What's New in Application Services
The Windows Server 2003 family builds on the core strengths of the Windows family of operating systems—security, manageability, reliability, availability, and scalability. Advances in Windows Server 2003 provide many benefits for developing applications, resulting in lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and better performance. This article provides an overview of benefits, new features, and improvements for application services in Windows Server 2003.
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On This Page
 | Benefits |
| New Features and Improvements |
| Summary |
Benefits
The Windows Server 2003 application environment provides the following benefits.
| Benefit | Description |
Simplified Integration and Interoperability | Easily connect with partners and customers, protect and extend existing infrastructure, and build dynamic applications. |
Improved Developer Productivity | Get products to market faster, develop applications that are on time and on budget, and take advantage of quicker and easier build cycles. |
New Features and Improvements
Windows Server 2003 provides the following:
| • | Simplified Integration and Interoperability |
| • | Improved Developer Productivity |
| • | Increased Enterprise Efficiency |
| • | Improved Scalability and Reliability |
| • | End-to-End Security |
| • | Efficient Deployment and Management |
Simplified Integration and Interoperability
As the foundation of Microsoft .NET-connected technologies, Windows Server 2003 delivers a revolutionary application environment to build, deploy, and run XML Web services. Integrating support for XML Web services enables applications to take advantage of the loosely coupled principles of Internet computing.
| Benefit | Description |
Native XML Web Services Support | Windows Server 2003 offers native support for XML Web service standards including XML, SOAP, Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI), and Web Services Description Language (WSDL). |
Enterprise UDDI | Windows Server 2003 includes Enterprise UDDI Services, dynamic and flexible infrastructure for XML Web services. This service enables companies to run their own internal UDDI service for intranet or extranet use. Developers can easily and quickly find and re-use the Web services available within the organization. IT administrators can catalog and manage the programmable resources in their network. With UDDI Services, companies can build and deploy smarter, more reliable applications. |
Support for Existing Services | Because XML Web services are deeply integrated into Windows Server 2003, existing services like COM+ and Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) can readily take advantage of them. Administrators can allow existing COM+ applications to be called using XML/SOAP by simply checking a configuration box. MSMQ can also talk to SOAP and XML as a native format to allow loosely coupled applications to interoperate with a broad range of systems. |
Federation Infrastructure | >XML Web services deliver the foundation and architecture for application integration. Federation infrastructure is fundamentally about enabling servers and services to interoperate across trust boundaries. |
Improved Developer Productivity
The Windows Server 2003 application environment improves the productivity of developers by providing a complete set of integrated application services and industry-leading tool support.
| Benefit | Description |
Microsoft .NET Framework | The .NET Framework incorporates the common language runtime and a unified set of class libraries that include Windows Forms, Microsoft ADO.NET, Microsoft ASP.NET, and other capabilities. The .NET Framework provides a fully managed, protected, and feature-rich application execution environment, simplified development and deployment, and seamless integration with a wide variety of programming languages. By integrating the .NET Framework into the Windows Server 2003 application development environment, developers are freed from writing "plumbing" code and can instead focus their efforts on delivering real business value. The .NET Framework—which Windows XP, Windows 2000 Server and Windows 2000 Professional, Windows 98, Windows Me, and Microsoft Windows NT® 4.0 all support—enables developers to create great Web applications with the help of ASP.NET and other technologies. It can also help them build the same applications they design and develop today. The .NET Framework provides deep, cross-programming language integration that boosts productivity by enabling developers to extend one programming language's components within another language by way of cross-language inheritance, debugging, and error-handling. Windows Server 2003 provides the richest set of services available with any development platform, including comprehensive data access, integrated security, interactive user interfaces, mature component object model, transaction processing monitors, and world-class queuing. |
ASP.NET: Simple Web Service Creation | Using the ASP.NET XML Web services features, developers can write their business logic and the ASP.NET infrastructure will be responsible for delivering that service via SOAP and other public protocols. |
Separate Code from Content | The .NET Framework enables developers and content creators to work in parallel by keeping content separate from application code. |
Industry-leading Tools | Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET provides an integrated, multilanguage tool for building Web applications and XML Web services. |
Reusable Code | ASP.NET provides an intelligent architecture that is easy to learn and that allows for improved code reuse. |
Automatic Memory Management | The .NET Framework runs in the common language runtime, which is a garbage-collected environment. Garbage collection frees applications that are using .NET Framework objects from the need to explicitly destroy those objects, reducing common programming errors dramatically. |
Server-Side Web Controls | The new ASP.NET functionality increases productivity by encapsulating complex interactions in server-side components. Developers can rapidly build scalable Web applications that can service multiple-user interface devices. Web controls are compiled and run on the server for maximum performance, and can be inherited and extended for even more functionality. |
Increased Enterprise Efficiency
Applications developed in the Windows Server 2003 environment are more responsive and available, and because the environment can be managed by fewer people, it will deliver lower TCO with better performance, improved scalability and reliability, and more robust security. In addition, Windows Server 2003 eases the burden on IT administrators, by making it easier to deploy and manage applications.
