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I missed most of Day Three of the PDC due to a competing event at the Beverly Hilton. It was Quick Launch Day for a lot of cool stuff that will be out before Christmas. APC, Brookstone, Epson, all had good stuff which you'll read about in upcoming columns, but the darndest thing was Iz from Sizzle, and you will not see its like this year. More on that in the column too.

As a result, I've asked Chaos Manor Associate and BYTE Contributing Editor Dan Spisak to do the Day Three report. Here's his report:

PDC Day Three

by Dan Spisak

Covering an event like PDC is a lot like trying to cover a weeklong marathon where subject matter experts bombard you with tons of new information each day on upcoming new bits of code from various projects in incubation. Today's keynote session opened up at 8:30 AM today just like in days previous and we were treated this time around to Microsoft Windows Server Senior VP Bob Muglia.

Muglia started out by outlining the roadmap for Windows Server over the next three years. The first part of that roadmap covers the upcoming R2 release of Windows Server 2003 near the end of 2005. The biggest impact of R2 will be its .NET support built-in will be based off of .NET 2.0 which will allow developers to start coding to some of the more advanced Windows features slated to show up in Windows Vista and later on in Longhorn Server. Other updated aspects of the R2 release contain updates to Active Directory to support WS Federated services, allowing IT organizations to authenticate against credentials in a partners organization. Microsoft is also trying to make R2 easier for developers with UNIX applications to move over with improved UNIX services and support for UNIX-based semantics inside an application.

Muglia went on to talk up other upcoming aspects of Windows Server 2003 R2 that would be beneficial to developers and IT organizations, most importantly the new version 3.0 of the Microsoft Management Console. Traditionally those who have had to write management consoles could either write to MMC (a less than satisfying experience) or they would go for a lowest common denominator approach and choose a web interface which wouldn't be as richly integrated with Windows. Now with MMC 3.0 Microsoft is making it possible to write managed code with .NET into an application for your MMC plug-ins resulting in a much richer integration experience. Coupled with support for application remoting coming in future versions of Terminal Server it will become possible to run MMC on any remote systems as a local application.

Muglia also emphasized that the other major project release coming in the R2 delivery timeframe would be SDM, or the system definition model. SDM works in conjunction with Visual Studio 2005 to let developers define a model encompassing their application. This model then lets developers specify all the components of an application and their relationships. Dimitri Nikonov then gave an impressive technology demo showing how third-party add-ons from Macrovision and Avicode could be used in conjunction with SDM and Visual Studio 2005 to enable easy integration of an application with Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) to allow reporting of applications errors back to coders in Visual Studio 2005. With the technology demoed it looks like it will finally be possible to close the loop tightly between operations and development allowing greater productivity and higher quality code to be generated easier by developers.

The next step in the Windows Server line to be released in the 2006 time frame will be Windows 2003 Compute Cluster Edition, according to Muglia. Microsoft announced that Beta 1 of the Compute Cluster Edition is available online (http://microsoft.com/hpc as of today). Microsoft says that most of the current compute solutions in use today are Linux based and that this is a disadvantage for companies due to the one-off nature of these solutions and their inability to integrate with a companies business environment. However, with the Compute Cluster Edition Microsoft is aiming to provide companies with a cluster solution that will scale from as small as four systems all the way up to moderate sized 128-machine clusters. More importantly these clusters will integrate with a companies Active Directory infrastructure allowing for better management of them.

Kyril Faenov then came out to show a demo of how Compute Cluster could be utilized using a complex web enabled Office 12 Excel spreadsheet running Monte Carlo simulations to model risk for a financial portfolio. During the demo Faenov had Bob Muglia unplug one of the clusters from the network during a job execution demonstrating successful job recovery in the cluster. Faenov also showed how the web enabled Excel spreadsheet was easily made cluster-aware which bodes well for making it easier for developers and others inside a company to fully take advantage of cluster capabilities.

Afterwards Muglia started to talk up the Monad object-based command-line interpreter. Microsoft says it will work towards getting a complete set of CLI management commands using Monad for its entire line of operating systems.

Day Three: Part Two

by Jerry Pournelle

Bob Muglia, Microsoft's senior vice president for the Windows Server Division, gave the Thursday morning keynote on Windows Longhorn Server. His theme, not surprisingly, was "The right server for the right job is about addressing specific customer needs and challenges--either through concentrating on individual workloads or editions of the server product, or in some cases integrating products together for the best solution for our customers, as we do with Microsoft Small Business Server."

Once he got past the marketing language, he revealed major improvements for IIS 7.0. Internet Information Services (IIS 7.0) is Microsoft's next-generation Web server, which won't be released until Longhorn Server ships. That's currently sometime in 2007. As for Longhorn (Vista) itself, tea leaves indicate probably 3rd Quarter 2006, and that guess is about as reliable as any forecast based on staring at residue in a teacup.

Muglia publicly acknowledged the contributions of Apache, and got cheers for that. IIS 7 has gone from a monolithic executable to an Apache-style modular program, probably the biggest change in IIS since first release. Other welcome changes are the permanent banishment of the Metabase forever in exchange for human readable XML style configuration syntax in easily portable text files. That got more cheers.

