Page II: Find out what you should expect in enterprise software development with the next version of Microsoft Windows.
That's great news for software developers who can't design an intuitive user interface to save their lives. They can leave that work to the graphic design professionals now. That model has worked very well in ASP.NET development circles, and should work well here too. Look for a number of professional design tools from Adobe, Macromedia, and others, to start supporting XAML output in the next 6-12 months.
But the feedback Microsoft got was that Longhorn would lack the install base for it to make sense for ISVs to start targeting it exclusively. Microsoft says it will be "widely available" in 2006, but that doesn't mean it will be "widely installed" anytime before the next even-numbered year. I mean, some companies still don't think that the security, usability, and stability improvements in Windows XP are enough reason to upgrade from Windows 98 and 2000, so ISVs can't be banking on huge enterprise Longhorn rollouts within the first six months it is available.
So Microsoft decided that the best course of action would be to backport many of the features in Avalon Longhorn onto Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. This is great news for developers, because now the ease of XAML programming will be available on older platforms. There are going to be some performance issues to solve, as Joe Beda, formerly of the Avalon team, described in his blog. Avalon wasn't designed for the Windows XP Driver Model, so it's just not going to be able to do the kinds of graphic enhancements it can on Longhorn's hardware-rendered desktop. But just because Avalon runs on Windows XP, doesn't mean that there still isn't a valid reason to run it on Longhorn. It will still be extremely compelling, as Joe discussed at length before jumping ship for Google.
Here comes IndigoThe really exciting stuff, and the pillar that is much closer to being finished, is Indigo. Indigo is the codename for Microsoft's new communications platform, which combines Web Services, Remoting, COM+, MSMQ, and peer-to-peer communication into one unified framework. If you've heard the latest catchphrase "service-oriented architecture," that's what Indigo hopes to enable. Just to jog your memory, SOA is an architectural paradigm in which programs are designed as a series of interconnected, discoverable services that work together.
So why bring everything under one roof? Because right now, it takes an ungodly amount of code to build a secure, transacted pipeline using today's tools. It's insane, and I personally wouldn't touch WSE with a ten-foot pole. It's just too much code to learn for the kinds of tasks that I generally need to accomplish. Thankfully, help is on the way.
At PDC 2003, Chris Anderson and Don Box showed a 500+ line WSE-enhanced secure, transacted message pipe, and accomplished the same task with no more than 15 lines of code on Indigo. It shouldn't take a genius to connect these dots: communication is about to get a whole lot easier.
Microsoft's plan for Indigo from the beginning has been for Indigo to be available for all current (WinXP/2003) and future Windows platforms. They haven't set any specific launch dates yet, but this writer is going to predict that you'll see Indigo released as part of, or slightly after, the "Yukon" wave (which consists of .NET 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, and SQL Server 2005). Those products are currently slated to ship in June 2005, so be on the lookout for it.
Bringing it all togetherLonghorn's priorities have changed. It happens in every software development project, and it was going to happen here. Building software is about finding a balance between three critical issues: Resources, Features, and Schedules. The first part of the project is about a term my CEO calls "dreamstorming" or coming up with all the things you'd like the program to be able to do if the world were a perfect place. Not long after that though, the team has to get its head out of the clouds, and its feet firmly planted in the reality of ship schedules and shareholders.
Microsoft changed some of its Longhorn strategy in order to make the technology available to a wider audience, and still ship in a reasonable time frame. Developers can rightly mourn the loss of WinFS from the initial release, but there are plenty of other reasons to be excited, even more so now that there is a "downlevel" story. Ultimately, they made the best decision possible.
I have to end with the "o-blog-itory" shameless plug. Over on LonghornBlogs.com, Interscape's award-winning home of all things Longhorn, I've been discussing the ramifications of Microsoft's changes in great detail. The series is called "The Longhorn Shake-up", and I've already put out two parts of the four-part series. Part One discusses the social perspective and the events leading up to the decision, while Part Two explains the lessons learned in Microsoft's "software wave" strategy.
biography
Robert McLaws is
President of Interscape
Technologies, Inc., a .NET solutions firm in Mesa, Arizona. He's also a
Microsoft ASP.NET Most Valuable Professional (MVP). He can be contacted through
his Weblog.
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