Microsoft Pushes .NET Server to April 2003

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Only a week ago, we told you that Microsoft had killed off the "Longhorn" edition of its Windows server operating system and that the "Whistler" kicker to Windows 2000, now called Windows .NET Server 2003, looked like it was slipping. This past weekend at the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates ended all the speculation by saying that Whistler would ship in April 2003, with Release Candidate 2 (RC2) shipping to customers in the next few weeks.

Microsoft did not give a reason for the delay. This is the third delay for the Whistler server, which was originally expected in mid-to-late 2001 and which is sold in a desktop version under the name Windows XP. The fact that Gates has emphatically set a date means that, whatever the problem is, Microsoft is confident that it can address it and fix it before April. This is also when the Visual Studio.NET 2003 development tool, code-named "Everett," is expected to be available, which has just this week gone into final beta. This tool will create code that adheres to Microsoft's .NET Framework, which creates Web services applications relying heavily on XML, and that .NET Framework runs on Whistler server.

In early 2001, Whistler server, which is the first version of the Microsoft platform to support 64-bit Itanium chips and NUMA clustering, was pushed out because it was not ready for primetime and neither was the Itanium processor. In the fall of 2001, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks and a sharp downturn in IT sales worldwide that still continues, Whistler got pushed out to the first half of 2002. Then the Microsoft Trustworthy Computing initiative pushed Whistler out to the end of 2002.

As for the reason why Whistler was delayed, Microsoft may simply be reading the economy and concluding that it will be better to make a big announcement with solid code on multiple, synergistic products in the spring than try to rush part of the announcement out the door in a weak IT-spending environment.

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