This week I did a real power tour delivering the .NET Deep Dive workshop in 4 cities across Romania (Bucharest, Sibiu, Brasov, and Cluj-Napoca). It looks like it was quite well received since most of the feedbacks we got from attendees were more than positive. The participants appreciated the idea of having a full overview of the Microsoft .NET Platform in a one-day event. I’d like to take this opportunity to say a big thank you to all the participants. Your feedback will most certainly help us improve the quality of this workshop.

There is more to follow for me in the upcoming months:

• BI Deep Dive workshops in Bucharest (3rd of March) and Cluj-Napoca (4th of March)
• SQL Experience (the launch of SQL Server 2008 R2) in Bucharest (10th of March)
• SQL Server 2008 R2 Course in Bucharest (11th and 12th of March)
• SharePoint 2010 Course in Bucharest (1st and 2nd of April)

To find out more about the official calendar of events organized by Microsoft Romania you can also follow Zoli’s blog (see my blogroll) as well as http://www.microsoft.com/romania/evenimente.

I have to admit I was a little bit worried about the overall performance of the new Visual Studio 2010 shell based on the Windows Presentation Foundation technology. I had some mixed feelings while using the preliminary releases like Beta 1 and Beta 2. Don’t get me wrong, I am a big fan of the new VS simply because WPF opens a whole new range of possibilities for it. My concerns were focused around its performance on mid-sized machines. I am perfectly aware of the fact that not all developers are going to code using VS 2010 on quad/octo-core hardware with 16/32 gigs of RAM. This is why I am using my Acer Aspire 1420P notebook as a benchmark to measure the quality of the development experience with VS 2010 (to make things clear, the machine has 4 gigs of RAM and a dual-core Intel Celeron CPU running at 1.2 GHz).

After one and a half day of use in heavy coding I have to say I am impressed and many of my original performance concerns are now things of the past. True, I haven’t had yet the chance to try all the different designers and project templates, but I can say there is a significant improvement in performance when compared to Beta 2. Jason Zander does an excellent reviewon Channel 9 related to the significant changes made in VS 2010 RC.

It certainly looks like VS 2010 together with .NET Framework 4 are on the right track to rock the world of developers once they hit RTM.

Most complex applications will rely on certain types of functionalities that are not tied to a certain layer or tier. Since they affect entire applications it is highly desirable to place these functionalities in a centralized location in code in order to avoid unnecessary duplication. The certain advantage you gain with this approach has its own Achilles' heel: you’ve just created the perfect location for high-impact design mistakes. Because of these interesting characteristics these functionalities are commonly referred among software architects as crosscutting concerns. Some of the most common crosscutting concerns are:

• Authentication and authorization
• Caching
• Communication
• Configuration management
• Exception Management
• Logging and instrumentation
• State management
• Validation

The 2nd edition of the Microsoft Application Architecture Guide has an excellent discussion about crosscutting concerns.

Since they are so common among software applications, it’s no surprise that every single application deals with (hopefully all of) them in its own way. Fortunately, most application platforms offer support to architects and developers in order to address the crosscutting concerns. The .NET Framework 4 in particular and the Microsoft Application Platform in general are no exception. But there’s a catch here: at the core level there is no integrated approach. Take .NET configuration files for services for instance. There are tons of things that you can do with configuration files in the development environment but there’s not much out-of-the-box functionality to handle them once they are deployed.

From the point of view of software architecture, one of the very interesting developments in Windows Server is the Application Server role. Indeed, Windows Server has come a very long way from being a platform providing fundamental APIs to being a true application server. At the heart of this journey there are two fundamental parts: the Microsoft .NET Framework and the Internet Information Services. Today, .NET Framework 4 provides all the necessary building blocks for the development of robust and scalable distributed solutions. IIS on the other hand evolved from a HTTP-based web server to a multi-purpose, multi-protocol, secure and robust hosting environment for application services. Add WAS (Windows Process Activation Service) to the mix and what you get is a pretty strong and scalable application server.

Building on  top of the existing functions in .NET Framework 4 and the WAS/IIS environment, Windows Server AppFabric brings the Application Server to the next level. And by next level I mean that in addition to existing fundamental APIs and hosting environment the AppFabric brings out-of-the-box, robust, and scalable solutions for the following crosscutting concerns:

• Caching
• Communication
• Configuration management
• Logging and instrumentation
• State management

These concerns are addressed via the following categories of functionalities:

• Better deployment, management, and configuration for WCF and WF services hosted in WAS
• Persistence management for workflows
• Tracking profiles (together with dedicated, queryable storage)
• Monitoring of hosted services
• PowerShell integration (custom management scripts)
• Caching of any serializable CLR object and caching APIs at enterprise scale
• Caching available as a service
• High availability and automatic load balancing

It is very important to understand that Windows Server AppFabric will not provide comprehensive solutions to the concerns mentioned above. Nevertheless, it is an excellent and powerful piece of the puzzle that software architects can take into consideration when designing software solutions.

For more details about Windows Server AppFabric you can check the dedicated section from the Windows Server Developer Center.