I posted a new page to the blog today that describes how to Create a .NET client application that calls the the fabric task that I created in an earlier entry.
One of the things that really jazzes me about creating fabric applications is how much it's like doing .NET remote object invocation in a massively scalable way. I don't know if you ever remember Microsoft's Application Center 2000. But it was this product that was going to allow developers to create massively scalable COM+ applications by providing a scale out architecture for your 'middle tier' COM+ objects. It was also to provide software based load balancing and fail over support. While it held a lot of promise, in practice it was pretty difficult to deploy and not very widely adopted.
So one of my favorite EAF (Enterprise Application Fabric) analogies for .NET developers is to think about the simplicity of remotely calling your .NET objects using Microsoft's Webservice / SOAP wizard, coupled with the scale out simplicity that Application Center 2000 promised and add to all of that an automated application installation-deployment model. That's the fabric!
Until next time...
Mark
