Top Ways To Light Up Your Apps On Windows Server "Longhorn"

Whether you are a developer building web applications, to a developer writing core server based system services, Windows Server “Longhorn” provides many new features that you can leverage to build more secure, flexible, and innovative applications.

1) Build More Flexible Web Applications

For developers wanting to build flexible web applications, IIS7 provides a very powerful platform in which to build upon. With IIS7, you can take control of the web server footprint to increase security and decrease patching, more quickly resolve faulty applications, go to market faster and reduce support costs with simplified deployment and application configuration, as well as rapidly leverage new technologies with IIS7’s extensible framework. IIS7 is also more efficient to manage with the introduction of new management APIs, a powerful new UI, a suite of command line tools, as well as the capability to manage IIS7 directly from Windows PowerShell.

More Information:

· The .NET Show: Bill Staples and Scott Guthrie on IIS7

· End-To-End Extensibility Example

· Downloads on IIS.net

2) Build Connected Systems

If you are writing enterprise grade distributed applications, Windows Server Codename “Longhorn” is the best platform you can target. Every aspect of the application life cycle enjoys state of the art support: service development, hosting, process modeling, manageability, performance, interoperability out of the box, extensibility, protection of the current investments… all those facets of distributed software development and management are natively implemented by Windows Server codename “Longhorn” features. Many of these features are provided through the Application Server role and the integration of the .NET Framework 3.0 within Windows Server Codename “Longhorn”.

Even if you are simply porting your Windows DNA based application, you will enjoy the great benefits brought by various key enhancements in the core services such as a completely redesigned TCP stack, enhanced transaction capabilities, MSMQ evolutions, and much more.

More Information:

· .NET Framework Developer Center

· Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 Community

· Introducing the .NET Framework 3.0

3) Develop Federation-Aware Applications

As the business need for ubiquitous user access has evolved, the demand upon Web applications is to no longer only support users inside the firewall. Potentially, these same applications, or portions of them, need to now be accessed by vendors, partners or customers as well. How do you provide access for these constituencies to applications built around the domain-based identity model? At the minimum, it infers additional user account management. Each constituent must have a domain-based identity inside the firewall as well. If this is hundreds or potentially thousands of additional user accounts, it’s a further burden on IT and help desk staff to manage provisioning/de-provisioning of accounts and password resets for those loosely affiliated with the organization.

With Windows Server “Longhorn”, technologies like Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) , Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS) , and Windows Authorization Manager (AzMan) provide you, the developer, with the capabilities to develop “Single Sign-On”, Federation-Aware applications.

More Information:

· .NET Developers Guide To Identity

· Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) Resources

· Identity and Access Management Developer Center

4) Design Highly-Manageable Applications

In today’s rapidly changing IT environment, it is critical that application errors be diagnosed and solved quickly by IT Operations, without the need for costly escalation. This requires datacenters and applications to be designed to be highly-manageable. Microsoft’s strategy for enabling these highly-manageable systems is called the Dynamic Systems Initiative.

The Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) is Microsoft's technology strategy for products and solutions that help businesses enhance the dynamic capability of its people, process, and IT infrastructure using technology. To enable applications to be managed within the DSI world, they must be “designed for operations”.

With technologies like Windows Eventing 6.0, Windows Installer 4.0, Windows PowerShell, Microsoft Management Console 3.0 (MMC 3.0) , and Task Scheduler 2.0, Windows Server “Longhorn” enables you to develop highly-manageable applications.

More Information:

· Windows PowerShell

· Design for Operations

· Dynamic Systems Initiative

5) Develop More Reliable Applications

Building truly reliable applications that can handle everything thrown at them, including everything from power outages to hardware failures, has always been notoriously difficult. With the addition of several new technologies in Windows Server “Longhorn”, building reliable applications has become easier than before.

By leveraging the new Application Recovery and Restart APIs, Restart Manager, Transactional NTFS, Transactional Registry, or even the new Kernel Transaction Manager, you can let the platform handle a large number of details and build more reliable applications at the same time.

More Information:

· About Transactional NTFS

· Transaction Resources List

· Kernel Transaction Manager and Friends

6) Build for Scalability

Windows Server Codename “Longhorn” provides new scalability enhancements that enable you to build, deploy, host, and manage even the most demanding applications. The businesses of today and tomorrow Windows Server Codename “Longhorn” provides new scalability enhancements that enable you to build, deploy, host, and manage even the most demanding applications. The businesses of today and tomorrow demand more scalability from their servers, and Windows Server Codename “Longhorn” delivers by providing developers new ways to control the concurrent processing behaviors of their applications.

With the new Thread Pool APIenhancements , developers have more control over how worker threads execute asynchronous callbacks within their application. By efficiently managing these callbacks and the creation of new threads, these enhancements provide a means to reduce the number of application threads needed by an application. The Thread Ordering Service in Windows Server Codename “Longhorn” controls the execution of one or more client threads. It ensures that each client thread runs once during the specified period and in relative order. Even enhancements to debugging these scalable application have been made with technologies like Wait Chain Traversal , enabling debuggers to diagnose application hangs and deadlocks.

More Information:

· Thread Pooling

· Using Wait Chain Traversal

7) Go Virtual

Virtualization is a very powerful technology that enables consolidation of existing servers, business continuance through flexible data recovery capabilities, lowers the requirements (and total cost of ownership) of testing and development environments, as well as providing unique capabilities to make the management of branch offices easier than before.

Windows Server Virtualization is Microsoft’s new hypervisor-based Virtualization product for Windows Server “Longhorn”. There are many virtualization enhancements coming with Windows Server Virtualization, like:

· 32-bit and 64-bit support for hosts and guests

· Leverages new hardware-based virtualization technologies

· Capable of supporting large memory (>4 GB)

· Supports “memory over-commit” (assigning more virtual memory to a virtual machine than physical memory on the server)

· Symmetric Multi-Processing capabilities for virtual machines (up to 8way)

· Pass-through disk access for virtual machines

· New Virtual Service Provider / Virtual Service Client architecture (allowing requests to shared hardware like disk devices, networking devices, etc.)

· Runs on Server Core installation, minimizing footprint and increasing security of host

More Information:

· Microsoft Virtualization Home

· Windows Server Virtualization - An Overview

 

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