Malek's Moorish tales - Longhorn announcement was great news!!!

	Tuesday, August 31, 2004

Longhorn announcement was great news!!!

Although many might be reporting Microsoft's Friday announcement as bad or mitigated news, I only see in it great news. Here is my tqke qt the issues :

It is reassuring to know that what matters most to me as a developer and architect, i.e. Avalon and Indigo, are on track and going to be released in 2006 as previously announced. As for WinFS, and away from the hype, even if I did consider it interesting to deal with the amount of data that we will be faced with whithin the Longhorn timeframe, it is not as important to me as the other two tenets, especially if search is, as promissed, enhanced to a level where it becomes really efficient. here is how I view the three technologies :

Indigo : if there is something that will change the world of computing and make the vision that Rafal Lukawiecki calls "pervasive integration" happen, it is the "Service Orientation". Off course Microsoft has been leading in the world of Web Services (asmx and WSE), but not until "Indigo" will we have the tools that allow us to start fullfilling that vision. It is the first framework that allows us to thing, design and implements in terms of SOA concepts (Data Contract, Service Contract, abstracting the services from the channels and transports). If there is any technology I am eager to see released as soon as possible, it is Indigo. This technology is really what will make development much better, and allow for the richest feature model through a coherent, mangeable model based on SOA.
Avalon : Even though the most talked about features of Avalon are not necessarily very important to me, I am very happy they are included in the Longhorn release : media and UI unification, vector based graphics, higher shell integration, unification between thin client and rich client, ...etc. These will make applications look and feel different, but will take time before becoming mainstream, and thus are not as time sensitive. However, what I would rather see happening as soon as possible, is a model where design is truely separate from code. that will save me and the developers I work with an incredible amount of time.
WinFS : Although I am probably not the best person to discuss the importance of rows and columns, I see WinFS as being a very interesting way to unify various Data Formats, but I remain convinced that with or without WinFS, our documents will still live in folders for quite some some time, which means that I don't see it as a time sensitive issue. at the same time, and with Yukons support for managed types and XML types, I don't see what would stop our applications that use or can make use of large quantities of document to store those in the database. We are not yet at the phase where developers are doing it and in bad need for a better framework. I even see the delay as beneficial, because it may well trigger more custom developped solutions, and thus real world experience that will guide the final format of WinFS. I will not discuss Object Spaces here, because I truely don't see that technology to be either important or even beneficial, simply because I don't like mapping messages and objects (although I do use such an approach sometimes, I prefer not to have it formalized as if it was a best practice). The only valid reason I can think of that would make WinFS an urgently needed technology is the need for quickly finding information that resides in documents in the huge number and size we probably will have on our hard disks (or for that matter, in remote storage as well) by 2006. That is why I was very relieved to hear that the new search functionality is going to be part of Longhorn.

If the annoucement was marked by the decision to keep the schedule, and to cut WinFS, it did confirm a very happy rumor : Avalon and Indigo will be released for XP and 2003. I have explained above why I need and want those technologies, and being able to use them on a broad deployment base is very good news indeed. I hope they will also be generalized to the various Windows mobile products as well.
I have seen some criticism about these news marking a move from being "technology oriented" back to the old "product oriented" days. actually, the announcement that the core technologies are being developed independently from product release constraints, then making it into a product release or not based on their own maturity and quality conveys a quite different message. Off course Microsoft makes its money out of products, and even its customers want it to be giving them the latest technologies as they go, according to manageable cycles. I think many customers would have been unhappy to be using the same technology for 7 years. that would have forced another major service pack / second edition, which would have been much less interesting than the new technologies that will be ready in 2006. I believe the message this annoucement conveys is that Microsoft remains a technology company, and that it does deal with market constraints and needs without compromising quality of the features and technologies.

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8/31/2004 9:47:50 PM UTC

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