To understand Dublin you can start with Steve Martin’s post announcing the new technology, which will be (of course) covered in detail at PDC later this month. Steve’s team heads up the WCF and WF parts of the .NET Framework so he’s in a good position to explain the new Dublin codename.

In a nutshell: Dublin is about letting the next versions of WCF and WF based apps scale better whilst providing easier deployment and management functionality.

How exactly this is enabled is difficult to get a grip on from Steve, which is why we need to head over to the new Dublin site on Microsoft. Here we learn that Dublin is a server (or as Mary-Jo writes, a new distributed application server).

Actually, it’s not exactly a server, rather a ‘set of enhanced Windows Server capabilities.’ that ‘.extend Internet Information Server (IIS) to provide a standard host for applications that use workflow or communications’ (from the Microsoft Dublin site). Stephen Forte probably has the good summary we came across.

It’s getting a little clearer now, but we’re still a little unsure. Thankfully a nice little table in this Dublin Overview document provides a nice little table:

Dublin will be packaged up and made available as a download for Windows Server customers, and of course included in future Windows Server releases.

The keen eyed amongst you will notice that Oslo rears its head (see Tuesday’s post for details on that front) and if you read through the doc you’ll learn that Dublin will be the first server product ot deliver support for Oslo.

But there’s others of course – further in the doc it notes that they’ll be directly supporting BizTalk and Dublin working nicely together.

Other items: Dublin will be backwards compatible and support existing .NET 3.5 WCF and WF applications.

Microsoft are touting Dynamics AX and CRM as the first products slated to support Dublin.