-premises. That is the best way to get started whether you are using on-premise or in the cloud."