This major release is built on top of the Windows Communication Foundation
infrastructure, and exposes deeper Xoom functionality to Xoom client tools and scripts
through web services. The release also features major performance and stability improvements, a
new tool for implementing renames of settings in the context of a configuration clean-up,
and a number of other enhancements.
Communication infrastructure
This release of Xoom is implemented on top of a new communication infrastructure. It uses
Windows Communications Framework, Microsoft's powerful, standards-compliant, cross-platform
communication framework, as its foundation, and builds on top of that. The new communication
infrastructure has numerous advantages:
- Xoom is now independent of IIS, making it much more suitable for managing applications
that don't require IIS on their own (Xoom made minimal use of IIS's capabilities). This
also makes Xoom resilient to badly behaved applications that sometimes kill the IIS
applications they run on. In previous versions this meant that Xoom web portal was also
killed as a side-effect, taking the relevant Xoom session with it.
- Xoom capabilities are now exposed via web services. This makes those capabilities much
easier to use for third-party programming and scripting, in particular using Windows
PowerShell. More complex automation scenarios are now possible.
- The communication channel is now tailored to the context, using named pipes for local
communication (in-memory, very fast) and HTTP for remote servers (fault-tolerant, rich). The
overall performance of the communication (and therefore of many Xoom operations) has been
substantially improved.
- The connections between Xoom clients and Xoom servers, and between Xoom server
and Service Optimization have been made more stable and reliable. All Service Optimization logon credential elements are
now supported everywhere, including the installer.
- It is now possible to run the Xoom service as a stand-alone application outside of the
services host for support purposes.
Communication capture and remote reconstructability
Another major feature of this release is the presence of infrastructure and a tool that allows
Xoom to capture all required communications with Service Optimization. This allows full remote
reconstruction of the Service Optimization environment (from the point of view of what Xoom needs to
function) without needing to create the same Service Optimization environment (which is complex and
time-consuming) or share a database dump (which would be much larger and would potentially
expose sensitive user data). This enables powerful new uses that were not possible before, such
as:
- Regression testing prior to an upgrade to a new version of Xoom without needing actually
to install the new version of Xoom anywhere on customer site.
- Implementation of Xoom interpretations and customisations with a quick and reliable way
of verifying their effect on the configuration representation without needing to make
any modifications to existing Xoom installations on the customer site before those
modifications are ready to be fully deployed.
- Off-site debugging of Xoom issues as though on-site, enabling Zany Ants to
attach locally to a running session using the actual customer's DLLs and therefore resolve the
problem with much greater accuracy and speed.
Other new features
- Retrieval of administrative user settings is now supported in the Settings Migration Tool.
- Xoom Explorer has a new, simpler UI that: supports retrieval of information from Xoom
using named queries; removes the command panel (which was confusing to users and took a
lot of screen real estate); explicitly exposes load from and save to file functionality; and
optimises the space devoted to the result on the screen. The tool also reports the number of
hits when used with an XPath query, which turns out to be very useful especially when the
query returns a large number of hits.
- Xoom Toolkit now supports retrieval using named queries. The general send
command has been deprecated but there is a new set command instead that allows the tool to be
used for deploying configuration changes. The tool now also supports
any number of consecutive XSLT transformations to be called on the result, simplifying the
automated generation of reports.
- A new tool is included that automates the deletion of unused settings and global setting
renames throughout the configuration (including the creation of undo files). The tool is
particularly useful in the context of configuration clean-up where unwanted settings
are removed, and some or all of the remaining settings are renamed in order to conform to a
naming convention that's more informative to administrators.
- Much system information (Xoom version number, licensing information, DLLs in use
including their version numbers etc.) is now accessible through the license manager UI.
Improvements/changes
- All Xoom client tools now use common core client-side code, leading to identical
results.
- Error reporting has been greatly improved, both in accuracy of the information provided and
in versatility of logging configuration available.
- Further improvements in support of Service Optimization 8.
- Dramatic performance improvement in Xoom commands that don't operate on the managed
configuration, including SXP and SQL commands.
Bug fixes
- The duplicates that sometimes appeared in multiple categories in Settings Migration Tool are now put in
their correct category.
- The Xoom service now shuts down more quickly and cleanly.
