REDMOND, WASH. - Microsoft last week said it was finished with the initial phase of its .Net rollout - providing development tools and basic standards support - and now is focusing on building the infrastructure needed to support Web services. That includes real-time communication capabilities, secure authentication, reliable transactional messaging and a single data store technology.
Net executives are glad to see Microsoft is ready to attack difficult .Net infrastructure issues. Users say the .Net infrastructure today consists of mostly retrofitted products that aren't well integrated.
But much like two years ago when Microsoft introduced .Net, critics say Microsoft's second .Net wave, which will stretch over the next three to four years, is long on positioning and challenges, and short on products.
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Microsoft has delivered the tools to build Web services applications but not a competent platform on which to deploy. Microsoft rivals IBM, Sun and others also are scrambling to unite Web services tools and platforms.
"It's classic Microsoft - they build the development tools and the language, and then they come around and back-fill everything else," says John Studdard, CTO for Virtual Bank in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. "We have been anxiously awaiting the news that they are finally rolling up their sleeves and getting under the hood of .Net."
Studdard, who has used Microsoft's BizTalk Server, an XML transformation engine, to support a collection of .Net applications, has been tweaking the server with his own code.
"BizTalk and .Net; that whole marriage is still vaporware," Studdard says. "We haven't been able to deploy the back-end servers the way we want to because to support .Net they use a hodgepodge of tool kits."
In June 2000, Microsoft unveiled .Net, but beyond the release of Visual Studio.Net and the company's participation in creating XML specifications, .Net remains a loose connection of renamed products and XML add-ons.
During a press and analyst briefing last week, Microsoft executives said they were happy with the foundation the company has created but admit there is work to be done and mistakes to correct.
"We have a lot of execution still to do, but our direction is sound," said Bill Gates, Microsoft's chief software architect. Gates said that direction is to deliver software that connects information, people, systems and devices.
Gates admitted Microsoft has made missteps in the past two years, including a set of services called .Net My Services that gave Microsoft control over user data. Those services, such as Passport, now are being reconstructed. Gates also said the company has made only modest progress in delivering software as a service, such as self-updating features, in providing rich XML data to servers and clients. Trust and user identification have become gaps that must be filled before .Net can succeed, he added.
"Microsoft has made a series of incremental steps that collectively show it's making progress and that people are using its tools and platforms to build .Net applications," says Dwight Davis, an analyst with Summit Strategies. "But there are a lot of elements needed to deliver the full vision on .Net into the future."
One of the most important is security, especially a standard way to establish identity and trust for users and machines.
Those capabilities are essential in a Web services world where users and code routinely cross corporate boundaries.
Microsoft plans to build an identity and trust infrastructure around the WS-Security specification it developed with IBM and VeriSign and which is now under the guidance of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards. It also has agreed to support the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) standard for user authentication and authorization.
Microsoft also has begun an ambitious project called Palladium, a combination of hardware and software for asserting identity of a machine, creating safe "sandboxes" for code execution and securing access to information. But Palladium, part of Microsoft's $100 million Trustworthy Computing initiative, will take a unified industry effort to succeed.
"Trust and identity are long-term and difficult problems that will take years to solve," says Dana Gardner, an Aberdeen Group analyst.
Other bumps have been problems in delivering Windows.Net Server, which has been delayed twice. The server is the first with native support of the .Net framework, .Net's run-time engine. Release is expected by year-end.
A few months later, Microsoft will graft on TrustBridge, a set of components to join user identities between distinct Active Directory deployments. Microsoft developed the product after identity became a pressing need for Web services deployments. TrustBridge also will include support for WS-Security. But much work remains to solidify WS-Security, including specifications to govern routing, policy, federation and reliability.
"We have the base infrastructure to send an [XML] message from Point A to Point B, but now we have to make it secure, reliable and transactional," says Eric Rudder, senior vice president of the developer and platform evangelism division.
But Windows.Net Server is only an incremental step toward the full .Net platform that will begin to take shape with the Longhorn release of the operating system, which is now more than two years out, according to Gates.
Longhorn will include what Gates calls his Holy Grail: a unified data store technology that lets users search across the Windows platform, providing a foundation for ubiquitous access to XML-formatted data for Web services applications.
The first taste of that is slated for release in the first half of next year with the Yukon version of SQL Server. Microsoft's Exchange collaboration server, however, won't add Yukon-like technology until its Kodiak release, likely sometime in late 2005 or 2006.
Those two servers along with the operating system would pull together a file system, a database and a store of unstructured collaboration data into one virtual data source based on technology similar to Yukon.
Microsoft also plans two updates to Visual Studio.Net, one to support Windows.Net Server and one for Yukon. Microsoft also is widening its options for developers, last week unveiling software to link .Net with Oracle databases and a partnership with Covalent Technologies that links .Net and Covalent's version of the Apache Web server (see story, page 61).
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