JS: "Our members are confused by the messages from Microsoft regarding the application of DCOM and now XML messaging. Should they give up building DCOM applications?"

DG: "Early messages from Microsoft may have confused the DCOM message with COM. There are situations where a small group of tightly coupled clients have a high-level of trust where DCOM may be the right architecture. But we realise this doesn’t scale-up to the larger, mixed enterprise scenario. This is where the loosely-coupled system based on XML messaging becomes more appropriate."

JS: "But when you step inside the Visual Development Tool environment, the support for loosely-coupled XML applications is poor and the developer has to roll a heck of a lot of code to build the infrastructure to support it."

DG: "Microsoft is in a transitional period. We are a technology company, we provide building blocks. We try to provide technology that makes your code look business-like and we will continue to push more code down into the infrastructure."

JS: "We have been learning about the DNS BizTalk application. It seems to make use of about every BackOffice product in the Microsoft tool kit – it doesn’t look like an architecture, more of a pragmatic quick demo using whatever was to hand."

DG: "We will continue to provide more of the architecture, for example, to make it easier to use XML and DTD by doing more of the work to decode it automatically. As more of the infrastructure gets subsumed into Windows, such as with COM+, the architecture will become cleaner."

JS: "One the comparisons I like to make between Microsoft and Sun, is that whereas Sun publishes a clear vision in the form of a spec and then we wait for the products to fall out of the market, Microsoft tends to slip a new product into the portfolio and then we all rush out and buy the book to find out how to use it. A typical example being Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS), which arrived in an NT update and required a completely new stateless object programming model, at a time when we were all designing business classes which were totally stateful. Perhaps it would be useful to have a Vision for XML before we launch into major application development?"

DG: "The problem people like the OMG had with the specware (sic) approach, is that it is easy to get half-way down the path before you realise the vision won’t work. I often find that it is difficult to know whether something I architect on paper will work, until I have built part of it. With MTS, Microsoft hired in some people with Transaction Processing Monitor (TPM) experience and they produced version 1 of MTS as a prototype, a reference product – it was not meant as a fully deployable product. The MTS platform has evolved as more experience was gained. People from mainframe backgrounds understand scalability issues and know about the performance trade-offs of saving state. I find very few people who sell systems who really understand how well their systems will scale. We ran many high-level sessions, in which we said: by the way, if you want your systems to scale, don’t save state. Perhaps we should have said: stateful objects are a trade-off between ease of programming and scalability."

JS: "In a similar vein, as a system architect I could really do with a clearer vision of where the two GUI models, Win32 or HTML, are going. It is a hard choice to make, whether to trade the richness of Win32 User Interface (UI) for the portability and ease of deployment of WebTop applications.

If we could see a clear convergence path from Microsoft it would help. For example, wouldn’t it be good if a VB form today would, one day, become an XML description deployable on the Win32 or WebTop?"

DG: "Yes, I see Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) vendors bringing out their HTML versions of their products, and taking a big step backwards in terms of the richness of the user interface. We have become used to instant data validation, help, and animated cursors, etc. There is a definite trade-off. Your forms as XML idea is so good, I am sure that if we don’t do it, someone else will."

JS: "I often get asked to recommend development tools, and one of the assumptions I make when discussing future viability of Microsoft Visual Tools is that Microsoft will never drop VB, and will always integrate their frameworks into its Integrated Development Environment (IDE). But, we are getting some mixed signals that perhaps Java is a better language, and we should be moving towards Visual J++. Is there a move towards Java in Microsoft?"

DG: "Microsoft is 100 per cent committed to VB, and seeing all the developer tracking statistics, VB is the highest used language in the corporate space. The Java question is a really interesting one, I am still trying to work out the gap between the hype I read in the paper, versus the experience I see with customers. At events, I ask how many people work with Java, and it’s really low. I have yet to see a response in double figures. Programmers have to be pretty good to design good classes and there is a limit to how many can make the jump to Java. VB is a much easier Rapid Application Development (RAD) environment, when developing for an internal audience."

JS: "On behalf of the CBDi Forum, thank you."

JS: "CBDi Forum members would appreciate some general indications of where the visual tools are headed, especially in the areas of COM+, XML support, and integration of Win32 and Web GUI models."

TG: "Having only recently shipped a version of Visual Studio, we can’t say a whole lot about the next release.

However, we have been looking at the way users think they are going to develop applications in the future.

Around 80 per cent are building Win32 GUI front-ends now, and this will rise in the future. However, the biggest rise will be in the development of Web front-ends. Currently, about 20 per cent of developers think they will be developing Web front-ends, but that grows to about 35 per cent over the next six months. The vision for the next release is to continue to support rich-clients, but to improve support for thin-clients. XML is a key technology in this. Microsoft has shown an excellent leadership in XML.

We are investing heavily in XML technology. We are making a big push to get Windows 2000 to work in heterogeneous environments – to interoperate with a whole host of other systems. XML is the way to exchange data with other systems. Our partnership with Level8 is key to making MSMQ work with other server environments, to enable XML messaging to integrate these systems.

In our next release, we want to work closely with the COM+ tools in BackOffice, to integrate well with MTS and MSMQ. Also, to help the rich-client developer, but also to work on reducing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) through integration with the management tools in Windows 2000.

From a high-level that’s really about it.

Some specifics; we will put all the tools into the same shell, and this time we really mean it! You saw the way we integrated J++ into the C++ shell. We will continue to make the shell more productive, more uniform help, and generally easier and more productive."

