TechEd Sneak Peeks: New Frameworks, Visual Studio for Teams

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Microsoft hosted its TechEd developer conference in San Diego last weekend, and Steve Ballmer, president and CEO, kicked off the event with a rousing speech that eloquently framed Microsoft's goals for application development. Ballmer also helped roll out several new application integration frameworks and gave a sneak peek at the future Visual Studio 2005 Team System, a team version of Visual Studio with integrated application lifecycle management tools.

Ballmer's keynote address began with a rah-rah speech that pretty accurately described the situation that Microsoft and its partners are facing. The company has an installed base of some 600 million users worldwide, on many different releases and versions of its Windows platform, each with their own security issues. The world is sick of spam, viruses, and worms, which seem to disproportionately attack the Windows platform because Windows dominates the desktops and server rooms of the world. Microsoft is faced with customer requests to better integrate its products, but has had to divert its attention to cope with security issues that, quite frankly, it did not anticipate. It is against this backdrop that Microsoft is trying to increase customer confidence in its products, which is problematic to say the least. And, of course, even with IT spending perking up a bit, the situation is not going to get any easier any time soon, according to Ballmer.

"IT spending as a percent of the world economy has certainly gone up over the last 20 years," he said. "I don't expect to see that change. But we're still all going to have to live in a world where the pressures to do new projects will nonetheless exceed new investments in information technology. And, for any company, Microsoft or anybody else, to loose sight of this fundamental fact--it's the fundamental fact that our customers around the globe are dealing with--would be a mistake. So we have to focus in on productivity, and we have to focus in on total cost of ownership. And I think those twin pillars will largely define what you want and what you expect of us."

To that end, Ballmer introduced the general availability of Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 2.0 and the Office Information Bridge Framework (IBF). To put it simply, the WSE 2.0 beefs up security on the elements of a Web services application (the links between application pieces), while IBF can be used to integrate and display these Web services applications inside Office and, perhaps more significantly, the Outlook e-mail/groupware client part of Office. This is exactly the kind of thing Microsoft has been promising for years with its .NET initiative. WSE 2.0 is an add-on to the current Visual Studio.NET application development tool and the .NET Framework it uses to create Web services applications. Microsoft says that 250,000 developers are already using the WSE 1.0 extensions to .NET in production. WSE 2.0 implements the Web Services-Interoperability (WS-I) security specifications.

IBF looks like a very particular set of tools and links that hook Office into the .NET Framework, but this is not what the Microsoft specs say. Suffice it to say that the 11,000 people who attended TechEd, most of whom are developers, are looking at these technologies as a way of simplifying their lives. This is exactly what Microsoft wants.

Ballmer cited a study by consultancy Forrester Research claiming that, in the United States, over 50 percent of developers polled say that .NET is their preferred development framework. (The major alternative is, of course, Java and its J2EE framework.) He also said that while a lot of customers are still programming in and using the old Win32 programming model, according to Microsoft's surveys, customers believe, on average, that .NET is 67 percent more reliable than the Win32 programming model, and another 67 percent say it offers better performance. Ballmer also said that surveys indicate that nearly three times as many programmers tell Microsoft that .NET is a more secure environment in which to build applications than the old Win32 environment. These are the kinds of numbers Microsoft hopes will encourage customers to move from the old Win32 paradigm to the new .NET paradigm.

Ballmer also talked about Visual Studio 2005 Team System, which is scheduled to ship sometime next year. (It could be with the regular "Whidbey" Visual Studio 2005 application development tool, or it could follow later in the year. Ballmer did not say.) Visual Studio Team System is the logical evolution from a stand-alone development tool for individual programmers creating monolithic Win32 applications to a tool for groups of programmers building Web services applications that span Windows and non-Windows systems under a distributed programming model.

The team version of the software helps coordinate the activities of programmers, provides a visual model of how a Web services application is architected, and helps to check code for security and logical flaws as the code is tested, before it is put into production. The tool is also a front-end for managing application specifications and the code that programmers create to fulfill those specs. Its change management system keeps track of code as it changes. And reportedly the system also will have a means for feeding bug reports back into the programming department, so patches can be created in an organized fashion. You know where all of these extensions to Visual Studio came from? Microsoft's own internal tools that it has used as part of the Trustworthy Computing initiative, which Bill Gates initiated several years ago to make Windows more secure.

While Microsoft was quick to point out that the team edition of Visual Studio "creates even more opportunities for the Visual Studio ecosystem," the reverse will almost certainly be true. Tool vendors who have been extending Visual Studio with their own lifecycle management programs now find themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to compete with Microsoft a year or so before Microsoft gets Visual Studio Team System out the door.