The .NET Endpoint : Dublin

Getting started with Windows Server AppFabric

AppFabric Team — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:40:00 GMT

In a previous post we introduced Windows Server AppFabric, a set of extensions to the Windows Application Server that “make it easier to build, scale and manage Web and composite applications that run on Internet Information Services (IIS).” AppFabric enhances the Application Server role in Windows by providing some features out of the box that customers previously have had to build by themselves. These include a scalable distributed cache and features for managing WCF and WF services. In this post I’m going to give you some tips for getting started with the service and workflow management features of AppFabric.

First, if you haven’t already done so, install AppFabric. You’ll find a pointer to the download page on the Windows Server AppFabric Development Center site. Keep this site handy. This is the main site for AppFabric and is where you will find the latest news as well as links to samples, tutorials, and the support forum.

Find the link to the download page on the Dev Center site. Follow that link and take a few minutes to download and read the installation guide and release notes. Install any prerequisite software and Windows hotfixes that you may be missing. The prereqs include .NET 4 Beta 2 and Windows PowerShell v2. If you’re running on Windows Vista SP2 or Windows Server 2008 SP2 you’ll need to uninstall PowerShell v1 and download and install v2. Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 include PowerShell v2 by default. See the installation guide for details.

On the download page find the Setup package for your machine’s operating system and architecture, and run the Setup wizard. We’ll use only the service and workflow management features of AppFabric for now so we require only the Worker feature to be installed, but install and configure the distributed cache features if you will use those later.

The Dev Center site links to a tutorial that walks you through deploying, configuring, monitoring, and managing a WF service. The tutorial does a nice job introducing most of the service and workflow management features of AppFabric and is well worth the time to go through. The first version of the tutorial has you use the IIS Manager tools for the exercises, while the second version has you complete the tasks using PowerShell cmdlets and scripts. The tutorial comes with a sample application that you will deploy using the Web Deployment Tool. You’ll hear us highlight this tool quite a bit as we talk about managing IIS hosted services. The tool is powerful for synchronizing applications and IIS settings from one machine to another.

If you just want to see some of the features in action, though, you can create a simple workflow service project in Visual Studio 2010 and run it in IIS. Create a new project using the WCF Workflow Service Application template. This will give you a workflow service with a GetData operation that receives a message and sends a response. On the project properties, view the Web tab and configure the application to run in IIS instead of the Visual Studio Development Server. If you’re running Visual Studio elevated as an administrator and you have the IIS 6 Management Compatibility feature of IIS installed you can create a new virtual directory directly from the Web tab. Otherwise, use IIS Manager to create the virtual directory, pointing it to the root directory of your Visual Studio project. (This is where you’ll find the web.config and XAMLX files.)

Once you have your application running in IIS you can see and manage its services with AppFabric. Open IIS Manager and expand the tree. Click on the root node and find the Application Server Extensions for .NET 4 modules in the center features pane. With those modules you can view service activity on the Dashboard, view endpoints, and configure services. Go back to your project in Visual Studio and add a Delay activity at the end of your workflow to keep instances alive for a few minutes so you can watch them go from the Active to Idle states in the Persisted WF Instances section of the Dashboard and see the instances show up in the WF Instance History section as they complete.

AppFabric adds some powerful features to the Windows Application Server. Install the Beta 1 and go through the tutorials to learn about the features in depth, or try a simple scenario on your own to get familiar with the features. If you run into any problems or have feedback to share with us please do so in our forum or via our Connect page.

Developing and Managing Services with Windows Server AppFabric

Cliff Simpkins — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:30:00 GMT

Today at PDC we are excited to introduce the Windows Server AppFabric Beta 1. AppFabric evolves the existing application server capabilities of Windows Server to make it easier to build, scale and manage Web and composite applications that run on Internet Information Services (IIS).

For Web applications, AppFabric provides caching capabilities to provide high-speed access, scale, and high availability to application data These capabilities are based on the technology previously code named “Velocity.”

For composite applications, AppFabric makes it easier to build and manage services built using Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). These capabilities are based on the technology previously code named “Dublin.”

This first post provides an introduction to developing and managing WF services with AppFabric. Download the Beta 1 release at http://msdn.microsoft.com/appfabric.

