Dublin TAP Announcement

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 23:32:23 Z

Code name “Dublin” Technology Adoption Program

Microsoft is pleased to announce that nominations are now being accepted for participation in the “Dublin” Technology Adoption Program (TAP). “Dublin” rounds out the existing application server capabilities in Windows by providing additional features to help organizations manage and run Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) services built using .NET 4.

The TAP is a program designed for customers who have specific business needs to get early access to new technology and to drive their requirements into the current and future versions of the product. In return, TAP participants help Microsoft reach its quality bar across product, documentation and support services and help validate features and use cases in real world environments. Customers receive direct support by Microsoft and are able to deploy pre-release builds into production if needed.

TAP requires significant time and resource commitment, so all nominations are required to have a compelling business need, appropriate resources and executive support to join this program. Additionally, due to the cost of running such a program, there are a limited number of seats available.

Should TAP not be suitable for you, Microsoft will also be offering a public beta later in 2009, which will enable you to evaluate the technology only in development and test environments.

We are accepting nominations now and will continue to accept nominations until August when the program is scheduled to start or until capacity is exceeded. Because “Dublin” needs WCF and/or WF 4 services to manage, we want to accept organizations into the program as soon as possible so that work can commence on the service development side prior to “Dublin” availability for TAP customers in August/September.

The rest of this document details the program benefits, the requirements for participants to join the program, the rough timeline of this program and how to submit your nomination. We look forward to your participation.

Thank you

Microsoft

TAP Program Benefits

TAP is a program designed to bring together the Microsoft engineering team and customer’s project team to drive a project into production prior to general release of the product. As such Microsoft provides a range of resources and benefits to help make this happen as follows:

Program Management

· Assigned Microsoft program manager from the product team

· At least one on-site visit to meet with your project team and management to review project status

· Weekly conference calls with participants’ project teams

Product Training

· Provide early access to product documentation and training resources.

· Invitation to attend monthly webcasts from the product team on specific areas of the product

Issue escalation and resolution

· Bug/Issue advocacy by assigned PM during regular triage meetings

· Highest level of Technical Support dedicated to supporting your production environment

· Ability to request and receive quick fixes to approved builds for project blocking issues

Early access to product bits

· Key milestones and interim builds

Community advantage

· Private TAP community web site/forum established to discuss issues for peer help

· Responsive engagement with the community/forum by the product group

In this “Dublin” TAP program we are interested in working with organizations who want to evaluate “Dublin” and commit to providing bug reports and feature feedback as well as customers who want to take this to the next level and put “Dublin” into a production environment. Therefore, we will have a “Production Pool” and an “Evaluation Pool” of customers. For the production pool, the additional benefits of technical support, QFE fixes and licenses to go to production apply.

TAP Program Requirements

Microsoft’s goal is to get critical feedback on feature capabilities and product quality that will be used to determine when “Dublin” is ready to ship. We would like a limited number of customers to commit to production deployments of Dublin to manage production services as well as a larger pool of customers who want to put significant effort into evaluating “Dublin” but cannot commit to production deployment. Since “Dublin”s focus is to help manage and run WCF 4 and WF 4 services, a significant amount of time will be spent by TAP customers building the underlying applications that “Dublin” will manage. Some customers may have an existing application or one in development; others may be starting from scratch. In any case the activities involved will be significant and there are some specific requirements that program participants will need to ensure happen:-

Product Use and Deployment

· Participants must have a project that is related to a specific business need and has appropriate senior level support and funding. This project will rely on “Dublin” and exercise one of more of the core scenarios listed below.

· Participants will install and run the most recent customer-ready build in their development environments upon joining the program.

· Participants who are selected into the “production deployment” pool will commit to going into production within 45 days prior to product release date on the release candidate bits and sign off on release 2 weeks prior to release date.

· Participants must have schedule flexibility (see program timetable below). For example participants in the “production pool”, should not have projects that are fixed date driven.

Project Team and readiness

· Assign Project Manager and suitable project staff including, as necessary, Microsoft partners, Microsoft Consulting Services, Microsoft Premier Support

· Team will participate in weekly conference calls with an assigned Microsoft Project Manager

· Team will provide ongoing weekly status updates

· Team will log product bugs and verify bug fixes

· Appropriate team members will attend TAP program training/conferences and participate in the TAP community

Agree to participate in PR/launch activities and contribute project artifacts

· Participant must be willing to take part in a range of PR activities, such as press releases, press interviews, customer interviews, advertising or launch events, written or video case studies, unless prevented from doing so by corporate policy or legal agreement

· Participants are strongly encouraged to commit to creating technical artifacts from their project that will help to provide guidance and best practices for others

Documentation Requirements:

Participants must accept and sign the following agreements that will be provided if the nomination is accepted:

· Master TAP Agreement

· Agree to Program Description

· Supplemental End User License Agreement

· Non Disclosure Agreement

Participant Selection

As mentioned in the program requirements above, the participant should have a project that will exercise multiple core scenarios that “Dublin” addresses. TAP participants will span a wide range of organization size, project complexity, and geographic location.

