At its annual developers' conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft
chairman Bill Gates outlined the company's plans for building and
deploying Web services based on its grand .Net scheme.
The .Net strategy will allow users to access data on a variety of
Internet-connected devices. In a bid to attract the developer
community to the new platform Gates unveiled a new set of
development tools.
Release Candidate 1 of the Visual Studio.Net software development
suite is the flagship of this set of tools. One key feature is the
ability to build a front-end interface for a Web service
automatically so that it can be deployed in a way that makes it
available on any computing device.
Most of the new functionality is provided through integration with
XML, the industry standard that has become the foundation of
Microsoft's .Net strategy.
Also unveiled were Release Candidate 1 of the .Net Framework - the
architectural blueprints of Microsoft's Internet computing platform
- and early code of ASP.Net, the environment for building Web
services for active server pages.
XML will be the central way the next version of Microsoft's SQL
Server database deals with information. Paving the way for this new
database Microsoft has introduced SQLXML 2.0, a set of components
for its VisualStudio.Net tool that extends the use of XML in SQL
Server.
The Office software suite will also become a tool for working with
XML documents. Microsoft is working on a future version that would
allow users to display and edit XML documents.
"XML would be the fabric to tie all these things together," Gates
said.
Microsoft has made a new service pack for Windows 2000 available on
the company's anonymous FTP server as a collection of HotFixes,
although some of the newer folders are not publicly
available.
Many HotFixes are already available through the Windows Update
feature. The files in the publicly available folders are
password-protected compressed archives, with passwords available
for a fee through Microsoft Services.