Developing an Application
With Windows Server AppFabric, there are no special requirements for creating an application beyond ensuring that the application can be hosted in the IIS/WAS hosting environment. The following project templates in Visual Studio 2010 guide you to build a service that will run in the AppFabric environment. If you have applications that are currently hosted in IIS/WAS, they can be deployed to AppFabric without any requirement to modify the project source.
WCF Service Application. Select File, point to New, and then click . Select Visual C# from the tree view, select WCF Service Application, and then click OK.
WCF Workflow Service Application. Select File, point to New, and then click . Select Visual C# from the tree view, select WCF Workflow Service Application, and then click OK.
WCF Service-Based Web Site. Select File, point to New, and then click Web Site. Select WCF Service and then click OK.
Services built by using these templates are managed by AppFabric without requiring any modifications. AppFabric discovers services built by using these templates and applies the AppFabric default application and service configuration settings. For example, it configures default settings for persistence and monitoring. These configuration changes are made in the computer’s root Web.config file. The scope of this file allows its default configuration settings to be leveraged by all the services deployed on that computer. Within AppFabric you can configure a service to ignore these default settings, or to use them through configuration defined by the blended hierarchy of IIS inheritance. For more information about how configuration works in AppFabric, see General Configuration.
AppFabric management capabilities apply only to services built by using the .NET Framework 4. Any services built by using a previous version of the .NET Framework must be explicitly migrated to .NET Framework 4 to be managed by AppFabric. For more information about the migration of 3.5 services, see Visual Studio 2010.
After completing the development process, you can use Visual Studio 2010 and the MSDeploy utility to export a WF or WCF service into a package. This package can then be imported into IIS to be managed by AppFabric. For more information about this, see Import and Export an Application in Windows Server AppFabric and Deploying an Application.
On a Web farm, Windows Server AppFabric will move instances between different AppFabric servers. This requires that the resources cab be shared between all nodes. None of the default NET 4 workflow activities contain any operations that access local resources. Since AppFabric does not offer any mechanism to mark a workflow as immovable, a developer must not create custom activities that fail when a workflow is moved.
Developing Custom Instance Store, Instance Query, Instance Control, and Monitoring Providers
AppFabric exposes an application programming interface (API) that you can use to develop instance store providers, instance query providers, and instance control providers. For details about these providers, see Instance Store, Query, and Control Providers. This section has topics that describe how to develop, register, and configure store, query, and control providers.
The API also lets you consume the Service Management Service, a WCF service that AppFabric adds to all applications with service management enabled. For more information about the service, see Service Management Service. This section has topics that describe how to consume the service from a client application.