Stories by: Jon Udell

Our marketing-driven and future-oriented IT industry doesn't like to remember its own history. It's surprisingly hard to recover the historical context of current events. Happily, though, there's one developer-oriented Microsoft online property with a memory. Channel 9, the video/podcast/screencast guerilla arm of the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN), has been active since March 2004, and so far, what's posted to Channel 9 stays on Channel 9. That's how I found this wonderful juxtaposition:

When entrepreneurs pitch their software-as-a-service ideas to me, I always ask how they plan to compete with what I call the galactic clusters -- Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. These giants have set a high bar for Internet-scale operations, and they're relentlessly pushing it higher.

I was one of the lucky souls who saw the only public demonstration of Microsoft's object-oriented file system, code-named Cairo, at the 1993 Professional Developers Conference. A decade later, in a column entitled "A Tale of Two Cairos, I reflected on Cairo's historical context and the modern context into which its successor, WinFS, would emerge -- which was, of course, the Web. Here's what I said three years ago:

Twenty-eight months since my last report on Microsoft's .Net technology suite, it's interesting to see what's changed and what hasn't. The desktop version of the Longhorn OS was renamed Vista, but its release status remains the same: beta. Of the three .Net-oriented "pillars of Longhorn" -- Avalon, Indigo, and WinFS -- two are renamed (Avalon to Windows Presentation Foundation and Indigo to Windows Communication Foundation) but none have shipped, and WinFS has been pushed post-Vista.

Graham Glass wrote a blog entry this week that touched on two of my favorite themes: open source and education. In the middle of a project based on the red-hot Ruby on Rails platform, he took time out to explain how he found, and worked around, a Rails limitation. Digging down to the roots of the problem took six hours of investigation. Crafting the work-around took just six lines of code.

Ad hoc social software will probably flourish in the enterprise. Is this the next-generation intranet? If so, we should sort out what we got wrong on the first try, and what we'll get right this time around.

A fault line runs beneath the groundswell that began a few years ago with XML Web services and continues today as SOA (service-oriented architecture). True, nearly everyone agrees that XML messaging is the right way to implement low-level, platform-agnostic services that can be composed into higher-level services that support enterprises business functions. Yet, here's also a sense that the standards process has run amok. IBM, Microsoft, and others have proposed so many Web services standards that a new collective noun had to be invented: WS-* (pronounced "WS star" or sometimes "WS splat"). The asterisk is a wild card that can stand for Addressing, Eventing, Policy, Routing, Reliability, ReliableMessaging, SecureConversation, Security, Transactions, Trust, and a frighteningly long list of other terms. Surveying this landscape, XML co-creator Tim Bray pronounced the WS-* stack "bloated, opaque, and insanely complex."

After a morning of keynote speeches at Microsoft's PDC (Professional Developers Conference) in Los Angeles, InfoWorld's Lead Technology Analyst Jon Udell sat down with Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates for a one-on-one interview.

When Peter Yared, CEO and founder of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl/PHP/Python) middleware startup ActiveGrid, realized he needed project management software to coordinate his company's development work, he tried Microsoft Project 2003.

Here are five species of application that seem, at first glance, to have little in common: mainframe "green screen," Win32/VB, Java/Swing, Web browser, and .Net WinForms. An enterprise application portfolio is likely to include members of each of these species. Nobody chooses this diversity; it just happens, and it complicates everything from development and deployment to maintenance and testing.

I'm sure there are dozens of versions of this story, but I heard it from Larry Wall, the father of Perl, and it goes like this: instead of laying down paved walkways, the builders of a new university campus waited for footpaths to emerge on the lawns. Then they paved the footpaths. Larry designed Perl around this idea of structure emerging from use, but that was an unusual case. We typically lay down the paving stones first, and when footpaths emerge we profess surprise or try to ignore them.