The .NET Endpoint blog announced this morning the availability of Windows Server AppFabric Beta 2, which can be downloaded at http://msdn.microsoft.com/appfabric. According to the announcement, Beta 2 was written to work against the RC of Visual Studio 2010, and is apparently now feature complete:

This build represents our “feature complete” milestone. That is, it contains all the features that we plan to ship in Windows Server AppFabric v1 by Q3 of 2010. For this release we focused on building a provider model for persistence, monitoring, and cache configuration stores. In our Beta 1 release we supported only the SQL Server based persistence and monitoring providers that we shipped and supported only an XML file based or SQL Server based cache configuration store. In Beta 2 we now also support providers for other database platforms or for other types of stores, in the case of persistence and cache configuration.

This is an exciting milestone for the team, and will certainly be a great time to begin evaluating Windows Server AppFabric for inclusion in upcoming projects.

While browsing Microsoft's Virtualization site, I stumbled across an upcoming event:

Looking at Desktop Virtualization including VDI? Thinking about Windows 7 migration; Want savings, but wondering about ROI?

Join Microsoft, industry experts and IT leaders: Desktop Virtualization Hour, March 18th, 9am PST.

This is all the information they’re sharing with the public at the moment, which normally might indicate a lack of planned content… but considering the fact that they purchased a domain just for this event, http://www.desktopvirtualizationhour.com/, Microsoft is being suspiciously vague about their plans.

I managed to find a ZDNet whitepaper posting from January that has some extra lines of description:

Have more questions than answers on the topic?
...
Watch and interact live with Microsoft, industry experts and IT leaders for a moderated televised discussion. Submit your questions in the hour or in advance.

Does the fact that these lines don’t appear on the event-specific domain mean something? Perhaps they’ve already chosen the questions they’re going to answer, or perhaps the list of experts grew too large to allow viewer participation? We’ll have to wait and see what transpires.

In the mean time, you can study up on VDI in preparation of this event:

• Microsoft's Virtualized Desktop Products and Technology – Homepage for Microsoft’s VDI solutions
• TechNet video series on VDI deployment (Part 2, Part 3) – Matt McSpirit walks through setting up VDI

I was looking over some of the industry news this morning, and spotted this gem from Miguel de Icaza’s blog:

We are also porting our C# compiler to work with Microsoft's Reflection.Emit to enable us to run our C# Interactive Shell in Silverlight applications and to allow .NET developers to embed our compiler in their applications to support C# Eval.

For those that typically shy away from penguins: Miguel is heavily involved in the Mono project. Mono is a project under the wing of Novell to create an EMCA-334/335 compliant implementation of C# and the CLI. The project includes much of the base class library found in the .NET framework, and also includes more project specific classes. The big selling points for me are binary compatibility with existing .NET assemblies, and availability on multiple platforms.

This is certainly exciting technology (just look at the reaction Anders received demoing very similar functionality at PDC2008). Now imagine that same type of experience in the browser (minus the Windows Form popping up out of no where, since no one likes pop-ups anyway). Imagine games that can be scripted in-play, or instantly extensible rich client applications.

Naturally there will be security considerations, and testing considerations, but for now it is what it is: fairly awesome.

Imagine that you have written an application that will need to invoke a service at some point. You can hard code the service address, you could place it in configuration, you can stick it into an external registry (a la UDDI), or you could come up with some custom method for resolution (e.g., storing endpoint information in a table of a SQL database).

However, Juval Lowy reminds us that we don’t have to re-invent the wheel. He wrote an excellent article in last month’s MSDN magazine about simple discovery in WCF. In the article he provides a simple explanation of what it is, and how it works, and even provides sample classes that can jump-start your development.

You can check out the article here: Foundations - Discover a New WCF with Discovery

Just before the long weekend, Microsoft quietly released a documentation update alongside their RC release of Visual Studio 2010. If you were dying to know how to implement Out-of-Order Message Processing in Workflow Services, click-away because you shouldn't find any more place holder content where you're expecting technical articles.

This should definitely lessen the learning curve a bit more.

Check out the announcement via The .NET Endpoint blog here: The .NET Endpoint: RC docs are live!