Just about a month following the AppFabric May CTP, which featured exciting new investments in AppFabric Service Bus Messaging, Microsoft has delivered a technology preview of the next wave of building composite solutions at enterprise scale with the release of the AppFabric June CTP (to be clear, there are no changes to AppFabric Service Bus in this release).
Composite applications are the evolution afforded us by the advancements of contract-first development and the trend towards packaging units of reuse into discrete, autonomous and interoperable services, be they domain-specific or addressing cross-cutting concerns such as security or caching. By separating concerns into units of work and composing them iteratively into larger solutions, complex systems can be planned, managed and developed in bite size pieces aiding in both planning, operations and developer economics. This approach is valuable to the development of enterprise solutions regardless of where they are deployed, but combined with a model for stitching these units of reuse together and a robust runtime and execution model that provides additional capabilities as a platform, AppFabric Applications capture the truest distillation of the value that can be obtained by building on the Azure platform today.
Over a year and half ago, I asked whether .NET was a great disruptor of the decade and suggested that alone, .NET has certainly revolutionized the Microsoft developer platform, but combined with cloud computing has the potential to disrupt an entire industry. Today, AppFabric Applications give organizations investing in both cloud and hybrid a way to take full advantage of the Azure Service Model with first class support for WCF, WF Services and AppFabric Service Bus for building composite apps at very high enterprise scale. With caching, monitoring and persistence support equivalent to or better than Server AppFabric (parity of features has been a goal that I think Microsoft has kept and exceeded its promises on) and a scale out story that will form a new hosting paradigm across Appliance, Box and Cloud with AppFabric Container. This is the next evolution in the AppFabric platform vision and is a very important milestone.
To learn more, there is an excellent video on AppFabric TV on Channel9 with Karan Anand which provides a great overview here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/AppFabric-tv/AppFabrictv-Announcing-the-Windows-Azure-AppFabric-June-CTP
In addition, Karan has posted a more detailed blog post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/appfabric/archive/2011/06/20/introducing-windows-azure-appfabric-applications.aspx
Kudos to Karan, my friend @mwinkle and team for a great preview into this exciting new way to provide an easy button for building composite services at enterprise scale.