Microsoft announced new application server technology on Oct. 1, code-named "Dublin," that will reside in Windows Server.

John Rymer, an analyst with Forrester Research, said:

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"Microsoft has never referred to any of its software as an ‘application server' before even though they’ve had one since Microsoft Transaction Server -- aka ‘Viper.’ Rather, Microsoft has always bundled its app server software with Windows Server. This may change. Dublin is a pragmatic way for Microsoft’s Connected Systems Division to introduce its latest ‘foundation’ developments to market without having to wait for a new release of Windows Server and BizTalk Server. Microsoft took the same approach with the first foundation releases in a package called ‘WinFX’ but that code ended up in Windows Server 2008 and was not released as a separate product. I can see advantages to Microsoft having a standalone ‘application server' product. It would free the company to more easily deploy to a variety of Windows configurations, both large (data centers) and small (devices). We’ll see."

AmberPoint has been working closely with Microsoft for quite some time now, said Ed Horst, chief marketing officer at AmberPoint, a maker of SOA (service-oriented architecture) governance and management software. "We provide governance and management for composite applications," Horst said. And Microsoft even ships a version of AmberPoint–AmberPoint Express–with the current versions of Visual Studio, he added.

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