A: The goal of Volta is to simplify the designing, building, deploying, testing, and debugging of distributed, multi-tier applications, while minimizing the amount of "new stuff" developers must learn. Volta leverages familiar, existing .NET compilers, tools, and libraries and extends them into the distributed realm. Volta achieves this goal by declarative tier-splitting: Volta inserts communication and serialization boilerplate code in response to developer-supplied declarations in the form of .NET custom attributes. By releasing Volta as a technology preview, we hope to learn from our customers how this approach opens up new opportunities and simplifies existing scenarios. Volta is a long-term project and may take many years to realize the full vision. By sharing it early, we hope to collect feedback to drive the ongoing effort as well as to prove the validity of the model early in-the-field.