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Microsoft mixes it up at MIX08


By David Worthington
March 7, 2008 — 
LAS VEGAS — Internet Explorer 8, Silverlight and utility computing were the topics de jour during Wednesday's keynote presentation at MIX08, and Microsoft made good on its promise to deliver long-awaited previews to developers.

Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie opened the keynote, declaring that 2008 was the year that the company's “Software and a Service” strategy will go from incubation to life.

Without elaborating on what Microsoft’s role will be, Ozzie predicted that enterprises would soon “embrace the cloud” and begin using distributed, federated services as program components. Companies will begin to transition away from applications servers to a virtualization powered utility computing model, he said.

He added that interoperability was crucial for that model to work, and made a passing reference to Wednesday’s invitation-only preview of SQL Data Services, as an example of the direction the company’s “cloud” services platform was taking.

Gartner vice president David Smith believes that SQL Data Services is similar to Amazon's SimpleDB, a Web service designed to run queries on structured data.

Greg DeMichillie, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, observed that Ozzie’s remarks were scant on details and noted that Ozzie has been taking about server-service symmetry since he came to Microsoft.

“The basic concept is that any server you license from Microsoft should also be available in a hosted form. Sounds good, and in some areas they are starting to make progress on this, Exchange for example. But in other areas it remains little more than a promise,” said DeMichillie.

DeMichillie noted that while Microsoft put some information about SQL Data Services on the Web yesterday, it was thin on details. “[Microsoft] provided absolutely no details other than encouraging people to come to other events later in the year,” DeMichillie remarked.

DeMichillie questioned whether Microsoft would allow its hosted products to undercut its traditional on-premise software on price. “If they do, they face potential revenue decline as users switch to hosted systems, and if they don't, they will find it difficult to fend off competitors,” he added.

On the browser front, Microsoft made Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 generally available to coincide with the start of MIX08. Internet Explorer lead project manager Dean Hachamovitch gave the first public demonstration of the browser, highlighting its compliance with W3C Web standards in comparison to IE7.

IE8 will have a full implementation of CSS 2.1 and will start to support HTML 5, he said. Further, Hachamovitch called for industry standards around CSS certification testing. Microsoft contributed 702 test cases to W3C under the BSD license.

He also demonstrated a new debugging tool that has the ability to trace CSS styles. It works within the browser, so developers do not have to switch off into a separate environment.

The IE8 feature list introduces an updated phishing filter, “Activities,” which is essentially a dialog box that lists available Web services when a user selects text, and “WebSlices,” which gives end users the ability to subscribe to portion of a Web page, including Silverlight controls.

Developers can add activities to their Web pages by inserting Activity XML, a specification Microsoft has added to its Open Specification Promise. It has donated a corresponding patent to the Creative Commons.

Microsoft also made the Silverlight 2 beta 1 generally available yesterday and released a beta of its Expression Studio 2 design tool to complement it. Silverlight 2 contains a slimmed down version of the .NET Framework's Common Language Runtime (CLR) called CoreCLR, and bundles over two dozen user interface controls.


Related Search Term(s): Microsoft, HTML 5, IE8, Silverlight


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