Ah, the rush of doing a trade show!

While my newbie counterpart Jasen had his trade show baptism in Las Vegas for the Serverside.com Conference, this trip will round out the dozen or so attendances I've made just to Microsoft's Tech*ed over the years.

Every show has its set-up pains, missing boxes / cables / tools, computer setup issues, power issues… but once that show floor opens, it's a complete adrenal rush to be able to show our demo to the masses. This year we are showing an application that demonstrates the scalability and reliability of a fabric via a graphical application that illustrates seats selling in a large stadium. It's great to watch people's expressions as you start pulling plugs from the workers in the fabric… and the application gracefully recovers!

I got to attend one session today (SOA217) Programming Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation: A Developer's Primer by Juval Lowy. Juval has written a couple of excellent books on Programming .NET Components (which I own both editions of) and Programming WCF Services, which this session was based on.

What I found really interesting is the similarities between the Windows Communications Framework (WCF) and our Application Fabric. Both technologies support the remoting of .NET objects, but what I found interesting is that today if don't want to host your WCF application in IIS, you can also use Windows Activation Service (WAS) - which is only included in Vista today.  So, if you don't want to use IIS and don't have Vista in your data center...

Well, welcome to the fabric! We will not only host and scale-out your .NET Objects via software load balancing, we will auto-provision them to every machine in the fabric and provide reliability with a simple annotation you can add to your classes methods and properties, TODAY!!!!

As I dig into WCF, I'll have to post some additional similarities and integration points between WCF and the Enterprise Application Fabric, as I believe we could be a GREAT transport for WCF…

If you are attending Tech*ed this year, come by and say hi - we are in booth 1033, right next to the O'Reilly both.

Until next time…

Mark

Technorati : Teched 2007, WCF, Windows Communications Framework