Now Available: The Windows Azure platform AppFabric LABS Environment

Today the AppFabric team has released the AppFabric LABS environment. This is a new environment which the team will use to showcase some early bits and get feedback from the community. Usage for this environment will not be billed.

AppFabric Labs provide a way for customers to test out and play with experimental AppFabric technologies. These are upcoming capabilities that excite us, and we want to get your feedback on them as soon as possible. As a result, there is no support or SLA associated with the LABS environment, but in return you will be able to preview the future of AppFabric while helping us shape it. Though similar to a Community Technology Preview, LABS technologies may occasionally be even farther away from commercial availability.

In this release of the LABS environment, we’re shipping two features:

1. Silverlight support: we’ve added the ability for Silverlight clients to make cross-domain calls to the Service Bus and Access Control Services.

2. Multicast with Message Buffers: we’ve added the ability for Message Buffers to attach to a multicast group. A message sent to the multicast group is delivered to every Message Buffer that is attached to it.

To get started:

1.    Go to https://portal.appfabriclabs.com/,

2.    Sign up using your Live ID,

3.    Create your LABS project, and

4.    Download LABS samples from here to learn more about these new features.

We hope you enjoy working with these Labs features as much as we have enjoyed making them available to you.

Thanks,

The Windows Azure platform AppFabric Team