Themes: Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2000

Orlando Convention Centre 11th – 14th July 2000

Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference is usually one of the biggest development events of the year, and 2000’s event was no exception. 6,500 developers braved the heat and humidity to pack the enormous Orlando Convention Centre in Florida. Billed as “The Defining Point”, the 2000 PDC was intended to be the public unveiling of the technologies behind Microsoft’s recent announcement of its .NET strategy at Forum 2000 in June.

The first day of the PDC was designed to allow developers an overview of .NET and what it meant for the future of the Microsoft platform. Paul Maritz’s keynote set the ground rules with an overview of the .NET web services model, and with the introduction of the next release of Microsoft’s development platform Visual Studio.NET.

The .NET framework introduced in the keynote is an XML-based distributed computing model that mixes enterprise application integration (through tools like BizTalk server and technologies like the XML-based business process description language XLANG) and next generation web services (through tools like the C# language and technologies like SOAP). It also requires a whole new Common Language Runtime which opens the Visual Studio environment up to any language – with Perl, Python, Eiffel and Scheme support announced at the PDC.

Visual Studio .NET remained the focus for much of the conference, along with Microsoft’s new language C# (pronounced “C-sharp”). A member of the C family of language, C# is a portable, garbage-collecting version of C++ designed for the development of component software. Microsoft will be handing the C# specification over to ECMA, and hopes that it will become an open standard language.

Closely tied with C# is the latest version of Microsoft’s Active Server Page dynamic HTML generation technology, ASP+. Where ASP required you to use just VBScript or Jscript in your pages, ASP+ now lets you work with compiled languages like Visual Basic or C# as well. You can also separate design from code, by using Web Forms. European developers with a focus on mobile Internet solutions aren’t left out here, as ASP+’s Mobile Forms will dynamically generate appropriate content for PDAs and WAP phones.

Visual Studio.NET’s new features include a single IDE for all Microsoft’s languages – Visual C++, Visual Basic and C#. There’s no Java in Visual Studio due to the ongoing legal battle with Sun, though the extensible nature of the Common Language Runtime means that third party developers could quickly add Java support – and Microsoft has given details of its JVM to object tools developer Rational. Various demonstrations went through the various new features, amongst them try…catch exception handling in Visual Basic, cross language inheritance between languages using the CLR, and full cross-tier distributed debugging.

Bill Gate’s second day keynote was a typical marketing-led speech, but did much to show the vision behind the previous day’s slew of announcements. He showed the Windows roadmap over the next two versions of Windows 2000 (including the end of the Windows 95 series of operating systems with the release in 2001 of a consumer version of Whistler), and the arrival of a whole new user interface.

The air-conditioned convention centre kept developers out of the 94-degree midday temperatures, and in the many breakout sessions that focussed on the .NET architecture. These include discussions on the use of SOAP, of Microsoft’s support for mobile devices, and of how to create XML data structures. There was also plenty coverage of how to deal with security in a distributed environment.

PDC 2000 may not have been a defining point, but it certainly was a turning point for Microsoft – away from the simple client-server model that has served Windows developers for so long, to a vision of distributed applications in a heterogeneous environment using components and XML. With developers leaving the conference carrying exclusive preview versions of Visual Studio.NET and some of its supporting servers, the proof of the pudding will be in the first non-Microsoft ASP+ applications and demonstrations coming from the keyboards of the developers who attended the conference.