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 NEWSMicrosoft to fill in .NET picture By Tom Sullivan and Ed Scannell October 19, 2001 1:22 pm PT MICROSOFT WILL CONTINUE its hardcore push to educate and inspire developers about its raft of .NET products and services at its Professional Developer's Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles next week, with updates to key pieces of its .NET product line and the delivery of an SDK (software development kit) for its .NET My Services.
The Redmond, Wash.-based vendor will hand out code for the Visual Studio.NET Release Candidate as well as for ASP.NET, a Web services development platform for Active Server Pages; the .NET Framework, an XML Web services integration engine; and the .NET Compact Framework for handheld devices, embedded operating systems, and devices without operating systems, Rudder said. Sharing the spotlight at PDC will be an SDK for HailStorm, the code name for .NET My Services, according to an industry source. .NET My Services, a bundle of online personal productivity applications, is going live this week, meaning that some of Microsoft's partners will start using it, and developers can start writing applications for it. Peter Urban, an analyst at AMR Research in Boston, said that Microsoft's technologies, along with the early version software that other vendors such as Sun, IBM, HP, and Oracle, the Web services products are maturing enough that companies can start to use them in testing environments. "Microsoft is the furthest along from a development perspective," Urban said. With the goal of helping users mix and match best-of-breed Web services, Microsoft's upcoming .NET My Services is essentially a collection of 14 components made up of new services such as .NET Presence and .NET Location, along with pieces that make up its Outlook mail client such as .NET Calendar, .NET Contacts, .NET Inbox, and .NET Lists. Microsoft will also discuss the environment needed to support .NET My Services, according to a Microsoft spokesperson. During founder and chief software architect Bill Gates' Tuesday keynote, Bob Muglia, group vice president of the .NET services group, will detail how end-users will subscribe to services, how partners will pay to use the services within their own applications and products, and how the business model will work for users that repackage someone else's Web services into their own offerings, the spokersperson said. A key piece of Microsoft's Web services strategy, the proprietary Passport single sign-in service, will also get attention as part of the Oct. 25 debut of Windows XP in New York. Meanwhile, third parties will also give .NET a push next week. One company that appears to be increasingly important in Microsoft's evolving Web services strategy is peer-to-peer pioneer Groove Networks, which Microsoft bought a 20 percent stake in last week. Groove next week will demonstrate a prototype of a client-based p-to-p product designed to work with Microsoft's upcoming Pocket PC. Using SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), Groove has built an extensible integration framework called the Remote Client Framework, which allows the client to interact with any other environment capable of processing SOAP. "Ultimately the goal of the Remote Client Framework is to allow us to integrate with other environments either through a third-party application or through some other Groove client that we can connect through end-to-end security to tap into the native Groove environment," said Matt Pope, manager of device platforms for Groove, based in Beverly, Mass. Groove will demonstrate how the client version of Groove can exchange data seamlessly with a version of Microsoft's Outlook for the Pocket PC and show it working within a Groove environment. Although the prototype does not support Microsoft's Instant Messaging and Windows messenger, Pope said Groove is "seriously considering" such support in the final version of the product. He declined to say when the product would be completed. Accenture, one of the world's largest consulting companies, will also show off its first application prototype of based on .NET My Services. The product is designed to assess how emerging technologies will impact the package delivery industry. Called Accenture's Dynamic Delivery, the product is using several .NET My Services components including .NET Presence, .NET Calendar, .NET Notifications, .NET Wallet, and .NET Locator. The idea behind the product is to fundamentally change the delivery paradigm from one of being address-oriented to one of being user-centric by allowing services such as dynamic package rerouting. "We think this will resonate well with anyone who has missed a delivery and gotten one of those sticky notes that says, 'sorry we missed you, we'll try again'," said Vaiju Shah, a manager at Accenture's Technology Labs. "We can reduce missed deliveries by better using calendar and location information and hereby create a new chargeable service, in this case dynamic rerouting of a package to someone no matter where they are," Shah said. The new prototype reportedly addresses a handful of basic business problems associated with package delivery, according to Shah. For instance, the application alerts a customer when a package is scheduled for delivery. That customer is then directed to a Web site that authorizes that delivery, as well as being able to have the shipment immediately re-routed to a new address where the customer will be located. Tom Sullivan is an InfoWorld senior writer. Ed Scannell is an InfoWorld editor at large  RELATED SUBJECTS  Web TechnologiesSPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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