Customer Reviews

Pro Windows Server: AppFabric

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4 star:		(2)
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It gives an idea what AppFabric is, but a little disorganized. I would stick with MSDN resources for now, until a new better book comes out.

They cover all the pro stuff of windows appfabric and WF. For instance: It gives good clues of how to do versioning with wf and appfabric and lot more stuff.

I do not give it 5 starts because I see it quite unordered, and sometimes it get lost in WCF and WF, but I recommend it, it is a good consulting book

Windows server AppFabric, formerly known as codename Dublin and codename Velocity, is defined as a set of integrated technologies to facilitate building, scalability and manageability of web and composite applications on IIS and WAS. Pro Windows Server AppFabric by Kaufman and Garber is a jaded introduction to this relatively new technology. The book is divided into thirteen chapters leading from basic introduction to high availability but unfortunately majority of these sections are similar to `hello world' style introductions and falls short on any substantial details. This exciting distributed caching, session management and hosting/management technology merits an extraordinary introduction to compare it with competing technologies however this lackluster text fails to do so.

AppFabric salient features involves supports for two key application development areas i.e. for Web applications, it provides caching capabilities to provide high-speed access, scale, and high availability to application data; and for composite applications, AppFabric makes it easier to build and manage services built using Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation. In their book, authors discuss the later aspects in-depth but completely skip the former i.e. web application caching and session management capabilities of the AppFabric platform. Besides this major letdown, the walkthroughs are done using windows 7 which is not a server platform and hence does not reflect the real-world scenarios as one would encounter in a windows 2008 server deployments especially in a HA (high availability) mode. The last chapter, "upgrading to appfabric" is literally less than 4 pages long which does not do any justice to the immense importance of this topic.

Some of the better facets of this title are practical examples of building and consuming WF end points with step by step instructions. It also provides powershell instructions and appfabric installations, features matrix however majority of this material can be found via MSDN documentation and related blog posts. A professional title usually entails an organized study of the technology with in-depth practical advice, best practices and detailed coverage of different characteristics of the framework. This book lacks in detail and organization to fulfill the technological needs of a developer or sysadmin.

This book has a lot of usefull information, it has all I need to know aboout windows AppFabric. Very important if you uses WCF and WF a lot into your organization and wants to move from point to point architecture to a distribuited arquitecture