An academic at the time, Watkins lectured at the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, and the Department of Software Development at Monash University. He was given the chance to visit the software giant's US headquarters in Redmond with researchers and developers from all over the world. Since then he has set up his own business, Project42, and travels the world providing training, consulting and mentoring to companies that wish to develop component-based software architectures for the Internet.
-People think of Microsoft as being desktop-centric, which it was 10-20 years ago," Watkins said. -I think .NET in some ways is Microsoft saying the future is the Internet and this is our way, or moving away from being desktop-focussed."
Pointing out that Web services is the buzzword of the moment, Watkins said .NET is very important from a strategic viewpoint. -.NET is Microsoft's Web services," he said, adding that it's good to have many large software vendors and computing companies travelling on a common path. -We have to have a common way of talking between things...it's nice not to have everyone pulling each other apart for a time."
Passport to the world
.NET has opened the door to over 20 countries for Watkins this year, who describes his profession as a -fantastic job, seeing so many countries in the world".
So far this year he has visited universities in Vienna, Graz, Frankfurt, Berlin, Stuartgart, Milan, Russia and Switzerland, all of which were Microsoft Research Cambridge sponsored events.
Watkins described a Sunday spent walking around St Petersburg with a local lecturer and his wife. -The city was magnificent and the buildings and canals were beautiful. It is a hard job," he quipped.
In July, Watkins travelled to Cambridge, Seattle and Beijing, all for Microsoft Research. Beijing, he describes as -one of the most marvellous cities I have ever been to".
Academic adoption of .NET is high
According to Watkins, academics are generally adopting .NET as fast, or faster, than commercial developers but for different reasons. Academics, he said, like the design and the architecture. -It is a good platform for teaching the underlying principle of component-oriented distributed systems." Commercial developers, he added, like the amount of breadth and depth of functionality in the libraries. -I think commercial developers are all a bit shell-shocked by recent company crashes and so moving to a new platform is not on many of their agendas for a while."
Watkins recently talked to commercial developers in Auckland and Wellington at events sponsored by Sapphire Technologies and Microsoft New Zealand.
Interest, he said, varies but is generally -quite good", and he attracted his largest audience of about 700 people for a single day of talks in Thailand this year. Most talks, he said, attract between 200 and 300 individuals. -Sometimes the talks attract less, such as New Zealand where there were about 100 at both events, but the interest was high and it was hard to stop talking," Watkins enthused.
Watkins pointed out that there has been much interest in the architecture of .NET and shared his interest in seeing people trying to take the .NET model and put it on platforms other than Windows, such as Ximian building a version for Linux.
-I hope these guys are successful," he said. -It's interesting for me to see so many other people building implementations of the architecture. It's a good validation for the design of the framework if it runs on other operating systems. People still want to see someone other than Microsoft build a version for something else."
.NET, Watkins pointed out, is not all here yet. Some is in beta, and will be for the next three to four years. -There's a whole lot of stuff still to come," he said, adding that improvements he envisages in Version 2--which is still a couple of years away--include a .NET framework with generics and support for dynamic languages.
Despite all the travelling he does, Watkins has only been to one event in Australia this year--Microsoft's TechEd conference in Brisbane this month.
He has, however, been on a .NET roadshow through Los Angeles, Vancouver, Calgary Edmonton, Halifax, Montreal, Toronto and Colorado Springs, each time visiting universities. This tour was a joint promotion by Watkins' publisher Addison-Wesley and Microsoft Corporate.
Watkins is currently writing a book for Addison Wesley on the .NET Framework.
-The book has been a lot of fun," he admits. Almost four years in the making the book is due out later this year. -It doesn't take four years to write a book, but architecture kept changing," he laughed.
