Microsoft Delays Future Versions of SQL Server, Visual Studio

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Microsoft has decided that future versions of its SQL Server relational database and its Visual Studio application development tools need to be cooked a little longer, and says it will delay launching these two products for about six months. This will likely not impact the appeal of the Windows server market to corporate customers, but it does change the feature sets that customers and partners on the leading edge of Microsoft technology will be able to use in the short term.

The current "Everett" release of Visual Studio .NET 2003 (which was code-named after the town in Washington State near Puget Sound, where the Boeing plant is located) shipped in April 2003, with the "Whistler" release of the Windows server platform, which we now call Windows 2003 Server. That release of Visual Studio was the first to exploit the XML and Web services capabilities of Windows 2003.

With the future release of Visual Studio, code-named "Whidbey," after an island in Puget Sound, and the future SQL Server database, which has been developed under the code-name "Yukon," Microsoft is weaving XML and its Common Language Runtime (CLR), one of the core components of its .NET Web services strategy, more tightly into its middleware and database stack. With Yukon, CLR will be embedded inside the database and could be used as a database trigger language or a stored procedure. Such things are done in SQL today in a lot of databases, and lots of shops have expertise in other languages (which are now supported inside CLR). Whidbey was supposed to ship by the end of 2004, at about the same time as Yukon, which will, by the way, store data in a native XML format that is more flexible than the relational database format used in the current SQL Server 2000 database.

With the current delay, Microsoft will be soon adding a second beta test for Yukon, now called SQL Server 2005, for a limited number of customers and partners, and a third beta, expected to come out before the end of 2004, that will be open, with perhaps millions of testers. Microsoft has promised to ship SQL Server 2005 sometime in the first half of 2005, but hedges in that if the beta programs indicate the code needs more work, the company will take more time.

The good impact of this change is that more companies will see Yukon before it becomes a real product, and Microsoft will be able to make it more reliable and secure, but the bad impact is that anyone who bought SQL Server 2000 in early 2001 and hoped to get an upgrade for free to Yukon as part of their Software Assurance contract (which runs three years) will have to relicense SQL Server to get the upgrade to SQL Server 2005 now that Yukon has been pushed out. If you licensed SQL Server 2000 under Software Assurance in 2002 or 2003 under a three-year contract, you should be able to get the Yukon upgrade, if you bought at just the right time. Yukon was originally scheduled for release in the second half of 2003, and it was supposed to beat to market the development tool that was geared for it, in order to lay the foundation for that tool.

The first beta of the Whidbey tool, now called Visual Studio 2005, will come out in a few months, and a second beta is due in the second half of 2004, according to Microsoft. How these delays will affect the future "Orcas" version of the Visual Studio tool is unknown, and Microsoft is not talking about it. Orcas is tightly tied to the "Longhorn" version of the Windows operating system, which seems to imply that Microsoft deliver both a client and a server implementation of Longhorn. But the advanced user interface tools, improved security model, and new data storage model coming with Orcas could only relate to the programmer workstation running Longhorn and the user end of applications that they create for users. For its part, Visual Studio 2005 will have improvements for Visual Basic, Visual C, Visual C#, and Visual J#, the core CLR programming language Microsoft is creating. The .NET Framework will be extended with Version 2.0, and it will support the 64-bit versions of Windows for both Intel and Advanced Micro Devices processors. But .NET as a naming convention is now dead. And while no one has said this, it is possible that the real reason why Microsoft is delaying these two tools is that supporting Opterons and Itaniums is tougher than it had expected.