Introduction to AppFabric

The benefits of having service-based applications, often referred to as SOA, to create systems based on autonomous services have been articulated in several MSDN articles. WCF is the technology that enables this, and in turn has been integrated with other Microsoft developer technologies such as ADO.NET Data Services, WCF rich Internet applications (RIA) services and WCF REST services. In .NET Framework 4, WCF has been deeply integrated with an improved WF runtime enabling you to build WCF services that are implemented with WF.

Whatever technology that you use to build and compose services together, you face challenges based on these questions:. “When building server applications what features of the platform can I take advantage of that light up my application and enable me to focus more on the business?” “Having built this application, where is the best place to test this, to run this in production, and how do I manage it?”

This post focuses on how Windows Server AppFabric, combined with the .NET Framework 4, addresses these challenges, with particular emphasis on WF services.

Developing WF Services

Depending on the architecture of your application, typically you build services focused on the middle tier. For example, ADO.NET Data Services are suited for the data access tier and can be composed together with other services in the middle tier. For an overview of WF services in .NET 4, read the Aaron’s overview of WCF in .NET 4 on MSDN. In the middle tier, WF services are an ideal technology, since they are strongly focused on using declarative approaches for composing services for your business. For additional reading on WCF Services, David Chappell’s ‘The Workflow Way’ provides an excellent introduction to the topic.

The key values that WF Services bring to service authoring are:

Long-running applications that wait for external input for activation such as messages, thereby using resources efficiently.
A single or sequential flow control programming model while handling the complexity of multiple async I/O calls. For example, by using a parallel activity in your WF Service you can coordinate multiple calls to other services allowing the WF runtime to take care of all the async message calls and marshaling the data back to your service.
Coordination of messages to workflow instances with the use of message correlation. WF Services in .NET Framework 4 provide content-based correlation that enables you to query the content of a message for unique information to identify the specific workflow instance the message relates to. This enables long-running scenarios being able to activate a specific workflow instance when clients send messages.
Consistent WCF and WF instrumentation integrated with Event Tracing for Windows (ETW). The WCF and WF runtimes now both emit ETW events for tracing and tracking to provide detailed monitoring and diagnostics. Using ETW provides greater performance, thereby having less impact on your applications.
An expressive set of workflow activities for authoring business process. Here the Flowchart activity is extremely powerful by enabling you to more closely match the typically graphical representation of a business process drawn using Visio, for example, with the implementation of the business in code using the Flowchart.
A simple extensibility model for workflow activities, enabling you to define your own library of business domain activities. These can be included into the Workflow Designer in Visual Studio 2010, enabling developers to more quickly build business WF services.

Hosting and Managing Services

Regardless of the technology used to build your service, where and how you run your services introduces a number of options. Today you can host your services in a process created by the Windows Process Activation service (WAS) in IIS, a Windows service or a self-hosted executable. This provides a mechanism for activating workflows, but is only one part of a broader hosting picture for providing a suitable environment to run your production applications. Typically there are other platform service requirements that as a developer you would like to take advantage of, such as application state storage (persistence), instrumentation for health monitoring, caching, and other capabilities that provide scalability and reliability to deployed applications. Windows Server as an application server today provides services you can take advantage of such as MSMQ for message queuing, and the event log for diagnostics.

Windows Server AppFabric builds on the application server capabilities in Windows Server to 1) host and manage your WCF and WF Services and 2) provide a distributed in-memory data cache. AppFabric provides a set of common services that your applications can take advantage of thereby allowing you as a developer to concentrate on building solutions that solve key business problems. These common services are focused on enhancing Windows Server’s WCF and WF Service hosting capabilities, and making it easier to manage these services. Additionally the distributed cache introduces rich scale-out capabilities for applications built using .NET Framework.

Persisting WF Services

The key scenarios this enables are;

Reliability – The ability to persist (save) workflow state and reliably resume workflow instances that have been idle for a defined time interval.
Availability – The recovery of saved workflow state when an application, process, or computer terminates unexpectedly.
Scalability – The ability to unload idle workflow instances from memory to efficiently use resources, the capability of retrying to load workflow instances when a message arrives on a different computer in the host farm, and gracefully handling retries when there is a lock on the instance.

Windows Server AppFabric provides a Windows service called the Workflow Management service (WMS) that manages instances in the persistence store. AppFabric can install a SQL Server persistence store for your WF Services which the WMS monitors to enable the scenarios above. AppFabric also supports other store solutions as well.

Monitoring

The key scenarios this enables are;

Health monitoring – How well is my app running? The ability to see expected healthy events occur within your service to know that it is still operational.
Troubleshooting – What has failed with my app? The ability to quickly diagnose failures within your service and either correct these or provide a developer with further detailed information.

