Microsoft took its .net strategy forward as it announced a host of
tools, specifications and software at last week's Professional
Developers' Conference held in Florida. Antony AdsheadMicrosoft
took its .net strategy forward as it announced a host of tools,
specifications and software at last week's Professional Developers'
Conference held in Florida. Antony Adshead reports reports
Microsoft last week announced a tools suite, core specifications
and a family of server software in an attempt to put some flesh on
the bones of its .net strategy.
Microsoft's Paul Maritz, group vice president for the Windows
platform, unveiled the .net framework, along with Visualstudio.net,
Soap Contract Language, Soap Discovery and a family of .net
enterprise servers at the Microsoft Professional Developers'
Conference held last week in Florida.
The .net framework (see story opposite) is intended to provide a
multi-language development and execution environment for building
and running Web services using Soap (Simple Object Access Protocol)
and XML (Extensible Markup Language).
Controversially, Microsoft announced that .net will support 14
programming languages but has omitted Java. Microsoft is currently
embroiled in a legal dispute with Sun as a result of alleged
unauthorised changes to Java, which it is claimed reduced the
language's cross-platform compatibility. Visualstudio.net will
provide developers with an environment to deliver the proposed .net
services via an XML-based model.
However, users are cautious. Simon Moores, chairman of user
association the Microsoft Forums, warned, "We will have to hope
that Microsoft does not embrace XML in the same way that it has
'embraced' Java."
The two core specifications announced at the conference are Soap
Contract Language (SCL), which describes Web services'
capabilities, and Soap Discovery, which gives rules for location of
Web services.
SCL, for example, provides descriptions of types of information
a Web service would expect to receive and specifies for that
information to be processed in a given way - such as identifying
share price information and forwarding it to other Web sites.
Soap Discovery provides rules for locating SCL descriptions.
This means that if a developer wished to build a share price
service into a site it would be found automatically.
Soap is an open standards interoperability protocol that uses
XML to provide common formats for use between Internet appliances.
In promoting this standard Andrew Layman, Microsoft Web service
architect, said the firm was "demonstrating a commitment to
continuing to work with the development community to make Web
services ubiquitous".
Gary Barnett, an analyst with Ovum, said, "Soap is potentially
extremely important. With support from companies such as IBM it
will enable global interoperability."