Frameworks
Makin' It Rain
Microsoft has been showering the industry with new developer-related technologies and updates.
As a longtime football fan, I've taken a grim sort of amusement in the twisted career of Adam "Pacman" Jones, the talented but troubled cornerback who has shown a penchant for nightclub altercations. In fact, we can all thank Jones for popularizing the phrase "makin' it rain" -- a reference to his showering dancers with dollar bills at a Las Vegas club.
Jones is enjoying his second, well-deserved league suspension in as many years, but that doesn't mean the rain has to stop falling. That's because out in Redmond, Microsoft has been showering the industry with new developer-related technologies and updates. Even discounting the torrent of announcements around cloud computing and Windows 7 at the Professional Developers Conference 2008, Microsoft was makin' it rain in the weeks just ahead of its largest industry confab in three years.
There were new details on Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio Team System 2010; the release of a new Web application server called "Dublin"; and lots of context and background on the "Oslo" modeling project and its repository, "Quadrant" visual designer and "M" modeling program language. There was also an early glance at .NET Framework 4.0.
As if that weren't enough, Microsoft in October unleashed the final version of its Silverlight 2 rich Internet application platform and runtime. That release included patches to Visual Studio 2008, Expression Blend 2 and the free Visual Web Developer Express Edition IDE. The company even announced a partnership with Soyatec to enable Silverlight 2 development in Eclipse.
But wait, there's more. Like something out of a late-night infomercial, the frantic pitches just kept on coming. Scott Guthrie's group hit the Web with the first official beta of its long-awaited ASP.NET model-view-controller (MVC) framework. Redmond also dropped a pair of developer helpers in the Web Platform Installer (Web PI) and Web App Installer (Web AI) betas.
Web PI streamlines the set up of Microsoft's complete Web platform, including IIS7, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition, SQL Server 2008 Express Edition and .NET Framework. Web AI gathers ASP.NET- and PHP-based open source Web apps, with the initial beta presenting a suite that includes Drupal, DotNetNuke, Graffiti, Gallery, OS Commerce, Wordpress and PHPBB.
Oh, and did I forget to mention the announced release of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Release 2, due to drop Feb. 3, 2009? Or the September launch of Windows High Performance Server 2008?
I don't want to get melodramatic here, but how in the world are Google, Adobe and Apple -- or even the entire Linux community -- supposed to compete with this? The output out of Redmond this fall has been prolific. If the agendas at TecháEd EMEA and WinHEC are any indication, we can expect more of the same through December.
But hey, that's Microsoft for you. Makin' it rain.
About the Author
Michael Desmond is an editor and writer for 1105 Media's Enterprise Computing Group.