Windows Server AppFabric provides a Windows service called the Event Collector service that captures health and failure events from your services and writes these to a SQL Server monitoring store, or another store built to leverage the pluggable AppFabric monitoring solution. This provides analytical data about your applications. You can either take advantage of rich UI tooling integrated into IIS Manager to view these events in the monitoring store, or build your own reporting using SQL Server Reporting Services or another data analysis solution, to view this data.

Process Hosting

The key scenarios this enables are:

Efficiently using computer resources by hosting services in the Windows Process Activation Service (WAS) in IIS. IIS and the WF runtime are deeply integrated. For example, if IIS decides to recycle a process due to memory constrains it will communicate with the WF Service to ensure that a graceful shutdown occurs, thereby allowing the service to be restarted in another process or on another computer by the WMS.
Auto-start to “warm-up” services hosted in IIS. When the computer starts, or when IIS starts, services can be pre-warmed, thereby reducing the latency on the first message.

By integrating the WF runtime deeply with the IIS/WAS process activation model, WF Services are ideally suited to being hosted in IIS/WAS and benefit from the rich hosting capabilities that IIS/WAS provide.

Distributed Caching

Distributed, service-oriented applications often require support for a large number of users, and high performance, throughput, and short response time. Services are increasingly moving “far away” from their underlying data stores and in many cases those data stores are “expensive” to access due to both technical and licensing costs. As a result, developers are increasingly forced to find alternatives to continually accessing the physical data store and often turn to caching to meet these challenges.

Windows Server AppFabric provides a distributed, in-memory, application cache for developing scalable, available, and high-performance applications. The caching capabilities fuse memory across multiple computers to give applications a single unified cache view that can be easily scaled-out by simply adding more computers on demand.

Some key caching features provided by Windows Server AppFabric include:

Caching any serializable CLR object and providing access through simple cache APIs
Enterprise scale: tens to hundreds of computers
Configurable to run as a service accessed over the network
Dynamic scale-out by adding new nodes
High availability through backup copies
Automatic load-balancing
Seamless integration with ASP.NET with an ASP.NET Session State Provider (better perf and scale and no more sticky routing!)
Integration with administration and monitoring tools such as Windows PowerShell, Event Tracing for Windows, and System Center.

Tooling

The tooling support for services in Windows Server AppFabric will be covered in more detail by future posts. Integrating tooling into IIS Manager provides a familiar management, control, and monitoring experience for the IT professional managing applications in a production environment or the developer troubleshooting deployed applications. In addition, AppFabric provides an extensive set of Windows PowerShell commands to enable you to script the capabilities in the UI.

Summary

This post describes the key benefits of building WF Services with Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4, and the benefits of hosting these in Windows Server and managing and scaling them with AppFabric.

The deep integration of WCF and WF provides an intuitive approach for developing declarative WF Services. WF Services make it possible to build long-running services that take advantage of the service coordination support provided by the workflow runtime, enabling you to use workflow to solve key business problems.

Windows Server AppFabric adds improved hosting capabilities to Windows Server to efficiently host all your WCF services, including WF Services. Additionally, AppFabric provides common services that help you as a developer build scalable Web and composite applications.

Downloads

You can download Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 from the Visual Studio 2010 page on MSDN.

You can download Windows Server AppFabric Beta 1 from AppFabric page on MSDN.

All WCF, WF, and ‘Dublin’ sessions live on PDC site; 5 Weeks to Go!

Cliff Simpkins — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:01:09 GMT

We’re five weeks out from PDC09, and the rest of our sessions went live last week. I know I posted a couple weeks ago about PDC and sessions that went live, but I wanted to let folks know about the four new sessions – to help you maximize your experience around the Connected Framework technologies!

This looks to be a great event, as the team dives in deep on the enhancements coming with .NET 4, and discussing some of the thoughts around what’s to come next.

PDC Sessions of Note
The below list is a refresh of the one I posted a couple weeks ago, with additions marked out.

The larger team will be delivering the following seven sessions:

In addition to the sessions being done by the team, WCF comes up in several other sessions of note at the event:

On the Floor of the Event
As an update, we have confirmed that we will have a small 20-seat theatre in the Framework and Tools lounge area. In the theatre area, we’ll be doing a series shorter ‘chalk talks’, discussing more special interest topics. There are some real gems being planned for discussion; we’re looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

I’ll post up any additional notes as we come up on the event. And, as a reminder, drop a note if you want to catch up with someone from the team while at PDC. Let me know what you would like to discuss, and I’ll reach out to the team that will be in LA and try to connect you with someone so you can coordinate schedules.

