Developers attending Microsoft's Professional Developers
Conference in Los Angeles expressed keen interest in the company's
upcoming technologies - codenamed Avalon, Indigo and WinFS - and
also expressed some impatience at the lack of a
timetable.
Avalon, a graphics subsystem, the Indigo communication
technologies for building advanced web services and the WinFS
storage subsystem will all be incorporated into the next major
version of Windows, codenamed Longhorn.
Microsoft offered conference attendees developer preview bits of
Longhorn and pledged to make a beta version available next year.
But company executives provided no estimate about when the Longhorn
wave of technologies will be completed, even though at past events
they indicated that Longhorn technologies could ship in 2005.
"It's interesting, but I think it's going to be a long way out,"
said Christopher McCarthy, a Chicago-based senior systems engineer
at Bank of America. "This is too far out for us to evaluate."
"We could use the technology today, and we won't see it for at
least a year," said one developer for a manufacturing company in
the automotive industry, who asked not to be identified. He said
Indigo, in particular, looks like a promising way to help his
company formalise how it constructs and delivers web services.
He added, however, that it was difficult to tell merely from a
demonstration how much of the technology Microsoft will be able to
deliver in a timely fashion. He expressed surprise at the magnitude
and scope of what Microsoft is undertaking with Longhorn, and said
any one of the parts - Avalon, Indigo or WinFS - would be an
ambitious project by itself.
Jim Mangione, a technical specialist at Merck, said he expected
Indigo to help with integration in his company's heterogeneous
environment, which includes Windows and .net, as well as Linux and
Java. "I'm just hoping it's in a production-ready state soon," he
added.
He said Indigo looks to be Microsoft's new messaging platform
and will help with the handling of events in an enterprise rather
than in a point-to-point fashion.
Jeremy Lehman, senior vice president and head of technology at
Thomson Financial in New York, said his company foresees a major
commercial opportunity with Indigo, even though it's just
"slideware" for now.
He said his company partners with Microsoft and othercompanies
to provide information and technology to financial services
customers, and he hopes to be able to demonstrate products next
year that use the Indigo technology to exchange data via web
services.
"Even if it were not to ship, if we can demonstrate effective
solutions on it, then maybe people considering making expensive
investments in alternatives would choose not to do so," Lehman
said.
He added that the proprietary middleware systems which companies
now use tend to work only with internal systems; by contrast, web
services can be used for the exchange of information between
disparate systems on an internal and external basis. He expected
Indigo to help ease integration, lower costs and reduce
complexity.
But Lehman is also aware that Indigo is not yet mature, and he
expects he will have to wait for its successor to get the semantics
and richness of functionality for transactions.
Gartner analyst Roy Schulte noted that Indigo is a superset of
Microsoft's Messaging Queuing (MS MQ) technology, as well as the
company's Component Object Model (COM), COM+, .net remoting and web
services support.
"Think of this as a simplification, a unification of
communication middleware on behalf of Microsoft's plan," he said,
adding that he sees Indigo as a very good enterprise service bus
(ESB).
"It is tightly bound with the sending and receiving application
more than many of the ESBs, and if you look at the feature list,
it's very impressive," Schulte added.
The new graphics capabilities in Avalon impressed many
developers at the conference. "It's almost like Hollywood and the
movies, the speed at which they can do these graphics. I think it's
just amazing," said one senior developer with a label manufacturing
company, who asked not to be named.
He believed his company will find the new XAML (Extensible
Application Markup Language) useful in building applications, since
it has the ability to separate the coding from the content. A
graphics person could design an interface, for example, and then
hand off an XAML file to a colleague to create the code behind
it.
John Robbins, a system architect at Cigna, said he can foresee
XAML also being useful for working with third-party design tools.
He, too, likes the new capabilities coming in the Avalon/Longhorn
wave to customise an interface based on the type of user. "It looks
pretty slick," he added.
But Joe Rockmore, another system architect at Cigna,admitted he
was still trying to get a better handle on what's going to be
stable and usable.
"I got the impression they're giving a view further out than
they usually do. Is this really a year out or two to three years
out? A lot of these things are prebeta," Rockmore said.
Carol Sliwa writes for Computerworld