Attended an introductory session on Windows Server App Fabric given by one of my new colleagues Charan Bhatia.
It was a useful one, with a candid introduction to the tool for someone like me, who never knew anything other than its name.
From what I remember and what I understood at a higher level, App Fabric is a monitoring tool that monitors the WCF web services hosted on IIS 7.x or above. The services should be built on .Net Framework 4.0. App Fabric was designed keeping in view its use for Azure.
The minimum pre-requisites include IIS 7.x, WAS, services built on .Net Framework 4.0.
There were some contructive questions as well, like,
How App Fabric differs from WCF trace and diagnostics utilities?
Answer: App Fabric has much more advanced features compared to the WCF trace and diagnostics. For example, Distributed Caching, etc., which will be dealt with in the next session on this Friday (11/02/2011)
Can we monitor classic web services (.asmx) in the same way as WCF through App Fabric?
This proved to eb a good question as Charan was really interested in researching on it and coming up with an answer soon.
Is there a way we can configure the App Fabric such that it only monitors a subset of the services deployed on the server?
Answer: Yes, of course. We have to decrease the level of monitoring to the least level (which means "Off") at the service level, for whichever services we don't want the it to monitor.
It was an interesting and useful session, evident fromt he way it was stretched almost unknowingly, from the scheduled 30 minutes to around 90 minutes.
The second part of the session is scheduled on this Friday (11/02/2011). This deals with, Distributed Caching through Windows Server App Fabric.
will update the proceedings once that is done.
