Tailspin Travel is a sample travel booking application that was born on the stage of PDC09. It is meant to highlight some of the most exciting features of the .NET Framework 4, Visual Studio 2010, and the Windows Server AppFabric.

Technologies Included

The Tailspin Travel application covers a pretty substantial set of functionality, but ultimately seeks to provide a holistic perspective of how Visual Studio 2010, .NET Framework 4, and the server platform can be used together. The following is a list of the exact features that are shown in the application:

Visual Studio 2010

1. Assembly Dependency Graph
2. Multi-monitor
3. Navigate To dialogue
4. IntelliTrace
5. New WF designer
6. MSDeploy
7. Coded-UI tests

.NET Framework 4

1. ASP.NET MVC 2
2. Windows Identity Foundation
3. Windows Workflow Foundation
4. Windows Communication Foundation
5. Entity Framework

Server Platform

1. Windows Server AppFabric
   1. Service Hosting
   2. Workflow Hosting
   3. Caching
   4. Monitoring
2. SQL Server 2008 R2
   1. DAC

System Requirements

Tailspin was built using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, and there are a few features in use in the demo that require that version (e.g. coded-UI tests). If you’re using a different SKU, you’ll still be able to run the solution, but there will be some features you won’t be able to take advantage of.

Because we consider the new Windows Server AppFabric a key part to the Tailspin Travel application, we also require that you have it installed. This is what enables the memory-caching, as well as the service/workflow containers, and monitoring support.

SQL Server 2008 R2 isn’t a hard requirement, but if you don’t have it installed you won’t be able to deploy the Data-Tier Application (DAC).

Next Steps

We plan on doing at least a couple more iterations on Tailspin Travel. There are a few tweaks we’d like to make, plus we are confident we’ll get some great feedback from you guys that will help make it even better.