JS: "Have you considered letting XML drive the user interface by allowing a style sheet transform an XML description of the data into a form that can be either rendered on a Web browser or on a rich-client?
The developer then has to associate each data element with a UI style for each target environment and let the run-time choose the appropriate UI format."

TG: "This is something we have talked about – we call it data-driven programming, where the data can dynamically change the application. XML would be a key technology for this."

JS: "We have been learning about the DNS demo application and how it uses BizTalk messages. Fine if you have attended these sessions and been walked though the code but, if you don’t know about the DNS, there is a lot of code to write to make XML applications work."

TG: "We are investing heavily in supporting XML. Visual Studio will be a great tool for working with XML. We will have native support for XML. Our applications, Internet Explorer (IE), and the platform will enhance XML support."

JS: "Is there anything you can say about the BizTalk server product?"

TG: "It will probably be something based on the COM+ application server, but we don’t really know much about it in the tools division."

JS: "I was pleased to hear about the new features in Windows 2000 for the ‘DLLs from hell’ scenario."

TG: "Yeah, it’s like, ‘I can’t believe we did that’!"

LF: "I remember when we developed Visual Studio, we decided to sort out all the DLL versions and found we had 15 different versions just within the tools group. Customers have DLLs from us, their own DLLs, and DLLs from other departments."

TG: "We are working closely with the Platform group because we are responsible for a lot of the DLLs."

JS: "I think users are surprised at the lack of support for managing DLLs. For example, some installers will overwrite your system DLLs as easy as you can say knife, and not even tell you what they have done."

TG: "We are working with Windows 2000, on the self-healing installation where Windows will have protected files which can revert back to what they should be."

JS: "And, for example, when I compile an EXE, wouldn’t it be nice if along with the EXE, came a file that described all the critical DLL versions that the EXE may need and, on installing on a machine with the wrong ones, it told you exactly which DLLs were out of step with what was required?"

TG: "I’m not going to go into how we are going to do it, but that is the exact concept of what we are working on to solve this problem. Also, now that VB will share the Visual C (VC) debugger, the VB programmer will get all the benefits of the VC environment, where it will tell you exactly where the DLLs are located that the application is using, and what the version number is. VB is doing the self-healing installation stuff that the VC environment will benefit from."

LF: "The other thing we are doing is testing new versions of the tools with different versions of products like SQL Server. So users will see which versions we have tested with."

TG: "The Windows 2000 team are designing their DLL linker, so that if your application needs version 6.0 of a DLL and the system has 6.2 installed, your application will run with the 6.0 version."

JS: "On behalf of the CBDi Forum, thank you."

JS: "First, could you introduce ComponentSource and comment on whether you are mainly selling into the GUI widgets for the VB market, or has the market started to mature towards more business-oriented components?"

SP: "We don’t release revenues, but we are growing revenues by about 20 to 30 per cent per month. This is significant. We have about 40 employees, and completed $10 million of venture capital funding on Friday.

We have definitely seen a switch from GUI layer to horizontal style business components, such as faxing, cheque printing; and e-mailing, etc.

Vertical market components are another story, we have just started selling these within the last weeks, and these are the components from EDS for the financial industry.
We have already made sales on these, even with a limited amount of marketing, which has now just started.

We are loading about 40 products a week. We see a direct correlation between the number available and the sales. Most are COM and Delphi products."

JS: "And JavaBeans?"

SP: "We have ten Java products, and they are very slow sellers. This market is only just starting to happen."

JS: "Is it still the case that developers can disassemble the Java and steal the code?"

SP: "That is still a problem, although some developers have managed to protect their code. But this is not seen as a problem to some developers. The other issues are that the code may only run in one specific virtual machine. The Visual Basic eXtension (VBX) market took off a lot faster than the Java one has."

JS: "A major systems house announced this week that they expect 60 per cent of their application development to be done with off-the-shelf components. Do you see the middle-tier business object ever becoming an off-the-shelf component?"

SP: "Whatever you buy you will have to do that extra customisation work, and it has yet to evolve how that will be done. We do see a growth in frameworks – I see about 10 to 12 per cent of the functionality being customisation, and future tools will generate wrappers for black box components and allow the extra features to be added."

JS: "As we push towards industry frameworks, the suspicion is that businesses all adopt the same data schemas, and eventually they say; well why build it myself, if what I end up with is the same as everyone else? Let’s just go and buy a package."

SP: "BizTalk schemas provide much easier integration and I am very happy that some standard-based work is going on, although I am not happy with the way the OMG are going about it.

Certainly, packages will be part of the market.
For competitive reasons, they want to add their own value on top. But without having to adopt the same data schemas, BizTalk schemas provide much easier integration and I am very happy that some standard-based work is going on, although I am not happy with the way the OMG are going about it."

JS: "In the next decade, what will application developers be doing?"

SP: "The key part will be getting the project done on time. The developer will have to be able to find the components and write the glue code to stitch them together.

I envisage the developer coming to our Web site, they say what their resources are, for example, I have a C programmer, two Java programmers, a Solaris server, and an Internet client, and I want to build this particular type of application. The Web site will then go away and come back with an answer as to the best solution. Here’s a framework, here’s a set of components, here is what other companies did with these components, and how long it took them."

JS: "That’s a impressive vision, and having met your Web developer I believe it will happen. On behalf of the CBDi Forum, thank you."

References:

Level8:

www.level8.com

Microsoft BizTalk:

www.biztalk.org

ComponentSource: