Day one finished up for me with a session on "Dublin" the codename for the recently announced hosting and management mechanism for Microsoft WF (Worklflow Foundation) and Microsoft WCF (Windows Communication Foundation).

To give a basic high level summary "Dublin" offers the following capabilities:

WCF Application Reliability

In addition to being hosted in IIS -  Dublin will provide tracking capabilities and perisitence for WCF messages. WCF message requests  are therefore monitored and perisisted in SQL Server databases. This allows persisted or suspended messages to be viewed in the database,  in order to examine and monitor the precise information flow for unhandled exceptions etc. Persisted messages can be restarted following failure and state preserved. 

Different tracking profiles can be used within Dublin, to allow viewing of message handling from a number of perspectives.

Application Version / Routing

This feature in "Dublin" allows routing based on based on message type / version etc, using ,Net Framework 4.0 correlation mechanisms. This feature also supports the definition of multiple destinations and the use of rules to determine which destination a message is routed to. These filters are XPath query based. A great use of this is the ability to route of requests based on version for instance from an old service version to a new one. Alternatively it allows the partitioning of service requests based on priority or other characteristics. This in turn is based upon some of the base SOAP routing capabilities.

Deployment

This mechanism uses the existing msdeploy technology provided by IIS and allows the deploy of artifacts to more than one server. Via powershell it would be possible to perform distributed deployment. IIS shared configuration features helps ensure that all deployed servers can be configured in a consistent manner.

Many of these technologies are not necessarily new and elements of these are already provided by Windows Application Services and IIS in the existing Windows Server 2008 version. What "Dublin" does is package these together with a management API to allow easy access and utilisation of these technologies in a consistent manner.

These are significant technologies which should ease much of the potential operational deployment and management pain associated with some WCF solutions. They will allow effective ongoing monitoring and fault-tolerance of service requests.

For me these technologies can't arrive soon enough for production use as there are currently gaps in provision.

Once these tools are complete they should be available as a free download for an existing Windows Server 2008 instance.