We are looking for customers who, through an active project implementation, can validate some of the following scenarios:

· Establish the appropriate IT Operations skills and best practices to use “Dublin” to deploy and manage a range of Windows Process Activation Service (“WAS”) hosted WCF or WF services:

- Deployment, configuration and decommissioning of service components and other artifacts with “Dublin” (using both GUI tools (IIS Manager) and command-line scripting tools provided via Powershell) across environments (development, testing, staging, production) .

- Services with high uptime requirements (both vertical and horizontal scaling architecture) and requirements to manage/monitor/report the SLA’s for these services.

- Highly available services that require changes such as versioning a service contract and rolling out this change to production with minimal impact on availability.

- Deployment using a virtualized infrastructure.

- Management of a large number of services.

- Integration of service and workflow management into a centralized operations management infrastructure, both Microsoft e.g. SCOM, and non Microsoft management platforms.

· Application scenarios that require high throughput.

· Development environments - both large and small, that plan to design, test/debug and deploy/undeploy/redeploy WF 4 services directly from Visual Studio.

· Applications that consist of long running workflows developed using WF 4 and the requirements and processes to manage these workflows over time (including processes to correct suspended workflows).

· Applications that would benefit from dynamic message routing.

· Requirements for application health monitoring and detailed troubleshooting

· Farm environments with multiple machines hosting services

· Building “Dublin” dependencies into commercial applications that require integrated setup and configuration.

· Using “Dublin” in a virtual and non-virtual multi-tenanted hosting environment.

· Migrating existing WCF & WF 3.0/3.5 services to WCF and WF 4.0 and deploying these using “Dublin”.

Program Timetable

The table below provides some general guidance for the TAP program timelines. This is subject to change based on product development progress and feedback.

June - August	Nominations	Customers nominated for the program and start addressing program requirements in order to be accepted.
	Selection & Enrollment	Customers selected for the program are notified and given information regarding initial participation. We will accept nominations as they are submitted on a case by case basis until the program is full. Expect to be contacted regarding your acceptance/rejection within 2 weeks of your nomination. Master TAP Agreement Supplemental EULA (prior to deployment) NDA Program Description All these documents must be returned. Additionally, a signed Supplemental License must be on file at Microsoft and the Program Description must be returned acknowledge by the organization.
	.NET 4 artifact implementation (WCF and WF)	Implementation of the .NET 4 artifacts e.g. WCF services and WF workflows should commence upon official acceptance into the program.
August/September	Release of CTP product build for testing	Deployment in development/lab environment within 14 days of availability.
Q3 2009 (Oct-Dec)	Beta 1 release	Upgrade all environments deployed to this release and continue development and testing of solution
Q1 2010 (Jan-Mar)	Beta 2 release	Upgrade all environments deployed to this release and continue development and testing of solution.
Q2 2010 (Apr-Jun)	RTM	For those customers accepted into the “Production pool”, production go-live for solution up to 45 days prior to product final release. Upgrade/deploy using release candidate product build/builds and system in production.

How to Submit a Nomination

Please use the steps below to submit your application for participation in the TAP program. You will be contacted by the Microsoft TAP program team within 2 weeks of your submission:

1. Log on to http://connect.microsoft.com, register if you don’t have an account and a profile

2. Under "CONNECTION DIRECTORY" on the top menu, select the "Server" category

3. Look for "Microsoft Codename "Dublin" Programs" and select the “Apply” link next to "Codename “Dublin” Technology Adoption Program (TAP)"

4. Fill out the Dublin TAP Nomination form available from the Downloads section (on the left hand-side menu)

Questions:

If you have any questions about the Dublin TAP program, please don’t hesitate to email us at: dublincp@microsoft.com

Additional Resources:

http://www.microsoft.com/NET/Dublin.aspx

http://blogs.technet.com/chriscraft/default.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.01.net40.aspx

Recent TechEd 2009 Sessions on Dublin:

SOA202 – A Lap around Dublin
http://www.msteched.com/online/view.aspx?tid=9bd4c1fc-6f4d-459e-9d18-83016bb9bd90

SOA310 – Managing, Tracking and Troubleshooting Services with Dublin
http://www.msteched.com/online/view.aspx?tid=a0ba0aad-eb7e-41bb-bcf6-a0fe2e6ea418