Derek Ferguson

(October 28, 2003) -Bill Gates kicked off the first official day of sessions at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference 2003 by telling the audience that his talk would be geared toward helping them to "catch the next wave" of software development. He said that we are no longer in an economy in which companies are willing to undertake major software development projects without a clear idea of their anticipated return on investment. Therefore, he said, all three of Microsoft's upcoming "waves" of technology - Whidbey, Yukon, and Longhorn - will be geared toward helping organizations to make more money by being ever-more productive.

One of Microsoft's key focuses in progressing through their upcoming software releases will be their Trustworthy Computing initiative. Concrete examples of this initiative in action include Microsoft's recent decision to ship their desktop operating systems with firewalls and e-mail scanners turned on by default starting in the first half of 2004.

Dramatically improving the reliability of Windows will be another key focus for Microsoft going forward. Toward this end, they have worked closely with driver manufacturers over the past 18 months to ensure that bugs reported automatically by Windows installations have gotten fixed. Microsoft has also opened up this program so that developers of all manner of software - not just drivers - can take advantage of automated error-reporting features in Windows.

The presentation was broken up by a short video called "Behind the Technology." A parody of VH1's popular "Behind the Music," series, this amusing short featured video interviews with such notable pop icons as Sean "Puffy" Combs, Anthony Michael Hall (who portrayed Bill Gates in the movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley"), and even Bill Clinton. There were numerous jokes, finishing with a video of Larry Ellison sailing his yacht in the America's Cup race last year - when many analysts felt he should have instead been in attendance at OracleWorld. Shortly after this video, Gates introduced the Longhorn operating system and passed the baton to Jim Allchin to continue the keynote address - which was scheduled to run for over three hours! Allchin said that his portion of the keynote would constitute a "lap around Longhorn" and would feature examinations of three main components of the future OS release: Avalon, WinFS, and Indigo. The key feature that most developers seemed to take away from the discussion of Avalon was the introduction of XAML. Using XAML, Web developers and others will be able to use a declarative, XML-based markup language to create Windows applications, in much the same way they might use HTML today to create Web pages. This will have the added benefit of allowing developers to finally and completely extract GUI-creation code (though not event-response code) from their application source. Instead, the XML used to create GUIs under Longhorn can be completely encapsulated in separate XAML files.

WinFS will bring the power of relational databases to the Windows file system. This will allow for complex relationships between various pieces of data in the Windows file system to be mapped and interrogated. For example, if a user had a thousand pictures on a machine, he or she would be able to add custom attributes to them to group them in such a way that would allow a search to pull up just photos of friends, or just pictures of family, etc. One could argue that this is currently possible under Windows simply by putting all related files together in folders. However, under WinFS these relationships can be maintained without the need to change the locations of the affected files, which is a real improvement.

Finally, Allchin gave a brief overview of the features that will be available in Indigo. Indigo, he explained, will form the communications framework for Longhorn, and will allow developers to access reliable, secure messaging without having to even think about the nature of the underlying transport mechanism. For further information on this, see Tim Huckaby's excellent report (www.sys-con.com/dotnet).