As of Friday, the Microsoft Solution for Windows-based Hosting 4.0 is now available on the web.  Well, almost everything.  You can download the solution components, but the documentation is not yet available.  The documentation is supposed to be available Monday via Technet, so keep an eye out for it.

There are two releases:

• Windows-based Hosting 4.0 [For Web Hosters]
• Windows-based Hosting for Applications [For ISV's]

What's the difference? 

Well from the solution component perspective, not much.  They "appear" to be the exact same files and folder structure.  The only major difference are the files sizes (the ones that are different, the “Apps” version is only 12800 bytes larger…. MPSSampleCPDev.msi is 13312 bytes larger) and the Apps version doesn’t have the “nonMPS” version of the Time Tracker.  Beyond that, everything else is exactly the same.  At least that’s what I can tell by the files.  I’m not sure about the actual deployment or anything.   

What's new in this release?  I'm not really sure yet until the documentation is available, but I can see this:

1. No registration required to download the components
2. Documentation will only be available via the web (soon)
3. New Providers: Terminal Services, FrontPageWebService, XmlFileProvider
4. New Namespaces: ManagedTerminalServices
5. Sample Control Panel

When I find out more information, especially about the documentation, I'll update this post.

Here are the URL's to download the components:

Microsoft Solution for Windows-based Hosting v 4.0
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4d7a68bb-415d-4ef0-9645-95441ecde380&displaylang=en

Microsoft Solution for Windows-based hosting for Applications
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=F7619610-1313-4FD3-BBAB-D207E1C6EE86&displaylang=en

For more information on the documentation, read Part 2 of this post: http://agramont.net/blogs/conrad/archive/2006/08/16/Windows-Based-Hosting-4.0-Released-_2800_Part-2_2900_.aspx