| Benefit | Description |
ASP.NET: Integrated with Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 | ASP.NET is integrated with the IIS 6.0 process model and leverages support for multiple application pools. This means that individual ASP.NET applications are isolated and talk directly to the kernel-mode HTTP listener. This leads to a reduced number of process hops and allows ASP.NET applications to leverage kernel-mode file caching. |
ASP.NET: Advanced Compilation | The .NET Framework advanced compilation provides increased performance by compiling pages instead of interpreting them. It supports both pre-compiled applications and on-the-fly-compiled applications. ASP.NET leverages more advanced threading models which allow it to perform asynchronous I/O, leading to improved performance and scalability. This eliminates the need to convert server-side code before execution, and therefore conserves server resources, increasing server performance and scalability. |
ASP.NET: Intelligent Caching | The ASP.NET programming model provides a cache application programming interface (API) that enables programmers to activate caching services to improve performance. An output cache saves completely rendered pages, and fragment cache stores partial pages. Classes are provided so that applications, HTTP modules, and request handlers can store arbitrary objects in the cache as needed. |
Garbage-collected Environment | The garbage collector in the common language runtime provides a more efficient environment for memory management in Web server scenarios. It avoids heap fragmentation issues by using a classic allocation/free model. |
Improved Scalability and Reliability
Here are some of the key scalability and reliability features that benefit developers and IT professionals in an application environment.
| Benefit | Description |
Asynchronous Support | The .NET Framework deeply integrates two asynchronous communication technologies for scalability and reliability: SOAP and MSMQ. This allows developers to build applications that are robust and can handle offline scenarios. |
Web Farm Session State | The process-independent, Web-farm-compatible session state increases reliability and scalability by storing session state in a process external to the ASP.NET application, so the state can survive application crashes and be referenced from other machines in a Web farm. |
IIS 6.0 Fault-Resilient Process Architecture | IIS 6.0 provides an architecture that delivers enhanced application isolation. Administrators can create multiple application pools and assign applications to those pools to provide isolation. Application pools can be monitored and automatically recycled to ensure application availability. |
ADO.NET | ADO.NET uses a nonpersistent connection and intelligent handling of state. ADO.NET actually sends XML messages between the data source and the application, opening and closing the connection as needed. The result is that applications scale much better with ADO.NET, and ADO.NET can work over many different network transports. |
End-to-End Security
Security in Windows .NET Server 2003 is built on top of a single security model anchored by Active Directory. Security enhancements and innovations new to Windows .NET Server 2003 help to reduce the "attack surface" and make Windows authentication and authorization more secure and powerful via a new application security architecture. Protocol transition capability enables any authentication on the front-end Web server to be transitioned to Kerberos in the back-end.
Native integration of Microsoft .NET Passport enables authentication and authorization for any customer or consumer, and sets the stage for future federation capabilities. When the front-end server trusts the .NET Passport, the .NET Passport is used for user validation and subsequent logon. The .NET Passport credentials can be mapped to the Active Directory for consumers and customers.
Efficient Deployment and Management
No-touch deployment is enabled by enhanced tools such as Windows Installer services and by new tools such as Fusion. Fusion supports side-by-side versioning for DLLs, while its counterpart, Manifest, tells you exactly which DLLs are required. Windows Installer can contain Fusion manifests and can now describe the application that runs side-by-side, making it easier to deploy reliable applications.
Additional tools that can shorten the deployment process and ensure greater accuracy include X-copy deployment and IIS edit while running.
The Windows Management Interface (WMI) does in hours what formerly took days, using new tools in Visual Studio.NET. Reliability is improved through command-line tools that are freely available for download via the Internet. Applications and services can easily issue events and define variables.
Summary
IT professionals can take advantage of their existing IT resources to maximize productivity while minimizing TCO. Developers can extend their existing code and write new applications and XML Web services using their current skills. And, line-of-business managers and business decision makers can optimize their return on investment by spending money on an operating system and gaining a world-class application development environment for the same investment.