Looking to drive industry adoption of its Web services standards proposals, Microsoft on Monday plans to announce availability of a software development kit featuring its own specifications. The Microsoft Web Services Development Kit (WSDK), to be available in a beta version Monday, will function with the company's Visual Studio .Net development platform. The free download will provide support for three Microsoft-driven specifications that the company wants adopted as industry standards: WS-Security, WS-Attachments, and WS-Routing.
A final kit is to be available in approximately two months, followed by periodic updates as new industry standards and specifications emerge, according to VanRoekel. But don't look for standards efforts from rival Sun Microsystems, such as the Web Services Choreography Interface (WSCI) submitted to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), to be supported in the kit, VanRoekel said.
Software piracy continues to be a worldwide problem and Microsoft is committed to a long-term strategy of protecting intellectual property through innovative technologies. The introduction of technical measures to thwart piracy has kicked-off a cat-and-mouse game between software publishers and those who pirate software. Specifically, software pirates have been busy engineering circumventions to digital rights technologies including Microsoft's own product activation. With Service Pack 1 for Windows XP, Microsoft will introduce additional technological measures aimed at ensuring licensed customers receive full benefits and to make it more difficult for those who pirate software to steal these same benefits.
Microsoft is betting that Windows .Net Server will get a spot on customers' crowded to-do lists. To make this happen, Microsoft has packed Windows .Net Enterprise Server RC1 (Release Candidate 1) with impressive new features. The vendor has taken the unprecedented step of allowing customers to download the OS for free (or order CDs), and every copy of RC1 comes with a one-year license.
RC1 embodies Microsoft goal of providing multiple rich paths to system management. The MMC (Microsoft Management Console) remains the primary interface for most administrators. A new role-based management interface, Manage Your Server, organizes administrative tasks, documentation, and guidance (for example, "what to do next") by server roles such as Web, domain, e-mail, and media. This facility is simpler and far more helpful than Windows 2000's Configure Your Server interface. If you access management consoles via Manage Your Server, new features such as task shortcuts and functional groupings will appear.
Showing how much the two companies now appear to be working together on issues from Web services to security standards, IBM shared the floor with Microsoft Corp. at the IBM SHARE conference here this week. At SHARE, IBM's annual software user conference, Microsoft executives talked up the forthcoming hardware/software/services bundle for systems management that the company is readying. Israel Gat, general manager of management solutions at Microsoft, introduced the Microsoft Solution for Management (MSM). Gat said MSM, like the company's Microsoft Solution Offerings (MSOs), will feature hardware, Microsoft-supplied systems and application software, related "prescriptive" implementation blueprints and other documentation, and services provided by Microsoft and third parties.
Melbourne-based Damien Watkins has been involved with the .NET phenomenon since 1998, when Microsoft approached a number of universities worldwide to provide feedback to the .NET framework. "People think of Microsoft as being desktop-centric, which it was 10-20 years ago," Watkins said. "I think .NET in some ways is Microsoft saying the future is the Internet and this is our way, or moving away from being desktop-focussed."
Academic adoption of .NET is high
According to Watkins, academics are generally adopting .NET as fast, or faster, than commercial developers but for different reasons. Academics, he said, like the design and the architecture. "It is a good platform for teaching the underlying principle of component-oriented distributed systems." Commercial developers, he added, like the amount of breadth and depth of functionality in the libraries. "I think commercial developers are all a bit shell-shocked by recent company crashes and so moving to a new platform is not on many of their agendas for a while."
Microsoft late Thursday issued a cumulative patch for its Internet Explorer Web browser that also fixes six new vulnerabilities, the most serious of which could enable an attacker to take control over a user's system, Microsoft said. A cumulative patch is a patch that includes all previously released fixes for a software product. The six newly patched vulnerabilities exist in various parts of Internet Explorer and mainly put client systems at risk, but Microsoft deems the super patch "critical" for Internet and Intranet servers too.
In addition to fixing the vulnerabilities, the patch package also permanently disables two vulnerable ActiveX controls, one linked to the MSN chat application and one to a feature for terminal services sessions, Microsoft said. ActiveX controls are small programs designed to perform a single task.
Microsoft licensing guru Allen Nieman dropped me a note about the licensing changes in Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1), which will ship soon. Here's Allen's succinct one-paragraph version of the announcement:
"Microsoft will introduce additional technological measures in Service Pack 1 for Windows XP aimed at ensuring legally licensed customers receive the full benefits of owning their valid license. These changes include denying access to the Windows XP SP1 updates for PCs with known pirated installations, product key validation during activation, and the repair of cracks to activation. Additional features have been added to provide a better customer experience including an additional three-day grace period to re-activate after significant hardware changes and the ability for volume license customers to encrypt their volume license product key in unattended installations."
Two private antitrust lawsuits filed against Microsoft by its competitors have been transferred to a Federal court in Baltimore, under the same judge who is overseeing more than 100 private class-action antitrust lawsuits against the software maker.The pretrial proceedings in the cases launched by Sun Microsystems and Be will be coordinated by Judge Frederick Motz of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, in Baltimore, the companies confirmed Thursday. A third private antitrust suit by Netscape Communications is also expected to be moved to Motz's court, according to sources familiar with the case. Netscape, a subsidiary of AOL Time Warner, could not be reached for comment Thursday.
When the federal government decided to prosecute Microsoft Corp. for antitrust violations in the high-flying boom times of the late '90s, corporate America was a different place. Back then, the economy was still "new," the advice of Wall Street analysts was widely considered untainted and Martha Stewart's greatest alleged crime was being too prissy. But since spring, when a federal court heard nearly three months of testimony on the punishment to impose on Microsoft for illegally sustaining its monopoly, the business climate has changed dramatically.
When U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly heard a series of Microsoft adversaries charge Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates with strong-arming partners, nobody knew that by summer's end, a number of corporate America's icons would be awash in criminal charges of book-cooking and insider trading.
It's all about timing. Microsoft formally synchronized the release of the next version of Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework with Windows .NET Server. Microsoft first shipped Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework in February of 2002. The timing meant the framework had to be individually loaded onto Windows 2000 servers and Windows 2000 Professional and Windows XP desktops for those operating systems to run .NET applications.
Microsoft plans to finalize the Windows .NET Server code by the end of this year, and the company had informally disclosed plans to release new versions of Visual Studio .NET, code-named "Everett," and the next version of the .NET Framework around the same time.