BizTalk Server vNext TAP Program

By John Callaway

We are pleased to announce to our customers and partners
that we will once again be participating in the Technology Adoption Program
(TAP) for the next version of BizTalk Server. Microsoft has yet to announce a
final name for the product, it is presently being referred to as BizTalk Server
2010 R2 or simply v-next, however they have indicated that the release date
will be about six months after the release of Windows 8 Server. I recently
posted another blog that talks about the future of BizTalk, check it out.

The TAP program assists Microsoft in soliciting feedback
from customers and partners regarding yet to be released products. As
participants in the TAP program we will be under strict non-disclosure
requirements so we won’t be able to say too much about the product until
Microsoft does, but rest assured that we will providing all the feedback that
we can to get all the cool features into the product that we have been looking
for.

 

 

QuickLearn has previously participated in the TAP program
for other versions of BizTalk and for Windows Azure. We will be prepared to
offer training on whatever new features are coming down the line as soon as the
product is fully baked!

 

Windows Server AppFabric Beta 2 Available and Feature Complete

By Nick Hauenstein

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.