On Monday, Microsoft revealed that its Media2Go platform for mobile multimedia would be branded as Windows Mobile for Portable Media Centers and that devices base on this platform would ship in the second half of 2004, a full year later than originally expected. The Media2Go platform, first unveiled at the CES 2003 trade show last January, is basically a stripped down version of Microsoft's XP Media Center Edition software that runs on Windows CE .NET in small, handheld devices. Some analysts have described the devices, which provide digital video, home movie, digital music, television show, and digital photo slideshow playback, as "video iPods."
Microsoft Senior Vice President Jim Allchin at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference here on Monday touted the upcoming Longhorn release of Windows for its XML, Web services, collaboration, and storage capabilities.
Allchin's keynote followed a Longhorn presentation by Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates, with Allchin's presentation interrupted several times for demonstrations of the technology. But developers, who are receiving early code from Longhorn at the conference, will have to wait a while for the finished Longhorn product. A first beta release is not planned until the second half of 2004, with general availability expected in 2006.
As expected, a trio of technologies took the stage at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference Monday, including the long-promised WinFS. This foundation technology promises to unify storage of all data types--relational, nonrelational and multimedia, among others. "We are bringing database technology over the file system. The XML revolution and user interface [advances] are capable of bringing it all together," Microsoft Group Vice President Jim Allchin said during his Monday morning keynote at the conference in Los Angeles.
New features in the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, will drastically simplify the development of applications for the forthcoming operating system, Jim Allchin, Microsoft group vice president of platforms, said during the first official demonstration of the software Monday.
Key advancements to Longhorn that address development challenges previously present in earlier Windows versions will be included in a new presentation framework, code-named Avalon, and a new communications layer, code-named Indigo, Allchin said.
The next version of Visual Studio.Net will feature significant developer productivity enhancements for providing access to myriad data sources, a Microsoft executive said Monday. The new features of the IDE, code-named Whidbey, are part of Microsoft's plan to design Whidbey specifically to work with the next-generation SQL Server, code-named Yukon.
Whidbey also will include improved editing capabilities and schema transformation for XML, Microsoft program manager Paul Yuknewicz said at a Whidbey demo at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.
Microsoft Group VP Allchin whipped through a lot of slides and information during his nearly two-hour keynote here at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference on Monday. But by the end of his talk, we didn't learn much more than we already knew about the ETA for Longhorn, which is currently expected to go live in 2006.
On the front end, Microsoft is providing support for a new markup language called XAML that "lets you build a Windows application in a declarative way." Allchin said XAML will make applications easier to learn, write and read because it allows developers to separate code and content. XAML sounds like a rival to XUL, but no Microsoft officials have made that comparison publicly so far.
At Microsoft Corp.'s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2003, Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates highlighted his company's vision for the next wave of software development in the Longhorn era.
"The opportunity for software developers is stronger this decade than any other," Gates said in his keynote presentation opening the conference here. "We believe in the next wave. Over the last four years Microsoft's R&D budget has doubled." He said the company's budget for research and development was $6.8 billion for the last year.
Hillel Cooperman, product unit manager for the Windows User Experience, joined Gates onstage for a demonstration of Avalon and showed elements of the system that included transparency, animations, and the use of pixel shaders and "other technology that's been typical of game developers," Cooperman said.
In addition, the Avalon sidebar in Longhorn shows such things as communications and services a user has in place, as well as other things like the time, buddy lists, slide shows and could even feature ''an RSS feed built right into the sidebar."
While Microsoft won't say when to expect Longhorn, Microsoft Group Vice President Jim Allchin did commit to some interim milestones and promised some other Windows releases along the way.
At the end of his keynote speech at the company's Professional Developers Conference here, Allchin promised that a beta version of Windows would come next summer, but he would be pinned down further. "We're not going to make other commitments of when we are going to get done with this product," he said.
Analysts generally give 2006 as the likely debut date for Longhorn, the next version of Windows.
Microsoft said on Monday that it would launch software for a new portable media device to be launched next year that will allow users to listen to music and watch movies on the road. Portable Media Center, Microsoft's answer to Apple iPod digital music player, will be able to play MP3 files as well as audio and video content recorded in Microsoft's own digital format.
The devices, which will be built by various manufacturers, including Tatung, Creative Technology, Sanyo Electric, and Samsung, are set to hit store shelves during the second half 2004, Microsoft said.
Although some are predicting that Microsoft Corp.'s next-generation Longhorn operating system will be the star of Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) here, the real show-stealer looks to be the company's new Web services framework, codenamed Indigo.
Microsoft will unveil its Indigo strategy Monday morning at the PDC. The new scheme represents a significant change in direction for the software giant, in that it is acknowledging service-orientation and service-oriented programming as the wave of the future. And while Microsoft programmers will not be forced to hop on that wave, it will become the default way to program in the Microsoft environment.