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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
In Bill Gates' version of the way things will be, we will all carry around hand-held computers that will allow us to access our e-mail, trade our stocks, send video and photos to the family and generally manage our daily lives. Those hand-helds will also be phones and navigation units, and will carry our electronic wallets. They'll communicate with our computers at home to manage the heating, order the groceries and, when we get home, set just the right ambience for that all-important date with a mix of appropriate mood lighting and Barry White.
In the business world, the vision is similar. Open standards in terms of both data and software interfaces will allow companies to trade data that will make customers' lives easier. Want to take a vacation in Florida? Web services will manage every aspect of organizing that trip, from booking the flights, to hiring the car, to arranging the hotel room and making a reservation at the restaurant for that crucial meeting the night after you arrive.
Such visions have long been staples of science fiction, and their advocacy is not solely confined to Microsoft -- other corporations, most notably Sun Microsystems, are pushing the same computer-mediated utopia. But .Net has the best chance to deliver.
Everything Microsoft has done to this point -- billions of R&D dollars and millions of developer hours -- has been working toward these visions of the future. Visual Studio.Net is the result, a set of development tools that really do make that almost "Star-Trek" view of the world possible, not in years to come, but tomorrow. The hype has been around forever, but the tools to build the products are now, finally, available.
Visual Studio.Net revolves around two key concepts; applications written in any programming language that can run on any platform, and Web services, XML-based components that can be picked up and reused regardless of who developed them and where they are located. So, for example, a Visual Basic.Net developer at British Airways could develop a Web service for flight reservations that could be reused by a developer at Hertz to bring the two company's commercial offerings together.
Or an independent, freelance Perl developer could produce a Web service for his or her own use and then share that Web service with a corporate Cobol developer who needs similar functionality. Out of the box, Visual Studio.Net provides three of its own .Net-enabled development languages, but companies such as ActiveState are already hard at work making existing languages compatible with .Net as well (Cobol, Python and Perl in ActiveState's case).
The "write-once, run-anywhere" philosophy is nothing new, nor is the distributed Web-service philosophy at the very core of Visual Studio.Net; again, Sun has been pushing it for years with Java and Jini. So what makes Visual Studio.Net any different? Why invest in it, and why invest in the retraining necessary to fully exploit it?
At the lowest level, Visual Studio.Net and the "common intermediate language (CIL) at the heart of .Net that allows it to interconnect with other programming languages are very similar to how Java works. But Microsoft's CIL is far more versatile. It is so inherently open that developers working with any programming language will be able to create code that can be turned into a working .Net application or Web service. This gives developers the freedom to choose the development language best suited for the problem they are working on, rather than the kind of software environment their program will ultimately end up running on. Developers choose the language they are happiest with and most productive in.
What about the retraining cost? Well, leveraging the .Net technologies is not an all or nothing choice. You don't have to throw away your legacy systems to .Net-ize them. A prime example of this is Dollar, the car rental company. Developers at Dollar produced a Web service as a front end for their reservations system and made that system available to a partner airline in just two weeks. The reservations system still runs on an aging VMS mainframe, but with the addition of .Net the system is now more open and the company better able to realize the across-the-board benefits of information partnering.
