Last week (december 5th) Microsoft announced 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. 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.

After tier assignments, Volta's deep integration with Visual Studio debugger and testing infrastructure dramatically improves the deployment experience for developers.

• Volta automatically creates communication, serialization, and remoting code. Developers simply write custom attributes on classes or methods to tell Volta the tier on which to run them.
• Developers may base tier assignments on any criteria, such as load management, performance, or location of critical assets and capabilities. Because Volta automates the hidden plumbing code, it is easy for developers to experiment with varying assignments of classes and methods to tiers.
• Developers can use all the .NET languages, libraries, and tools they already know, including debuggers, profilers, test generators, refactoring, and code analysis tools.

Volta offers deep integration with Visual Studio 2008, including debuggers, profilers, and testing frameworks. Developers can step through code seamlessly from one tier to another, can set breakpoints on any tier, and trace flows of control across distributed systems.

What do you need to use Volta?

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