Windows Server AppFabic 1.1

AppFabric 1.1 is the new version of Windows Server AppFabric 1.0 first release. The new release 1.1 provides new features, many bug fixes and improved memory management.

Graceful shutdown

One of my favorite features is so called Cache Graceful Shutdown. If you never used the cache in cluster this feature will not be important.
If the cache cluster is build on many nodes, there will be a moment when one node needs to be shutdown. As long all items cached on all nodes are in sync (means all items are distributed to all nodes) the shutdown is not an issue at all. But in the real life systems are dynamic. That means new items are put into the cache and old items are removed. That means item distribution process (sync) is running continuously. Under this assumption shutdown of one node would destroy all items cached at that node which have not been synchronized with other nodes. To solve this problem, v1.1 of cache provides a new parameter Graceful of power-shell command Stop-CacheHost.

From the client side point of view, old 1.0 clients are compatible with the server version 1.1. However, both cache client libraries 1.0 and 1.1 should not be installed on one machine.

No more GAC
Cache client assemblies are no more installed in GAC. GAC registration has prevented using Windows Azure AppFabric Cache assemblies side by side with Windows Server AppFabric Caches assemblies.

Installation Path
Installation path is moved from C:\Windows\System32\AppFabric to .\Program Files\AppFabric 1.1.

For the full list of issues please take a look here.

For documentation purposes here is one which I need often:

custom WCF bindings and behaviors Schema Issue

If your services use custom elements, it is not possible to configure these elements in AppFabric directly. To do that convert custom element sections to MWA-compatible schemas and place that schema in %SystemRoot%\System32\inetsrv\config\schema. MWA will automatically pick up this schema and parse the custom section in configuration correctly. These  sections can also be edited by using IIS Configuration Editor, which is inside of IIS Manager( not the AppFabric Configuration Editor).