Hope to see y’all in LA!
Cliff

The team is getting ready for PDC; are you?

Cliff Simpkins — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 21:19:03 GMT

The 2009 Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is less than a couple months away, and the team is starting to create content and demos for the event. The team has been working with PDC event management over the last couple months to secure sessions and space at the event; and I wanted to share with you how the event is shaping up, as well as make a plug for our sessions.

The event will deliver a lot of really great material, as well as provide you with access to folks who are writing the code. We hope you can make it down to Los Angeles in November for the event.

PDC Sessions Of Note

So far, four sessions are currently live on the PDC event website:

In addition to the sessions being done by the team, WCF comes up in several other sessions of note at the event:

We are working very hard to not present the same content as last year.

For WF, we’re building upon last year’s introductions to WF4 to expose more of the underlying architecture of the new WF runtime, really giving you a view into how different the new runtime is…and demonstrating how workflow services work in the new Windows Application Server technology (codename ‘Dublin’).

For WCF, we heard you loud and clear that there wasn’t enough WCF content. This year, we have a session focusing on the WCF enhancements coming in .NET 4, in addition to the sessions covering how WCF is used with HPC Server, Silverlight, and covering advances in ADO.NET Data Services (which is built upon WCF).

And, last but not least, last year’s PDC introduced the technology called ‘Dublin’ – and it’s been a hot topic for customers ever since PDC. This year, we dive deeper into how ‘Dublin’ lights up WCF and WF applications and where we’re going with the technology.

We have a few more excellent sessions in the pipeline covering technology futures; and I’ll post the updated list up here when the next batch of sessions goes live.

On the Floor of the Event

Beyond sessions, speakers and other team members will be at the event in the lounge area for Framework and Tools, both to hang out and chat with you about the technologies, as well as working a couple booths in the lounge area to show the technologies in action.

Anyone attending PDC is encouraged to stop down to the lounge and say hello. Bring your questions or just share your thoughts on the technologies; we truly love meeting our customers – and your comments and questions do have direct impact on the shape of the future platform. If there’s someone in particular you would like to connect with, let me know – I’m happy to share folks’ lounge schedules as we come up on the event and schedules are finalized…just let me know who you’re looking to connect with or a particular topic you want to drill down on.

We are currently working on getting a small 20-seat chalk-talk area in the lounge area again this year to do smaller, more niche discussions. We’ll post more on that topic here in the coming weeks, as well, as we make progress on that front.

Pre-PDC Workshops

And, lastly, it’s worth noting that Michele Leroux Bustamante will be running a pre-PDC workshop covering the Microsoft Technology Roadmap, helping workshop attendees understand how the many technologies that make up the .NET Framework fit together – from A-W (Azure to Azure). ^_^

There is also a FREE Windows 7 Developer Boot Camp pre-PDC workshop that is open to anyone (whether attending PDC or not) as long as there is room.

Not registered? There’s still room!

There’s still room at the event, and I hear they have a $300 discount for folks registering before October 13 (and there’s also a significant discount for students and employees of academic institutions). And there is still plenty of hotel availability around the convention center as of a couple weeks ago (when I registered). A couple of the closest hotels were full, but there are still plenty of quality ones about.

Rundown on WCF, WF, and ‘Dublin’ sessions @ TechEd next week

Cliff Simpkins — Wed, 06 May 2009 19:27:05 GMT

As I spend much of this week finalizing items for TechEd next week, I thought it might be helpful to post a schedule of the great content that will be presented at the event.

If you haven’t already pre-registered for sessions, now is an excellent time to look through the schedule builder and check out all the great content and speakers we have lined up at the event.

As is tradition, the bulk of the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) sessions are in the SOA and Business Process track. This year, we are joined in the SOA track by sessions covering the ‘Dublin’ technology extensions for Windows Server, which allow you to easily host and manage your .NET 4 WCF and WF applications.

