Where next for Visual J++ and Visual Studio?
July 9 - Tim Anderson talks to Greg deMichillie and
Tony Goodhew from Microsoft's Visual Studio team.
Tim: What is the future of Visual J++, in
the light of the legal dispute with Sun?
Greg: The judge in the preliminary
injunction required that we do three things to our tools. We have to include RMI (Remote
Method Invocation), we have to include JNI (Java Native Interface ) in the VM, and we have
to provide a dialog box which warns developers that they are using the Microsoft
extensions. We did those three things and released those in February.
Tim: We’ve noticed that this
litigation has cast a cloud over Java itself, not just J++. Java developers are looking at
Sun’s litigious nature and they are concerned. A lot of developers are thinking there
is an inherent amount of risk if they do any Java development, and they need to weigh that
risk against the usefulness of Java in the application.
Greg: We are waiting for the judge to
finalise some decisions. The decisions so far are preliminary and could change. There are
some issues that he needs to rule on for us to know what we can do with the product.
Courts move slowly so our plans are unset at the moment.
Tim: What are the key factors?
Greg: There are too many unknowns at this
point. The judge himself is still asking a lot of questions. The judge has said from the
beginning, though, that no matter what happens our customers who are using VJ++, with FC
and the Microsoft extensions, can continue to do so. He has been very aware that
companies’ livelihoods get caught up in this.
On RNI versus JNI the judge said he thought
Sun was likely to win. On the language extensions issues he simply said it was unclear to
him and required the warning dialog to mitigate any confusion in the market. But most
developers are very smart - they understand when they choose to build something Windows
specific and when they choose not to. There is no accidentally building a Windows
application.
The shocking thing, which I think is
under-reported, is that Sun are claiming a copyright on the language Java. While it has
never, in the US at least, been formally ruled by a court that programming languages are
not copyrightable, it was the everyday working assumption of programmers throughout the
world. For example, it was assumed that you couldn’t copyright C. You can copyright a
book describing it, but not the underlying programming language.
Everyone thinks this was resolved by the dBase issue
(litigation concerning dBase compatible products) and by the Lotus/Borland issue
(litigation concerning a 1-2-3 compatible product). Both were settled prior to an actual
ruling, but they were not finally decided. Sun is claiming a copyright on the Java
programming language, not just the books, and I find that surprising.
Tim: Could you redo WFC (Windows
Foundation Classes) to use JNI?
Greg: I won’t get into that. We
think WFC represents a step forward for Microsoft in terms of class library design and how
you integrate classes with editors.
Tim: Visual J++ has an excellent IDE
along with the WFC for rapid development. What is the future of those aspects?
Greg: We have been planning to converge
on a common IDE for all our tools. We realised several years ago that neither the VB nor
the VC IDE was suitable. Our goals include an IDE that is first-class for any language,
and that is richly extensible. We set about writing a new common IDE. The Visual
J++/Visual InterDev IDE is its first version. We are now committed to it, and we have VB
and VC in development using that same IDE.
We have put a lot of continuing work into WFC
and there will be future enhancements. So if you look at Visual J++ you can see two core
technologies which will continue regardless of what happens with Java.
Tim: Turning now to Visual Studio as a
whole, how will XML impact the tools?
Tony: XML will be a key part of our
tools. We will make our tools XML aware and provide XML parsers.
Greg: XML has a big role to play in data
architectures. Think about how corporations are going to interchange data, or how
insurance companies will exchange data with healthcare providers. That’s going to
become XML. We want to take our leadership in the browser space, with the first browser
that supports XML, and to extend that to the tools.
It is one of the few technologies that is
hard to overstate. I really do think that XML is one of the few things that actually does
represent as big a shift as the hype suggests.
Tim: What else will be new in the next
Visual Studio?
Greg: We are in between product cycles,
so it is too early to talk about specific features. We can talk about directions, like
unifying the IDEs, support for XML, and extensibility. We are also doing more for
application architecture, so the tools are not just about small widgets and components but
about building multi-tier applications as a whole. You can already see that in Visual Studio there are features like modelling,
and that is a trend we see continuing. Customers want more architectural guidance with the
application as a whole.
Tim: Will there be more RAD features?
Tony: Our approach with VC is slowly to
build up RAD features. Other C++ RAD products have almost universally been market
failures. They have jumped too far in compromising what you can do.
Greg: The challenge is that developers
want as much productivity as you can give them, provided that it costs them nothing in
terms of abstraction layers.
Tim: What is the focus of the Visual
Studio presentations at Tech Ed?
Tony: We are talking about database and
internet support, including topics like how to extend applications into a Web space, and
how to leverage existing code into that model. Specifically, we are looking at how to
build extensions and components for IIS (Internet Information Server). We have just
released an e-commerce kit on our Web site, giving VC developers code examples. The other
products in Visual Studio will be getting similar support over the next 6 months.
Tim: Are you recommending Active Server
Pages or ISAPI extensions for Visual C++ developers?
Tony: The Visual C++ team talks primarily
about ISAPI, while Visual Basic developers will use ASP. What gives the highest
performance, is using VC to extend IIS via ISAPI.
Tim: What is the role of the new MSDE
(Microsoft Database Engine)?
Greg: What is important now is picking
the right application architecture. One characteristic has got to be intrinsic support for
offline data access. Over 40% of computer sales in the Fortune 500 are notebooks. The MSDE
is very important for offline data storage. You don’t have to learn another database
model. You can use SQL on the server, and have your offline store in SQL as well. The nice
part is that you don’t need to consider your replication model. You get to use SQL
Server replication which is much more convenient than trying to put that in manually.
Tony: Many developers have complained
that the programming model for Access and for SQL Server is different. MSDE gives us
consistency.
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We talked
to Greg deMichillie at TechEd 98