Microsoft wants developers to build server applications that will
last for decades, said Jim Allchin, group vice-president of the
company's platforms group, in a speech at the Microsoft DevCon
conference.
Allchin extolled the virtues of the company's planned
next-generation release of Windows, codenamed "Longhorn," which
will not appear until 2004. Microsoft wants developers to push the
limits of the Windows server platform, he stressed.
"You're really designing systems that will live not five years but
10, 15, 20 years," based on a Windows architecture that will be
modular and componentised, Allchin told the audience. "It's pretty
amazing when you think about it. You can get presence information,
you can get notifications, and you can sort of integrate the front
office and consumer applications with what's happening in the
backroom," Allchin said.
To advance its server platform, Microsoft has a roster of
improvements planned in areas ranging from security to storage and
scalability. Sixty-four-bit processing will be supported in Windows
.net Server 2003 operating system planned for release in
early-2003. "I think over a period of time you will see 64-bit
becoming pretty much the mainstream," Allchin said.
In the area of security, Microsoft's Palladium project will secure
machine integrity, Allchin said. This will extend the use of
digital rights management to protect content, he said. Higher
levels of privacy are also planned.
The Longhorn release of the Windows server operating system will
feature a much richer storage system, the foundation of which is
the upcoming Yukon release of the SQL Server database, Allchin
said. In Yukon, developers can write stored procedures in whatever
language they wish, he said.
Longhorn will feature intelligent automatic configuration;
resilient, self-healing operations; componentisation, and "smart
eventing" and monitoring services, according to Microsoft. Error
reporting will also be improved.
With Longhorn Microsoft wants BIOSes and firmware to be
"automatically updated in a seamless way," said Allchin. Using
smart eventing and monitoring services, the system will better
understand events happening amongst multiple systems.
Administration in Longhorn, meanwhile, will be scalable and
seamless, Allchin said. Longhorn will also support the allocation
of racks of machines to specific purposes.
With Web services, the company is endeavoring to standardise
protocols to enable richer message-passing. "We're super-committed
to the Web services area," said Allchin.
Users will have location-independent storage, to move files between
different environments via virtualisation of storage and switching
fabrics. "I consider this really, really important," Allchin said.
Some of this technology may precede Longhorn, he added.
Seamless data migration is also a goal for Longhorn, as is improved
security. Microsoft hopes to make available some currently internal
tools for scouring code and symbolically executing it to find
issues. The new software is likely to include Trustbridge
technology, due out next year.
In addition, "we want to be able to put servers inside businesses
and have bits flow to those servers, which can then be pushed out
to servers or clients within the company," added Allchin, about the
company's security management goals.
Longhorn will also enable deployment of applications with rich
media types such as video. In the area of dynamic indexes,
Microsoft plans to schematise a set of import objects such as
groups, said Allchin. Intelligent folder support is also
planned.
On the client side of what Allchin called the Longhorn "wave,"
Microsoft plans to deploy a concept called "client immersion,"
which features rich storage, peer-to-peer support, and a new
presentation system with improved 3D graphics. To improve "network
intelligence," Microsoft will drive adoption of IPV6.
Hardware is also set to dramatically improve, Allchin said.
Security-wise, processors will "change in a way that we can be more
dependent on knowing that software isn't tampered with," he
said.
Speaking about open source systems, Allchin compared Linux to a
puppy that is cute upon arrival, but then the owner suddenly
realises he must bear the burden of housetraining, feeding and
walking the animal.