Here are some notes/snippets of this morning’s keynote marathon:

 

Bill Gates

• They strive for equivalence of (on-premise) servers and (off-premise, 3^rd party hosted) services.
• Customers demanded to have WCF (“Indigo”) and WPF (“Avalon”) available on XP and 2003.
• Office “12” features XML file formats that were described as “open” and “royalty free”. It will ship in the same timeframe as Windows Vista, which is “late in 2006”.
• They were really emphasizing RSS as a premier technology to publish information and for use in notification scenarios. IE 7 will have an XSLT to render RSS neatly – some of the server products (SharePoint, CRM) will integrate RSS deeply.
• SharePoint portal services were positioned to replace the file server for most practical purposes. It is really well integrated with the new Office release.
• The user experience on Vista and Office “12” is quite different from XP/200x. I expect the end-user training for these products to be significant.

 

Jim Allchin and the four Clowns (Box, Anderson, Guthrie, Heijlsberg)

• The Beta 2 (build 5221) was demoed during the keynote and is expected to ship “as soon as the features are fixed.”
• From their perspective, the edge of the network (namely clients) is the place where innovation and changes are happening now. Allchin strongly emphasized user experience, P2P, etc. as key differentiators for competition. Consequently, Microsoft is putting a lot of energy into these areas in Vista.
• “Atlas” is a new framework for AJAX development. It will be well integrated into ASP.NET and VS 2005. The (according to them) significant Jscript client library for Atlas is available from http://asp.net.
• WPF/E (Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere – “Avalon” for mobile/compact devices) is currently being developed and will be available later for the .NET Compact Framework.
• The “Data Pillar” of Longhorn (WinFS) was suspiciously de-emphasized.
• WCF (“Indigo”) will be even more protocol/transport independent, with new features like REST/POX support, deep P2P and InfoCard PingID provider for UNIX. Interestingly enough, while internally everything is still represented as a SOAP message, the “SOAPishness” can be stripped by using e.g. POX.

 

Showcase

• The Sun booth is at 118 and they have two demos there (J2SE on Vista and WS Interoperability). Interest so far was not too bad, considering that they are in a far corner of the showcase.

 

This was definitively fun. Although the turnout was not very high (hey, what do you expect at 9:30 on the day *before* the actual conference with 3 days of notice to the audience), we had a few really good an interesting discussions:

We talk a lot about interoperability through web services, in particular on WS-Adressing in JWSDP, WS-Security, Attachments (yes, MTOM is on the right way) and reliable messaging. Simon Guest talked about his efforts to get secure WS-RM interoperable and gave some insight into the current mindset at Microsoft ("It's all about implementation right now.")

Michael Preadovic of Intrinsync talked about their interoperability story, which allows Java containers to talk to .NET Remoting systems and also .NET systems to speak RMI. He also noted that their IIOP for .NET implementation get a lot of customer attention.

 

I just realized that all my old blog entries are missing and thus, some people might not know me:

My name is Gerald Beuchelt, and I work in Burlington, MA, as a Web Services Architect for Sun Microsystems, Inc. My bio can be found here, along with a picture.

UPDATE: You can now find much more information on me at http://www.beuchelt.com/.

Well - I always *love* to arrive in LA (not!): The plane was late, we deplaned on the taxiway, the baggage took 1 hour and I got lost (again) in LA's freeway jungle. Just to top it off, LA is currently in the middle of a major blackout .... Oh, well.

("Don't be such a winer" - yeah, I know. Still, I love to hate this city )

I'll head over to the conference center around 4:00, and I guess I'll be hanging out in the BOF are or around Commnet. See you at 9:30!

My BOF on interoperbility is now scheduled on Monday, Sep 12, 9:30pm in room 511A.

Please join me for a vivid discussion on today's interoperability issues and their current and future solutions.

After a fairly wild start with the PDC this year (I nearly got no conference pass, since the show was sold out), I am now scheduled to go there and - lo' and behold - hold a BOF there. It will be on Monday night, at 9:30pm at the conference center, with the title: "Interoperability: .NET, Java, Windows and Solaris". I will talk about a few interoperability issues and their current solutions there, but also meander cautiosly towards a rough sketch of a roapmap.

After partially loosing my old blog here, I decided to get a fresh start. I will post a few of my older articles here, if I find the time.

While Liberty has a very rich framework for SSO, it does not define a comprehensive infrastructure protocol framework for SOAP/XML web services. While this might look as a limitation, it can also be a strength: it's non-dependance on SOAP, WSDL et al. makes Liberty a truely componentizable architecture, where SSO and Identity functionality can be applied to all kinds of Web Service technologies, including e.g. RESTful web services.

Since last week's Monday (March 7) I am in a new position within Sun: I am now working in the CTO's Business Alliances group, together with people like Eve Maler, Bill Smith, Lauren Wood and some more really smart people. We are working closely with different groups within Sun and Microsoft on making the alliance of the odd couple (Sun/Microsoft) a reality. I am truely looking forward to this challenge, since this group is in the unique situation of being able to influence not only Sun's but the entire industries perception of interoperablility and Web Services in particular.

To me, this is a long-due fine-adjustment to my tenure at Sun: I started with Sun Germany in 1997 as a pre-sales Systems Engineer responsible for "PC" Interoperability. Then - in 2000 - I took up a job with the (mostly) Boston-based Competitive Strategy Group. Our charter was to support the Sun Legal team on various occasions and supply them with Microsoft Interoperability Information...

This is going to be fun.