Breakout Sessions

This year, we’ve assembled some of the greatest speakers on the topics, so please join us for the following breakout sessions:

Session	Title	Speaker	Timeslot	Room
SOA201	A First Look at WCF and WF in the Microsoft .NET Framework 4	Aaron Skonnard	Tues, May-12; 8:30am	Petree Hall D
SOA202	A Lap around Microsoft Code Name "Dublin"	Dan Eshner	Tues, May-12; 2:45pm	Room 404
SOA206	Every Class As a Service: WCF As the New Microsoft .NET	Juval Lowy	Thus, May-14; 2:45pm	Room 151
SOA302	Building RESTful Services Using WCF	Jon Flanders	Thurs, May-14; 10:15am	Room 404
SOA303	Busy Microsoft .NET Developer's Guide to WCF, SOA, and Success	Jon Flanders	Fri, May-15; 1:00pm	Room 151
SOA309	Load Balancing and Scaling Your WCF Services Today and Tomorrow	Michèle Leroux Bustamante	Weds, May-13; 4:30pm	Room 515B
SOA310	Managing, Tracking, and Troubleshooting Services in "Dublin"	Ford McKinstry	Tues, May-12; 4:30pm	Room 403A
SOA401	Developing Service Oriented Workflows	Brian Noyes	Weds, May-13; 8:30am	Room 502B

For those unable to attend TechEd in person, my understanding is that all of the breakout sessions above will be recorded and be made available online. As we get more information post-event, we will post additional information up here on the blog.

In addition to the breakout sessions above, there is content that will be presented at TechEd that will unfortunately not be made available online after the event, this comes in three forms: the pre-conference sessions and interactive theatre sessions.

Pre-Conference Session

As I mentioned in my blog post on Friday, Zoiner Tejada and Michele Leroux Bustamante will be presenting a pre-conference on Sunday, the day before TechEd (PRC07: A Day of WCF + WF + "Dublin") that covers WCF and WF for .NET 4. The day is full of presentations and demos, and Michele and Zoiner have worked hard to update the session to cover the beta 1 features we’re talking about here. There are still seats available for the pre-conference, and it looks to be a real treat for those who can make it.

Interactive Theatre Sessions

Additionally, there are interactive theatre sessions that happen on the event floor among the booths. Within the Application Platform section of the floor (you can find us by looking for lots of blue), we have two theatres. Within the interactive theatres, we will have the following three sessions over the course of the week in Blue Theatre 2 that many folks are sure to find interesting:

Session	Title	Speaker	Timeslot
SOA02-INT	Communicating with State Machine Workflows	Philip Wolfe	Tues, May-12 1:00pm
SOA03-INT	Interacting with Web Services Using Microsoft Silverlight	Yavor Georgiev	Tues, May-12 4:30pm
SOA05-INT	Migrating a WF 3.0 Application to the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 and Microsoft Code Name "Dublin"	Tom Castiglia Zoiner Tejada	Weds, May-13 10:15am

Hands On Labs

We also have six hands on labs at TechEd this year, the two introducing labs have been updated based on past event feedback, and we’ve added four of brand new labs! If you have an 45-60 minutes and like to get your hands dirty with some code while you learn, please check them out:

HOL Code	HOL Title
SOA09-HOL	WCF REST: Addressability of Resources
SOA10-HOL	WCF REST: Exposing a Resource Collection with the WCF REST Starter Kit
SOA12-HOL	WCF 3.5: Introducing Windows Communication Foundation 3.5
SOA13-HOL	WCF 3.5: Unit Testing Windows Communication Foundation 3.5
SOA14-HOL	WCF and WF 3.5: Using Advanced Context Management in WCF Workflow Services 3.5
SOA15-HOL	WF 3.5: Introduction to Windows Workflow Foundation 3.5

Booth

Then of course there is always the booth. The booth is open every day of the conference, and we’ll have folks there through lunch and during sessions – ready to chat with you about the technologies and show you how things work. If you have questions about WCF, WF, or ‘Dublin’, or would like to learn more about how the technologies may apply to your solution – feel free to drop by.

Over the course of the week, we have folks at the booth that can talk at a high level (BTW-that’s me ;-) ), all the way to folks that can talk through how and why the API works the way it does. And if you can’t get your question answered at that time, we should be able to help you connect with someone at the booth who can help, or getting you the answer post-conference. We have a really good crew at the booth again this year (and I’m told we have a small white board at the booth this year!)

All of that being said, we hope to see you in LA next week and to learn more about how you’re using WCF and WF today – it should be a lot of fun all around. And for those unable to attend, check out the online recordings and continue to engage with us in the forums and the Connect site!