Posted on January 21st, 2011Recently, the team at Microsoft released an addition to Windows Server known as Window Server AppFabric. AppFabric was designed to enhanced hosting and management capabilities for web applications. This new addition was designed with the .Net 4.0 frame work in mind.
Windows Server AppFabric has made significant improvements to workflow management and health monitoring. AppFabric adds a new dashboard that can quickly show you the status and health of all of your services. If any issues are detected, AppFabric can take deeper look into the problem to help you identify the cause. AppFabric, also, can help you with work flow management, as it has a dashboard that gives a user control over workflow instances. Commands can be issued such as suspend, resume, terminate or cancel against any long running workflow instances. Both of these features can be extremely useful for a shared hosting company needing to monitor multiple web applications at any given moment. Cloud hosting and cloud computing can also benefit from these dashboard additions, as it gives a ten thousand foot elevation overview to many of the central tasks of IIS.
The .NET 4.0 frame work is the wave of the future and AppFabric aims to leverage it as best as it can. A web hosting provider can now streamline Meta Data and information cataloging, which used to be saved as “.svc.” files, by allowing this information to be included natively in the web.config files. This essentially renders the “.svc” file useless and relives some of the management overload associated with large companies with multiple services.
New with AppFabric and .Net 4.0 is the addition of multiple site bindings. Now a web host or web hosting company can send multiple domains and ports to one unique address. Essentially one could have a domain, yourdomain.com, that has redirects from yourdomain.com and port 80 as well as yourdomain.com and port 90.
Another major addition of AppFabric is the ability to have extension-less URLs. As a web developer that are tons of scenarios were one may wish to hide a web pages URL extension. With AppFabric, a developer can make yourdomain.com/products/product.htm appear as yourdomain.com/products/ to the browsing client. This is an awesome improvement to site security.
With the dawn of increasingly popular services like SaaS, Software as a Service, and cloud computing the modern hosting company needs a range of tools to be more competitive. AppFabric’s new dashboards and high level overview, coupled with increased flexibility and customization make it an awesome update form the developers at Microsoft.