What this book covers

Chapter 1, Installing Windows Server AppFabric, covers setting up your development environment to use Windows Server AppFabric. You'll learn how to install hosting, persistence and monitoring capabilities, including provisioning repositories, choosing the appropriate storage options, making changes to configuration after installation, and troubleshooting common (and not so common) installation issues you might encounter along the way.

Chapter 2, Getting Started with AppFabric Caching, introduces Caching in Windows Server AppFabric, covering everything you need to get started with introducing this important capability to your composite applications and services. You will learn how to set up and use Caching using code and configuration options, as well as working with Caching within your applications. In addition, you'll learn how easily an existing application that relies on ASP.NET session state can immediately benefit from Windows Server AppFabric Cache, handling common error conditions, using PowerShell commandlets, and building a custom provider model.

Chapter 3, Windows Server AppFabric Caching — Advanced Use Cases, builds on the concepts in the previous chapter, covering the use of Regions and Tags as well as choosing the right concurrency mode and establishing expiration, eviction, and notification policies. You will also learn advanced monitoring concepts including the use of performance counters, configuring high availability, and common troubleshooting techniques for getting the most out of Windows Server AppFabric Cache.

Chapter 4, Windows Server AppFabric Hosting Fundamentals, introduces Windows Server AppFabric's hosting capabilities, covering common deployment, management, and hosting scenarios. You'll learn how to host WCF SOAP and REST services as well as simple WF services along with a number of tips and tricks for moving beyond the service template defaults.

Chapter 5, More Windows Server AppFabric Hosting Features, covers additional hosting topics, including supporting long-running WF services, how your services can benefit from the Auto-Start feature, properly hosting WCF services that take advantage of Windows Azure Service Bus Relay bindings for enabling modern, hybrid scenarios as well as common PowerShell commandlets for scripting many of the tasks covered in this and the previous chapter.

Chapter 6, Utilizing AppFabric Persistence, provides ample coverage of Windows Server AppFabric persistence capabilities, including configuring persistence for WF services, working with multiple persistence stores, and developing instance store, control, and query providers. This chapter also provides an in-depth walkthrough of development and configuration of custom instance, control, and query providers.

Chapter 7, Monitoring Windows Server AppFabric Deployment, provides an introduction to the monitoring capabilities provided by Windows Server AppFabric. Topics include collecting and viewing events from WCF and WF services, enabling tracing and configuring tracking profiles, and leveraging PowerShell cmdlets for monitoring WCF and WF services as well as the Caching service. In addition, you'll learn how to surface monitoring information to any user experience by following the sample recipe for building a custom monitoring dashboard using ASP.NET MVC and OData.

Chapter 8, Scaling AppFabric Hosting, Monitoring, and Persistence, covers a common scenario for scaling Windows Server AppFabric across multiple IIS hosts. You will learn how to prepare two hosts for clustering using Microsoft NLB as well as understand deployment, management, and administration of a multi-host Windows Server AppFabric deployment that shares a common, centralized persistence store.

Chapter 9, Configuring Windows Server AppFabric Security, covers what you need to know about planning and implementing a security model with Windows Server AppFabric. You will learn how to secure the caching, persistence, monitoring, and eventing (via ETW) subsystems of Windows Server AppFabric.