Book Image

Microsoft Windows Server AppFabric Cookbook

Book Image

Microsoft Windows Server AppFabric Cookbook

Overview of this book

Windows Server AppFabric provides a set of integrated capabilities that extend IIS and the Windows Server platform making it easier to build, scale and manage composite applications today. Windows Server AppFabric delivers the first wave of innovation within an exciting new middleware paradigm which brings performance, scalability and enhanced management capabilities to the platform for applications built on the .NET Framework using Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation.'Microsoft Windows Server AppFabric Cookbook' shows you how to get the most from WCF and WF services using Windows Server AppFabric leveraging the capabilities for building composite solutions on the .NET platform. Packed with over 60 task-based and immediately reusable recipes, 'Microsoft Windows Server AppFabric Cookbook' starts by showing you how to set up your development environment to start using Windows Server AppFabric quickly. The book then moves on to provide comprehensive coverage of the most important capabilities provided by Windows Server AppFabric, diving right in to hands-on topics such as deploying WCF and WF applications to Windows Server AppFabric and leveraging the distributed caching, scalable hosting, persistence, monitoring and management capabilities that Windows Server AppFabric has to offer, with recipes covering a full spectrum of complexity from simple to intermediate and advanced.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Microsoft Windows Server AppFabric Cookbook
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Installing Windows Server AppFabric


Windows Server AppFabric is an extension of the Application Server role on the Windows platform. At the time of this writing there are two ways to install Windows Server AppFabric. One is the standard direct install and the other is using Microsoft's new and exciting Web Platform Installer (WPI).

In this recipe, we will go through the step-by-step instructions to install Windows Server AppFabric using WPI. Needless to say, if you already have Windows Server AppFabric installed on your machine, then you can skip this recipe.

Note

WPI is the preferred approach because it streamlines the installation process by smartly identifying and installing the prerequisite software.

Getting ready

Windows Server AppFabric can be installed on Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 SP 2, Windows Vista R2, and Windows Server 2008 R2 (it supports both 32 and 64 bit architectures). You will also need Microsoft .NET Framework v4, IIS7, and Windows PowerShell 2.0. In terms of hardware, officially, any 1GHz+ CPU (900MHz+ for Dual Core and 700MHz+ for Quad Core) with 2 GB of RAM will be sufficient to get up and running with Windows Server AppFabric. However, it is recommended that you have at least 4 GB of RAM to run Windows Server AppFabric.

Note

If you want to try Windows Server AppFabric before actually installing it on your host machine, it makes sense to use a virtual machine that has Windows Server AppFabric installed on it so that you can play with it. The good news is that Microsoft has made a preconfigured Windows Server AppFabric VM available on MSDN that can be downloaded and used with Microsoft's Virtual PC. This download is available as a part of Microsoft's training kit for Windows Server AppFabric. The download is available at: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=7956.

How to do it...

WPI offers a highly streamlined package/software download installation mechanism. You can get WPI from Microsoft's website at: http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx. After downloading and installing WPI, you can use the following steps to launch Windows Server AppFabric Installer:

  1. 1. Under the Start menu, go to All Programs. If you are using Windows 7, type Web Platform Installer in the custom menu item, find the WPI as shown in the following screenshot, and launch it:

  2. 2. Accept the User Account Control (UAC) warning. This will allow WPI to make changes to your computer.

  3. 3. Click on Next at the bottom of the screen to get started with the WPI.

  4. 4. Type AppFabric in the search box (in the top right-hand corner of the screen) and press the Enter key:

  5. 5. This will reveal a search result showing Windows Server AppFabric. Click on Add and then on Install to continue:

  6. 6. Now, WPI will ask to review the download and install of all the required software components to run Windows Server AppFabric. Select I Accept to continue.

    Note

    The list of components, third-party application software, and Microsoft products will vary from machine to machine. WPI will determine the missing software and will list it on this screen.

  7. 7. Once you select I Accept, WPI will download and install all the required software components one by one. Sometimes this may result in multiple reboots for the host machine.

  8. 8. Once all the required software components are installed, the Windows Server AppFabric installation will be complete. Click on Finish:

How it works...

The Windows Server AppFabric installation adds three new Windows services: AppFabric Caching Service, AppFabric Event Collection Service, and AppFabric Workflow Management Service, for caching, monitoring, and hosting scenarios respectively. These services can be seen when the Services Snap-in is launched from the Control Panel (or by typing Services.msc in the search box under the Windows Start menu).

As we can see in the preceding screenshot, only AppFabric Event Collection Service and AppFabric Workflow Management Service have Status as Started and have Startup Type defined as Automatic. By default, Windows Server AppFabric Caching Service is not available for use after a machine reboot.

Note

AppFabric Event Collection Service, AppFabric Workflow Management Service, and Windows Server AppFabric Caching Service form the heart of Windows Server AppFabric. These services work in the background and perform tasks such as collecting events, managing the workflow's life cycle, connecting to the cache cluster, and serving cache related requests.

Once Windows Server AppFabric is installed, the next step is to configure it using the Windows Server AppFabric Configuration wizard.