Microsoft offers glimpse of the future

Microsoft will attempt to whip up enthusiasm among its nation of developers next week when it shows off many of the pieces that will serve as the foundation of its technology vision of the future for corporate users.

At its 10th annual Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, the company hopes to stoke that enthusiasm among 7,000 developers by delivering to them early versions of its long-awaited next generation operating system, development suite of tools, database, and Web services framework.

The show figures to be the first of many come-to-Jesus gatherings as a way to entice developers to start working on development and to win early mindshare. Given that some of the finished versions of the products such as Longhorn, the Windows XP successor, will not be available until 2006, it figures to be a long religious crusade.

The company will finally release early code of Longhorn to developers, which will include a SDK, which should allow them to begin working with some of the new features of the upcoming operating system. Company officials cautioned, however, that it is merely a preview version.

"Developers should be able to start working with all the cool fundamental things that will be in Longhorn. I think they will like the breadth and depth of what they see. But if you were to pop this onto your home PC you would not be super happy with the experience," said Adam Sohn, product manager at Microsoft's Platform Strategy group.

Microsoft will show off the latest work it has done on Longhorn's graphical interface, saying that developers should walk away with a deeper understanding of what the company is trying to help developers accomplish within the new presentation layer. He said they will show off some interface prototypes and lay out their thinking on what "user interface experiences" should be.

A key ingredient in the early version of Longhorn is its new Windows Future Storage (WinFS) file system that promises to take a new approach to the way data is stored on hard drives and other physical media and make it easier to find and visualize data.

"The story [with WinFS] is, what is in there is pretty solid, and developers will be able to start programming against it," Sohn said.

Microsoft will also release early code of the next version of its Visual Studio development platform, code-named Whidbey, which should give a good feel for what will be in the finished version. Sohn cautions again that it is still early days for the product and it has a ways to go before all the pieces are polished and put in place.

"I think they will get a sense for the innovations we are trying to push into the platform technology, but it is not production-level stuff. It is for developers to get a first peek at what we are up to. We want to get their feedback and their creative juices flowing, and maybe to start some very early work," Sohn said.

Another early version of a long-awaited program to be released is Yukon, the company's next-generation version of its SQL Server database that will include a Services Broker that makes use of asynchronous queuing and reportedly has guaranteed messaging. The product also has built-in support for Web services.

"In terms of Yukon there will be a hard focus on what developers should be doing to utilize the full power of the data-driven section of the platform. You will hear more about our storage vision and how data needs to be managed at different levels inside an organization," Sohn said.