Microsoft Live Labs announces a technology preview of Volta--a new experimental toolset for .Net developers. Volta is designed to allow developers to build multi-tier apps for the Web using familiar techniques and patterns from developing .Net applications. Here's somebackground from Microsoft on the Volta innovations:

 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.  Using the declarative tier-splitting, developers can refine architectural decisions based on this profiling data. This saves time and costs associated with manual refactoring.  In effect, Volta extends the .NET platform to further enable the development of software+services applications, using existing and familiar tools and techniques.

To learn more about Volta and to preview and test it go to http://labs.live.com/volta/