Microsoft Volta Tech Preview Available

Microsoft Live Labs - Announcing Volta: Web Development Using Only the Materials in the Room

"Today, we are announcing the Volta technology preview, a developer toolset for building multi-tier web applications using existing and familiar tools, techniques and patterns. Volta’s declarative tier-splitting enables developers to postpone architectural decisions about distribution until the last possible responsible moment. Also, thanks to a shared programming model across multiple-tiers, Volta enables new end-to-end profiling and testing for higher levels of application performance, robustness, and reliability. Using the declarative tier-splitting, developers can refine architectural decisions based on this profiling data. This saves time and costs associated with manual refactoring. In effect, Volta extends the .NET platform to further enable the development of software+services applications, using existing and familiar tools and techniques.

You architect and build your application as a .NET client application, assigning the portions of the application that run on the server tier and client tier late in the development process. You can target either web browsers or the CLR as clients and Volta handles the complexities of tier-splitting.  ..."

For get a high level feel, check out, Getting Started: Building an Application with Volta in 8 Steps.

The magic starts on step 6;

"...

Step 6: Refactor into a Multi-Tier Application

The Volta application built so far represents a single tier application; everything executes entirely on the client side, in the browser.

You transform it into a multi-tier application by declaratively specifying the split point using a custom attribute. To do that:

..."

While I'm still feeling beta burned out, I think this sounds uber cool enough to play with this Tech Preview. I'll be looking more at  the CLR client implementation than anything.

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(via InfoWorld - Microsoft offers Volta preview for Web apps development)