More importantly, we saw IIS 7 accept updates to web config files on the fly without needing a reboot of the system or a restart of IIS 7. Welcome features of the new web config files are the ability to inherit configurations via file hierarchy (for instance, subdirectories can have their own config files which can choose to inherit settings from parent directories). This has ramifications for portability of the configuration, as well as now allowing the developers of the sites themselves to work on the configurations, a task that previously required being the machine administrator.

One of the other big leaps forward in IIS 7 is the ITAPI public interface API Microsoft is including. Developers will now have access to the same interfaces that the IIS development team uses to add features to IIS. Combined with the new modularity of IIS 7 it will now be possible to reduce the attack surface of a web server by running only those modules needed for the present job. This has ramifications for patch management as well, making the number of patches an administrator needs to install to keep their web server up to date dependant only on those services running and not the entire set of services. IIS 7 is also coming with a much richer set of diagnostic capabilities and tools to enable administrators more easily to see what parts of a site or script are not working. That will illuminate the underlying problems so they can be addressed quickly. It all sounds wonderful, but then demos usually do.

Muglia also spent much time talking about the future of Active Directory and services coming in WinFX to augment it. According to Microsoft, approximately 75 percent of primary enterprise directory useage is Active Directory right now. Microsoft wants to make Active Directory even more attractive to the enterprise space with the improvements coming from WinFX. Chief among these was talk about federated identity or infocard, using secure tokens to authorize users instead of usernames and passwords which can be easily compromised.

Other powerful features coming to Active Directory include information protection capabilities through rights management services. This should enable developers to write internal applications that attempt to proactively ensure the security of the data within them by limiting the user accession based on the rights associated with the user account. One example demonstrated was a company's hypothetical application that generated sales quotes and maintained price lists. Members of the company using the application had free access to both the data and the application itself. Additonally, because the demo application was taking advantage of the infocard federated identity capabilities in WinFX the user didn't have to log in with a username or password because the system was able to verify his secure token, thus simplifying management of user accounts and allowing single signon. However, access through the secure token of a third party partner was limited to the data, without ability to save or cut and paste. In addition, protected price data was unavailable to the partner; an illustration of the rights management services to come.

According to Muglia the secure token services will come after Longhorn Server ships sometime in the 2007 year timeframe. However, he claims that adding infocard and other secure token services will be easy for developers because the frameworks for these services will be built-in to WinFX's foundations. General timeframes were mentioned as well, Muglia claiming that Vista will ship in the 2006 timeframe with Longhorn Server to come in 2007. The new version 7 of IIS is included as part of the code developers at PDC received and should be in future MSDN packs.

Modularity

Longhorn Server will be modular: three levels of modularized components that fit in at the Server Core, Server Core Plus, or beyond. A Longhorn system running just the Server Core level modules would be a GUI-less system with just the Windows Kernel and some other basic services running. At the Server Core level would be items like security, management, networking, DNS and Active Directory. At the Server Core Plus level Microsoft sees things like .NET, the GUI, the MMC and other tools living

This would be the first time Microsoft has enabled the ability for a Windows server system to run without being tied to a graphical environment and underscores the CLI management work they want to enable through the use of Monad. With this modularity Microsoft will make it possible for IT departments to minimize the attack vectors of their servers by maintaining the minimum set of services running on their systems. This modularity will also pay off in time dividends on the amount of patching that may need to be done depending on a servers complexity, the less services running the less potential for patching.

Another big feature coming in Longhorn Server is TXF, or Transacted Filesystem update to NTFS. Quite simply, TXF is going to give the OS the ability to make all file operations transacted. This would give you the ability to do multiple file copies conditionally and then if an error happened, rollback the file operations all the way back to the beginning state. TXF is also going to be a core service used by SQL Server and WinFS later on when it gets released so we plan to keep a close eye on its progress as it could help enable many powerful capabilities in future software yet to come.

There was a lot more, too much to cover in any detail. Some additions to Terminal Server sound promising, including features such as the ability to remote applications or have terminal server sessions traverse firewalls easily. However, on the development roadmap Muglia showed to everyone at the keynote one feature that sounded exciting to us but wasn't talked about was labeled as "USB device redirection". Provided that this is as straightforward as it sounds it would open up a whole new world of flexibility for remote workers and administrators and we look forward to hearing more about it as Longhorn Server development grows more mature.

Overall the most exciting things coming out in the near future from the keynote will be Windows Server 2003 R2 near the end of this year and Windows Compute Cluster in 2006. Meanwhile WinFX appears to be rapidly gathering a great deal of developer energy and effort.

32-bit Legacy

Muglia underscored Microsoft's commitment to 64-bit computing when he said, "As we move forward with Windows Server I really think of 32-bit as legacy". Muglia also commented that all development today and future was done in a 64-bit mindset and that the Windows Server platform would move aggressively to a 64-bit world.

Breakdown sessions illustrating features of Muglia's talk took up the rest of the day. PDC is a strenuous event, and it's very easy to get into a state of information overload even when you have several technical editors with you to explain what you just heard. I'm not trying to hype Microsoft conferences: it's just fairly obvious that companies that send only one technical employee to PDC will miss a good bit. You really need at least two people so they can discuss the conference while the information is fresh.

Or that's my conclusion, anyway.

Chaos Manor Associate Dan Spisak contributed to Part Two of this report.

Jerry Pournelle is science-fiction writer and DDJ columnist. Jerry can be contacted at jerry@jerrypournelle.com.

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