What you need for this book

This book assumes you have a solid foundation in messaging and workflow concepts and are proficient in developing web services with WCF 4.0 and WF 4.0, in addition to C#, the .NET Framework, and Visual Studio 2010. You will need a Windows 7 (or Windows Server 2008/R2) machine configured for IIS 7 along with SQL Server and Visual Studio 2010, as well as either Windows Server AppFabric or Microsoft AppFabric 1.1 for Windows Server.

To take advantage of the latest caching features introduced in AppFabric 1.1, it is recommended that you install Microsoft AppFabric 1.1. for Windows Server. Otherwise, Windows Server AppFabric (the first version of this release) will suffice and is the product name we use throughout this book.

Either version can be installed on Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista R2, or Windows Server 2008 R2 and they support both 32- and 64-bit architectures. You will also need Microsoft .NET Framework v4, IIS7, and Windows PowerShell 2.0. In terms of hardware, officially, any 1GHz+ CPU (900MHz+ for Dual Core and 700MHz+ for Quad Core) with 2 GB of RAM will be sufficient to get up and running. However, it is recommended that you have at least 4 GB of RAM to run Windows Server AppFabric or Microsoft AppFabric 1.1 for Windows Server.