I've been explaining and demonstrating what a Enterprise Application Fabric is now for about eighteen months now. During this time I have had the opportunity to attend several Gartner and Microsoft industry trade shows shows from coast to coast. I've presented to dozens of corporations, and to every major computer operating system vendor and hardware manufacture. It's been an incredible opportunity to talk about a product that I'm deeply passionate about.

What I have come to realize, which may not be much of a surprise for some, is that coming to a common understanding concerning a new computing paradigm takes more then just 'speaking the language'. It really comes down to finding some common reference point, a common context that can be used to build on.

Being that a majority of my life has been focused on using Microsoft technologies, I wanted to introduce you to the fabric from a .NET point of view as concisely as I can -

• Application Fabric is a software based application cluster that can be scaled out to 100's of machines, but is managed as a single logical entity.
• Since the fabric 'hosts' .NET on Windows, developers can take their custom developed .NET solutions and the fabric will self distribute them to every machine within a fabric.
• As requests are sent to the fabric they are automatically load-balanced across every machine, and monitored by multiple machines while the requests are processed, providing a "Tandem like" reliability model.

So I like to point out that the fabric is a real-time, self-organizing, self-healing, for the most part a self-managed software environment that lets your custom build application scale without fail!

Now that you know what it is, let me tell you how simple it can be to fabric-enable your application...

Thanks

Mark