Microsoft's application server goes Irish

Restful Dublin state

By Gavin Clarke in San Francisco, 1st October 2008

Microsoft is adopting REST and ATOM-based feeds in its application server to boost development and management of Windows server applications.

The company is today expected to announce changes in Windows Server that'll see Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) updated to support stateful and conversational services using REST and ATOM.

The pay off for this work is Dublin, a planned bundle for Windows application server that'll use the web-service friendly WCF and WF 4.0 to help provide a set of pre-built monitoring and management tools for the application server. Dublin, WCF, and WF 4.0 will also feature other web service APIs such as WS-Discovery and XAML.

Dublin's tools will deliver message-based correlation and forwarding, content-based message routing, and a compensation service for long-running transactions for Microsoft's server. Dublin will be the first Microsoft server technology to use model-built applications under Microsoft's Oslo platform and will also work with Microsoft's BizTalk Server the company said.

Microsoft's application server is based on a patchwork of Windows Server technologies, including IIS, Microsoft Message Queue, Active Director Mode (ADAM), and Network Load Balancing. Users must build their own configuration, management, and deployment tools to run single and multiple instances of an application on servers.

The planned web services-based workflow and communications capabilities are intended to modernize this and support deployment in ever larger Windows server environments.

Microsoft is plans community technology previews (CTPs) of Dublin and WCF and WF 4.0 at its massive Professional Developers' Conference (PDC) this month. A WCF REST starter kit for Visual Studio will be posted to Microsoft's CodePlex site during October and will ship with WCF and WF 4.0 as part of the completed .NET Framework 4.0 - for which there's no release date yet.

Dublin will be after available after the release after .NET Framework 4.0 and the accompanying Visual Studio 2010. Microsoft said it would provide more information on Dublin's availability in "early" 2009, but noted the bundle will initially be made available for download by Windows Server customers, and then included as part of Windows Server. ®

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