Microsoft's Whidbey version of its Visual Studio tool,
due in 2004, will feature a set of design tools called Whitehorse
to enable building of services-oriented systems.
Whitehorse enables visualisation of relationships between
services, according to Rick LaPlante, a general manager in the
Microsoft developer division at the Microsoft Professional
Developers Conference 2003 in Los Angeles.
LaPlante showed a three-step demonstration in which information
is communicated to an engineering team, a view of the datacentre is
presented, and a service is validated to conform to policies. Web
services can be incorporated or restricted via Whitehorse.
An audience member said the idea of Whitehorse, to unite network
operators and developers, is a good one.
"I think that Whitehorse is kind of a great technology, to
integrate those two [technology areas]," said attendee John Conger,
assistant vice-president and senior development analyst at Ivy
Asset Management.
Microsoft senior vice-president Eric Rudder stressed ease of
development features planned for Whidbey for both client and web
development.
Print management will be simplified, as will user management.
"Whidbey has a feature to deal with objects to simplify printing,"
Rudder said.
"In Whidbey, we've also taken a dramatic step forward and built
in a user management system to ASP .net," he added.
Visual Basic development is eased in Whidbey, said Ari Bixhorn,
lead product manager in the Microsoft developer division.
"We really are able to take productivity to new heights,
particularly for Visual Basic developers," Bixhorn said.
Also highlighted in Whidbey is a system called My Help,
which provides better searching, a hierarchical view of data and
integrated community features.
The smart tag feature in Whidbey enables customisation of a look
and feel of an interface without writing any code, Bixhorn said.
Advanced data binding enables binding of a picture to data in SQL
Server, for example.
Web application development functions planned for Whidbey enable
the product to be combined with ASP .net for faster development of
web applications, said Scott Guthrie, product unit manager in the
Microsoft developer division.
When building pages on a site, master templates can be used to
add content directly to the page. Web services can be accessed for
information such as user IDs. Control technology also is used for
functions such as providing a login screen, according to
Guthrie.
Microsoft also is planning enhancements to its mobile
development offerings to dramatically reduce the lines of code
required for development.
Microsoft's also unveiled plans for its Indigo web services
framework. Initially it took 50,000 lines of code to build in
Visual Studio .net, and 27,000 lines of code in the company's web
services enhancements toolkit will be reduced to three lines,
according to Rudder.
Additionally, Microsoft will release to developers its
internally used Prefast tool for checking buffer overruns.
The company will also release a Longhorn Server update to
Windows Server, planned for release in 2004. Longhorn is also the
name of the company's client operating system planned for release
in 2006.
Paul Krill writes for InfoWorld