Microsoft is to release details of Indigo, its upcoming
web services applications framework, at its Professional Developers
Conference 2003 event in Los Angeles in two weeks'
time.
The company also will discuss the release of SQL Server and the
Whidbey releases of ASP .net and Visual Studio.
Indigo is described on the Microsoft PDC website as a
programming model and framework for building connected applications
and web services. The technology is built on top of Microsoft's WS
protocols.
Indigo is intended to enable developers to develop and deploy
applications with ease and services that work together and scale
without limit. A default security behaviour also will be part of
its applications. Additionally, developers will be able to build
next-generation Indigo Message Bus endpoints within ASP .net
applications.
The site said Indigo "brings together the best of .net Remoting,
MSMQ (Microsoft Message Queuing), ASMX, and .net Enterprise
Services to form a unified model and runtime for building connected
applications on the Windows platform".
Microsoft will present a road map at the conference for
migrating existing applications to Indigo. A Microsoft
representative would not comment on the planned release date for
Indigo.
The Whidbey release of ASP .net, which is Microsoft's Web
development platform, enables developers to "dramatically reduce
the number of lines of code needed to write real-world
applications, provides much-improved administration and management
support and dramatically improved performance", the site said.
A personalization engine in tWhidbey enables storing of profile
data about users. Also featured are Tracing, Troubleshooting, and
Auditing APIs. The controls model has been unified so ASP .net
controls inherently support mobile devices without the need for
separate mobile controls.
Whidbey is also the code name for the next versions of the
Visual Studio developer tool and the .net Framework development
platform. Microsoft's Whidbey variants are due to ship in the
second half of 2004.
The Whidbey version of Visual Studio features new deployment
capabilities for offline application support. The release combines
simplified web data access, rich site layout features, dynamic web
projects, and additional features to enable rapid construction of
dynamic web applications.
A new XML editor enables enhanced validation against XSD (XML
Schemas language) and DTD(document type definitions) schema and
XSLT (XSL Transformations) debugging.
The planned Yukon version of the SQL Server database features a
service broker which incorporates asynchronous queuing and
guaranteed messaging. Yukon also introduces native web services
support in the database. T-SQL, a query language in SQL Server, is
updated in Yukon to incorporate ANSI SQL:99 functionality. Yukon
also is targeted for release in late 2004.
Paul Krill writes for InfoWorld