TechEd 99 - Keynote report

Preparing for the next generation

July 6 - It's the first day of TechEd Europe 99, and some 6,500 developers are converging on Hall 7 of the RAI Centre in Amsterdam to hear Paul Maritz, group vice president of Microsoft's developer group, deliver the keynote presentation of the conference. The huge hall is split into two by the massive projection screens, one at the front and one half way down so the delegates at the back can see what is going on.
      Delegates entered the hall to the booming soundtrack of a video portraying the last few days before Microsoft US moved the Redmond domain from NT4 to Windows 2000, deadline 12 April 1999, in dramatic style. It was therefore something of a surprise that Maritz did not concentrate on Windows 2000 itself, but instead chose to talk about third-generation Web applications, the importance of XML and Biztalk, and an assortment of other products, technologies and TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) that Microsoft will be introducing in the near future.
      First generation Web applications hardly justify the term, being simply Web servers serving up static HTML pages. It is only in the second generation that we see the emergence of Web and intranet sites that use logic to react to the user in an intelligent way, and link to back-end data. The main driving force behind second generation sites is e-commerce, and the primary supporting technologies from Microsoft are Active Server Pages (ASPs), Transaction Server (MTS), Microsoft Message Queue (MSMQ) and SQL Server, backed up by Windows NT.
      Maritz used the term 'Internet Application Server' to describe such a system, which in future would be supported by Windows 2000, Internet Information Server (IIS) 5.0 and Internet Explorer 5.0. Construction of a Web application would be made simpler by the services of COM+ with features such as events, queuing, dynamic load balancing and in-memory databases. The underlying architecture would of course be Windows DNA.
      Maritz's next theme was interoperability through a future release of SNA Server codenamed Babylon. This will extend COM+ to incorporate CICS and IMS applications, and MSMQ to incorporate MQSeries.
      Moving on to the database arena, Microsoft is extending SQL Server, client-side versions of which are already available for Windows 95 and 98, to include the Windows CE platform. SQL Server for Windows CE should be available by Spring 2000 and, like the other versions, will support "replication between tiers". Meanwhile Maritz urged delegates to explore the Microsoft Data Engine (MSDE), which offers exactly the same programming model and behaviour (within the limits of the platform) as SQL Server. Furthermore, the runtime can be distributed free of charge.